timonium 21093

here's some news

I am leaving CollegeIworkAt. No, I didn't get fired for impregnating anyone or something like that. I am leaving on my own accord. I resigned last week after a long and (honestly) pretty tough last couple of months deciding where I was going.

Let me begin by saying that much of my unwillingness to blog has been because what has been on my mind revolves around my current work who knows that I keep a blog. So, I have been unwilling to really share because it could have gotten me fired. Starting about a year ago I found myself very unsatisfied with my work. Don't get me wrong, I really like the students I work with and who work for me. They are in fact, the reason I stayed so long. I found that I was enjoying the work less and less, thanks to the insane growth at CollegeIworkAt. Every year it was more and more work with no money and not even a new title. I mean how hard is a new title? Throw your employees a bone if you aren't going to give them more money. Anyway, I wanted out. Situation came to a head back in September 2007 when a friend who works for Uncle Sam told me that there were some openings in his directorate and that he was in good with his bosses, etc, etc. I applied for the job, jumped through a bunch of hoops and received a bunch of good feedback for the first time applying for a federal job. (I had applied for federal jobs for about 2 years to no avail) According to the government hiring website, I had been selected. All I had to do was fill out this extensive questionnaire and the next step would be to bring me in for an interview at which point I would be pretty much in the door. When this news came through, I was on my way to a college fair in Northern VA. I said to myself, I should probably do this immediately but I've got to run so I will do it when I get back - after all - the email said I had a week to complete it. When I got back from the college fair, there was a new email from the federal hiring people saying that the position had been cancelled. Cancelled. I was , as you, dear reader could have guessed, quite despondent.

I returned home to Timonium and started to rethink my motivation for trying to find a new job. I found that I wanted out because I was angry. I wanted out because I didn't like some people and the direction CollegeIworkAt was going. That's not a good reason to leave. I decided that working for the feds was just not in the cards. I did a lot of soul searching and decided that I was doing good work, I enjoyed being close to my friends and family and I loved being here in Baltimore. I was at peace. Still making peanuts for salary but at peace with myself and my life.

Fast forward to February 2008. Out of the blue, I get an email from the feds asking me to do some online questionnaires. Haven't I been down this road before? Didn't I spend a ton of emotional and psychological capital getting my life in order? What the hell?, thought I. This time around it wasn't just one online questionnaire it was about a dozen. Each one was so long it took about 30 minutes to do each one. So that was that. Fast forward to late February. I get a call out of the blue asking me to the feds for an interview. I have mixed emotions because after all, they burned me once before - badly. So I went up for the interview which was about as standard as can be. About a week later - first week of March or so they called me while at work as offered me a job. Whoa. "How long do I have to tell you my decision" I asked. "I am authorized to give you up to 48 hours". Ouch. Not only was I eyes deep in application season but I honestly hadn't thought they would offer me a job. So I turned them down. I know what you're thinking - you IDIOT - right? Well like I said I had made peace with my life and I just couldn't leave CollegeIworkAt. I was too deep into the season and they needed me. So I thought that was that. All things being equal, it would have been.

Fast forward to April. I get another call out of the blue- the feds again ( I thought I told you to take your jobs and shove it!?) offering me a job. This time - I decided to take it. Long story short - there was a ton of paperwork that had to clear security-wise before the offer was official and I could notify CollegeIworkAt. So last week everything cleared and I gave notice to the boss. Needless to say this was hard. I've been there for four years and I've made some good friends and I am really proud of the lives I've changed. Even the small things stick in my mind. Whether it was recommending a book or a class to a student or suggesting that showing up drunk to an exam might not be a good idea, I've enjoyed the last four years. I will miss my students the most. I feel bad that they have all left for the summer so I will try and do something for them.

So why did I take this new job? Well to be quite honest - CollegeIworkAt has moved to a new pay scale system that doesn't even guarantee minimal cost of living increases. When you work for a non profit and make peanuts to begin with , that 3% is pretty critical. Knowing the department and the college as a whole like I do, I can tell you exactly what was coming and it wasn't pretty. Cheap, yes. Also, I've really hit the glass ceiling there. I've advanced in the ranks and taken on tons more responsibility but the honest truth was that short of the top end of the department quitting tomorrow, I would be doing my job forever. The feds don't pay like the private sector but they offered me more money and guaranteed raises for the next couple of years. Yeap. So what's the catch? Why the melancholy?

I have to move to New Jersey for at least a year, likely two. I still haven't come to terms with this. Baltimore is my home. It always will be. My family is here. My friends are here. My hear it is here and it always will be. College was one thing - it involved huge chunks of time that I could spend here so in essence I never really left. Work, however will keep me away from Baltimore for most of the time. I plan on being here weekends to visit my family and friends but well - yeah. I will miss it terribly. It's home. I will be moving back when the installation I will be working at closes and the operation comes Maryland but until then I will be in Babylonian exile. I95 lead me back to the promised land. I will be checking out of Timonium on June 7. I will keep you all (I know all 4 of you who read this) informed as to any going away parties or some such.

