Behold Elwood!

The newly crowned "World's Ugliest Dog"

A New Breed

Those of you who have been reading this blog for awhile will no doubt recall a bit of nomenclature I coined back in the fall: the K6 Bitch. In short, this was my alternative and spicy term for the "roaming teacher" assignments I often took during my time as a sub in the local township.

Well, it appears my days as a bitch are not over. Present circumstances, however, have led me to become a new breed: the house bitch.

In "A Subdued Existential Funk" I spoke of how I had been spending the weeks since the school year ended struggling to find a viable and rewarding source of income for the summer. Finding work in Indiana isn't particularly easy. Finding rewarding work is even harder and trying to find rewarding seasonal work is borderline impossible.

Thoughout my search for work, I was conflicted about how badly I even wanted a summer job (again, see my "Funk" post). A chief reason for my apprehension was the reality that this summer will be my last in Indiana for several years, if not the rest of my life. And my move to Denver is going to put my friends in the Midwest and the South out of convenient traveling range for a substantial chunk of time. In light of all this, what I've most wanted is to use this summer to savor my time with those friends and family I'll not see more than three times a year after my doctoral studies begin. Encouraging this mindset has been the fact that I earned enough dough during my last month as a sub to cover my bills until September, so I don't need to earn money this summer in the way I needed to during the fall, winter, and spring.

Nevertheless, there have been at least two compelling reasons to work this summer irrespective of pure necessity. First, there's the fact that I have a considerable move awaiting me at the end of this season. Moving isn't cheap and it would be nice to not have to raid my savings to fund that endeavor. Second, and maybe even more importantly, Susan and I had a serious discussion several weeks back about her and Perry not wanting me to be a free-loader this summer- eating their food, soaking up their AC, and doing nothing constructive for three months.

And yet that problem of finding rewarding summer work still hung over me. That work which can be readily secured for a season is low in pay even when one puts in high hours. That would mean seeing significantly less of those aforementioned loved ones during these "final days" while only earning (at best) around eight bucks an hour. Thankfully, when re-presenting these concerns over a recent family dinner, Susan (who, I should add, rarely ever utters a curse world) came up with a viable compromise/solution:

"You can be my bitch this summer, Dave. You wouldn't get paid for it but then we wouldn't mind you hanging around the house without a job either."

And her bitch, I have become. In short, I have taken over much of the domestic responsibilities of the household. I had chores before, of course, but now I have additional housekeeping duties. There are also special projects that will come my way from time to time. For example, I've already done some mulching for the first time and my life, and I've heard rumbling of a garage cleaning adventure just over the horizons. For those of you who have been following my status updates on Facebook, this is the type of activity I was referring to when I mentioned being a "house elf." I most often say house elf over bitch given its lesser likelihood to offend, as well as its greater appeal to the many Pot-heads I know.

"But what about the money to cover moving expenses?" you may be asking. "How will go about acquiring those funds now, Mr. Bitch?" Well, here's what I've been thinking:

Every summer since 2002, I've considered the possibility of selling my late father's baseball card collection. It's fairly large and composed of several complete sets, especially for the year 1991. One concerned friend recently asked me, "Do you think you're ready to part with your dad's baseball cards?" To which I was able to quickly respond, "Oh yeah! I don't think I could sell his comic book collection at this point, but I can sell his baseball cards no problem." You see, collecting comics was something my father and I did very much together, whereas trading cards were much more something my dad did on his own.

Selling these cards will not be a breeze, but it hopefully won't be terribly difficult either. There'll be a lot of sorting and organizing involved, and I'm sure I'll have to enlist the aid of eBay once that's all done. If I'm able to sell for a price near market value, I anticipate having enough to cover my moving expenses while freeing up a substantial amount of closet space in the process.

And that sums up what I've done about my summer employment situation.

Expanding My Territory in Cyberspace

My Friends, I am expanding my communication horizons by registering for accounts with MySpace and Facebook. While the Kingdom of the Madness will still be my primary site for electronic expression, these other two sites are now each a means by which you may contact and keep in touch with me. If you choose not to take advantage of them, that is fine with me. Honestly, I'm still not confident that I will be using either on more than an occasional basis.

The MySpace profile I've set up may be found here:
www.myspace.com/davescott82

and since Facebook is a gated internet community, you'll have to have an account of your own to interact with me there.

