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Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Corporate America is my daddy

Yup, they own my soul now. I'm signed up, plugged in, logged on... I have a 401K, an HMO, an IDP, and if I get hit by a bus, someone gets 1-and-a-half-times my salary in a life insurance payout. For those of you looking for the keys to a bus: no, it's not you.

We had a small (4-week) delay while HR got the paperwork through, but as of last week, I'm officially a corporate slave - no more hourly pay-for-play contract. I had mixed feelings about that - particularly when I realized how much smaller my checks would be (don't worry, I'm still not exactly starving) - but I know this is best for my career (career (ke-rir) n. - see "responsibility," "adult," "corporate raping," blah, blah, blah...).

The delay gave me enough time to finish The DaVinci Code and Vonnegut's Player Piano, then read Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, followed by Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal (thank you, Jon; that book's definitely in my top 10 list now) and Ayn Rand's Anthem (hey, if she only ever wrote about 1 central theme, why tackle the 1000+ page Atlas Shrugged when you can get the gist of it in 120 large-font pages?), then start Don Quixote, where I've stalled about 30 pages in.

So right now my reading's as stagnant as my love life, but my friends continue to make up for it all. Jason, Mike, Mark and I spent Sunday at Valleyfair (it's like Six Flags, or Disneyland without so many poor bastards who have to walk around in foam suits). The ride that slowly takes you up over 200 feet with your feet dangling in the air, pauses, then fires you downward still scares the crap out of me (in a good way). Afterward, we met up with Jason's wife (that still sounds weird to me) for $1 burgers in Uptown, where I impressed the whole group by hitting on our waitress (with no success, of course, but they all gave me points for guts and "smooth"ness - even the waitress).