Have We A Perica?

I am sitting here spending time on the internet just because I can. I find myself exhausting the internet, or at least my interest in it. Occasionally I find something to do on the World Wide Web that I haven't done before. Tonight I searched for people on Facebook with the last name Perica. Facebook fetched me at least ten people with the same last name as I have.

Perica, I don't truly know the origins of my name. I know that 99% of people slaughter the name in their pronounciation of it. Most of the time they sound so bad that it makes me lose faith in a human's ability to formulate noises by the combination of written letters they see before them. I'll stop digressing. The point I meant to make in this paragragh was, and still is, that I don't run into that many Pericas. In fact, I have never known another Perica that wasn't in my family. This seemed to change when I typed 'Perica' into the search field on Facebook.

I could only see the Pericas Facebook found in a very small picture, but I instantly felt like I was spying on members of my family that have been kept secret from me for years. It was a very weird feeling. The internet caught me again marveling at the information it can provide me with. I also felt an awkward happiness for these people. I don't know them, but dang they have a sexy last name.

Nawlidge

Reading and learning have always been on the top of my interest's pile. I say this to establish that I loved learning and reading before I went to London.
However, being in London only made me love them even more. Knowledge just seemed to me so much more accessible over there. The city is chock full of free museums and galleries. Every street, old looking building, square, or church have enough stories locked up in their walls to fill history books, and they have. I spent every minute I could learning about London and all that it contains, but with three months there I just took a piece of the pie and that is all. Honestly, being abroad has given me an even greater thirst for knowledge with a much better perspective on the information that I am taking in as well. This is a hard feeling to describe, but I tried and I know it is there, and it is not leaving. That is all that matters.

A Minute on the Minuteman Project

Considering what else goes on within the borders of the U.S. it shouldn't be surprising to hear about the Minuteman Project, but it is for me. Here is this story in Thursday's paper about a 51-year-old professor who is going to spend her vacation this summer building a fence along the Mexican border. Excellent idea. I know just the right thing to help the Minuteman Project accomplish this task--a huge chunk of concrete outside the Imperial War Museum in London. I can't remember exactly where it is from, but it does have a bunch of graffiti tags on it, and they aren't in English, ahh yes, the Berlin Wall. I wonder why a piece of it has been put on display? Because it was such a good idea, right?

The Minuteman Project's executive director says this about the Project's members, "These guys actually have teeth, they don't all chew tobacco, they don't all have a gun rack in the back of their truck." Right, but most of them do, and I hope the director sees why this might bring concern to the millions of Americans now confronted with this group of fanatics on the television, internet, and in the newspapers.

Luckily their is a group monitoring the Minuteman Project for racist rhetoric, but shouldn't their be some history buffs on site wherever the group goes so before they set out on building a wall--that the government won't build--they can consult the European History books?

This Isn't Objective Writing

Following my recent lapse of not liking the real world I am still feeling the same way. However, I am making steps, or progress if you want to call it that, toward finding jobs, and most importantly toward having one.

It really isn't late, but I am tired and I got on here and felt like writing something before I went to bed...even if it isn't themed. That is the problem with my writing on a blog. I feel like I have to have a theme always. I feel if I don't write in some sort of argumentative way that the writing is crap and no one is going to want to read it. I am sometimes successful in truly writing down what comes to mind and not giving a care if I give the pros and cons along the way, but most of the time not. Of course, I was trained to write in an argumentative/persuasive style for the last four years. Objective writing is for journalism majors, not english majors, at least that is what people say. Anyway, that does hold true for most writing. By no means am I calling anything on this site a beautiful argument for or against someone or something.