More to follow...

Goodnight, ya'll.

je vois que vous avez un chou

enjoy this till I return with updates. Soon. Really.

merry christmas

Merry Christmas out there to anyone that is still listening. It's been a busy last couple of months. Some good things have happened - some bad things have happened. I will do my best right now to give you a brief synopsis of those events both good and bad.

This summer, as some of you may recall, I had some vandalism done to my vehicle. Well according to the court system, it didn't happen because the person accused of the crime was not mirandized properly got off scott free. So super. But what is done is done, the car is fixed and basically the same as it was before. It's been a rough go I suppose of the last few months. I had a lot on my mind and was trying to come to grips with a few things that I really can't go into much detail about in this forum but rest assured it was nothing life threatening or anything like that. Some events related to said issues have recently occured and provided me some perspective on my life. The simple fact is that while my life is really not going anywhere fast, it's not bad. I have great friends, a caring family and many other things to be thankful for. I have made some decision about taking action in my life because I realized that for the worse, I had been putting my life on hold for nearly two years now, make few decisive moves or doing few things that I enjoyed or thought to be important to who I am as a person. Getting my life back on track will not be overnight, nor will it be pleasant at every turn but what I find most interesting is that right now I feel more psychologically healthy than I have in literally, years. So I think that's a good thing, we will see if I was right or I am continuing to delude myself with introverted escapism about the future. Let's hope that I am right about the former.

I believe that few things happen accidently. There is a pattern to the chaos and that has helped me deal with some of the things that have come my way over the past two years. I don't know if I will get to update this thing again before the new year, but I will repeat my sincere hope, that this coming year will be better than the last, not necessarily because 2007 was bad but because we should all hope to make things better each year. Corny, sappy - sure but sometimes that makes things a little easier to deal with. Merry Christmas, friends and a Happy New Year.

Coming soon: Thoughts on the First World War and my hometown of Baltimore.

ahoooooooy crew members!

friends josh and kevin will attest to the fact that after hearing the 'captain chesapeake' theme song at the ball game the other day - it has rekindled many memories of being a 'crew member'. take a look at this video i found on youtube today. if any of you grew up here in baltimore in the 70's and 80's - this will surely make you smile - or bring back memories of a troubled childhood. either way, i get to feel warm and fuzzy inside.

A long lost interview with Captain Chesapeake

wild bill hagy - RIP

who knew that heaven had an upper deck?

thanks for the memories and for Oriole Magic, Wild Bill. Section 34 forever.

O-R-I-O-L-E-S!

cal and me

or more appropriately, Cal and I - but hey who's keeping track?

I am going to Cooperstown, NY this weekend to see Cal Ripken Jr. be inducted into the hall of fame and I feel like this is something that I have known about my whole life and now it is coming to fruition. I am lucky enough to have some pretty cool Cal Ripken memories and tonight I feel like sharing a few.

I think my earliest memories of the Orioles and Cal in particular revolve around the 1983 World Series championship over the Phillies. I really have no conscious memory of the event but I can remember people talking about those Orioles with an air of excitement that made me a fan before I really knew what baseball and the Orioles were all about - all I knew was that the O's were good and something to be excited about. I mean why not - they seemed to make everyone around me happy? My second early memory was meeting "The Bird" - yeah just a guy in the mascot costume but for a 5 year old it was a pretty big deal. I remember my Mom and Dad taking me to the grand opening of some store where The Bird would be present and signing autographs - that picture remains a treasured possession to this day. Playing little league ball kind of had a negative impact on my impression of baseball for a while - mostly because I was not a good hitter. Fielding- no prob - base running - check - hitting - nope. It didn't help either that my coach one year was Stan White (former Baltimore Colt living vicariously through his kids) who had all kinds of "helpful advice" that he was ready to share in his own way about my game - but I digress.

One summer I was really sick - nothing worse than a summer flu, right? My Dad bought me a Sony Walkman - no cassette player just an AM/FM radio. I was probably 8 or 9 and I listened to every single Orioles game on that radio. I would often fall asleep with the headphones on my ears and wake up with stiff neck because of it. I must have gone through a crate of batteries that summer listening to ball games and if they had the night off the phone in request show or Forgotten 45's on WQSR - great show that I miss terribly. But what was better for me was listening to Fred Manfra, John Miller and Chuck Thompson call O's games - life was good. I had lots of favorite players on those teams - Bob Milacki, Randy Milligan, Chris Hoiles, Brady Anderson - but Cal was always there. I didn't need to root extra hard for Cal because I knew that he would be there always and play his hardest and do right by the team and the uniform.

