I am apparently employed

I’ve been working since August of 2008 at ACTION Health in Danville, PA through a the CORE Susquehanna chapter of AmeriCorps State. I got in before the job market crashed. If you want to get into AmeriCorps next year, good luck. But it’s a great experience (even though I’ve been paid $6.41/hr gross).

With AmeriCorps State, basically there are local groups & community organizations that have been granted funds to administrate AmeriCorps programs for local areas and/or specific needs. The advantage here is that there may be one of these groups in a location of interest to you, or maybe they will be a group that concentrates on cleaning a river or getting kids to school on time. My AmeriCorps State agency is CORE Susquehanna, and we run the gambit because we have people at all kinds of non-profit agencies in Central PA. I’m at a health agency doing office work and community health outreach. There are few of us serving at Big Brothers/Sisters, and others at local schools and community centers running after school programs.

The plus for me is that this position has helped me develop my professional and people skills, and made me much more aware of the world around me, mainly because I’m working with all kinds of populations. It has been a great learning and growing experience, and has made me realize that everything is going to be okay, that there are opportunities everywhere, that I needn’t worry about getting a long-lasting good paying job as in it’s not my primary goal in life to do so.

I’ve been intimately involved in HPV and Cervical Cancer education and awareness, increasing access to healthy, nutritious foods in hard times, diabetes education, and developing a website for volunteers and community members, among many, many other things. It’s hard to sum up a job you’ve been doing for 9 months in a few graphs, especially since I’m doing a different thing everyday.

Kim is a big part of my life

Aww, Kim. Isn’t she cute? We’ve been dating for over 2.5 years. That’s a long time, even for me. She’s smarter than me by .03 GPA. I only beat her by one honor society (sigh). That’s all you really need to know. She’s nice, she makes me a much better person. You can definitely trace my success to her. I’ve felt better, done more cool stuff, thought about more topics, become way more sociable, ever since we’ve been together.

She won’t take any credit, but she deserves it.

I’m still the shit

Sure I’m living in my parent’s basement right now, but let’s face it–I’m awesome. I am elite, not an elitist. I have been known to throw cards, and they do destroy.

If you read my old website (or if you read through some of the articles in the archives), you’re sure to notice that I appear to be full of myself, that I’m pretty sure of myself. This is just part of the persona.

My good friends know that I like to play up my awesomeness, for the most part, as a joke. If you talk to me in real life, you’ll note that I’m pretty modest. It’s true, I really don’t know anything. Everyone has something valuable I can learn from them. My closest friends think it’s funny, at least I hope so, so if I continue to use this persona, you should count yourself as lucky, because you’re getting me as if you were my best friend.

So why am I the shit? Because I know tons of stuff, have lots of skills I’ve picked up along the way, got good grades, and project an overall personality of success. People tend to like me, and believe that I can be an effective leader. Whatever I do, I succeed at, eventually. Much of the time, this requires help from my friends. I’ll take credit for anything, and I have an excuse for everything–just ask my basketball-playing buddies.

I pretty much have my mind made up on where I stand on most issues, hence the idea of making this website ideologically-based, in that I’m reasonable about issues, and I’ll be happy and interested in looking at new perspectives on issues to better understand the complexities of this world, but you’re probably not going to easily convince me to change my mind. Sorry.