SO WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?

Craigslist for the past few years has really been a big part of my life. I mean I could almost tell the story of my life post-college through the trials and tribulations of my existence with Craigslist. Actually come to think of it, I cant really tell the story of my life through the trials and tribulations with using Craigslist, I can mostly just tell of the failures in my life through usage of Craigslist. Craigslist is like the bad girlfriend that I keep going back to.

Let’s see, it was last summer. I was in the market for a full size conversion van—something that makes me want to laught hysterically and want to vomit as I think about it now. So I landed a deal on Craigslist for a Dodge van. This thing was roughly the size of a German U-boat and consumed roughly three times that amunt of gasoline but it was a beauty—full oak trim interior, TV/VCR combo, electric folding bed in the back, enough room inside to cart around a pack of wolves, etc. The thing was immaculate. And so there it sat in my driveway as I called Mom and brother Alex to come outside and look at the piece of machinery. I was so proud of my purchase. I was planning to go on a road trip with the beast and then move out west. Things were looking good.

So now that I had purchased the thing—and come all the way from Chicago mind you to land the deal—I had to turn it around and take it back to the Windy City. I was on the road for about 10 minutes when the red light on the dashboard lit up telling me I should check the engine. Super. I started to sweat. And by sweat, I mean I was lying in a grease pond of my own perspiration. I was just watching my $2700 prized purchase evaporate in to the summer sky. All the sudden the engine started to unnecessarily rattle and it seemed as though I had something of an issue—30 minutes in to owning the goddamn thing.

I took the monster wagon in to a local Auto Zone for them to hook it up to their computer and run the diagnostic—they do this for free mind you, it’s a pretty good resource. A fellow by the name of Steve came out to hook up the computer and I was genuinely frightened that this guy may try to beat my head with a hammer instead of helping me out. He looked like Sid Vicious and talked like Steve Carrell—a freaky combo. I never really got over this. He hooked up the computer, ran the diagnostic and looked me straight in the eye. I was in the middle of explaining that I had just purchased the car that day from an old man and Steve didn’t give a fuck—“DUDE, YOU GOT BONED.” He was screaming, probably from years of acid metal music killing his eardrums. “THIS ENGINE IS MISFIRING ON ALL EIGHT CYLINDERS.” I stared on with general dumbfounded-ness completely unaware of what an “engine misfire” was really implying. I didn’t say much and Steve knew I may be clueless. “DUDE, YOU GOT FUCKED. GET IT?”

Jesus Christ.

Long story short, I called the guy back that I had purchased the monster truck from and told him I was bringing the truck right back and that I wanted my money returned immediately. He was about 60 years to my senior so he had a genuinely hard time hearing me and understanding that I was bringing his van back to him. After about 5 hours of vicious arguing with an 80 year old man that smoked black and mild cigarettes throughout the entire course of our argument, I realized I was in a genuine conundrum. The old man would periodically change his argument completely mid sentence and this was really throwing me off. One moment we would agree he would give me all the money back that day, and then the next moment I was getting the money back the following week after a mechanic looked at it. The guy was genuinely crazy, and I was pretty sure that arguing with him cost me about 10 years of my life.

Eventually, a few days later, I got all my money back. That was Craigslist failure number one— with a minor twist of success.

Right around the time I voluntarily quit my last job at the office, I decided I would be needing a laptop of my own because I was going to have to turn in my work laptop. For whatever reason, it seemed reasonable for me to approach the market through Craigslist to find a used laptop. Not sure why this seemed like a great idea, but I nevertheless went forward with it. I found a very suitable Apple iBook G4 with all the specs that I wanted from a guy up in Wrigleyville—just a couple miles away from my apartment in Wicker Park. The guy’s name was Temi and we schedule a time to meet so I could have a look at the laptop.

Easy peasy.

