I just realized that I did my last blog entry prior to starting my new job. 
What can I say, this job is a time killer and I'm pretty beat once I get home in the evenings. But I'm not complaining since it's heaps of fun and extremely well paid. I'm far from being rich but for the first time in my life I'm not hoping to win the lottery. Granted, a villa near the ocean would be nice but I'm very content with where I am at the moment and I actually would not want to give up this job.
After being unemployed for a few months it's pretty weird to be able to go and buy most things without looking on the price tag. Just last week I bought some sunglasses for almost € 250. The pair before that had cost me € 10...
Anyway, I'm not saying this to brag but to state that I'm happy.
Now I only need to find me a woman, but they are much harder to come by than good jobs. Probably because my boss does not want to fuck me and did not judge me by my looks.
On another note, I've gotten a decent sunburn on our office outing last week. I haven't had one of those in over a decade and it sucks. Not to mention that it looks quite funny since you can actually see the lines of said sunglasses on my face.
What can I say, this job is a time killer and I'm pretty beat once I get home in the evenings. But I'm not complaining since it's heaps of fun and extremely well paid. I'm far from being rich but for the first time in my life I'm not hoping to win the lottery. Granted, a villa near the ocean would be nice but I'm very content with where I am at the moment and I actually would not want to give up this job.
After being unemployed for a few months it's pretty weird to be able to go and buy most things without looking on the price tag. Just last week I bought some sunglasses for almost € 250. The pair before that had cost me € 10...
Anyway, I'm not saying this to brag but to state that I'm happy.
Now I only need to find me a woman, but they are much harder to come by than good jobs. Probably because my boss does not want to fuck me and did not judge me by my looks.
On another note, I've gotten a decent sunburn on our office outing last week. I haven't had one of those in over a decade and it sucks. Not to mention that it looks quite funny since you can actually see the lines of said sunglasses on my face.
So tomorrow will be my first day at the new job. I'm a little nervous but also looking forward to it. I haven't been working for a while now and sitting at home doing nothing really gets old.
In the life of every man comes the time when he thinks to himself, "Hey, why not shave my head?" Today it was my turn. Well, not totally shave, but 1mm is really bloody short. To be quite honest, I've been thinking about trying this for a while now but never had the guts before. I've never had totally short hair before and I was afraid that I'd look like Gollum or a bowlingball with ears.
But tonight I had one of those "oh, fuck it" moments and decided to go for it. And I have to say that I'm rather happy with the result, I can look in the mirror without having the urge to say "my precious" or "filthy little hobbits" over and over. Well, no more than unsual anyways.
And since I firmly believe that a blogentry like this needs pictures, there you are. Be warned though, they were made with a rather shitty phone cam and also contain parts of unsexy male boobage.
This is me in the middle of the hacking away, when the machine decided that it wanted to be recharged. With a bit of color this look might even have worked out. Or not...
The sideview.
Some of the hairy mess. Doesn't look that much but cleaning up took some time.
The final result, almost. A few stray hairs need cutting but the machine was totally done for today. Also I need to decide what to do with my beard.
Thats it.
But tonight I had one of those "oh, fuck it" moments and decided to go for it. And I have to say that I'm rather happy with the result, I can look in the mirror without having the urge to say "my precious" or "filthy little hobbits" over and over. Well, no more than unsual anyways.
And since I firmly believe that a blogentry like this needs pictures, there you are. Be warned though, they were made with a rather shitty phone cam and also contain parts of unsexy male boobage.
This is me in the middle of the hacking away, when the machine decided that it wanted to be recharged. With a bit of color this look might even have worked out. Or not...
The sideview.
Some of the hairy mess. Doesn't look that much but cleaning up took some time.
The final result, almost. A few stray hairs need cutting but the machine was totally done for today. Also I need to decide what to do with my beard.
Thats it.
