The Cold Part
“So long to this cold cold part of the world
so long to this bone bleached part of the world
so long to this salt soaked part of the world
I step down as President of Antarctica.”
-Modest Mouse
Those lyrics just seem so appropriate as I look out my window. Connecticut is my Antarctica at the moment. The snow is continuously piling up outside of my window. I am trapped here as my car is undergoing inspection for a malfunctioning part. I can’t really go out as I lost my ATM card the day before Christmas and the bank has yet to send me a new one, so I have no access to my funds. I can’t write a check because…my mistake…I left my check book and a pile of bills I meant to pay while on the road in a Doubletree Hotel room in St. Louis, Missouri. So I feel trapped. Not to mention I am pretty sure I suffer from Seasonal Depression Disorder—or maybe it is just Connecticut Depression Disorder—haven’t figured it out yet.
It’s an odd thing, being in the so dubbed “real world.” All of my friends have pretty much graduated from college and are now becoming scattered through out the Universe. The ones that are here can’t go out and play because they have 9-5 jobs. I’m the lone pigeon in this situation. I was just laid off from a government contract where I run around airport-to-airport training the Transportation Security Administration people on how to properly use the “Improvised Explosive Device” (bomb) detecting equipment. Congress, because of Republican stonewalling, never finished approving the funding for the training and the company I worked for lost the contract (briefly, so I am told). It is extremely amusing for me to watch CNN and see them saying that all of the training met the December 31st deadline because I know that is a lie. Not only did we only train 20,000 of the 29,000 employees we were supposed to train, the TSA changed the rules at the last minute. See, baggage screeners were supposed to receive 60 hours of on-the-job training. TSA decided to do this other cross training for passenger screeners on the baggage equipment, the passenger screeners only received eight hours of on-the-job training. Now, this would have been fine if the original intention of cross training—to have back up at the airport—was kept. But it wasn’t…in STL the TSA started making passenger screeners, with their eight hours of training, full time baggage screeners. It was a trick so TSA could kiss Rumsfeld’s ass and say, “Look! We did it!” A flat out lie. TSA is an illusion at this point in time. That may change if training continues after Congress approves the funding, but who really knows. I did my job. I put my heart into it because I cared about the objective of making airports safer, but after what I witnessed in STL happened, it just felt like they through out all of our four months of hard work.
As I was saying about my friends working though…the point I was trying to make is that no one is around to go sledding with. Hot damn, it would really boost my spirits if I could go sledding….
