I’m in Los Angeles.

I had a large, insightful entry about Los Angeles all ready to go. It was sharp, witty, and sophisticated. Then my browser crashed. So nevermind. What I said was:

– Los Angeles is a whore
– It’s people are shallow and afraid
– Everyone here is being completely and utterly dominated by the reality they themselves create
– The worst thing in Los Angeles is a break in hipness/chicness/sexiness decorum…
– …because the sham that is their reality might snow through the cracks

Everyone here is fake. Everyone here is real somewhere underneath, but that reality so repressed that it takes on a mythological quality. Everyone here denies death and history. Death is in the air; death, cash, cynicism (in reality, fear masquerading as faux-cynicism), and sex (in reality, fear masquerading as faux-sex) are the overwhelming stenches everywhere in Los Angeles.

This place is easy to own; it’s just that nobody really, underneath it all, wants to own it. It’s no San Francisco or Chicago, or even Vancouver or Seattle. These people don’t know how to live.

I’m young, bright, motivated, and skilled. Why am I also broke?

—

Today:

– Sent out app packets to CCSF and PCC (took all day yesterday and most of today!)
– Played some more in the student loan maze
– Snagged the CVS for usbvision
– Checked my bank balances and frowned

Tomorrow:

– Interview
– Los Angeles?

—

I am exhausted. So fscking exhausted it hurts. I just want to curl up and sleep and sleep and sleep. But I can’t, the pressure’s on. I’m jobless and in debt and things are coming due and society is not prepared to grant me any sort of reprieve whatsoever.

I posted this huge entry expressing my frustration with the job market and the way that some of us secretly help everyone else to do their jobs (you know us, we are the “go-to” people that you call with questions because you’re guessing we’ll know the answers, and we usually do) while suffering financially themselves, somehow unhirable to do the same things they perpetually help others to do or teach about. But I deleted that post. It was too long-winded and bitter. I’ll just add these thoughts:

When I get my Ph.D. and begin to contribute in really surprising and important ways, I want to state publicly, at least once, that the Ph.D. doesn’t even scratch the surface of what I can do (and have always been able to do) in any number of areas; it’s just a process I grudgingly pursued because somehow society otherwise failed to credit me for my considerable contributions, knowledge, and skills at all. Yes, I know that all I’ll get credit for is my Ph.D. and my publications. But I’m here to tell you that those are 5% of what I know and can do and I’ll continue to contribute in a million other ways without compensation or recognition, as will the other top functioners in society.

If you’ve been helped for free in the past year by someone you know who’s just “always helpful,” consider saying thanks to them again. Call them up and thank them, out of the blue, for the help that they gave you, especially if they helped you while you were on the job, getting paid — if their expertise helped to preserve your income, ehance your performance review, streamline your office, or bring you a buck. It’s the least you can do.

—

As a side note, for those who want to understand my comment better, the issue is the division between enterpreneurs (experts in business) and experts in other areas. Experts in other areas don’t start businesses because they don’t know much about business. They’re not a CEO or an HR manager or a mid-level operations manager. They’re an expert in some applied or theoretical field. They’re hoping to work for someone who needs them.

Business people, on the other hand — CEOs and HR managers and mid-level ops people — know all about business: bottom lines, motivation, paperwork, efficiency, morale, etc… and they know nothing about any of the fields from which they have to hire employees. So they try to apply the value judgments from business to experts in other fields when making selections… and they end up choosing people who are 25% of the employee that they could have had at half the cost, because their criteria were totally inappropriate (and they don’t have any knowledge of the correct criteria, or how to make judgments about such criteria having been met in a given field).

It’s a classic problem across a spectrum of expressions. In some of us, it is very strongly expressed (i.e. I am so far away from CEO or HR manager it’s hilarious). But in all cases, whether egregious or slight, it lowers quality, morale, and productivity while raising costs and liabilities.

But the enterpreneurs don’t know any better. And the top skilled/educated laborers in any field have no interest in being enterpreneurs… so, in our economy at least, you’re never getting the best product possible — just the best product that the MBAs were able to organize for you, with their limited understanding of any product, process, or measure of validity outside of business itself.

It’s so frustrating. All of these employed people are always coming to me to help out with stuff they’re getting paid to do, becuase I’m one of those rare people who actually knows how to do it. The story is the same as usual:

– Person X takes a class from person Y on product Z
– Person Y says they don’t fully understand product Z
– So person X doesn’t fully understand product Z
– But person X needs product Z for work
– So person X calls me, and I help them with
   * What they’re paid to do
   * What Y was paid to teach them but didn’t or couldn’t
– I get paid nothing by society, even though
   * I’m really hurting
   * I help lots of people with product Z
   * Unlike most, I fully understand product Z, not just how to use it, but how it works
   * I’ve applied (and not been hired) many times to jobs using product Z
   * I’ve applied (and not been hired) to teach about product Z

There are so many persons X and Y and products Z in my life over the years that I absolutely lose count. All the “thanks!” are echoing in my ears, but other than friendly satisfaction, I have little to show for them.

