so you've decided to serve rich people!

hello! so, you've decided to SERVE RICH PEOPLE! welcome to the fast-paced and rewarding lifestyle of earning a living from the TABLE SCRAPS of the wealthy!

we here at SERVING RICH PEOPLE are glad you have joined us, warmly bringing you in to a beautiful dance, making slightly more than MINIMUM WAGE for hours of disdain and glaring from rich people IN YOUR AREA!

now i know what you may be thinking - what can I DO to serve rich people??? my past work experience only involves WORKING WITH UNDERPRIVILEGED CHILDREN and HELPING RUN MY SCHOOL LIBRARY.

do not worry!  serving rich people involves little to no training, just a WARM SMILE and an ability to shrug off condescending remarks ON A DAY TO DAY BASIS!

we have positions available now! you could serve rich people their food at any number of restaurants staffed by local ARTISTS and recent college GRADUATES! handling food not your thing? rich people also love MARTINIS after a hard day of MAKING THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS.  bartending is a great way to MAKE MONEY and be verbally and sexually HARASSED by men with 401 K PLANS and UNSETTLING MORALS!  

love CARS???

you could always park the cars of rich people on their way into dinner!

stand outside in DISGUSTING conditions for hours on end only to run and get someone's LEXUS or BMW at their beck and call!  feel like a SECOND CLASS CITIZEN as they investigate the outside of their cars before tipping you ONE DOLLAR!

and there are MORE options still!

there are thousands of rich children just begging to be BABYSAT! they also need to go to TUMBLING CLASS! and endless hours of PRESCHOOL! or just walked around THE BLOCK! 

act as a parent for a wealthy child as their creators do more important things, like WORK and ATTEND BANQUETS! you might become so good at watching over rich children they will mistake you for THEIR REAL MOTHER and become MORE EMOTIONALLY ATTACHED to you!  oh, how the benefits just pile up!

not really a kid person? well rich people have SO MUCH SHIT they need done during the day you can barely MAKE A LIVING doing things like WALKING THEIR DOGS or running simple errands for them!  as everyone knows, rich people turn into GOBLINS when they are forced to do physical labor, so imagine all the YARD WORK and LAUNDRY you could accomplish for them!  

the exciting world of SERVING RICH PEOPLE is laid out before you, and it is all yours FOR THE TAKING!  so make sure you look PRESENTABLE and get that smile ready, because RICH PEOPLE are out there just waiting for someone like you to make THEIR LIVES BETTER!!

will exercise for money

this sunday was the chicago marathon. it was cold, it was windy, i imagine it was a very long and tiring four hour run.  but i bet everybody that did it was very proud of themselves. myself, i woke up at 1:15. that's pm, baby.  in the spectrum of sunday morning accomplishment, you had a slew of russians and kenyans pushing their bodies to the point of exhaustion for over two hours. 

and, on the polar opposite side of things, you had a 26 year old adult man sleeping until a time suitable for lunch.  

but back to the race...it seems that most everyone i know that ran had some sort of charity or organization they were raising money for.  i think this is pretty commonplace now. everyone has seen a request in their inbox, pledges to donate money for every mile run. or mile biked. or mile walked. or hour stayed up to. you get the picture.

and i feel like this has become a great donation business, pushing yourself to physical extremes to help out a cause, group or research pertinent to your life.

but i'm more concerned about how, exactly, the practice of donating money for marathons etc. originated.  i'm sure it was something good-natured, people looking to help out their athletic nephew, neighbor or good looking dorm resident advisor.

but this is the dialogue i imagined in my head.

"hi, paul. this is jeff."

"hey jeff, what's happening? saw you out runnin the other day"

"yeah, that was me.  love it! but i was actually calling to ask you...well ask sort of a favor of you."

"oh yeah? need help movin? airport again?"

"actually, i'm trying to raise money for a charity, it helps do research on (nameless illness). if i can get donations from all my friends, family and co-workers i could make a really good contribution."

"oooh....well, am i gonna get anything out of this?"

"i mean, just the satisfaction of helping out i guess."

"hmm. well, see i just don't know if that's enough for me.  i mean, i'd be willing to donate, i just...i'm just not gonna give it out for free."

"i mean, i could maybe do some chores for you?"

"nahhh."

"a nice dinner?"

"no, i won't need that."

"well what then?"

"well, i'd like to see you...i don't know...i want to see you just fucking run."

"like, sprint somewhere?"

"no, no sprinting. i want you to run for like....5 fucking hours. straight."

"straight?"

"right through baby."

"and if i run for five hours straight you'll give me 70 dollars for research?"

"believe it, my man.  and you have to take pictures of it, for proof."

...or something like that.

andy young's facebook comment...

...is making me put more efforts into writing funny shit for my friends to read. Thanks, brother.

So here it is, I haven't updated in about two months. I'm sorry. There are reasons for it that are far better than working at Staples. Or that I'm doing nothing. I'm busy living the life of a vagrant, sleeping nearly every night on the floor of my brother's apartment, keeping my belongings tucked away in the closet and drinking a nearly fatal amount of coffee each morning.

