Impending Doom

Damn it, damn it, damn it, I'm heading back to the northeast next Saturday (10/24/15). I can't find decent work in the LA area and by decent I mean anything that I'd want to do. And everything is so damn expensive that if I have to take some shit job I don't know if it would be viable to do it in such an expensive place. I've spent the last year or so of my life preparing to get out of the shit hole that is the northeast only to head back there after just 2 months right in time for the shitstorm that is winter.

The thing that's difficult for me is that I absolutely hate the weather in New England, but all my friends are there. I hate the fall, winter, and spring. I could give a shit about the changing seasons, I want warm sunshine. It's so depressing knowing that once I get back it won't be nice until next June, and that's not even guaranteed. I remember a June a few years back where it rained almost every single day and was overall very, very shitty. I would imagine the horrid weather is why, in my opinion, New England is filled with miserable f**ks. I mean, that's what I feel like when I'm there. I know most of the country hates LA, but at least there's a good variety of stuff to do here besides going to bars and shoveling snow.

At some point this past April I'd had enough and rage quit my job (which I was not happy at) and left for LA a few months later. Since I've been out here the weather has been nothing short of amazingly nice and it has even precipitated for a few brief instances. I just can't find a decent job and what is really frustrating is I know I'm going to have that problem once I get back to Massachusetts. My job experience is not very good and I've only been working for 3 years, so I don't really have all that much experience any way, not to mention that I haven't worked since June. My main concern is going back home, getting another shit job, and continue the unhappiness. I haven't been satisfied with anything that has happened since I graduated college. I haven't liked either of the two jobs I've had and the weather from October until June makes me want to inflict pain on myself so I can be distracted from awfully depressing it is.

I've had some people ask me if something in particular happened that made me want to leave, like a bad experience or something. You know what the answer to that is? Yes, something has happened, and it's been mounting over the years, I hate New England, Why is that so hard to understand? Sure some things have happened in life that I don't particularly like, but those things fade with time. You know what's not going to go away? The shitty weather, that's permanent. I think it's dumb to have regrets in life because you can't go back and change anything, but if I were to change one thing in my life, I would have gone somewhere nice to go to college. That way I could have made connections somewhere nice and hopefully obtained work somewhere nice. I don't know what I'm going to do when I get back home. My worst nightmare is to sentence myself to more fall/winter/springs in New England. I also have experience to go off here. I have lived and worked in Massachusetts and I hated it, that's what pushed me to come to LA. Now that I'm going back to Massachusetts, what's going to be different?

Prediction time. I predict that about two hours after landing at Logan in Boston I'll regret going back. Here's the true dilemma, though. What really sucks is that I have (had? I don't know what the hell I'm doing) to chose between to shitty things. This isn't a win/win situation. I either have to live in a place I hate and have a bunch of great, already established friends to do stuff with, or I live in a place that I like and have no established friends to do stuff with. Both have potential to cause unhappiness and over the past few weeks I've been attempting to decide which would be more miserable. I still don't have an answer. All I know is that I was not happy doing what I was doing. I can't even begin to describe how unhappy I've been over the past few years. I feel that over the past 4 years I've been becoming slightly more bitter with each passing month. I just don't think that going back to the same situation I was immensely unhappy with is going to solve any problems. I really like Southern California, it's an interesting place with a lot of variety. I like outdoor things, like running, biking, and playing sports. These types of things are greatly hindered in New England by the cold weather. I think the main thing that killed my excursion to California was simply location. I'm not a huge fan of large cities, in the sense that everything is super dense, there are lots of homeless people always begging for money, and bad traffic. I would rather live on the outskirts of a large city and work either in the city or also on the outskirts. I have had very limited transportation available to me and LA's public transportation can only get you so far. Not to mention the horrid experience I had dealing with a temporary employment agency out here.

The bad experience I had with the temp agency was all one particular dude's fault, this guy single-handedly tanked most of my hope of finding some kind of work to test what living and working in Southern California would be like. I think part of the problem was that I wasn't specific enough with what I was looking for, but this guy just called me up and told me to show up at a job without consulting me about the position before hand. He did this to me twice. The first time he sent me to what looked like a sweatshop, I don't know for sure because I was only there for 3 or 4 hours one day. After that day the employer wanted to cancel the arrangement which was fine by me. Then a few days later I was once again called by this guy and told to report to another job, again without providing me any details on what the position entailed or what company it was for. I told him I didn't want to commit to this job because I was working on another lead I had garnered on my own, but he told me I had to show up because he already told the client I was coming. It would be unprofessional to change anything now. Well, what do you call promising my arrival at the job without ever consulting me? I knew absolutely nothing until they called me. I would categorize that in the "unprofessional" family.

