Tonight, in the bottom of the 8th inning of game 4 of the world series, the Colorado Rockies are down by one run and struggling to stay in contention for the biggest honor in the baseball world. I had never been a big fan of baseball or any sports for that matter and only began taking a slight interest in sports a few years ago, more out of necessity than pure interest. In 2003 I moved from Denver to Baltimore where I used to work a job that required me to travel extensively and I spent my fair amount of time in airports, hotels and bars downtown. I consider myself to be the kind of person that requires alone time to rejuvenate from the day to day hassles we all face but after awhile, when traveling by yourself, you do whatever you can to keep yourself company, and that means having to talk to perfect strangers.
It turns out that when you do this, especially when in bars, women think you are hitting on them and men generally talk about sports. Since a majority of the time I was not looking for amorous adventures, I eventually had to learn to talk about sports and I was able to do so by reading the front page only of the sports section in the USA Today. It's like the candybar of newspapers. I don't know how but in doing this one simple task every morning the amount of conversations I could have with strangers throughout the day almost doubled. I could just throw certain sports names or sports happenings out there and be engrossed in a conversation and really have no idea what I was talking about. Not that it mattered, I most likely wouldn't ever see this person again.
It just so happened that at this time the Red Sox broke the curse of the bambino and won the world series for the first time in something like 80 years, two nights before my 28th birthday. And I watched the ACLS playoffs and the world series that year with the intensity of a really good X-Files episode. And the next thing I knew I developed a very very small interest in baseball where I had none before. I even went out and bought a Red Sox ballcap which I wear often.
I returned to Colorado after I quit that job and found myself going to Coors Field where you could buy reasonably cheap tickets to watch the Colorado Rockies play baseball. At that time they were never any good but I watched them nonetheless, they were my team. I felt like I had spent enough time in Colorado to consider them as such. I've only visited Boston once.
What a strange feeling to be back in Oklahoma now, after those few short years, I am once again watching the world series and in the bottom of the 8th inning of game 4, the Colorado Rockies are down by one run and struggling to stay in contention for the biggest honor in the baseball world, rooting that they will make it, while wearing my blue Red Sox ballcap with the bright red B blazing across the front.
And as it turns out, the curse of the bambino is still broken. The Boston Red Sox just won the world series.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Sunday, October 21, 2007
The Mayor of Casterbridge
I maintain a myspace page as the British author Thomas Hardy http://www.myspace.com/thomashardy and I wanted to take one of my blogs from that website and post on in this one.
I wanted to share something from my recent reading. I don't know if you are familiar with the story of the mayor or not but it begins when he is 21 years old and he is married to Susan and they have an infant daughter named Elizabeth Jane. Hardy states that the chief attraction of the woman is the mobility of her face, that when she looks down sideways she is pretty but in the shade "she had the hard-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of Time and Chance except, perhaps, fairplay."
Thus it starts with the family of three walking down the road towards the small town of Weydon-Priors which has no conventional suburb for "town and country meet at a mathematical line" and at this time the husband, who is to eventually become Mayor of Casterbridge, Michael Henchard, is a lowly hay-trusser looking for work and is quite dissatisfied with his wife when they come upon a country fair where the family stops in at a furmity tent (think malt-o-meal/wheat puff cereal) for dinner where the furmity hag will pour rum in to your basin for two shillings. Michael Henchard does so and sets the action for the story on its course when after hearing the livestock auction in the tent next to theirs decides he should be able to do the same with his wife and auctions off her and the daughter to a sailor. Henchard then passes out drunk in the tent.
The sailor takes Susan and Elizabeth Jane to Canada where they live for twelve years and then return to England. Around the time the daughter turns 18, Susan has become unhappy with her sailor husband, Mr. Newson, and by the logic of a friend she realizes that this sailor has no real claim upon her and therefore Susan has no real duties to him as a wife. So as the sailor is out at sea one month, Susan begins wondering how she can rid herself of the sailor when fortuitously for Susan he just happens to drown out at sea. Now Susan decides she must seek out her old husband because after all they are still married and legally obliged to one another. But during all this time Susan has never told her daughter about what happened that day at the fair and all these 18 years Elizabeth Jane Newson has always known the sailor to be her father and no one else.
So at this point the story brings us back to the same dusty road the three were walking on at the very beginning but it is now just Susan and Elizabeth Jane looking for, as mom puts it to daughter, "a distant relation by marriage" for she doesn't want to mentally scar her daughter with the truth.
And here is what I love about Thomas Hardy, these little gems you come across like this, the last sentence from the third paragraph of Chapter 3 describing the pair as they walk down the dusty lane: "While life's middle summer had set its hardening mark on the mother's face, her former spring-like specialities were transferred so dexterously by Time to the second figure, her child, that the absence of certain facts within her mother's knowledge from the girl's mind would have seemed for the moment, to one reflecting on those facts, to be a curious imperfection in Nature's powers of continuity."
It's like chewing on a really good cut of meat.
I wanted to share something from my recent reading. I don't know if you are familiar with the story of the mayor or not but it begins when he is 21 years old and he is married to Susan and they have an infant daughter named Elizabeth Jane. Hardy states that the chief attraction of the woman is the mobility of her face, that when she looks down sideways she is pretty but in the shade "she had the hard-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of Time and Chance except, perhaps, fairplay."
