Something happened almost two weeks ago. Due to the potential audience of my blog posts, suffice it to say that this event caused me to take a step back and take stock in my current "situation" and "position", as the words "undisclosed" and "no transfers" got tossed around. Bob Cratchit was threatened with this after he vocally subscribed with Scrooge's nephew Fred regarding Christmas. I think that's eloquent enough...
I must admit, I've sort of grown comfortable in my current position. I finally have a supervisor who I like and appreciates me for my work, I've been given the permission to work from home and love every minute of it, but the volatility of the industry has me wondering. For one thing, it has me wondering "What next?" Not as someone going through constant trials and then having another trial come upon them and shaking their fists heavenward and shouting "what next", but as in career-wise, what is the next step?
Currently I am pursuing and am halfway to attaining, an AA in General Studies with a Concentration in Business. After that I will be following that up with a BA in I-Don't-Know-Yet. But I haven't looked at the market in a while, so to speak. However, that would mean giving up the chance to get these degrees - at least, the chance to get them at no cost to me.
Taking stock of the situation, taking stock of my position, taking stock of my...location. What if some awesome job opportunity presented itself in, say, Oregon? Well for one, I would never know because I haven't been out there looking, but I hear that Oregon is one of the 10 states where the job market is exploding. Am I really so tied to Wisconsin? Who knows...that BA is a ways off yet, thinking 2-4 years away. And we just went through the whole moving fiasco...only to find ourselves right back in the city we were intending to leave a year ago...
It once again makes me go back and "dust off history" (consider further my last post, In Which History Gets Dusted Off). That post I focused on Paulina, who traversed the Eastern United States in an effort to find her sister, Anna. Whereupon finding her, stayed with her and lived with her and her husband and family until meeting my great great grandpa, Frank. Now I think of Frank's side of the story. While I don't know the schematics of it all, Frank came here to avoid being forced back into the Austrian Army due to lack of Draft Card, which I'm sure being forced back into the Army was the least of the potential punishment...but that's neither here nor there. The fact is, sometime around 1901 he came here. Landed I'm sure in New York City where Paulina found herself just a year previous, and as a hard-working, (probably) liberal-minded (The Google tells me through Wikipedia that typically, Austrian immigrants as well as Polish were of the liberal persuasion) 30-something single Catholic, I can only assume traversed the country as well just trying to attain a job to sustain himself.
History has shown me that my individual family roots had come to this country (excluding perhaps the English Colonial ancestors) due to either religious persecution or a better opportunity to escape the constant war and strife of the European scene at the time...almost reminiscent to today's America, but that's another blog post. I seem to be developing a theme of "Piecing Together History", as it were.
Anyhoobastank (credit to Wheezy Waiter for introducing that word into my life, seriously check out his channel it's amazeballs) it makes me wonder, not to sound like Adam Levine, what it was that brought Frank ultimately to Iron Mountain, Michigan. And even more than that, what took him in such a short time from Iron Mountain all the way to Milwaukee, Wisconsin? Nowadays that's about like an 8 hour trip, I can imagine it taking probably thrice as long in the early 1900s. Was it the influx of German and German-esque immigrants to the Milwaukee area? Although Chicago would have sufficed as well...what was it that took them precisely to Milwaukee?
So now, four generations later, I find myself in similar shoes, so to speak. No, I'm not contemplating fleeing the US Army (they wouldn't take me even if I wanted them to), but I find myself a hardworking, liberal (sorta)-minded 30-something Catholic wannabe (albeit married with children), asking myself is my current city the best location and is my current position the best position for me to have at this very moment in time?
The answer remains to be seen. As the scientists put it, "Further research is needed." The job market in Wisconsin is stagnant at best. Like Frank, however, I have family here, although his was admittedly possibly smaller than mine is at present, he had family that he left in Michigan to remove down to Milwaukee. It was for a job that my father removed us from Milwaukee to my current city. Is the perfect well-paying job just waiting for me in some place like Bend, Oregon (had to say that just for the name), and I'm too focused on what I'm doing now to catch it? Could it be that there's life outside of Wisconsin? Those last two statements are facetious but you get my drift.
As to the monkeys referenced in the title, it is too soon to discuss one of them; suffice it to say I took one important step to remove it from my back. Tomorrow the recipients should receive their correspondence and responses may or may not come. But the ball is officially out of my court, not that it was even ever in my court to begin with...but were it kicked over there, I've returned it back to the opposing side. The Collective Soul album title "Hints, Allegations and Things Left Unsaid" comes to mind. I took care of those, and await the results. Albeit not one of my monkeys, I've also begun writing letters to my grandfather, because it dawned on me that I cannot get down to where he lives (a little over an hour away) as frequently as I'd like to, and even when I do, I can't fill him in on everything going on in our lives, because so many other people are doing so. As he is not online, I've done the next best thing (and some would argue, including myself, an even better thing): written correspondence. Summation - there is something to be said about a hand-written letter.
The other monkeys are my vehicles. Let me preface by saying being in an upside down car loan sucks. However, being that the Teacher has allowed us to climb further out of a debt hole by utilizing it, I can only see it as being a friendly if not annoying monkey on my back, not one that is doing me harm. And while climbing out of a debt hole using more debt doesn't seem to make logical sense, it's more of a consolidation thing than it is a debt thing. That being said, it still sucks. Especially when the vehicles now need more work in them than they are worth. It will take some thrusting to get these monkeys off our backs,
Time - on its resume, it would have to include professional healer of wounds, single entity in which futures and fortunes are told, and flight extraordinaire (at someone else's fun expense).
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