For a moment - and by a moment I mean a single post - I’ll take this blog back to its roots and write about my ceaseless post-grad boredom and less-than-ideal employment experiences. Now, in the past year, I’ve had a couple of dope-ass writing gigs, one in Iceland and one in The D, but they lasted four days and two hours respectively. Other than that, employment has been sparse and dull.

A summary of the last year-plus would be quite unnecessary at this point, so, instead, let’s go with some observations from my first day back at an old job. This morning I returned to grading standardized tests, which involves my favorite part of the educational process: passing judgment on children whose success in life is largely dependent on the whims of strangers. I’m not allowed to go into many details of the content of the tests or the scoring process, but trust that I have an enormous amount of power over the future of the state of Connecticut.

Anyway, after about four hours of intermittent sleep, I woke at 7:30 a.m. and was greeted with cold-ass temps and snow flurries. Bullshit. Now, my birthday is coming up soon, and a year cannot pass without my mother telling me about how I was born during a blizzard, but I thought that that was just an omen, a one-time occurrence that announced to the world that I was going to cast a frigid pall over this place… or some shit like that. From that day forward, there has been an implicit agreement ‘twixt me and the universe that there wouldn’t be snow after March 21. But sometimes the universe is a heartless and/or lazy bitch-goddess. Hence, snow this morning.

Whatever. I can usually roll with the punches. Still, this morning the snow put me in a bad mood. That and the fact that all I had for breakfast was a Cold-Eeze and a cigarette. Returning to this place after leaving it 10 months ago was like stepping through a time warp (never actually tried it, but I can conjecture). Nothing has changed: I’m reading responses to the exact same prompts, in the exact same room, at the exact same desk. There are a few new faces, but for the most part it’s the usual suspects: Condom Head (a woman whose hairdo resembles a rolled-up condom balanced precariously on her noggin), Flat Face, the little Indian girl who never says a word to anyone, countless old CRC-ers, and countless older CRC-ers. There are maybe three other people there in my age group, and only one of them shares a worldview close to mine. Suffice it to say that when I roll in wearing a brown corduroy sport coat, a pink dress shirt with tattoos peaking out from the sleeves, a do-rag, and three days of stubble, I look a little out of place. Not a big deal, really. The cool thing about CRC-ers is that when they’re around people they don’t jive with, they’ll bite their tongues until said people are out of view. Not to sound like too much of a dick, but I couldn’t care less what they think, and all they do is strengthen my resolve to, as my esteemed brother says, take off the Mitten.

So, yeah. It’s about 4:30 in the afternoon; I’m out of work; and I’m finally getting the taste of crappy artificial sweetener and crappier tea out of my mouth with some delicious animal crackers (eaten head-first (is there any other way?), of course). I don’t wanna go so far as to call today surreal – in fact it was quite ordinary – but something about it has brightened my mood. What started as bleak and depressing has ended on a sweeter note. I guess you could say the countdown to the Exodus has begun. I love the taste of animal crackers in the afternoon. They taste like… freedom.