I showed up at his apartment. Going in to strangers’ apartments is always kind of freaky— even when it is a stranger that you are aware of through a mutual friend or something. The smell is always the first thing I pay attention to. Temi’s apartment, as I approached the gleaming Apple laptop that I would be purchasing from him for $450, resembled the smell of a dead rat laying roadside for roughly 10 days in the hot summer heat. Next in a stranger’s apartment, you can’t help but look at the objects scattered about. Temi had computer discs covering the floor. I am guessing roughly 35,000 of these things just plastered across the floor boards. Every turn of my eyeball was potentially an opportunity for blinding myself because of the constant glare resulting from CD’s reflecting sunlight.

Awesome.

Temi was kind of freaking me out. Despite all these sings of Satanic-like behavior, I walked out of Temi’s Wrigleyville apartment with an Apple laptop.

I think two weeks later to the day I was sitting on my balcony enjoying a beer with my roommate Drew when I got a weird message pop up on my screen alerting me that my laptop needed to be shut down immediately. And so I did. No big deal. Well, it’s just that I got this message 600 more times every time I tried to turn the computer on. The computer never actually turned back on after that fateful evening on the balcony. So I called Apple Care and told them the issue. Well, my motherboard was fried apparently. I was furious. Here I had just bought the damn thing, and with my luck, the computer was now a vegetable. I could use it as a placemat now. Or maybe when I had kids I could let little Tommy sit on it to boost him up in his chair. So I wrote a letter to Steve Jobs telling the man what a disgrace this whole situation was. Oddly eough, I got a response in the form of a phone call from one of his “assistants” who wanted to try and fix the problem.

Well, he didn’t fix it but rather I just got a note from Steve telling me that I could pay $300 and have the thing back in working order. I declined. Craigslist failure number two.

Well, all things considered, I took a bit of a risk— given my track record with Craig and his list— by finding the Crocs job with Craigslist. I answered a very thorough ad when I was passing through Seattle and Portland in response to what was called a “Brand Ambassador” position. I got a phone interview scheduled and it went well. This led to the scheduling of a face-to-face interview when I got to Portland. This was the same trip that while sitting in a Laundromat one morning, a bum gave me HIS sweatshirt because he thought that I looked like I needed it. I took that as a pretty sweet gesture (still have the sweatshirt in my room) but nevertheless immediately realized that I must be looking AWFUL. The following day I checked in to the Hawthorne Hostel, had a shower and cleaned up for my job interview.

Things went well, and lets be honest, I was pretty sure that this job was the best thing that had ever happened to me—I would be traveling, meeting new people, driving a truck and oh yeah… doing marketing work. For the past 6 months I have been writing here of the adventures: trials and errors with a sexy imported box truck, adventures in truck stop America, the exhilaration of the open road, etc etc. You know the drill. Then I got moved to a different tour that went to MUSIC FESTIVALS and I was working with one of my BEST FRIENDS. It was like something was too good to be true. If Jesus were to live amongst us mortals, he would probably have a similar work setup. I mean that’s about how good it was.

So it all stopped and crashed because lets be honest—the curse of Craigslist had to show its face at some point.

And so it did the morning of July 21. My boss paid a surprise visit to Michigan which kind of made me poop myself a little bit when I was talking to him on the phone and he told me he was there. Mike was sitting passenger side as we were driving home after our event that weekend. I pulled the whole “holy shit!” face as I looked over at him and tried to mouth what was going on. I am a terrible multi-tasker so talking to our boss on the phone and trying to convey to Mike what was going on proved impossible. The news was in—Mike and I were to meet him at the Holiday Inn in Birmingham at 9AM the following morning. Yep, this sounded awful. And it pretty much was. We got laid off right there on the spot when we showed up. There was no getting around it.

All I could think about was Craig and his stupid fucking list.

Crocs decided to pull the plug on the Rock With Crocs tour that I was on because revenues were really shit for the third quarter and they needed to try and stop the bleeding somewhere. I guess it’s the nature of the beast depending on how you look at it. Either way, the romantic tour de force of Americana and its infinite glory is over. The curse of Craig, indeed.