This whole situation culminated with me leaving this job after 3 weeks because it isn't what I wanted to be doing or with a company that I had any interest in working for. This could have been avoided by communicating with me before telling me to show up there, so I don't feel bad at all for leaving and at this point I was done working with this agency. I was going to try to do it on my own. However this agency has multiple branches and another of the branches that had no knowledge of what transpired over the last few weeks contacted me about another position. I received a voicemail about something that might "fit me." My first reaction was that I wasn't even going to call them back and I think that's exactly what I should have done. Instead I called them back and drove another nail into my hopes of finding a job I wanted. I agreed to a phone interview and did some research on the company. Again, it was something I'm not terribly interested in. So I went through the phone interview, not interested, hoping they wouldn't select me, but planning to reject if they did. A few hours later I got a call from the temp agency and they told me their client wanted me to start tomorrow, in this moment of shock and after a pause I said I'd go. That was a huge mistake. I got the confirmation email, looked at it briefly and then broke into a massive fit of rage that involved me yelling and swearing at myself while pounding repeatedly on my thigh. I decided to eat lunch and think about it. I didn't want to go, so I responded to the email and told them couldn't commit because I was waiting back for the final word from an interview I had the previous week. This is true, I was waiting to hear back on a job I actually wanted. After sending the email I decided to shut everything down, I didn't respond to any phone calls, voicemails, text messages, or emails from the agency. I was done, still angry and fed up with this agency.

The next week I heard back on the job I put everything on hold for. It took them 15 days to tell me they didn't choose to pursue my candidacy for the role any further. So here I was with no work and no leads. I had been applying to other jobs while waiting to hear back and continued to apply for jobs. So far the only one I've heard back from is the one that eventually decided not to go with me. I have learned that I'm really good at obtaining jobs I have no interest in. So there's that.

Now the best solution I've come up with is going back to Massachusetts and let the misery fester! I hated living there before, so I'm going to go do that again, how logical! Living there is like having an abusive partner. I don't know why people stay with abusive partners, much like I don't know why I'm going back to Massachusetts.

I consider the end of the baseball season until the beginning of the next baseball season the dark ages because I absolutely hate that time. I guess I may as well couple the dark ages with the shit-tastic place that is New England to make the perfect shitstorm.

The Near Future, It's Uncertain

Two weeks ago I had an interview for a job that I believe would do me some positive things for my "career," or whatever I should call it at this point. As of now, 8:40 p.m. on the fourteenth day since that interview, the phone has been silent, the email has been receiving messages, just not from the interviewing company. So what's next? I have no idea, but I'd really like to know if I'm still a potential candidate for the job or not. I'll be realistic, they don't want to hire me, which taking a realistic approach again, I can't really blame them for. Let's take a brief look at my so-called career so far. After college, I spent 8 months basically paying bills, then for the next 2 and a quarter years I basically called people and told them the owed money to the company I worked for. What great experience!

Honestly, I feel like my intellect has been insulted since joining the world that exists after education. Now I'll be the first to admit that I'm a dumb shit, but what I've been doing is mind numbing and down right insulting. That is why I left my two previous jobs and why I am search of something that doesn't make me want to physically harm myself every day because of how stupid it is. So at this point I've been out in Southern California for about a month and a half, it's almost October and the weather is great, but I have some issues. The first issue was the unpleasant experience I had with a temp agency that I have since cut ties with and the lack of success I've had applying to jobs on my own. It's looking increasingly like I might need to work another shitty job for a while, hopefully one that at least has valuable experience, but now the question is where do I want to do that?

I love the weather in Southern California, but now I'm beginning to doubt the decision to move out here, at least at this time. California might be too far away from New England, where I for the most part grew up, for me right now. The largest problem I have with the distance is actually the time zone differential. A three hour difference from the east coast is rather large and even with the awesome technology at our disposal, that can't reduce the time difference in these two regions. Having said that, I do not want to go back to living in the northeast. Going back to live in the northeast is low on my personally made option list. However, I would consider going back east except to a central/southern state, somewhere like North or South Carolina. I don't know how feasible that is right now. For me, the locations of California and New England are very unfortunate. I hate the cold and snow, but I also don't like the pacific time zone. I feel like the pacific time zone is behind the rest of the country and it makes it rather difficult to stay in touch with my friends the way I'd like, but damn the weather out here is nice. It still feels like the middle of summer and it's September 30th!

