Skip to main content

I have a plan. Right?

So I quit my job today. It was a pretty good after that. During one of my breaks I went into the break room. The vending machine in the break room is an older model, I guess. It has an interior compartment that revolves around. You can choose from an assortment of snacks that you do not want. I tested the door in front of the Mountain Dew. It opened. Huh. I thought. A free drink! I closed the door, pulling my free drink out. Suddenly the machine freaked out. It started beeping and spitting quarters out. Jackpot! It spat out $20 in quarters.

So I put them in my bag.

I've been thinking lately. Ever since Tuesday, really. People ask me what I'm doing a lot, now. "I'm in an EMS class," I tell them. "Are you going into medicine?" They ask. "No, I'm a geology major." I answer. "But I want to be a musician. Or a filmmaker." They stare at me for a second. "Oh."

"Why?" They ask.

I do not know. I don't know what I'm trying to do with my life, honestly. I've been going through the motions for so long. I don't have any aspirations. I don't have any ambition or motivation. It's as if I'm content with just surviving. I'm not, though. Working on that ambulance on Tuesday set something in motion. In my head. I can feel it. It's working. Helping those people. Carting them into the room.

They turn and look at you. You look back at them as you stand in the doorway. Their eyes say everything but they still talk. "Thank you." They say as the nurses move around them. You smile and walk out of the room. You wash your hands and get back on the ambulance. It's satisfying. Helping people. It's worth whatever cost.

It made me think, though. Is that what I should be doing? Is that the wind for my sails? When I was working out there I felt something. It was a good feeling.

Do I have the will to follow up on that?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Past the butterfly wall.

Spontaneous pneumothorax is a collection of air or gas in the space between the lungs and the chest that "collapses" the lung and prevents it from inflating completely.  Spontaneous means there is no traumatic injury to the chest or lung.   There are two types of spontaneous pneumothorax: primary and secondary. Primary spontaneous pneumothorax occurs in people without lung disease. It occurs most often in tall, thin, young people. I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket but I can't answer it. We are in the middle of rehearsal. It is not an uncommon event. We continue to play. The strap of my saxophone cuts into my neck. The nylon is rough against my skin. I look out of place. Everyone else is dressed casually; shorts, shirts, shoes optional. There I stand, a button down shirt and slacks. I'm entitled to dress up a little. It's my birthday. My phone vibrates again. I always used to roll my eyes whenever I saw those scenes in movies. The phone call. The bad news....

I'm a geologist, not an alcoholic.

I thought I had seen people drink before. Hell, I thought that I had drank before. But, clearly, I thought wrong on both of those counts. I cannot, for the life of me, think of a reason to justify all of the drinking that transpired down there last week. There was no rhyme or reason to it, it just was. Field work just makes a man thirsty. Taking this class was easily one of the best things I've ever done. We worked hard every day out in the field. Wake up at 7, leave the beach house by 8, hit the water by 9. My first three field days were in service on the R/V Acadiana , a 58 foot vessel that towed the CHIRP fish , the air gun, and the streamer to measure all the seismic data--looking at the subsurface of the seafloor we drove over. My second ship was the R/V Itasca using the multibeam , sidescan , and grab sampler --getting seafloor surface bathymetry. They were long, exhausting days and we returned to the docks around 6 or 7 every evening. And then, drinking. So much ...

Yeah, that is not okay.

So stuff is okay, I guess. Things are alright. My friend and I are actually making some decent headway on our project. It's been such a long time since I've made a movie. Actually made a movie. Not just started it. I feel pretty good about where this is going, though. That's good. It's a good thing. I'm pretty excited about it, honestly. I think the scripts we've written so far are pretty funny. They are probably not as funny as I think. I tend to get unreasonably close to my work. That's okay, I guess. I think a lot of people tend to do that. It makes it hard to hear criticism. I have no problem with handing out the criticisms, though. That's always fun. Actually it is not all that fun. I know how they feel. That's okay. We're just having some casting issues, I guess. We're planning for a lot of side characters to come in for one-shots episodes, but we haven't quite managed to fill those out. Or develop the characters...