I remember the night when Cal hit #3000. It was freshman year in college and thankfully one of my suitemates was an O's fan - thank you Ian - and we had the game against the Twins on tv. I ran out to get something to eat or maybe a soda and as I was walking down the hall I heard Vik call out that Cal was up to bat. I sprinted the rest of the way just in time to see the bat strike the ball and it land in the outfield of the Metrodome. You've probably noticed that I haven't mentioned anything about The Streak. Well - it's something that everyone knows about Cal and that is great, really. But this is about Cal and me.

Why does Cal mean so much to me? Well it began with unconscious memories of baseball and Cal and then all of the years he was with the O's - his entire career. But something else was that he was one of us. Not because he wore the uniform but because in the rarest of occurrences in pro sports, a player got to play for his home town team and at that spend his entire career there. When Cal took the field in an Orioles uniform - he represented this town in a way that no other person on that team could - as one of us in the truest sense. He grew up eating crabs, listening to WBAL, shopping at Mars and doing other ordinary Baltimore things that we rarely even think about as we do them. They define us and give us a sense of place and now we can say that Cal is one of those things that define us. Pretty cool.

My closest memory of Cal is from a few years ago when I got to shake the great man's hand. He was being inducted into the Orioles own Hall of Fame and through friend Kevin I scored tickets right at the wall. After the ceremonies he came by to shake a few hands and I reached out and I shook his hand. The hand that for 21 years played every day - over 3000 hits, 400 home runs and 2632 consecutive games. It was a moment that I will take with me for the rest of my life - to touch greatness to be in its presence but also to feel like I knew him as a man and not just a marble statue. He is after all, a lot like me and a lot like us.

What inspired this sappy post of paternal baseball memories of Cal Ripken? I was watching tv and waiting for a great new show to come on "Simon Schama's Power of Art". So far they have been great and a new one was airing tonight. Instead I got drawn in by Cal appearing on QVC selling some of his hall of fame items. I sat there enthralled by the moment. Here was Cal sitting in a ballpark that he built and named after his Dad. I never would have imagined it. He sat there telling stories to the audience and was admittedly nervous about the whole thing but thankful that he could take his mind off of his meeting with destiny this Sunday in Cooperstown. Several people called in and were on the verge of tears telling Cal what he meant to them and I watched his eyes and his face and could see that he was really just moved to hear what these folks had to say - and so was I. To me, Cal represents the best things about Baltimore and about baseball. I see in him greatness but also humanity and a humility that is all but absent among today's sports stars. Michael Vick barely qualifies as human compared to Cal. I can't imagine how hard it is to be him and to have to live up to so many expectations but it would seem he has a pretty good handle on it. I think though why I feel so strongly connected to Cal is that after Johnny U died, I made it a point to take a moment to get as close to that greatness as I could. I've mentioned in the past how I often just missed Johnny U or saw him and let him alone - I feel now that I was foolish because he of all people, like Cal deeply cared for his fans and from what others have told me would have been pleased to meet another fan. We are very lucky here in Baltimore to have such greatness be around us all the time. Whether it was Johnny Unitas shopping at Cohen's or seeing Cal at the Hunt Valley WalMart - sometimes you just can't beat this town.

See you in Cooperstown, Cal.

sundry items

So I am once again vexed with a small case of insomnia, so here we are at 12:48 AM and I am writing. What spurred this, you may ask? Well a number of things. I can never sleep the day before I leave for vacation and this at age 25 is no different than age 4 when I went to Ocean City for the first time, still get excited and I still hate to leave. It's not like it costs me anything to go anymore, either. My folks have a house down there so I can mooch off that as much as I want but that long drive back to Baltimore on Rt. 50 with everyone else is just a downer. You can see it in the eyes of the other motorists heading back to Catonsville or Edgemere or BelAir or wherever - boxes of Candy Kitchen stuff and tubs of Fisher's Popcorn and some Thrashers in the tummy its a sad ride but at least you know you had a good time. I still get the same feeling even though I know I will be back soon. Ocean City, MD is the place to be. Period. Best thing I have seen on the boardwalk in a while was two things, OK so maybe it wasn't one but one was funny and the other was disturbing as well as funny. The first was spyed two weeks ago when I walked past one of the various pizza parlors on the boards with a sandwich board that read "Authentic New York Style 'PIZZA'" "Pizza"??? Why the quotes? Is it not legally allowed to be called pizza? A pizza-like substance that tastes remarkably like pizza? What gives?

This past weekend was spotted an old woman wearing a bright blue t-shirt with the words in all caps "JUST DO ME" . Ocean City - class all the way.