On a positive note, I have discovered a talent of mine! I have found that I am good at getting job offers for jobs I don't want. A lot of the displeasure I mentioned with the temp agency had to do with the assignments they were giving to me. This is partly my fault because I could have been more specific on what I was looking for. However, I can't do anything when the agency calls me up and tells me to report to a job without consulting me, telling me what the job is, or giving me any information at all. And according to them, I have to go because it would be unprofessional for me not to show up because they already told the client I would be there... without consulting me. That doesn't sit well with me and it pissed me off to the point that our relationship had to be severed.

Well, I've got some thinking to do! I've left the northeast and gone to Southern California, but I still have no idea what I'm doing with my life. Hooray for indecision!

New Things in a New Place

Ten days ago, August 14th of 2015, the day I finally made the move to Southern California. Feels like I've been bitching about the weather in the northeast for an eternity and talked about moving to California for about as long. How long this experiment will last, I know not. I might be here for a month, I might be here for years, there are a lot of factors at work. Now I've only been here for ten days, but I've already been called an ugly faced MFer by a presumably homeless man, seen a guy getting a blow job in his car, and met some dude on the street who said he was known as Batman and he's been prowling the streets of LA for twenty-seven years. That's longer than I've been alive. But let's talk about the guy who was getting a blowjob.

This morning I was on the way to my first assignment job thingy. Assignment job thingy is my way of describing my work life right now. I'm using a temp agency to find work since I was too stupid in college to secure myself a good job upon graduation. So I was in one of the many LA public buses minding my own business en route to the industrial sector of the city (not my choice). While stopped at a red light, I glanced out the window to my left and couldn't help but notice what was going on in the car stopped along side the bus. This guy was straight chilling in the driver seat while the woman in the passenger seat was bent over giving him a quickie in the car. At first I did a double take because I've heard of this, but this was my first time seeing it take place. So naturally I stared. Not really, though. I only glanced over a few times in an effort to not be creepy. Then the light changed and the bus started moving before the car, but when the car caught up I could see she was still down there as they took a left at the next intersection. Now I have no idea what that guy does for a living and I have no idea who the woman was next to him, but this guy was getting his dick sucked on a Monday morning in one of the biggest cities in the US. This guy must be doing something right. What an inspirational sighting.

Then I got to the assignment job thingy, sat around for four hours and did basically nothing, then happily found out later that this particular company didn't want to extend my temporary work assignment there because I didn't speak Spanish. This was news to my ears because this job was honestly embarrassingly below my intellect, not that I'm smart, but this job was painfully boring and required no thought. However, I received this news a few hours too late. I have some moments of extreme anger and the continuous search to find a good job has driven me mad many times. Today was one of those days that it got the best of me. In a fit of rage, I punched my knee with my right fist, which I've done many times, but this time I had the unfortunate bad luck of hitting my knee right on the cap which has bruised the bottom of my right hand. I don't think I broke anything and will continue to hope that it is just swollen. I wish I hadn't done that, but I just get so damn angry sometimes.

Well, I have new assignment job thingy to interview for tomorrow and I'm happy to an actual interview. The thing I went to today was one of those suspect no interview deals. Anyways, I'm in LA and attempting to look for a way to make a living. Until next time...

The Decision

With a mixture of unhappiness and rage, I finally went through with something I've been considering doing for quite some time. On April 24th of the year 2015, I gave notice at work that I would be leaving and quit my job. Some will consider me crazy for quitting my job without having a new job lined up and would probably really think I'm mad if they found out I have also declined two potential job opportunities, one which is only about ten minutes from where I live. I'll get into the declined job opportunities later, but first let me do my best to describe what I've been going through for the past two plus years.