But things are good. I'm working at an outdoor store in the city, selling Nalgenes and polar fleeces to the city's affluent and maladjusted. I work with a collection of interesting people, most functional stoners that come into work hungover (with a frequency that makes me feel right at home.)

I'm also trying to write some novel for young teenage boys about video games, the united states military and other preposterous ideas. I've written two chapters and am waiting to hear back from it.

Two weeks ago I had a conference call with an editor and the VP of the company, two people talking to someone living a life that couldn't be further away from the ones they've grown to know. I am technically homeless. When I work I am fielding questions like "Do you guys have fishing lures here?" and "Well then where the hell can I buy guns in this city?!". I am still 40 percent sure I have some amount of wildlife living inside my body.

When they asked the question "Are you represented by anybody? They'll want to look over a contract if we send it to you," I didn't really know how to respond. Do I just tell them I sleep on a floor every night? Do I just read aloud my banking statement from the last period? (chipotle, bar, bar , chipotle, mcdonalds, public transportation, seven eleven...)

Instead I'm playing it cool, hoping that one of these days a contract might be showing up in my mailbox. And I'm using the term 'my mailbox' loosely, as there's not really an address I'm guaranteed to be at.

In short, if you have siblings that will let you sleep on their couch for upwards of two months, I suggest doing it. It's much better than Staples. Although sometimes I do miss the faint smell of mothballs 60 year olds working cash registers give off.

phase 5

right now i am in, probably, phase five of shaving my facial hair off. this is not by design, mind you, but just because my beard trimmer was not sufficiently charged. one would think that by now we've been able to harness the power of a beard trimmer that can work on battery AND use the current flowing through itself as it's plugged into an outlet. pipe dreams, friends.

what i have been left to do is save up enough juice to get about 30 seconds worth of trimming in. my first initial trim had the power of about an hour and half behind it, so i really got a lot of work done. face sides - check. neck beard - check. goattee and wild sideburns - somehow even more wild.

so now i am left to play the waiting game...going to my computer for about eight minutes and then reentering the bathroom to see how much i can get off of my face before the razors begin tugging and pulling what is left of a majestic beard.

after the second phase i looked something very similar to colonel sanders, just missing a thin bowtie and looking a little more haggard. you could probably order chicken from me, it just may not be up to certain standards we all enjoy. (and most likely you could only pay in cash or some sort of gold trade.)

phases three and four have not done much to help me out. phase three made me cut one sideburn too short. phase four required me to forget about the beard and try and get this fucking sideburns situation figured out.

you see, in three days i'm going on a vacation with my girlfriend (sara brown!) and her whole family. while i know that they probably couldn't care less about my facial hair, trying to not look homeless is something that my mother has always tried to instill in me. (i think she's slowly thrown out all of my thrift store tee shirts over the years.)
so i need the sideburns to look good. and i also had a tragic accident this winter where i kept trimming up, up and up until i literally had no more sideburns to trim. if you're trimming up to the top of your ear you're either 1) amish or 2) a serial killer. or 3) a perfectly meshed combination of the two. so for about two weeks i tried and brush my side-hair down as far as possible. it didn't really work.

also, you really pay more attention to peoples' sideburns when you don't have any. i kept looking at friends and other prominent figures in my life to see if they were on my "no sideburns" team.

sadly, none of them were. only really, really pale guys with really, really gross bowl cuts. and let me tell you what, that is not a team that you want to be the captain of. and i feel arrogant enough to call myself their temporary captain.

so now we come to phase five. i'm trying to kill a lot of time so it gets a good charge; hopefully this will be my last attempt at shaving my beard off. it's already made me an hour and half late for shopping for new glasses. but no beard is better than no beard and no sideburns.

that kind of thing is like a phase seven thing...possibly even phase eight.

for someone that strives to write professionally...

...i do a pretty shitty job at keeping up with it.
for the last, oh i don't know, five days my little notebook has had only a few simple tasks that i've listed in order to feel like a productive person. sadly the only ones that have been fulfilled are 'adventureland at 5:10' and 'record rock of love bus.' i am not joking.

things like 'do taxes' and 'write a first draft of a new story' have been pushed to the wayside for things designed to suck the creativity out of my body. it's pretty impressive how little you can accomplish on a day to day basis.

the only thing worse that i could imagine is making a list of everything that i've accomplished since i came home in november. and the only thing worse than that is sharing that list on my blog.

here are just a few highlights from my last four months, and believe me i'm only taking the cream of the crop on this one.

-one week i worked at staples for 37 hours.

-i have watched probably 85% of the cavs games this season

-i took four ibuprofen in one swallow

-we found a beer in the snow at towner's woods

-i helped drink a frozen beer at towner's woods

-have played roughly 100 hours of halo 3

-vomited in the desert

-eaten a couple of oranges


so when you get it in writing, it really does make it all look better!