The other reason I wrote was to tell a fun story about my days as a DJ at our crappy campus radio station at dear old MWC. The station management had told us in a meeting that we could put the studio monitors (that's radio talk for speakers) out the window if the weather was nice. What I neglected to hear was "...if the weather is nice on a Friday afternoon after 5PM..." This would not have been a problem if I had one of those coveted time slots but nay nay, my show, "Paper or Plastic" aired every Monday morning at 9AM. So one brisk October morning I got in early and wired up the studio monitors and propped them into the little attic windows up in the 3rd floor of Lee Hall. All seemed well. No calls then suddenly the switchboard lit up. Interesting because we figured no one would be listening let alone near a phone to call in a request. Turns out it was some professor in Trinkle Hall next door screaming at me to turn the music down. I told him that I was allowed to broadcast the radio station and that if he did'nt like it - he could call station management. Well - he bypassed them and went to the police who in about 30 seconds attempted to break down the studio door. I went and let him in and he had his handcuffs out and threatened to arrest me on the spot for GodKnowsWhat if I didn't turn the music off and get the speakers out of the window. So seeing reason I complied and WMWC went off the air for about 22 minutes whilst the officers stood over me as I dismantled my speaker set-up.

I was thinking about this as I realized the other day that as Lee Hall is being renovated from top to bottom the old radio studio is gone now. It was definitely this side of crappy but I think that's what made it real to me. Old concert posters on the walls - defunct radio station stickers all over the mixing boards - bad carpeting and worse furniture and the studio door covered with the autographs of all the musicians and groups who had visited the station - apparently all have hit the scrap heap. Definitely the end of an era - the station had been broadcasting from the attic of Lee Hall since 1946 - just over 50 years isn't bad I guess. I can close my eyes and be back in that crappy little studio doing my show that no one heard and loving every minute of it. We had a brand new instant replay machine sitting on top of a mixing board from about 1985 next to a couple of turntables and a cartridge machine. I used to play the same station promos all the time and I got yelled at for it - but come on, how you could not love a Run DMC station promo? We also had to run a couple of PSA's (public service announcements) and again I played the same one over and over - about clean water. It had this scary music in the background with this little girl's voice asking "for a dwink of water". "DO YOU WANT TO HAVE CLEAN WATER FOR YOUR CHILDREN??????" and so on. Brilliant. I found a couple of the old station promos on their crappy website - definitely haven't heard them in about 8 years so it was a neat flashback. Also, the fact that WMWC's website is crappy tells me that things are just fine and the same as always.

That'll do it for today folks - I'm Bryan Fischer and thanks for listening to Paper or Plastic on WMWC 91.5 Stereo FM.

watch my garden grow... also my car got broke

Yeah - a miscreant of some caliber decided to tune up my car's driver side window. Can't say much more other than it's part of an ongoing investigation. Stay tuned for updates.

Also it's about that time for my veggie garden to start coming in. This year I really put some time in on it. I started back in the first weekend of May. Spent the better part of a day ripping out all the nasty weeds and such that had taken over the garden beds and tilling the beds themselves. Next day I went to the garden center and picked up about 200lbs of organic humus and some basic 10-10-10 fertilizer. So far (knock on wood) I haven't had to use any kind of pesticide or anything like that so technically it's an organic garden right now. This year I decided to try out some heirloom varieties. Regular hybrid tomatoes are pretty boring so I ordered some heirloom Cherokee tomatoes from seedsavers.org. They have really taken off like mad and are actually bearing more fruits right now than the hybrids. Chalk a win up for the old school. Also these tomatoes are going to be purple when ripe. Neat, eh? I also decided to grow some heirloom peppers. Got a neat long skinny Italian sweet pepper as well as a polish variety that is more traditionally shaped but supposed to be super sweet. Everything is going to come in at once and I am really getting impatient. Take a look and be jealous.

Bryan's Veggie Garden 07/09/07

going downey ocean.... enjoy this while I'm gone...

Dancing and math combined in a way that only the Japanese could accomplish.

baltimore with a capital B

It's been a long time as usual... so what else is new?

So to recap briefly the last couple of weeks (months? ) since my last post:

Friend Josh recently got un-funemployed and has now relocated to that state we like to call the armpit of America, New Jersey.

Friend Kevin was promoted at that place that he works at. Good for him.

Went to the Polish festival the other day. Good times and the inspiration for the title of this post. Seen at the Polish festival - a polka band (accordions and trumpets, etc) playing covers of Merle Haggard and Elvis, people walking around in plaid pants and those who shouldn't be doing so wearing bathing suits in public. Definitely Baltimore with a capital B. Also the band was wearing the same thing that friend Gump wears all the time, jean shorts and a tshirt. I am pretty sure that the Polish people are all just versions of the same guy. For serious.

Still working at my place of employ, status unchanged. Huzzah. Also congrats to friend Snay for his recent completion of studies at the best university in Towson, the Medix School. Zing!

Is this what being old is like? Man, it is boring as all get out.