The best way I can describe the place I've worked since the beginning of 2013, I'd describe it as a horrible place that creates tortured souls. From the exterior it's a growing company in a growing industry, but what can't be seen is how terribly bad things are internally. To the best of my knowledge, I don't know anyone who is truly happy there, but at the same time it does sound illogical to leave a company trending upward. What it came down to for me was quite simple, the painstaking daily responsibilities handed to me far outweighed the nonexistent positives of the role. I found myself hating every waking moment and hating myself for every day I let go by that I didn't quit. By the 24th of April, I met my breaking point, I just couldn't take it any more and finally quit. I knew it was getting really bad that week because I had only been to work three days that week and I was still insanely angry about everything that was my job.

My anger and disgust boiled over to the point where I didn't care what the company was, how much it was growing, or about anything, just that I knew it was time for me to leave before something bad happened. My job isn't worth my mental sanity. Now you're probably wondering what was so terrible about my job, so a good place to begin is my personality. I'm not one to verbally fight with people, in fact I hate it and I get frustrated very easily when I'm personally hung out to dry. My role with this soul torturing company evolved into primarily collections. Basically I've been spending the last two years telling people that they owe us money from obscenely long times ago, some dating back as much as two years. Then of course there's no way this can be right and I, let me repeat that, I am responsible for the mess. I can only take so much of that before I want to break my phone and everything else at my desk. I'm sure the people who sat in the cubicles near me must have thought I was crazy from all the swearing under my breath and whatever other things I did while I was being tortured daily on the phone. Oh and did I mention that I was the only person to deal with any issue that involved money? Cue 100% of phone calls that had to do with invoicing, account balances, payments, I need someone to yell at, coming to me and me alone. I stopped answering my phone on incoming calls because let's be serious, I don't give a shit about these people's problems. I was basically a secretary for myself. Sometimes when I'd get back to my desk after lunch, I'd have 10 missed calls. I don't think I should have 10 calls in a week, never mind an hour. Basically my role evolved into a collections/customer service job. If I wanted to answer customer phone calls, I would have interviewed for a customer service role.

I figured as time went on things would get better, but a year and a half later and it's the same shit. My position was a newly created role, and to put it kindly, what the company has found it needs is not at all what I want to do. Frankly the job sucks and has been the worst experience of my short life. I won't ever be able to look back fondly on my time there, it has been marred by the years of horrible experiences my anger.I'm so full of hate toward that place that you could call me Anakin Skywalker. Another way to describe the job is an abusive relationship. The benefits of the job are the salary, but man does it beat the shit out of you on a daily basis. Why do I keep going back when all it does is abuse me?

The best way for me to relate/rationalize things is in baseball terms. To sum everything up, I feel like 2008 Manny Ramirez. I'm disgruntled and I'm ready to force a move away from the Boston area. I've taken the next step and left my job so now all that's left is to see where I end up. Hint: Manny went to Los Angeles, that sounds nice.

When Can I Move South?

Well, another few months has passed and I'm still confused as hell about what I want to do with my life. Yesterday I went for a job interview in New York City and today I had another interview about ten minutes away from where I currently live. I came out of the NYC interview feeling much better about how the whole interview went. Both companies are good, but there was something that didn't quite sit well with me after the second, closer to home interview. Unfortunately for me, I'm still finding the same issue with every job that I've currently had any type of interview for, they're all in the northeast. I don't know whose d*ck I have to suck, but I really just want to get the hell out of the northeast and its horrible weather. I'm approaching the point where I'll look for a job at a convenience store somewhere in the south, where its warm, and there's no snow, and you can't really tell when the seasons change. You know, somewhere nice.

I'll look on the bright side of this, at least I got to miss two consecutive days of work. I also called out one day last week to go for another interview, which makes me wonder if my boss is catching on at all. I called out of work in my first two years with the company, and now I've called out for a morning and two consecutive days in the past week. That's two and a half days that I haven't had to deal with any of the aggravations and crap that occur at work daily. Regardless of what happens from here, it was nice to have a little adventure into NYC, a place I hadn't been since my sister was looking at NYU back around 2004 or 2005. Of course it was raining, though. It's like a reminder that NYC is still in the northeast and subject to the same garbage weather that New England is. I didn't have any time to go exploring while in NYC, but I saw a whole lot of taxis and heard a whole lot of honking.