Thus it starts with the family of three walking down the road towards the small town of Weydon-Priors which has no conventional suburb for "town and country meet at a mathematical line" and at this time the husband, who is to eventually become Mayor of Casterbridge, Michael Henchard, is a lowly hay-trusser looking for work and is quite dissatisfied with his wife when they come upon a country fair where the family stops in at a furmity tent (think malt-o-meal/wheat puff cereal) for dinner where the furmity hag will pour rum in to your basin for two shillings. Michael Henchard does so and sets the action for the story on its course when after hearing the livestock auction in the tent next to theirs decides he should be able to do the same with his wife and auctions off her and the daughter to a sailor. Henchard then passes out drunk in the tent.
The sailor takes Susan and Elizabeth Jane to Canada where they live for twelve years and then return to England. Around the time the daughter turns 18, Susan has become unhappy with her sailor husband, Mr. Newson, and by the logic of a friend she realizes that this sailor has no real claim upon her and therefore Susan has no real duties to him as a wife. So as the sailor is out at sea one month, Susan begins wondering how she can rid herself of the sailor when fortuitously for Susan he just happens to drown out at sea. Now Susan decides she must seek out her old husband because after all they are still married and legally obliged to one another. But during all this time Susan has never told her daughter about what happened that day at the fair and all these 18 years Elizabeth Jane Newson has always known the sailor to be her father and no one else.
So at this point the story brings us back to the same dusty road the three were walking on at the very beginning but it is now just Susan and Elizabeth Jane looking for, as mom puts it to daughter, "a distant relation by marriage" for she doesn't want to mentally scar her daughter with the truth.
And here is what I love about Thomas Hardy, these little gems you come across like this, the last sentence from the third paragraph of Chapter 3 describing the pair as they walk down the dusty lane: "While life's middle summer had set its hardening mark on the mother's face, her former spring-like specialities were transferred so dexterously by Time to the second figure, her child, that the absence of certain facts within her mother's knowledge from the girl's mind would have seemed for the moment, to one reflecting on those facts, to be a curious imperfection in Nature's powers of continuity."
It's like chewing on a really good cut of meat.
We have concluded our liabilty decision
I work for the insurance industry. In the summer of 2006 I was hired by Farmers Insurance to work as an auto liability adjuster in their office in Shepherd's Mall off 23rd street. I have never written anything about my job until now and I hit my year anniversary of employment mark just a few months ago. For those of you unfamiliar with the insurance world, an auto liability adjuster determines which party in a car wreck is at fault and whether or not the insurance company pays for any damages. To put it plainly, this job does not match my personality and it does not fill me with any sense of satisfaction or accomplishment other than earning a paycheck.
I am able to do the job successfully but it creates quite a large amount of stress for me. I have developed difficulty in relaxing and increased jaw grinding. In addition to the job and its inherent stresses, I also study for national insurance examinations which give me certifications that aid in the attainment of salaray grade raises. I have been studying for the second of such tests today, called the AIC 36. This particular test, requiring hours of self study by reading insurance texts, covers all the basics of liability claims from auto to commercial, including advertising injuries. In the first chapter of the text I came across a few words that summed up those things which create the negative aspects of my job listed above. I quote, "Liability claim representatives will, without exception, encounter situations that drain their energy, challenge their sense of justice, and make them question the goodwill of others."
I worked several different jobs before finding my way in to the insurance industry. For a year I installed point-of-sales systems in restaurants and casinos. Seeing the underbelly of the casino industry and Las Vegas specifically I found distasteful but manageablly kept at a distance. I once worked as a data processor. That job was monotonous and boring. I even flipped burgers in high school and I look back on that job fondly.
But not once had I ever held a job until now where my actual profession caused me to call in to question the good will of others. Now don't get me wrong, other experiences have caused me to question this before, but never on a day to day basis.
That's why I am writing this blog. I decided to go back to school to do something about it.
I am able to do the job successfully but it creates quite a large amount of stress for me. I have developed difficulty in relaxing and increased jaw grinding. In addition to the job and its inherent stresses, I also study for national insurance examinations which give me certifications that aid in the attainment of salaray grade raises. I have been studying for the second of such tests today, called the AIC 36. This particular test, requiring hours of self study by reading insurance texts, covers all the basics of liability claims from auto to commercial, including advertising injuries. In the first chapter of the text I came across a few words that summed up those things which create the negative aspects of my job listed above. I quote, "Liability claim representatives will, without exception, encounter situations that drain their energy, challenge their sense of justice, and make them question the goodwill of others."
I worked several different jobs before finding my way in to the insurance industry. For a year I installed point-of-sales systems in restaurants and casinos. Seeing the underbelly of the casino industry and Las Vegas specifically I found distasteful but manageablly kept at a distance. I once worked as a data processor. That job was monotonous and boring. I even flipped burgers in high school and I look back on that job fondly.
But not once had I ever held a job until now where my actual profession caused me to call in to question the good will of others. Now don't get me wrong, other experiences have caused me to question this before, but never on a day to day basis.
That's why I am writing this blog. I decided to go back to school to do something about it.
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