I'm already committing myself to post all my meaningful reflections and reports right here, so don't feel like you have to check my other accounts to know what's going on with Dave Scott.

All that being said, I hope your respective weeks are starting well.

FINISHED!!!

Early this afternoon I finished The Dark Tower, the seventh and final book in the Dark Tower series. Thus I was able to read the entire cycle inbetween May 9th and June 8th (and I even took a whole week off between volumes four and five). The total page count is roughly 4,550. This brisk pace was due not only to my great appreciation for the books but also the substantial amounts of free time my current, and hopefully brief, period of unemployment has allowed me.

Having come to the end, I would still highly recommend this series to anyone seeking to read an epic and high quality work of fiction. The fifth through seventh books, all written at essentially the same time, read like one cohesive tome. Book V, Wolves of the Calla, is jockying with The Drawing of the Three as my personal favorite installment in the series.


Anywho, that's the last I have to say about that.

A Subdued Existential Funk

What follows is true, but the sentiments and feelings I share shouldn't be blown out of proportion. It's less than organized but it's not too long.



My sense and perception of my world has changed since Memorial Day. The change isn't necessarily radical but it's much deeper than superficial.



My sense of the world is different because the framework of my day has changed since the school year ended. For the last eight months, I was working as a substitute teacher. Though this job didn't pay a great deal or come with any benefits, it did give short-term meaning and short-term purpose to my individuals days, as well as the weeks and months composed by those days. Taking an assignment meant having a place to go and having responsibilities to assume. Being able to seek out and to accept assignments in advance gave me the ability to shape my future proactively and concretely.



Substitute teaching allowed me to do something I love; namely, working with children. And though filling in for elementary schools is a far cry from leading a course full of college students, I gained experience in the field of education. Something else positive about this position was that (once teachers and administrators began acknowledging my aptititude for the job) it allowed me to feel a sense of accomplishment in how I was spending my days and, more importantly, that fleeting sense we all chase in our work- that my actions and my words make some meaningful difference.



The school year ended May 24th, so my time as a substutitute teacher is over. I'm not so much upset that this job is over as I am dissappointed that I have to find some other means of making money for the next three months. I've had enough summer jobs to know there's little existential gratification to be had in them. And that rare ability to determine so much of my own schedule will be out the window. Instead of working with children, most of whom engaged me or even admired me immediately and unconditionally, I'm must go back into that imporsonal world of commerical transactions and near anonymous labor where I make very little difference.



This all hit me a week ago Wednesday. After the losing the buzz of being with dear friends over the holiday weekend, I finally stepped into a full awareness that my time as a sub was over and done. I remember rejoicing in August of '04 that I was "finally done with summer jobs." Only to find myself once again needing to find one, and loathing the situation. (I typed out most of a rather lengthy expounding why I feel this way and then quit because I thought such a post would be excessively self-indulgent and tedious for anyone else to read.)



My perception of the world changed significantly just a few days ago. I didn't learn something new about myself exactly, but I did receive a stunning revelation about how some in my inmost circle have come to view me and who they think I am- what my character is and what my motivations are. I won't be as detailed on this shift of perception as I was regarding my shift of sense because I don't want to name and potentially embarass those loves one to whom I refer.



What I will relate is that I was told something that invalidated much of the last year for me. Who they thought I was and what I was about was not a totally unfair assessment, but off base enough that I felt attacked. I learned that I have been regarded in a way and talked about in a way that I never detected and (maybe foolishly) never expected. The talk was not an angry arguement but truly a conversation of good will. By its conclusion, the assertions made about me were softened and some apologies made. There were hugs and expressions of genuine appreciation. Yet the assertions were never retracted, and I would be remiss to go on as if they were.



A revelation this big needs time to sink in properly. I'm finally self-confident enough to have stood up against claims about me I thought were false (which I do not regret). But I still need to be self-critical insofar as it enables me to see the grains of truth in those claims and make the corrections in myself.


The combined shift in my sense and perception of the world has led me to question whether or not there is some fundamental flaw in the way that I have lived my life as an adult. More specifically, it leaves me wanting the last year of my life back so I can redo it. Maybe if I think it's worthy of posting I'll expand more on these matters later. I apologize again for my clandestine language.