I’ve applied for so many jobs in my life, and have gotten very, very few of them. The ones that I have landed have been crap, by and large, low hourly with no benefits or freelance/contract with no benefits and no rights. Fast food. Customer service. Writing/editing grunt work. And yet right now I’d love to have any of them, since I’m broke and in fiscal trouble. I sit here all day and fill out applications and send out resumés and everyone says I’m really impressive and then nothing. I don’t get hired for the jobs that X and Y hold, even though X and Y aren’t quite qualified to do them and I end up doing them for free in the end anyway when X or Y (or both) come to me.

Ethical dilemma: do I stop helping people and just pretend I know as little as commercial society credits me with? I still won’t get paid for anything, still won’t have a job, and in the meantime, I won’t be doing my best for the world. But at the same time, what encouragement is there for anyone to know how to do anything if there are people like me out there who are free-laborers at:

– Copy writing
– Copy editing
– Networking, network integration, network deployment, and network security
– Rapid application development
– Web development
– E-commerce administration and hosting
– Systems integration, infrastructure, legacy systems
– Technology consulting
– Social services consulting

I have helped so many people make so much money over the years… yet I’m still broke… and nobody will pay me to do anything, it seems. My credit is worse every year, and my bank book smaller. I have fewer and fewer things to do as the people that I’ve helped over the years gradually increase their skills and improve their positions based on the help that I gave them, eventually no longer needing me.

I am trying not to be bitter, but when you have bills to pay and people still needing my help with things they’re getting paid for and I’m not, it’s tough. It’s not that I hate helping — totally opposite, I love helping people out. But if I’m willing to always help and contribute so much to society, why is society trying to destroy me? Why is my credit rotten, why am I homeless, why can’t I afford to operate a motor vehicle, and why can’t I get a job?

I don’t know what the answer is. Everything I come up with as an explanation or a comment sounds really bitter. I just don’t know. I’m exhausted. Very, very exhausted. Every day I’m more exhausted than the last. I don’t know how long I can keep this up before I absolutely reject the “social contract.”

SOMEBODY GIVE ME A JOB! I’M AN IQ 150 MASTER OF ARTS FROM A WORLD-RENOWNED GRADUATE SCHOOL THAT CAN DO ALMOST ANYTHING ON EARTH YOU THROW AT ME, WITH AN EXISTING KNOWLEDGE BREADTH THAT FEW ON EARTH CAN MATCH!

Plus, I’m bright.

The longer I’m here the more I realize why everyone hates Californians.

Hey, California, you and your little bourgeois faux-paradise-of-Mercedes are going to fall into the ocean sooner or later, and nobody is going to come and save you because NOBODY IN THE REST OF THE WORLD CARES…

…so FUCK YOU!

I feel a kind of desperation, like I’m disappearing or losing myself or something. I don’t know what to do with myself. I fidget endlessly. I’m waiting for the end of the world. I only get one life and this is what I’m doing with it: sitting in front of a television screen watching nothing in particular waiting for it to be months later, not because I have anything in particular to do months later, but because I have nothing in particular to do now and I’m hoping something will magically have appeared months later.

Stupid. I have no plans, no goals, no likes. I am not doing what I want, and there is nothing I want to do. I am waiting for some kind of personal messiah. Such a person is not coming; such a person doesn’t exist.

So I just sit and read Sartre over and over again, like a poseur.

“Hey, are you using this plug?”
“Well, my computer’s plugged into it.”
“Um, yeah, but I want to know if you’re using it.”
“I’m typing on my computer right now. The computer that’s plugged into it.”
“Okay, fine, I’m going to take that as a no.”
“Yes, I’m using it.”
“Okay, fine. Thank you very much, sir.”

(i can hear her hissing inside of her head)

—

Woman walking around the store with her arm bent and extended, as though she’s continually fending off a beating. She looks at me fearfully.

—

Man speaking over the announcement system saying that someone lost their little black dog named “Arby” in the bookstore. He’s in the security office. They ask that the owner please come pick him up.

—

Plug girl’s phone rings. She tells her friend with the fur boots, faux alligator belt, and ultrableach ultraperm that it’s her mother calling. She’s maybe 19 but she thinks she’s 44. She stands up and starts toward the door, answering her phone.