Now I can't crap on the city of New York, I don't know much of anything about it, all I know is that the winters are still harsh, it still gets really cold there and it's less than ideal from a weather standpoint. I've also been saying for years that New York is a place I never wanted to live, along with Fitchburg and a whole bunch of other places. So the saga continues. I'm just hoping to have everything not necessarily figured out, but to have made some kind of a move before next winter comes around, because if there is one thing I know, I don't want to be here for another winter. I've been living in the northeast for the past fifteen years, and looking at the past 3 years since college graduation, I'd say this isn't really working for me. I can't say that I've been all that happy since I graduated. I've had two jobs, neither of which have satisfied me in their own unique ways, and I absolutely hate the weather.

Did I mention that I don't like the weather in the northeast? Anyway, I've given the northeast a fair chance, I'd say, but I'm ready to at least give another place a chance. I don't see why I shouldn't relocate either, it's not like I have anything tying me down here. I've said it once and I'll say it again, the only thing I'd miss about this place is my friends. At the same time, though, I don't see my friends that often as it is because of the different paths our lives have gone down since the completion of college. Times change and I think a major change would do me good at this point. I'm looking for a change to nicer scenery (meaning nicer weather), it's simply not working for me in the northeast and I'm ready to leave.

Give me the Crowbar, not the Monkey Wrench

Now that I'm a quarter of a century old, I decided this is a good time to figure out what the hell I'm doing with my life. Up to this point I've been lollygagging along with very limited direction. Everything has been very standard: graduate high school, graduate college, obtain a job, move out of my parents house. That brings me to where I am today: a 25 year old operating in a peon position at a multi-million dollar company. Now for the last year and a half I've been either slowly or rapidly (I can't really tell right now) growing more unhappy each day. This all stems from one area of my job that I don't like at all.

What I've been seriously contemplating since sometime in July (of 2014) is moving to Southern California. This are of the country is very appealing to me because of the phenomenal weather, plus I've been out there before and it's definitely a place I could get used to. I think now is the time to do this since my Dad is currently out there on work and my Mom is going to join him at some point in 2015 (I think). What a great opportunity this is to have some help getting settled in to a new place. I've already squandered a few opportunities to move my life out west, such as the $17,000 annual scholarship I was offered by a college in Southern California to run track. At that time I wasn't ready to make such a move because I didn't want to part with my friends and I thought I had a good thing going with a girl from back home. Looking back I wish I had applied heavily to schools in Southern California and chose to attend one. That's all in the past and now I'm ready to go. I hate the weather in the northeast and I'm not attached to the region or any of it's cities one bit. The only thing I'd miss are my friends, but I don't see most of them that often anyway, but mostly I'm such a weirdo that I don't fit in with the typical crowd. I don't really enjoy drinking alcohol, I go out with my friends more as a function of being a friend and I want to support the happiness and well being of my friends because I do care about them. I'm kind of a loner/family guy and I'm ok with that.

Recently a monkey wrench or two have been thrown into my very loose hope to leave this dreadful (my opinion, I realize that some people really like it in the northeast) area. I'm just saying there's a reason Dante wrote about harsh cold in the layers of hell. For one, I feel like there's actually a conscious effort occurring at work to make my job suck less. One day last week I'm pretty sure some of my coworkers thought I was having a mental breakdown or something. I wasn't, it was actually just a normal day, I was just expressing my displeasure a hell of a lot more than usual. My friend at work told me some people were asking if I was ok and later on that day my boss asked me the same thing. Then the following day the VP had me come to her office and pretty much asked me the same thing as everyone else. I've shared ways to improve the problem that we face in my department and I truly believe that there will be an effort to make things better. However, I think part of me doesn't want this to get fixed because it would make leaving the company easier. As I stated before, my work happiness has been on a decline for quite some time now, dating back to October of 2013. I still remember the day it started. It was game one of the ALDS between the Boston Red Sox and the Tampa Bay Rays. It was the day I first heard The One Man Thrill Ride on WEEI. In short it's been a while since I was truly comfortable at work.

What I feel like at work

What's so bad about my job? Well, it all stems around one problem that has been plaguing my department since I've been there. The 1,000 plus unread email I have and countless voice mails I haven't listened to are a big factor, too. I don't think this was intentional, but basically any customer issue that has to do with accounting/finance gets funneled to me. The problem here is that it's absolutely ridiculous for one person to manage this for a multi-million dollar company. Especially when that's not really my job either, I have other shit to do. I've developed a new policy for answering my phone: I always answer if one of my coworkers is calling, but if it's an outside number I don't answer it unless I'm not in the middle of something, which is never. Currently my voice mail inbox is full with messages I haven't heard. I'd probably need to allocate an entire day or week to sort just the voice mail out. So... f*ck that, I'm not customer service.