But I feel OK. I really do. I am sad to see the touring life dissipate in front of me, but I am pretty sure that another opportunity is beckoning.

Right now I am sitting at home for about the tenth day in a row. And yes, its starting to feel weird. I am unemployed. This is typically brought up to me in the most opportune of moments. Most recently, it was standing in the grocery store and seeing an old unfamiliar acquaintance from high school. The vaguely familiar face approached while I was assessing which green peppers to purchase. Green peppers aren’t exactly cheap in the summertime at $1.99 a piece, so I typically look for the largest one in the pile of roughly 50 of them that sits in front of me. I always try to hide the fact that I am looking for the largest one which is kind of stupid, but its also the truth. So I am looking for the perfect green pepper and the said face presents itself in front of me with an absolutely wonderful fucking question.

“SO WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! I thought you were living in a cave in Uzbekistan.”

“Awesome. Yeah. That’s the next stop after I start drug trafficking in Colombia.” At this point I really want to have this conversation with this person, but honestly, the fire isn’t there and I can’t even remember the person’s name. I could look in my year book that sits in the southeast corner of the basement at my parent’s house amongst about 10 years worth of shit, but honestly, that would probably even take forever and a day.

“Seriously though, what are you doing around here? Seems like the last time I saw you was in that world literature class with Mr. Palizzi.” I don’t remember what instance the familiar stranger recalled where we last saw each other, so I just inserted a relic of my high school days for the sake of telling the story. Mr. Palizzi, the teacher of said world literature class, is single-handedly responsible for the largest portion of my current vocabulary.

In second place was my fourth grade teacher Mrs. Scarlett. That woman looked like Satan and was probably on her way to becoming his right hand man, but she still taught me a lot with my spelling tests. She drank coffee with the sort of intensity that suggested maybe she was an Alaskan killing wolf. It was downright scary to watch her lips pucker as she reeled in what I recall as a cup of coffee that was roughly the size of a mailbox. I would always be observing her chugging coffee from my desk in the rear of the room as she taught us spelling. My friend Billy, a neighborhood kid I used to ride bikes and go get cheap candy bars with, used to sit in the back of the classroom and masturbate under his desk while all this was happening. This is no joke or exaggeration. The kid used to rub his penis from the outside of his pants and pucker his lips while he was doing so—just like Mrs. Scarlett drinking her coffee. I once came home asking my mom why in the hell Billy was doing such a thing—to which I was introduced to the concept of masturbation. The reason why I mention all this is because on one particular occasion after I had scored a perfect score on Scarlett’s spelling test for the third week in a row, she told me that she was going to give me a special word list to pump up my vocab. Little did I realize that this new word list would involve words like Czechoslovakia (It took me three weeks to spell that one correctly—the biggest problem of whih was the second “o” in the word. I always wanted that “o” to be an “a.”) and a word that I erroneously mistook one week for “masturbate.” I was baffled as to why this was on the test. It’s funny because I don’t even remember what the word was that triggered my memory banks to think of Billy and masturbation, but I suppose that’s sort of irrelevant.

ANYWAY, familiar stranger was still standing in front of me as I tried to figure out if I was going to skirt around my recent layoff. I shot right back with confidence, “Well, in all seriousness, I am considering drug trafficking because the reason I am home is that I recently got laid off from my job.” At this point my attention is now back to the green peppers. I try to multitask between looking for the perfect pepper and attentively listening, but again, this is impossible.

“Ohhhh shit man. Bad news. What were you doing?”

“I was working for Crocs, you know, those goofy looking shoes.” Whenever I would explain to people my job that sentence was always the anchor of my description. And honestly, everyone knew what I was talking about when I said those three words goofy…. looking…. shoes. Now, those goofy looking shoes haunt me. I see stores with Crocs in the display and suddenly I lunge for Kleenex and a box of chocolate. This is weird.