I always wanted to be able to draw and I envied those people who were able to capture anything with seemingly effortless strokes of their pencil. Back in school I wasn't even that bad in "art class" but lets face it, it's not like drawing a bit of watercolor is much of a challenge.
Anyways, since I have bit of free time on my hand these days I finally decided to give it a shot and try whether or not I might be able to teach myself a bit of drawing abilities. I haven't touched a pencil in ages, so obviously I was more than a bit pessimistic about this.
With this in mind I tried to do a quick (I have no patience to speak of) portrait of todays front page SG Milloux and I have to admit that I'm rather satisfied with the result. Obviously the resemblence isn't that great and there are many things to fix, but I don't think I'm hopeless and since I've always been my worst critic it's a huge step for me to admit this to myself.
Obviously this'll never be my career but I think it might become a nice little hobby.
Edit: Is there any way to post a thumbnail preview of big pics?
Anyways, since I have bit of free time on my hand these days I finally decided to give it a shot and try whether or not I might be able to teach myself a bit of drawing abilities. I haven't touched a pencil in ages, so obviously I was more than a bit pessimistic about this.
With this in mind I tried to do a quick (I have no patience to speak of) portrait of todays front page SG Milloux and I have to admit that I'm rather satisfied with the result. Obviously the resemblence isn't that great and there are many things to fix, but I don't think I'm hopeless and since I've always been my worst critic it's a huge step for me to admit this to myself.
Obviously this'll never be my career but I think it might become a nice little hobby.
Edit: Is there any way to post a thumbnail preview of big pics?
Why 2009 sucked...
Basically I'm writing this to try and get over some things. I always tend to brood over the bad stuff a bit too much and maybe writing about it will help a little. Although I seriously doubt it.
Now, where to start? Maybe with my job situation. I have been fired on September 30th with effect from January 1st, 2010. I was home ill at the time and they actually did send someone from the company's mailroom to deliver the letter to me personally. The letter had to arrive on this day otherwise the cancellation of my contract would have come in effect three months later. The poor guy handing me the letter was almost in tears as I was pretty well liked by nearly all my colleagues.
I have been working for this company since 2003, first as an apprentice, then as key account manager. Before my apprenticeship I even jobbed there a few times. Basically they have known me for almost ten years.
So why did they fire me then? That's a long, long story, way too long to write down, but I'll try to describe the events a litte. At this point it's important to know that my service unit consisted of 13 people and I had been the one with the biggest portfolio of policies (yes, we're talking about the wonderful world of insurance here). Also I had two very important contracts in my responsibility which brought millions of Euros a year. Basically everything was peachy and I even had been considered as a possible candidate for a promotion and a very substantial raise. Then things went downhill very fast. It all started when first my colleague with whom I shared an office and then my direct boss became mentally ill (burnout/depressions). This left the whole unit in chaos and me especially since I had to do the work of my colleague as well as mine. Needless to say that this is a task aking to juggling knives while having sex - virtually impossible without some collateral damage.
This collateral damage was me fucking up one of my accounts. I apologized to the customer (who did not even make a fuss out of it, they were cool about it). The problem was, that the head of my department took this as a reason to view me as his personal nemesis. Since that day (which actually was back in 2008) everything I did was not good enough in his eyes, no matter how hard I tried. I had more than 100 hours of overtime, came to work on saturdays if necessary and helped colleagues from the whole department with 1001 different things (mostly Excel/office-stuff or translations) and I even attended several meetings with english clients because the responsible accountants did not want to have a meeting in english. I'm not mentioning this to flatter myself but to show that I absolutely tried to do my best and show my qualities. Unfortunately he would not have any of it. Usually my days at work after this time started with him coming to my office, closing the door behind him and starting to verbally beat me down about whatever thing he could find. Sometimes even things that happend months ago or during my vacation. I didn't stay too long, I was talking too much with colleagues, all my work is wrong and so on and so forth...