“Hello, Molly. Fine. How’s it going?”

and then, in a voice full of slime and catty estrogen,

“Yes, it has been a little while. How wonderful it is to hear from you.”

She doesn’t have a mother. She’s a bitch and she has a bitch.

—

Older man with gray hair raising a ruckus about the fact that the bookstore doesn’t carry his favorite magazine. The young girl behind the coffee counter is trying to explain to him that she doesn’t have access to purchasing decisions about magazines in the store. He keeps asking her for her supervisors’ home phone numbers.

He’s trying to be threatening.

I wonder how angry he’s willing to get over some stupid magazine.

—

Plug girl comes back and stares at me angrily. It makes me want to use the plug longer.

It makes me want to tower over her and tell her that everyone including her knows that mother doesn’t love her and never did, because she’s just not loveable enough to have been worth her mother’s time.

—

Back to work.

Bankers are evil, evil people. I’m not rich right now. I wait for two weeks for a $350 check that I earned through hard temping. I’m trying to pay bills. I deposit the check. I pay bills. Rather then process the deposit first, my bank processes the bills first, then the deposit later the same day, even though I physically made the deposit first, and they paid the transactions. The result: 25% (one fourth) of my check went to overdraft and cycle fees against a deposit made on the same day as the bills I paid later, that they paid out on rather than deny due to lack of funds. But of course their interests are not served by such logic.

They hold onto deposits until the end of the day, once they know you’ve got money coming into your account and they know any new charges are covered, to see if they can get you on overdrafts and then process the deposit at the end of the day. If I haven’t made a deposit, they just deny transactions (insufficient funds), but if I have, they’re happy to process it as late as they possibly can and in the meantime to pay out on every transaction, racking up overdraft fees over and over in the meantime. And of course it’s all legal.

These people need to be shot. They need to be ass-raped with a 1/2″ drill bit, then shot. They are the reason the revolutionaries put people against the wall, then gouge their eyes out with unsharpened pencils, then trim their ears with scissors, then drain their blood through a puncture directly through the chest and into the heart made with a rusty coat hanger.

Oh my god, I feel like hell today. Wow. I didn’t wake up until maybe 11.00. Now it’s 12.20 and I’m shaky and queasy and I have a headache. Not gonna do that again for a while.

—

I can’t believe it, I just created that new email address the other day and I’m already getting SPAM on it. How? Is it possible that some of the SMTP servers out there are doing double-duty as address collectors? I guess these days everyone, person or company, will stoop to any level for a buck. That sucks.

If I hear one more conservative commentator call the man “Osama Bin Obama,” I’m going to shoot somebody. It’s not only racist in its intent, it’s racist on its face, conflating all non-white peoples together. Fuck you, Limbaugh.

—

Okay, I’ll try to explain it to you, people.

Social Security is not supposed to give you a return on your dollars. It’s not an investment plan. Long-term investment of your capital is what (gasp) investment plans are for. Social Security is designed to take from those who can afford it to ensure that those who can’t afford it don’t starve or end up homeless and naked.

That’s right, it takes from the rich to give to the poor. It is, was, and was always intended to be, a socialistic plan that provides insurance to society against hunger and poverty, especially for those who are unable to work. Do you expect a good return on your insurance premiums? No. Do you expect to get them back if you don’t need them? No. Your insurance pays out only when you need it, and probably never if you don’t.

Social Security is there to help you if you ever need it, not when you want to get your money back out, with interest.

Privatizing Social Security recreates the precise problem that Social Security was designed to solve — the problem that rich people can invest their money and have comfortable retirements, while those who are unemployed or can’t work… can’t. Turn Social Security into an investment plan where everyone gets out what they put in, and once again the wealthy will live comfortably on their returns while the poor and unhealthy, who couldn’t contribute, will starve. Social Security privatization with mandatory witholding is little more than state-mandated participation in capitalist exploitation.

And once the wealthy are all getting great “returns” on their “Social Security investments” in fifty or a hundred years, and the streets are (gasp) swarming once again with unemployable, aged, and injured homeless and hungry panhandlers and vagrants because the social insurance system is gone, society will again discuss creating a socialistic insurance program that takes from those who can work and who can pay to feed and clothe those who can’t do either… or at the very least society will end up paying for additional enforcement to keep such people out of sight and off the streets where the crimes of poverty are committed.

Do you see? One way or another, you’re going to end up paying for the poor people if you can afford it… either to feed them or to stop them from stealing your food. “Socialism” should really simply be called “life in society.”