“Wow. That’s a bitch. So you living around here for a while then?”

“Well, sort of. I am headed to New York then Austin. And then South America. I will stay there for a few months. Then I have a ticket out to Australia and will try to get some work out there. So I guess the answer is no.” As I got through those few sentences I immediately regretted getting in to that much depth. I started to look harder at the peppers that were now beckoning me at every blink of my eye. Hell, I was even considering the red and yellow ones at this point.

“Shit. Where do you get the money to do all that traveling? I mean where are you going to work?” Wow, if I haven’t had this conversation three thousand times before. Al Green came on the PA in the supermarket, so that was kind of helping me out a little bit.

“I’ll be selling drugs along the way. I am just kidding, man. I guess part of the beauty of all this is that I kind of figure it out as I go. It sounds weird, I know. But I guess it just works for me. I’ve gotta run though, it was really cool and random to catch up. Take care.”

I felt like I was Zach Braff in Garden State after he comes home for the first time in a long while and deals with the awkwardness of existing amongst the familiarities developed in previous years living in his hometown. There’s that feeling of misalignment, that feeling of sirens going off all around you, that feeling of shitting your pants while riding in the car because your fart was a little more powerful than you had expected. I really don’t know if the whole shitting-your-pants analogy was accurate, in fact it probably has no alignment whatsoever. I just stood there thinking about Zach Braff and what is next after going on my tangent with stranger man about drugs in Colombia, green peppers and goofy looking shoes.

“SO WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!”

It’s fucking scary.

It is no easy task. Up until the age of 21 everything was mapped, planned, charted and organized. School was the mainstay of existence occupying the months of August through June. Summers in grade school were spent at camp and on the baseball diamond. High school summers were spent bussing tables at the country club for the sake of some quick cash. In college, summers were spent developing your resume with work experience. It was easy. There was no wonder about what would bide your time, no question as to what should be done. There was really minimal choice in the matter even. I could choose the companies I got internships with in college, but that seemed like about as much wiggle room as I had. Now, I burst out of the gate from the university days with a sea of the most enormous question marks and suddenly I have quarter life crisis material—that is IF and ONLY IF I choose to be consumed by the inquiry of answering that simple question of “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!!?”. It’s easy to make yourself falsely comfortable with less-than-optimal situations to answer that simple question. I did it for a while in Chicago. You take the good with the bad and deal with the rest. At a certain point though, I told myself there was something better out there—slightly outside the conventional at times, but nevertheless a forward progression that I could plainly see in my thought patterns.

And so I move.

Perhaps all this quarter life crisis material is easily averted if you can train yourself to become comfortable with ambiguity—a moving object that serves as your final destination. I call it my happy place. My life essentially revolves around this happy place. One day I will get there after having traveled an assortment of different roads and accumulating roughly 4 million airline miles. BUT! BUT! I will get there and be completely pleased with the occupation or activity that is the mainstay of my happy place. There is going to be a marching band, moonwalking lessons and a giant fucking inflatable ball pit for the kids because its going to be a party when I get there. I think my happy place becomes something slightly different every 6 months or so, but as I continue to move, it gets more and more specific. And that’s success in my book.

And so I move.

But God knows that question “SO WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?” is dangerous, dangerous shit. It forces you to advertise exactly what your plan is. And everyone has a different idea about what a good plan involves. Many times, it’s the furthest thing from my happy place. So that corresponding pressure of needing to advertise your plans properly can pull you in like a fucking angry grizzly bear, chew you up and kill your innards leaving you completely lifeless doubting whether you will ever move again. I can just as easily succomb to the pressures of falling in to the lifeless mold of second-rate decision making for the sake of advertising a publicly acceptable plan.

Or we can dare to be FUCKING BOLD.

Or so I would like to think.

Proceed forward young diplomat!