Thank you for visiting my blog.
This blog is a work-in-progress "table of contents," with links to all of the threads I have written on Twitter, from when I started using the social media platform, in October of 2012, through April of 2022.
Every once in a while, I like to do a "thoughts" post, talking about my life experiences over the time frame for the threads I've recently posted links to.
For this post, the time frame is basically February through April of 2022.
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As I've mentioned in other posts, in 2021, my life was basically wrecked when, after I'd done sales consultancy work for about five and a half years, I lost my main gig and was unable to find any decent positions.
I eventually went back to doing work as a permanent full-time employee for a fintech company in November of 2021. But by that time, my livelihood and finances had been so decimated that, in October of 2021, I moved in with my mom, out in Western Colorado.
In addition to my 40-hour job for the fintech company, I worked about 25 hours a week at the Walmart in my mom's town, so I could get started up as quickly as possible repaying all the debt I'd accumulated over the course of 2021. As of now (January of 2023), I am still only about 33% paid off on that debt.
I was, for a while, working seven-day weeks between my day job and Walmart. But, at the end of January of 2022, I stopped working Sundays, which put me down to working only six days a week.
As soon as I got my first paycheck from Walmart, I started contributing to my mom's household expenses -- paying for groceries, the internet, etc. But in January of 2022, I also had to start paying the rent on my mom's place, due to some rules about her living situation.
Paying my mom's rent was fine. And, in fact, I started thinking about living with my mom for good. I could see how much money I'd be making from my fintech job. I knew I could find a much bigger place than the one where she and my three little adopted sisters were currently living. We could all live there. And I could help take care of the family.
I don't think I've ever mentioned this. But, at first, my hope had been to be able to leave my mom's house in mid-January of 2022.
I told my mom this. And she asked me not to be so quick to move. She'd said it in such a way that I felt like she really actually wanted me to keep living with her.
That wasn't an idea I was fond of. But my mom is getting older. And she has three girls she's taking care of. And I thought, If my mom needs me, then I'll stay with her. And that's what made me seriously entertain the idea of finding a place where we all could live.
But it turned out that my family, especially my oldest little sister, didn't really want this. And, in fact, it started to feel to me like my family would be a lot happier if I moved out of my mom's house sooner rather than later.
At first, my life outside of work revolved around my family. After all, I thought I was going to be living with them for good. Then, after I realized I would be moving, I allowed myself some time to myself. But, as much as I hate to say this, I also started spending less time with my family because my oldest sister was making it really painful for me to spend any time with the family at all.
Additionally, there were some things that were really stressful for me, some involving my nephew, who was also living with my mom at the time. But I just can't write about all of this stuff, even now, without getting too emotional about it.
By March of 2022, I had enough money to get into a place of my own. And I knew I needed to get out of my mom's house. So I focused a lot of my energy on getting into my own place. By the last week of March, I was in my own place -- though there were a few days when, thanks to internet issues in my new house, I still went to my mom's house to do my day job.
My new place was in a town about 20 miles away from my mom's place. Out in Western Colorado, that's pretty customary. In my hometown of Denver, a drive between suburbs might be six miles and take 20 minutes. Out here, the drive from my house to my mom's house is 20 miles, and it takes 30 minutes. So it feels like basically the same thing.
March was a tough month for me, because, in addition to working six days a week, I was driving to places, in pretty much all the towns "near" my mom's town, looking for a new house. My focus was on that more than anything else.
April was tough as well. In addition to working six days a week, I was also driving back and forth between my new town and my mom's town, where I was still working at the Walmart six days a week. Some days I'd wake up around six-thirty in the morning, start my day job at seven, work until four in the afternoon, drive to Walmart, work until eleven, or likely a little later, drive home, get home around midnight, unwind, and get into bed at maybe one in the morning, if not later.
But I also still made a point of spending at least two days per week with my family. And I couldn't always work it so I could fit visiting my family in with going to work at Walmart. In fact, one night per week I usually drove out to my mom's house to attend a weekly virtual class for families with adopted children. So that was, now that I remember, another night per week I drove to my family's house, outside of driving to work.
The strain got to be too much for me -- as weak as that sounds. And by the end of April I stopped working Saturdays at Walmart -- though I think there were still weeks where I worked three nights at Walmart: three weeknights, I mean.
So by May I was only working five days a week. But between my day job and Walmart, I was still working about 55 to 60 hours per week.
Life at my day job was pretty stressful, too, at this time. As many know, 2022 was a pretty bad year for the tech world. And the fintech world wasn't spared. People who worked at my company started leaving in droves. Then people started getting fired in droves. And then more people left in droves. This is just the story of upcycles and downcycles in companies. I'm familiar with it. But it never stops being stressful.
It was really only a month or so after I'd started working at the company that I could see this was all going to start happening. And so I would have been stressed about losing my job, just thinking about all this stuff myself.
But, as the tension started ratcheting up, some of my managers and teammates started getting really weird. It's like they were looking for reasons (not that they needed any, legally) to fire people, including me.
As soon as I could see all of this happening, I started talking with my human resources department on a regular basis, so I could keep a paper trail of what was happening -- for whatever good the paper trail would serve later on. I've kept this communication going all the way through to now.
However, while people were acting weird, dealing with the stress of the market situation in their own weird ways, and -- let's face it -- checking out from this company while they were looking at other companies to check into, they were also supportive of me, as a teammate, and as a new employee at the company.
Partly because of my own skill, and largely because of the support of my teammates, I exceeded the expectations set for me almost immediately. All the way through 2022 I exceeded the expectations set for me each quarter. I dealt with a lot of stress at my day job in 2022. But I also received a lot of support. And I achieved a lot of success.
The two Twitter threads I wrote on April 3, 2022, are... well... weird. I wrote both of them, basically, after my first full week of living in my new house. And both of them were written while I was drunk, as I clearly mention in the threads.
Working at Walmart was an interesting education for me. I had gotten so used to not doing any serious grocery shopping over the years. But as I worked at Walmart, and as I watched what other people were buying, I became more and more intrigued by all of these products. And -- despite all the talk in 2021 and 2022 about inflation, I was really intrigued by how affordable a lot of these products were!
Anybody can see from my art and philosophy that, despite my having a somewhat Marxist analytical view towards economics and finance, I do believe strongly in capitalism, and I am absolutely in love with consumerism. And working at Walmart was such a great inspiration for me, and such a great education in consumerism.
That said, I rung up a lot of alcohol for people while working at Walmart -- all that sweet, canned-cocktail-type alcohol -- the spiked sparkling water, the twisted teas, the hard lemonades, the crazy blue Smirnoff whatever -- all that kind of thing. And I started getting really curious about those products.
That curiosity, plus all the stress I'd been dealing with, made me decide that as soon as I got a place of my own, I would have a night where I just bought some of those drinks and got drunk.
I had that night on April 3rd, while I was watching the Howard Hawks film His Girl Friday -- which, I'm sorry -- it was so relevant to a lot of stuff going on in America today that I, drunk, totally flipped out and wrote the wild threads I wrote.
I didn't drink like that again. For a few weeks following that night, I would still buy some of those crazy sweet alcohol drinks for dinner. But I tired of them pretty quickly.
I don't really like getting drunk. But I do see how that night of getting drunk may have been an okay thing for me, and a kind of catharsis for all of the stress I'd dealt with over 2021 and into 2022. So I don't regret it. I just also really don't want to do it again.
So those are some thoughts about my life from February to April of 2022.
Thanks again for visiting my blog. Thank you for reading. Please enjoy.
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