Creature of the night

Once again I've gone way too long without adding to this blog. It takes some commitment to really do this on a regular basis...... it also helps to have something interesting happen on a regular basis too. Since I last wrote a couple of interesting things have happened. I wrestled in a tournament. First time I've wrestled in competition in 6 years. Tournament is a loosely used term because there were only 2 other guys in my age division and weight class. I had a bye the first "round" so I got to see both of my opponents wrestle. I wrestled the winner of that match first and won 12-1. I'd trained pretty hard to get in shape for this but I was completely gassed after wrestling a full 6 minutes. 20 minutes of intense interval training does not equal 6 min of wrestling. I gave up the one point with 5 seconds left because I was too tired to try to hold the guy down for 5 seconds after we went out of bounds so I just let him go and finished the match on our feet. The second guy I wrestled was much stronger than the first guy, but he wasn't as good, I pinned him in 45 seconds. It felt good to wrestle and completely dominate. I technically got first place but one guy lost both of his matches and got 3rd so I wasn't too excited about a gold medal. I talked with both of those guys after we were finished and they were friends that wrestled together in high school and had just finished their freshman year of college. These guys were one year out of wrestling, I didn't mention I hadn't wrestled in 6 years. Makes me think that I was maybe a little better than I thought when I was in high school. Lots of fun and I'll be doing it again for sure.

Wrestling doesn't make you a creature of the night..... I guess it could if you wanted to train at 3 am, but it doesn't inherently. Getting a job working 3rd shift however will make you a creature of the night. I started working for a company that prints and cuts (literally cuts, not writes) checks. My main job is to box these checks after they get cut. This consist of checking a mailing label to the runheader (has all the info about the order) then checking the checks to the run header. If this sounds exciting to you, you'd be wrong. At first it was a lot of learning, now it's becoming automatic after 3 weeks of doing it. By the time my shift is over (10pm-6am) the numbers start to get a little blurry and my focus is pretty much shot. This is a relatively important job though because as a "boxer" I'm the last person to see the checks and make sure the right thing gets sent to the right people. You can imagine the problem that a dishonest person recieving YOUR checks might pose since they have your account and routing number on them. Could get ugly. So we are expected to not be human and not make mistakes. This sorta sucks cause they also expect you to be fast. I'm getting faster but I still have a long way to go. The best part (sarcasm) is some of the people that you get to meet. I'm sure you can imagine the type of people that work this type of job during 3rd shift. Just an example, the other night one lady had a shirt on that said "Heaven doesn't want me and Hell's afraid I'll take over". Yep, that's 3rd shift. Most people are just fine, trying to make a living, but there are definitely a few nuts in there. The weekends have been interesting. I'm trying to stay on my 3rd shift schedule but that isn't as easy as I thought it might be. I try to stay up til 3 or 4 so I can at least be close to my schedule. Unfortunately there isn't much to do at 3 am. TV is mostly old reruns and someone trying to sell you something ridiculous. One night I saw something "interesting". On regular cable, not the HBO home shopping hour, I saw sex toys for sell. Man was that weird. Two women very casually selling all sorts of things "at a great value". My whole family was asleep of course so I had to fight laughing histerically at a particular phalic device that strapped to your CHIN! Who thought this was a good idea! Really! On your chin! I just can't feature anyone being in a romantic or even just an erotic mood and being turned on by a chin penis! Maybe I should refer back to some of those 3rd shift folks. I want to try to keep this blog wholesome and clean, but I just couldn't keep from writing about this.

On a more serious note, my plans for school have changed. My sister, mom's friend who is a principal's secretary, and friends that are teachers have all said that getting a master's in PE with no experience teaching is a horrible idea, meaning I will never get a job. Apparently gym teachers are "a dime a dozen" and no school corporation will hire a PE teacher with a masters especially with no experience. So scratch that idea. Now I'm going to look into transition to teaching. I don't know what I want to teach though if PE isn't an option. I want to teach high school though. I've learned that from Velocity. The little kids are fun sometimes but the annoying little kids seem to get under my skin a lot more than the annoying older kids. I'm thinking history or math will be my route. I know for sure that english will not be my route. Of course Sam is thinking I should work for customs like he is and that doens't sound like too bad of deal. He's making a very nice salary and has great benefits and his job doesn't sound like it's too hard. The only down side is it sounds like it could be a little boring. Who knows. Is having a job that pays well and has good benefits worth doing if you aren't really excited about doing it? I know it'd sure beat doing what I'm doing now.