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.