Imagine having this every week, almost every single day for more than a year. I thing it's understandable that over time my work actually did get worse and worse. I was afraid to even come to work, let alone do anything. At the end it took me hours to write a letter because I was so deadly afraid that he would find anything wrong about it. By this time I was eating antacid in absolutely unhealthy doses (about 50-60 pills a month) and not a single day would go by in which I would not feel sick.
To make a long story short, eventually they fired me and we went to court. They offered me more than I would have guessed and I accepted because my condition did not enable me to even thing about continuing dealing with them.
So that's one part of why 2009 sucked, 'cause now I'm without a job in an industry that's heavily hit by the financial crisis. Judging by the number of rejections I've already received, I'll be unemployed for quite a while. But there's more. It turns out that I'm mentally ill as well. Right now I'm in therapy and I even had to visit the psychiatric emergency clinic at the beginning. I have a pretty severe depression with all the nice little side effects such as lack of drive, spontaneous cying (e.g. in the bus on the way to work) an absolutely weird need for sleep. I sleep up to 14 hours a day, where normally I'd only need 6-7 hours. And that's even though my medication is meant to push me a bit.
I myself did not even think that I might be depressed. I guess when you in the midst of it, you tend to not realize the situation too well. I met a woman in 2009 and madly fell in love with her. She's pretty, funny, nice and the first person I ever could talk to. I've never opened up that much before as I did with her. She was equally open with me and told me about her mental problems (she's a borderliner) with occasional phases of self-mutilation (some of her stories made me cringe). I told her about the OCD I had for many years and had overcome all on my own without ever talking about it to anyone before. We quickly became close and our relationship turned physical within a week. So we burned brightly and as is common with things that burn brightly, we burned out pretty quick too. That is to say that her feelings for me burned out. She was honest about it and tried to comfort me but man, it hurt like hell. I've cried like a baby (pretty unmanly, come to think of it). She kept calling me and wanted us to stay friends and that's where we are now and I'm thankful for that. She was the one - to get back to the topic - who recommended me to go visit a therapist. Not only because of my depression, which was very evident for her but also because of of very highly developed social anxiety. The latter was actually the reason for her not to have a relationship with me. I was (and am, mostly) nearly unable to attend social situations. I have no friends other than her and I never had them. Even something trivial as posting in a forum or writing a blog like this is a stressfull situation for me because I surrender myself to other peoples criticism. The weird thing is that this anxiety does not effect me at work, I'm an entirely different person then. Funny, eloquent and kinda outgoing. But this is only a mask I wear to help me get through.
I am working on it, but it's fucking hard. So that's the other part of why 2009 sucked, because I finally had to admit to myself that I'm fucked, that my life is basically empty and I will be celebrating my 30th birthday like the social outcast that I am. I considered traveling on this day, but quite frankly, I'm too scared.
That sums it up, I guess. I left a bit out and shortened things a bit but basically this is a good description of where I stand now. I'm thankfull that my family and myself are healthy and of course that's the most important thing but the last year and a half have beaten me down like nothing ever has before and rebuilding seems like a herculean effort.
Okay, done whining for now. Sorry for any typos, I more or less hammered this down.
Basically I'm writing this to try and get over some things. I always tend to brood over the bad stuff a bit too much and maybe writing about it will help a little. Although I seriously doubt it.
Now, where to start? Maybe with my job situation. I have been fired on September 30th with effect from January 1st, 2010. I was home ill at the time and they actually did send someone from the company's mailroom to deliver the letter to me personally. The letter had to arrive on this day otherwise the cancellation of my contract would have come in effect three months later. The poor guy handing me the letter was almost in tears as I was pretty well liked by nearly all my colleagues.
I have been working for this company since 2003, first as an apprentice, then as key account manager. Before my apprenticeship I even jobbed there a few times. Basically they have known me for almost ten years.
