Hi

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 11:43:17 GMT

I assume that you read my profile before coming here? That might eliminate much of the need for a "hello, this is me" post.

Where this stands: in part, as a poor person - yes, see how naturally that theme of austerity must have come to me - I have to get past my own phobias. I've become far too accustomed to having ideas about what I'd like to create, but putting them off because I just don't have the money to do them, or the opportunity to make the money to do them. Old story - I went to graduate school, came out looking for work, and found that I was living in a world in which entry level professional jobs were refused to those without personal connections. I then went looking for any job I could find, and was refused those on the basis of overqualification. How was I supposed to get past that and get my first real job, I asked. That's your problem, I was told, and I never got my first job, not even after my 40,000th job application (that's to be taken literally, not as a figure of speech). My reward for working my way through school (and earning a high dean's list average from a top 20 school) was a lifetime of job discrimination and inescapable poverty. So it remains to this day, with even hamburger flipping jobs being refused to me on the basis that I might someday run off and take a wonderful job that those saying this admit will almost certainly never appear.

The "help" given by the government to those on the receiving end of this sort of discrimination has been to stubbornly refuse to accept reality and insist that what an unemployed person with a Master's Degree or PhD really needs to do is go out and get an education. So, we're offered training programs for jobs which are now acknowledged to not be in existence, meaning that the programs are nothing more than an exercise in wheel spinning for those enrolled in them. But they're pushed on us more aggressively every year by one and all, just the same. Anything to avoid the ideologically unpalatable, politically incorrect conclusion that the only real remedy to discrimination, the only one that history has seen work, is (gasp!) governmental regulation. Score one for the liberals, I would say, if only the liberals weren't voting with the neocons on this one, feeling that any sort of concern for poor "white" people would be an unacceptable distraction from their obsession with skin color.

So, this is reality, and short of emigration - funding that trip and my residence at a new location with what, I don't know - and seeking better opportunities elsewhere, I see no hope of changing it. I might as well find some way of spending my time - and I do. The hard part, sometimes, is getting started, when so many past efforts have proved fruitless, owing to the unreasonability of my fellow man and what it has brought.

I just have to get past the idea that I'll always be thwarted by my circumstances, as understandable as history makes that assumption. Looking at this page, I find myself wondering if Electronic Music making is something that, like writing, can be done almost for free. If so, perhaps I'll look into that. I'll still be angry, and with good reason, but at least I'll be a little more distracted from that anger often to give myself a little more peace, and that's a good thing, too.

Ex Nihilo / Music Journal

Hi