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Name: Z
Country: United States
State: New York
Metro: New York City
Birthday: 6/15/1984
Gender: Male
Interests: I am currently interested in being employed.
Expertise: Minesweeper
Occupation: Unemployed/Between Jobs
Industry: Other
Message: message me
AIM:  capnzron
Member Since:
12/31/2003
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| how to...continue...the feeling...
Almost every year now since the beginning of high school, TAF has given me a chance to refresh my mind, reevaluate my life and my actions, and gain perspective on life. My time at TAF may be nearing an end, so the question for me now is how do I remember the feeling, remember why what we do at TAF is so important to me and why it has had such an impact in my life? I found that leading up to TAF, I kind of had trouble feeling why I put those letters on myself. I could articulate it, although it's not something that I usually explain to random strangers, but in terms of what I felt, I felt like it was something in the past, and yet I realize even after just going for the weekend that there are things I still need to remember for the future, going forward. I was thinking in lieu of TAF maybe I should create a personal holiday around the time of the conference every year to reinvigorate myself. I dunno...seems kind of weird though....
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| With a little over two weeks left in my job, I feel that I can finally speak honestly about some of the things I have seen. The corruption of the Catholic church and the blatant dishonesty of many within this secretive institution is appalling. Although I believe a combination of fear, incompetence, and lack of vision runs to the highest levels, it is my more immediate experience that has galled the most.
As a Catholic school, our institution is formally tied to a church. The pastor of the church is the official head of both school and church, and our former pastor, who was just reassigned this month, was in control of the school's finances for the past 8 or 9 years. The church, having a small and primarily lower income congregation, had few sources of revenue. Most revenue coming into the institution was from tuition collected by parents, the large majority of whom were not a part of the church. Even after all revenues from tuition and fees are accounted for, the school still runs a large deficit. Much of this deficit was covered by outside donors and fundraising. The problem at my particular school is that the pastor regularly stole money from the school, to the tune of twenty five to in some years as much as fifty thousand dollars a year. As the official head of the church and school, this is not against the law. But that is beside the point. How could this man, a man who is supposed to be a community leader, someone people look to for moral guidance, spiritual advice, and life lessons, blatantly steal thousands upon thousands of dollars that would otherwise go to the education of the 200+ students in the school? In addition, part of being a priest is taking a vow of poverty, no? The school over the years paid for phone bills, plane tickets, and many other expenses. In addition, he gave out the school's money liberally to friends who had done him favors and added ghost employees to payroll. He signed leases for multiple copiers, each writing him a check, sometimes for as much as $12,000, to pay off the lease on a copier from a different company. He pocketed these checks and stuck the school with 63 month copier leases on machines have sat idle in the closet since 2003. Upon his departure, ten thousand dollars and four blank checks have gone missing from the school. These abuses were just the tip of the iceberg. How does this man live with himself? And while he has moved on to another congregation, I am sure he has not changed, and I feel sorry for those who are now placed under his "care."
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| I went up to the school I used to work at in East Harlem today to help out with some stuff, and when I came back I had to go through rush hour traffic, a rarity for me these days because I walk to work. This story may only make sense if you know the New York subway...
I had already been on public transportation for about half an hour, having taken the bus to the 6, and ridden the 6 from 116th st. to Bleeker, where I transferred to the F. When I got to the F platform, the line across the whole station was already about 3 deep, so I figured the train would come soon. It didn't. We waited about 10 minutes while one Queens bound F and two Bronx bound D trains went by (the opposite direction from where I was going)...then after another 2-3 minutes, a D train finally came. It was raining hard today and I don't like walking in my work shoes, so I decided not to take the D, which stops much further from my apartment. I also figured the F HAD to be coming because at this point the platform was basically full of people. It came about 4 minutes later, and of course it was already packed. I let it go by because there was no way more than 3 or 4 people could fit in each door it was so crowded. Then the train stopped at the station for about 3 minutes because people kept on getting stuck in the doors and they weren't closing all the way. I figured there must be another F coming soon after. Wrong. Another 3 minutes pass and finally another train comes, but it's a V train, which ends at 2nd Ave., which means I would again have to transfer to the bus, which I don't want to do in the rain. Another 5 minutes. Another train, this time a D train on the F track. What, the fuck. At this point I don't care and the D gets me closer to my house than the V, so I hop on. "D train to Brooklyn, next stop Grand St. (my stop)," the conductor says. Everyone who is waiting for the F gets off the train, groaning, which is pretty much everyone except for me, and waits for another train. An F train pulls up on the D track, and everyone gets on, I stay on the D bc again I don't really care at this point and I'm too lazy to walk across the platform. Then the conductor gets on the intercom again and says, "This is now an F train we will be making all F stops, next stop 2nd Ave." Great! Even better than the D. The herd of F train lemmings then gets back on the D marked train that I'm on, and we stand there for a while. "This is now an F train," the conductor says again. Good...then another conductor gets on the horn and says, "This is a D train to Brooklyn, next stop Grand St.," and again the herd collectively groans and gets off the train. Then the craziest thing happens...the same conductor says again "This is a D train to Brooklyn, next stop Grand St.," and the OTHER conductor gets on and overrules him and says, "This train is making F stops to Coney Island, next stop 2nd Ave.," and because they contradicted each other and the herd is obviously confused as hell, (while some of us including myself think the whole situation is pretty amusing at this point), the same conductor repeats about 6 times that this is now an F train, so as to placate the masses who were waiting for the F. They then explain that there was an accident on the B train (which runs with the F and the D and the V from Rockefeller Center to the stop I'm at, Broadway-Lafayette), which is why there is this whole screw up. Gotta love public transportation and New York City. Ain't nothing like it.
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| Let's see...my grandmother is dying, a girl who just graduated from my school had an aneurysm and is in an induced coma in the hospital, girls don't like me, and I wasted 5 and a half hours of my life waiting for the iphone today and didn't get one cuz they ran out. Oh yeah, and I can't really drink or smoke my problems away because I'm training for this goddamn marathon. Fuck me.
EDIT
And as long as we're counting, I still don't have a job and the two I've applied to haven't given me interviews, I tried to go to the NBA Draft last night but it was sold out, my basketball team lost by 3 on Wednesday, and I haven't run in three days.
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| It's the eve of my 23rd birthday. That's Michael Jordan's number, for those of you who didn't grow up in Chicago, didn't follow basketball, or both. Life is great. Just missing one thing, but nothing is ever perfect.
Unfortunately, I think things are about to get rocky. I postponed LSATs cuz life was so great I forgot to study. I need a new job. I didn't get into the New York marathon, the Chicago marathon registration is closed, so I'm going to have to run Philly, a city I absolutely do not like, although the route does look kind of cool, going through not only my alma mater but also starting and finishing at the Rocky steps and through manyunk, which I've heard is interesting. Speaking of training, I haven't run at all this week, although I did play b-ball yesterday and soccer today, it's nothing compared to a good five mile jog. In any case, happy birthday to me.
I wonder what I'll think when I look back at this post in 30 years.
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