So why did they fire me then? That's a long, long story, way too long to write down, but I'll try to describe the events a litte. At this point it's important to know that my service unit consisted of 13 people and I had been the one with the biggest portfolio of policies (yes, we're talking about the wonderful world of insurance here). Also I had two very important contracts in my responsibility which brought millions of Euros a year. Basically everything was peachy and I even had been considered as a possible candidate for a promotion and a very substantial raise. Then things went downhill very fast. It all started when first my colleague with whom I shared an office and then my direct boss became mentally ill (burnout/depressions). This left the whole unit in chaos and me especially since I had to do the work of my colleague as well as mine. Needless to say that this is a task aking to juggling knives while having sex - virtually impossible without some collateral damage.
This collateral damage was me fucking up one of my accounts. I apologized to the customer (who did not even make a fuss out of it, they were cool about it). The problem was, that the head of my department took this as a reason to view me as his personal nemesis. Since that day (which actually was back in 2008) everything I did was not good enough in his eyes, no matter how hard I tried. I had more than 100 hours of overtime, came to work on saturdays if necessary and helped colleagues from the whole department with 1001 different things (mostly Excel/office-stuff or translations) and I even attended several meetings with english clients because the responsible accountants did not want to have a meeting in english. I'm not mentioning this to flatter myself but to show that I absolutely tried to do my best and show my qualities. Unfortunately he would not have any of it. Usually my days at work after this time started with him coming to my office, closing the door behind him and starting to verbally beat me down about whatever thing he could find. Sometimes even things that happend months ago or during my vacation. I didn't stay too long, I was talking too much with colleagues, all my work is wrong and so on and so forth...
Imagine having this every week, almost every single day for more than a year. I thing it's understandable that over time my work actually did get worse and worse. I was afraid to even come to work, let alone do anything. At the end it took me hours to write a letter because I was so deadly afraid that he would find anything wrong about it. By this time I was eating antacid in absolutely unhealthy doses (about 50-60 pills a month) and not a single day would go by in which I would not feel sick.
To make a long story short, eventually they fired me and we went to court. They offered me more than I would have guessed and I accepted because my condition did not enable me to even thing about continuing dealing with them.
So that's one part of why 2009 sucked, 'cause now I'm without a job in an industry that's heavily hit by the financial crisis. Judging by the number of rejections I've already received, I'll be unemployed for quite a while. But there's more. It turns out that I'm mentally ill as well. Right now I'm in therapy and I even had to visit the psychiatric emergency clinic at the beginning. I have a pretty severe depression with all the nice little side effects such as lack of drive, spontaneous cying (e.g. in the bus on the way to work) an absolutely weird need for sleep. I sleep up to 14 hours a day, where normally I'd only need 6-7 hours. And that's even though my medication is meant to push me a bit.
I myself did not even think that I might be depressed. I guess when you in the midst of it, you tend to not realize the situation too well. I met a woman in 2009 and madly fell in love with her. She's pretty, funny, nice and the first person I ever could talk to. I've never opened up that much before as I did with her. She was equally open with me and told me about her mental problems (she's a borderliner) with occasional phases of self-mutilation (some of her stories made me cringe). I told her about the OCD I had for many years and had overcome all on my own without ever talking about it to anyone before. We quickly became close and our relationship turned physical within a week. So we burned brightly and as is common with things that burn brightly, we burned out pretty quick too. That is to say that her feelings for me burned out. She was honest about it and tried to comfort me but man, it hurt like hell. I've cried like a baby (pretty unmanly, come to think of it). She kept calling me and wanted us to stay friends and that's where we are now and I'm thankful for that. She was the one - to get back to the topic - who recommended me to go visit a therapist. Not only because of my depression, which was very evident for her but also because of of very highly developed social anxiety. The latter was actually the reason for her not to have a relationship with me. I was (and am, mostly) nearly unable to attend social situations. I have no friends other than her and I never had them. Even something trivial as posting in a forum or writing a blog like this is a stressfull situation for me because I surrender myself to other peoples criticism. The weird thing is that this anxiety does not effect me at work, I'm an entirely different person then. Funny, eloquent and kinda outgoing. But this is only a mask I wear to help me get through.