Anyways, I'm getting a bit of topic here. I'm not very happy with my current employment situation, but the simple effort to make things less miserable certainly make me at least a little reluctant to leave. However, when I think about it, I should do what makes me happy and that always has me leaning toward making a change. At least we live in a wonderful world of technology today and I take full advantage of this by looking at the job market on a daily basis while I'm at work. Going to work to look for a job, it's a thing of beauty.

 The other side of the work conundrum is finding a job across the country. If I want to move to Southern California, I kind of need a job. I've sent my resume to a few job postings in California and haven't heard a thing. It could be that they don't like me as a candidate or it could be that the hiring people are thinking what in the heck is this guy from way out east doing applying to this job? Although, if I made up my mind and decided, screw all this, I'm moving, and just quit my job and picked a date to pack up my shit and move to the other coast I could always use an agency to help me find a job. I did that here and I landed myself a job.

Excuse me while I pry away at this problem

Friends are the biggest road block in my master plan to move. I have a few very good friends that I've had some great times with, times I won't forget anytime soon. I'm such a weirdo, though, that I don't exactly fit the mold of a person my age. Most people my age have one common interest: drinking alcohol. Sure I have an alcoholic beverage every now and then, but there's no consistency and I could easily give it up in an instant. I'm just not interested. It's the way I'm wired or something. For most of my life I've been what I'll refer to as an athlete, though not a very good one. I really miss running track and playing baseball and soccer. On many occasions I've seriously considered returning to competing in track, but the problem is the lack of facilities and time to properly train. It would be a dream come true to earn a living by playing a sport, but that has pretty much passed me by. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that I'd rather use my spare time to train and better myself physically than go out drinking. It's only fitting that my best friend shares this same passion for bettering himself physically. We used to workout together for some time until I moved out of our hometown earlier in 2014. Not many people share this type of passion because let's face it, it's hard to stay in good physical shape. I workout on my own now, for the most part. Let's not get too far off the point here. Despite the friends I've garnered in my time in the northeast, I don't really see them all that often and again we live in this wonderful age of technology. As long as there is an effort made, you can stay in touch with relative ease.

The people I've discussed a potential relocation the most with are my parents. I'm not sure if my Dad is for or against me moving, but my Mom seems to really understand that I'm not particularly happy with where I'm at. I would love to live somewhere winter doesn't really exist, except as the name of a certain time of year. I want to live in a place where I can go outside in shorts and a t-shirt and be comfortably warm almost year round. This is all simply a personal preference of mine. Southern California is not for everyone, but I believe it's a place for someone like me. All I ask is for people to see this from my point of view when considering the decision that racks my brain daily. I envision making this move solo. Most of my friends don't want to leave the area we currently live in, and that's fine, that's their preference. I think it would be easier to make this move on my own. The exception I would make is if I had a girlfriend who shared the passion to move with me. My sister basically did this when she decided to move across the country and she's been happy ever since! Maybe I should take a page from her book and just buy a plane ticket and then tell everyone. I guess I'd have to quit my job, too, but my sister decided all on her own that she was moving and I respect that decision. She knew what she wanted to do and stuck with it. Granted she was moving to go live with her boyfriend, but she did what she thought was best for her. That's what I want to do with myself. I don't like those "where do you see yourself in five years?" questions, but when I think about that now, I just think that I don't want to be here.

You know what the funny thing is? Despite all the desire I show about wanting to move, I'll probably still be living in the northeast in five years and working at the same job. I'll admit, I would find that a bit funny myself. If my uncertainty about what I'm doing with my life was hate, I'd be the number one Sith Lord. Honestly, I have no idea what's going on. Currently everyday is like the last one, same shit different day. Am the only one who would love to go live elsewhere not only for my desire of better weather, but also for different culture? Maybe it's because of how I grew up. As a young child my family and I were some kind of nomads. We didn't live in any one particular place for an extended amount of time. Two or three years in one place, then two or three years in another place which included a stint in Brazil. At the time I didn't really notice the difference in cultures, I was too young. But looking back at those days in Brazil, it was quite the experience. There was a period of time, probably an entire year, that I almost never wore shoes. I was a little second grader running around with my sister outside in the sun barefoot taking in the nature that surrounded us. I feel like I've spent long enough in the northeast and I'm ready for change.