can't sleep

You know what's funny? It is now 3:00 am and I can't sleep. I've been tossing and turning all night long and, after trying to avoid it, have finally settled into the belief that I will be up all night surfing the internet and trying to read from the two books in which I am currently enthralled: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling. It's a good thing there aren't any wizards named Alyosha at Hogwarts, or else I'd be thoroughly confused.

Not that I have everything together, mind you.

"Fountains of Wayne" currently blares through my speakers as I type. It's the song "Mexican Wine," which is a lot better than that "Stacey's Mom" song. But, I think, given the context of the album as a whole, the idea of "Stacey's Mom" makes a lot more sense and is even quite enjoyable. The band has a quirky sense of humor that is completely lost when you take individual songs and try to sell them to the public. My favorite song on the album is track two, which is a happy little ditty about an alcoholic who keeps promising to overcome his problems, right before he goes on another bender. The corus goes "I'm gonna get my shit together/Cuz I can't live like this forever. /I've come to far and I don't wanna fail / I got a new computer and a bright future in sales, yeah yeah."

Then you have the song about a high school kid singing about how hot his girlfriend's mother is. It might not make sense to you now, but trust me. Listen to the album and it will make sense. I promise.

Well now! It seems that, since I'm up late and since the docet tones of the Fountains of Wayne have bathed my room in a melancholic mood, I am of a mind to discuss employment concerns.

You see, my job is not quite as exciting as I had previously thought it to be. I don't hate it or anything and the people are nice (even the guy who argued idiotically about the athletic prowess of Jason Bay), but I find that I spend the majority of my time glancing at the clock, calculating the minutes and seconds until I get to leave.

I was cleaning my room the other day, and I came across two interesting pieces of paper. The first was my final paper for my management capstone class from my last quarter of college. It wa a bulky 35 pages and it contained all sorts of grpahs and numbers and long winded explanations about foreign entry strategies and economies of scale and that sort of thing. The other was the paper explaining the results of the GMAT test I took less than two months after graduation.

The paper was an interesting experience. It was an analysis of a fake game we played in class. We had split into groups of five, and each group was pitted in competitiion with the other in a computerized game in which we had to control a shoe company from top to bottom. We had to control the supply chain: purchaing materials, shipping materials to manufacturing plants, assembly, and distribution. We had to manage marketing, finance, technology, and everything else your average shoe company had to deal with. Each week counted as a year in the computer program and at the end of the week, we submitted out plans to the professor, who ran them through the computer and returned a 22 page financial summary of the results to each team.

Naturally, my team came in dead last place. But what was interesting about the experience was that I spent 35 pages explaining why we had been such an outstnading failure. I thoroughly enjoyed ripping my team to shreds. And I especially enjoyed proposing how we could have performed much better. The professor agreed and kept my paper as an example for future classes.

The GMAT test paper was also fun to see. You see, I didn't really study for it. Sure, I bought a revoew book and I even looked at it once or twice; usually while I was watching The Daily Show or falling asleep to a move on HBO at 4am. I never figured on going to grad school anyway, despite the fact that I had the sufficient gpa and experience. I took the test and scored very well. I scored in the top 5 percent on the analytical test and I rocked a perfect score on the written section, proving once and for all that the ability to bullshit counts much more than real knowledge in our warped society.

The expereince of finding each of these papers lead me to investigate grad programs at OSU again. They have a PhD program at the Fisher college of Business in International Strategic Management. I think I meet the minimum requirements, and my current job deals with business in countries all over the world (the boring part is that I do the same thing over and over and over and over...and over).

I think I'm going to apply for admission to this program for Autumn 2006. I might not be suited for the halls of academia, but I know I'm not suited for cubicle life and I figure that a life of lecturing to a classroom full of bored undergrads is probably better than staring at the clock for a living.

Wish me luck! We won't find out for a while, but I figure that, regardless of the outcome, it will at least be a reason to go out to a local bar, order a glass of Woodford Reserve and smoke a stogie the size of Alabama.

And I'm always looking for a reason to do that! I'm finally gonna get my stuff together! Cuz I can't live like this forever! I've come too far and I don't want to fail!

I've got a new computer and a bright future in sales!