A series of unfortunate and ultimately painful events led me to a startling moment of clarity earlier this week. The village I live in has nothing in the way of jobs. It has been like that for a surprisingly long time — if you won’t work at the Tim Hortons (or in my case, can’t because you already worked there and now the manager hates you) you’re practically shit out of luck.
It’s the kind of place where if you manage to land a job that doesn’t immediately piss you off you hold on for dear life, even if the chances of you ever getting things like a raise or a promotion are nonexistent. Even if it’s a gas station where your boss will take any gas shortages, including random drive-offs straight out of your paycheck despite that being incredibly illegal.
I did a stupid thing a few years ago and gave up my job at that gas station and moved to the city. I then struggled to find work there, and moved to Toronto, an even bigger city. Shortly after that my cash reserves were tapped, and I was forced to come home temporarily. “Temporarily” turned into more than a year, which then crept over past two years. In that interim I busied myself trying to land freelancing work as well as actual positions at various video game websites (read: pretty much every opening that I was ever aware of), but to no avail.
Left with a lot of free time I did was any red blooded North American would do, and began devouring television, but I never stopped looking for a job. Jobs provide money, which in turn allows me to pay debts and shovel fuel into the furnace that is my addiction to video games.
So, coming full circle, I had a chance for a job doing heavy labor. Now, I am not a particularly in-shape individual. I’m something like sixty pounds underweight and messed up my right knee when I played Keeper for the under-18 soccer team here, and then proceeded to bust it beyond non-surgical repair in a volleyball tournament a few months later. On top of that I’ve been a heavy smoker for a large portion of my life. However, until recently I walked absolutely everywhere I ever went, including a nightly 5KM (3ish mile) walk.
So I knew I wasn’t sitting on Captain America levels of physical fitness, but I didn’t think I was too far on the wrong side of the unhealthy line, is what I’m saying.
Enter the physical labor. My job was to join an understaffed crew of other laborers carrying big ass tables to the top floor of a new school. The kind of tables that you can probably lift by yourself, but are big enough and heavy enough that it’s really a two person job to move one any distance, or maybe you use some kind of machine to lift many of them for you, or maybe you use an elevator to avoid climbing three flights of stairs.
This crew did not have any of that, and the elevator in this school was nonfunctional. So I was treated to the discovery that I am, in fact incredibly unhealthy as each of us carried a table each up these flights of stairs.
I’ll be embarrassingly honest here: After something like an hour and change I almost blacked out, and almost puked – I then called it quits.
How does any of that relate to the fact that this is TVQuesting, a weekly post ostensibly about television shows? On the drive home with my mom we ended up talking about television and it turns out my mom has pretty awesome taste in television. Her biggest recommendations to me, and thusly all of you were:
– The Walking Dead: “I looove that show,” said she.
– The River: “THE FOUND A MEMBER OF THE OLD CREW HANGING BY A VINE NOOSE AND HE JOINED THEM WHEN THEY RESCUED HIM,” she informed me.
– Bomb Girls: “I thought it was gonna suck but it actually doesn’t suck,” she asserted.
You’ve already (maybe) read my thoughts on The Walking Dead. I’m watching it, and it isn’t actively driving me away like I assumed it would. But mom appears to be like the rest of you. She seems absolutely in love with the show and I can only assume it’s partially because of how absolutely jacked Jon Bernthal is. Or maybe she’s into that gross ass well walker.
Either way, I don’t really need details.
At her insistence I finally checked out all the current episodes of The River. I think the most interesting aspect of the show was that the leading dude seemed incredibly hostile toward the whole situation at first. That character could have been an awesome bit of countering the status quo for a show like this; it’s why I like Supernatural. The characters seem to hate their job most of the time. But by the current episode he’s down with the mission to save his dad, and the show has quickly become a ‘spooky-thing-of-the-week’. So maybe it’ll get good, or maybe not.
I haven’t checked out Bomb Girls yet, because I still agree with mom on the first bit of her point. I still think it looks kinda bad, so I’ll wait until the potential pool of every other television show dries up before I check it out.
There’s a reason for that long-winded story, though. The moment of clarity: I desperately need a job, and the only way I’m going to be able to get one in my current location is with the ability to commute to and from a potential place of employment. So I sold my television, and will be selling some other valuable stuff including my 360 and games.
Once I have a steady job I plan to immediately repurchase everything, but for right now I need the cash to get a car. What this means is that my television watching may be limited for a short while, but hopefully not enough to impact this feature. We’ll find out sooner or later.
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