The TV use has been minimal since I have returned to the States but I was pleased, no, ecstatic to find the second leg of the Arsenal v. Villa Real match-up in the UEFA Semifinals on ESPN2 yesterday. You probably don't care about the outcome, but I did. Arsenal won on aggregate thanks to Lehman's amazing save on a penalty kick. While I was over in London I read a fascinating article regarding the number of kids that play soccer in America. The number is huge! However, those kids reach a certain age and they just drop off the soccer/football radar. The author blamed this on the lack of American interest in anything that wasn't born, raised, and bred in America. I thought he had a pretty solid argument, but there is no denying that soccer is not in the public eye over here and, naturally, many people want to be in that spotlight and they abandon, or rather at a young stage their parents abandon soccer for them and push them along to more Americanized sports. The spotlight is on them now, but what is the rush to abandon the soccer ship? Not everyone is going to be the quarterback of the football team.

Direction Free

Not only is graduating not very exciting to me, but in the meantime I have also discovered that I don't know the first thing about getting a real job and how to go about doing that. I do know that whatever job I do end up getting isn't going to come out of thin air, but I don't really know where to begin. I have read countless articles and information about searching/finding/applying for jobs on the internet and still I can't grasp something to launch myself into that pool of motivation that is sort of eluding me right now.

The time passes so slowly when I am here during the day by myself. Other than looking for a job, I literally have nothing to do. The internet needlessly bites away at the day when I check my email ten times and go to facebook every other hour to see what other people have been doing during their busy schedules at school, which I miss by the way, the busy schedule.

I ran for a longer time today. You would think the motivation behind that longer run might be to work myself harder, but that wasn't the reason. I wanted to escape from home, the looming job search, and other possible adult responsibilities. I just wish I could leave it all. Money truly does suck. I want to live in the Shire. When you watch The Fellowship of the Ring doesn't the Shire look like the most beautiful, peaceful place in the whole wide world? It does to me and I would live there if it were real. Of course then I would have to deal with the threat of Sauron and all, but that would just be a little blip in an otherwise carefree existence.

Many of the articles I have read go on and on about how it is no longer hard for English Majors to find jobs after graduating. It is beautiful reading something like that and truly believing the opposite. I don't feel of worth or marketable to anything right now. I suppose this isn't good, but that is the way it is and writing this is the happiest I have been all day.

The Unjoy of Graduation

I smile and nod and force out a "Yes, it's awesome" when people tell me how great it must be to have finally graduated from college.

I am here to tell you it isn't all that great right now. I have an English Major. Where do English Majors go if they don't go right off to get their MA, PhD, and to teach? Wherever that might be, that is where I am going and I am not looking forward to it. It might be descending into the depths of poverty, the likes of which I have never known, and it might not entail such extreme economic changes, at least not that soon. Graduating college without a title like doctor, pharmacist, or engineer is losing all your lifelines at once. If you don't have any idea what you are going to do next, like myself, the future doesn't look all that grand.

College was great and I feel guilty and pathetic for wishing I was starting it all over again right now.

The U.S. of A.

Americans don't know how to dress. I am walking through O'Hare and I can't stop staring at what some people are wearing. One guy stands out above the rest. He is maybe 35 but looks 45 probably due to smoking. He has a mullet, you know the big, layered, unkept kind of hair that was really prevalent in the 80s and early 90s. His top is a faded MOPAR drag race t-shirt accompanied by a pair of old jeans.

Okay. I was spoiled with well dressed Londoners for three months...what can I say? It isn't just Londoners though. Parisians look well kept. Israelis kick our but in fashion sense too. Don't get me wrong, I know it is not a competition, but it is amazing how someone's wardrobe can improve their look. Now you can argue, well it would just be boring if everyone dressed the same. I would say you are wrong in assuming this. There are a plethora of styles in London and none of them looked as trashy as what I saw in O'Hare on Monday, and none of them looked the same as the other.

This should come as no surprise to some of you. Americans like doing things their own way. Whether it is politics, sports, business, using English units, or dress, we are really into each other and most just don't care about how things are elsewhere in the world. Yes, we are the United States of America. Yes, we might be the only true superpower left on the planet, but we will never be above the rest of the world, no matter how many Americans think we are. I wish for the Midwestern American wardrobe to get some serious humility training quick.

Did I mention we are really fat too? I don't think I did, but that is another story.