Anyone still breathing?

We're in the process of reopening with a fresh iteration.

My extreme laziness may retard progress.

Maybe check in if you've got a pulse.  

I'm still alive, apparently.  For instance, I still breath and poop and stuff so I figure I'm alive.  Could all be a simulation though.  There's no telling.

It's just my view that ghosts don't poop is all.  At least I've never seen one pooping.  And according to SCIENCE, an absence of evidence rises to the level of de-facto proof.  

I even sobered up.  

It's boring.  

@Pi, I have searched my soul and decided to forgive you.  Possibly.  Temporarily.  Conditionally.  We'll see.  

Ok, I gotta poop now.  Talk to you guys whenevs..

Where my ghosties at, yo!?

All hear around here is some faint background noise like "OOooOOOoooOOOOOOOOooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooo!"

Life's a bitch, ain't it?  One minute you're alive doing a bunch of pointless BS -and the next you're dead *not* doing a bunch of pointless bullshit.

In that sense, death is more productive than life.   Don't worry about getting bored.  You won't have opinions about squat following brain death.

The only reason you think you're reading this is because in the moments preceding death, the memory centers of the brain go beserko causing your life to flash before your eyes.

A couple of you guys had serious heart problems, so I'm concerned.

I don't know why my heart hasn't crapped out yet, given my decades of heavy smoking and drinking.  After a bender, in the recovery/detox phase, my heart feels weakened.  A week later it's fine.  My theory is that it's like any other muscle, you gotta break it down to build it back stronger.  In other words, binge drinking is the optimal means to stay heart-healthy.

This theory may, as I understand, come under some criticism.  For being severely stupid.  But I attest to you that I am living proof of both.

I've found that talking to myself is light-years better than talking to other people and all their bullshit.

We can't all be socialites like you, out at the cafes getting into enchanting discourses about philosophy and the arts, trading witticisms and cunning ripostes.  

Hellboy Kickass wrote:Still alive, but barely.

Lost 2 jobs this year.

Been a fuckin' hard year.

Getting too old to bounce back from setbacks.

Sorry to hear that.

They fired my entire department last January, hired new people, fired all of them.  Then the same thing again. The whole thing was a scam to filter public funds for helping homeless people into the boss's bank account anyway.  

Then I took a job doing phone work for insurance benefits.  It took over two months to get the job, followed by a month of training.  I worked for one month until they called a Zoom meeting where some corporate bitch told us we were all laid off because the company needed to reduce headcount. They said they might hire some of us back in a month, but a month later the entire company closed down.

After that was another three months of job searching, sending resumes off into the aether, hundreds of them.  I drank myself into oblivion out of hopelessness.  

Luckily, a school hired me full-time out the blue in July.  I generally work 10+ hours a day with no break in very demanding and stressful system.  It's grueling but it's decent money so I'm trying not to bitch too much.  It works out because we get massive paid holidays, like this week being all paid holiday, then another three weeks for Christmas and New Years.

I'm fortunate to have it.  Most of the jobs here are part time and pay minimum wage.  Even those are hard to come by and they are unstable -while rents, groceries, and everything else keep shooting through the roof.

Greed-ridden, anti-human, corrupt society.

Online teaching is crap. One would be far better off working at the gas station ringing up people's beer, cigs, and coffee.

First off, they usually pay "per teaching hour," with some shit like $10-15. Then it's months to accumulate students or some such crap deal to get up to a reasonable numbers of hours that allow you to maybe pay your bills.

Secondly, there's no tax or social security being paid in. In the US, it means that unlivable 13k USD you made for the year is subject to Federal and State tax, and SS is owed in at 14% -double the rate if you had a US employer.

The disadvantages are almost too numerous to list. Things like being kept on call with no pay, losing out to long foreign holidays, getting blamed (and penalized) for tech errors on the student's or platform's end, unpaid prep and last minute cancelations, working off hours and spread-out hours -to name a few.

If you can get 35 part-time hours being a clerk at the convenience store at minimum wage, it will come out to far more in salary -and taxes will be paid in.

Going abroad for ESL jobs is crap these days. In fact, it's always been crap, but moreso than ever now.

The airfare alone these days will bankrupt you.

My last job didn't pay us for 5 months -at "the largest university in the Middle East."

My last job offer for China was an HR position. The dude told me I'd be moving teachers around to different schools because the schools keep breaking contracts and teachers keep getting pissed, so they wanted me to play a massive shell game moving 2,000 teachers around.

It's been nothing but instability and crisis for my 20 year ESL "career" abroad. Schools going out business (ALL of them,) not getting paid, housing crisis, visa crisis, money crisis... just an endless string of that shit for two decades.

55, which I'm rapidly approaching, is the cut off for work visas in most countries, including China.

I'm done. The US isn't much better, sadly, but what other choice do I have? I focused on getting my housing cost down. And thank the imaginary Lord I did, because I would have gone broke by now if I hadn't.