Wouldn’t it be easier on all of you (including those who will end up homeless and hungry in the meantime, before the cycle comes full circle) if you just paid into the program and let it do its job — to promise those who aren’t able to work or pay their own way (including you, if you should ever be so unlucky) some means of survival?

Figure it out, kids. If you have extra cash, that’s what the stock market is for. But Social Security is insurance against abject povery, for you and everybody else as well. You’ll get it if you need it. You’ll help out if you don’t.

I’m getting a new phone, this not being able to make calls is ridiculous. The best phone I ever had signal-wise was a TDMA Nokia 6360, so I’m gonna try and grab a GSM version (i.e. 6340i) and hopefully that will do me just as well. It’s a brick compared to the little-ass LG I have right now, but if little-ass LG isn’t actually good for making any phone calls, then what good is it?

—

Waiting game today. Waiting for a job phone call from a job I think I’ve got a chance of landing. Waiting for the check that I’m going to get tomorrow from the temp people. Waiting for the middle of the day so that I have an excuse to go to Taco Bell. Waiting for the evening so that I have an excuse to have a beer.

—

Maybe I’ll have a beer now and forget about all the rest. 🙂

—

In ten years I’m going to be Dr. Hsiao, Professor. My Grandfather did pretty well by his kids and grandkids. Once I get mine, there will be six Doctors and three Masters among his children and grandchildren (and there aren’t all that many) and nobody over twenty-five without a college education.

Ah-gong, your unfailing belief in and drive for education and enlightenment — the thing that you most ardently desired for your children and grandchildren — has done us well. Someday, I hope to know some fraction of what you knew; I hope to be able to give to others some fraction of what you gave (and gave without ever really even needing to say a word).

—

True strength is silent. Invisible until long after it has triumphed, it stands the test of time. When all the lights begin to dim, it’s the only thing that remains.

…in the high ground.

But I have always held it, more or less, and I will always hold it in the future, I think. It seems to be unavoidable, for me. It’s the only thing I understand. I am not wanted in most corners. No matter. I’m here, and those that try to avoid me or be done with me will still have to cope with me long after they thought they were rid of me. No, it’s not some cryptic code or creed. It’s just the nature of human memory and identity. I mercilessly haunt the past of every person who’s ever betrayed or injured me. I’m not happy or sad about that fact; it just is.

Despite claims of transcendence, ignorance, or justification, I know. I know.

—

I’m not the right person for any of this, I’m just future-professor-guy with the beer and the desire to smoke a cigar and wear a jacket. It’ll come to me eventually, it’s like building your future, like building a house or a boat or anything else. I’m building. I’m gonna get there.

And then, when I do, half the world will hate me and the other half the world will hate me ’cause I’m not a profiteer, and I’m not an anti-profiteer, I’m just a guy who tries to transcend it all.

Everyone is so fucking tied to their materiality.

I mean…

Let go already!

So I went several weeks not having any idea where all my cash (well, my tiny bit of cash) was going or had gone, and now today I log in and have more money than I think I should. I passed everything from Algebra to n-dimensional Calculus, so why can’t I figure out how to add and subtract basic bank?

Jesus.

It’s happened. My e-mail has reached the point at which it is basically useless. I am using Bayesian SPAM filtering and spending hours a day sorting through SPAM vs. non-SPAM, but the last few days nearly 75% of the mail I want to keep has ended up in SPAM and in the meantime I’m still missing messages that should be marked as SPAM. The volume is too high and the assholes are just too good at what they do anymore.

In the last 48 hours I received over 1,200 messages of which about 1,190 were SPAM. Only about 1,000 of these got routed to my bulk mail folder, meaning that I still had to sort through nearly 200 messages by hand. Meanwhile, I am now in the position of having to go into the 1,000 that did get routed to SPAM and search through titles and senders for mail I want that may accidentally have gone there. About five messages were thus misrouted, including mail from personal friends and family members.

I don’t know how many I might have missed. When searching back through 1,200 messages, there’s only so much you can do… you’re basically eyeballing it. I’m spending hours every day sorting through SPAM and I’m still losing personal mail. I give up.

My primary email address will soon be changing. Those of you who email with me sometimes will notice it. The old one will still work, but you’ve just heard about your chances of getting through to me on it. Hopefully a new address that isn’t so old will give me some better chances with the filtering.

I hate SPAM. I mean, just last night I discovered that I’d been called back to interview for a job I really wanted way back in November. And I never saw it… because it went into my SPAM folder along with a batch of about 2,500 messages representing half a week’s mail download.

in the sleepy west of the woody east
is a valley full, full o’pioneer
we’re not just kids, to say the least
we got ideas to us that’s dear
like capitalist, like communist
like lots of things you’ve heard about
and redneckers they get us pissed