I am working on it, but it's fucking hard. So that's the other part of why 2009 sucked, because I finally had to admit to myself that I'm fucked, that my life is basically empty and I will be celebrating my 30th birthday like the social outcast that I am. I considered traveling on this day, but quite frankly, I'm too scared.
That sums it up, I guess. I left a bit out and shortened things a bit but basically this is a good description of where I stand now. I'm thankfull that my family and myself are healthy and of course that's the most important thing but the last year and a half have beaten me down like nothing ever has before and rebuilding seems like a herculean effort.
Okay, done whining for now. Sorry for any typos, I more or less hammered this down.
There I am again, after more than a year.
The past 1.5 years have been the worst of my life and especially 2009 has knocked me down good and hard (I will talk about that in a later blog update). So I've decided to celebrate 2010 by treating myself to a new membership to this site in the hope of having a good time and some distraction.
If there are people here, who remember me I'd like to say hi to you all. Also I'm looking forward to getting to know new people.
I've declared 2010 my year to rebuild, to reinvent and to grow.
The past 1.5 years have been the worst of my life and especially 2009 has knocked me down good and hard (I will talk about that in a later blog update). So I've decided to celebrate 2010 by treating myself to a new membership to this site in the hope of having a good time and some distraction.
If there are people here, who remember me I'd like to say hi to you all. Also I'm looking forward to getting to know new people.
I've declared 2010 my year to rebuild, to reinvent and to grow.
At the moment I feel like I'm living only for my job. And just last week my boss told me that I should consider working on saturdays as well for a few weeks. 
Say hello to my niece...
She was born a few hours ago. Everything is fine and I'm happy.
She was born a few hours ago. Everything is fine and I'm happy.
Seems like I haven't been here for quite some time. Work is really eating me up right now. The last few weeks have been pretty hard. Thankfully I'll be having three weeks off soon. Never before have I needed them this much. I'm mucho tired.
What else is new? In the next few weeks my niece will be born and I'm totally looking forward to all the baby holding, cuddling and handing her back to her parents as soon as she starts crying.
Also I'm developed a huge love for the TV shows Miami Ink and LA Ink. I've ordered all three seasons of Miami Ink on DVD and plan on spending a certain amount of my soon to come free time by doing a DVD-watching marathon.
I'm currently without any tattoos but watching those shows has given me a few ideas and there is a chance that maybe next year I will overcome my fear of needles and succumb to the inky urge.
What else is new? In the next few weeks my niece will be born and I'm totally looking forward to all the baby holding, cuddling and handing her back to her parents as soon as she starts crying.
Also I'm developed a huge love for the TV shows Miami Ink and LA Ink. I've ordered all three seasons of Miami Ink on DVD and plan on spending a certain amount of my soon to come free time by doing a DVD-watching marathon.
I'm currently without any tattoos but watching those shows has given me a few ideas and there is a chance that maybe next year I will overcome my fear of needles and succumb to the inky urge.
Okay, so Wii Fit is telling me that I've got the body of a 39 year old guy and a BMI of 28. What a way to start the weekend.
Nevertheless I had some great fun with Wii Fit today and my utterly untrained body surely feels what I've put it through. I'm curious to see if I manage to do the exercises regularly and if my fitness will really improve.
To all you people out there who can eat what they want and don't get fat - I hate you.
Nevertheless I had some great fun with Wii Fit today and my utterly untrained body surely feels what I've put it through. I'm curious to see if I manage to do the exercises regularly and if my fitness will really improve.
To all you people out there who can eat what they want and don't get fat - I hate you.
SEPTEMBER 2010
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AUGUST 2010
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JULY 2010
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