Rowland Ramble -

A year ago, I began this blog for the purpose of looking back and also sharing some of my experiences with you, my readers. I know that I likley do not have many if any reading my blog here but the truth is, it is OK. I have a place to connect to from most anywhere in the world and document my experiences so I may one day look back and see where I have come from and gone to. This adventurous job I have taken on along with some good advice on life has helped me grow so much that without them I’m not sure where I’d be in the process of understanding things the way I do now but looking back I can see the some of the changes.

It was this time last year that I was nearing a completed a contract at my favorite company ever with a really great manager whom I truly miss working for. He had an outlook that was inspiring in many ways. I used to tell my friends that I worked in the happiest place on earth and they would guess Disney most every time. They were right and I truly miss it.
One of my favorite managers at Disney before he left Disney.


While I have enjoyed living in the desert, I am ready to come back for a while. Not really sure if one can actually come back “home” because some things change…even if it’s just the person returning. Someone who once told me that you can’t really survive here in the desert until you make the move in your mind. I found that to be true because for many months, I kept thinking about how life was when I left and I had forgotten a very critical element of life. It keeps changing things even when you aren’t there. This was witnessed when I went back home for a vacation. With the exception of a select few, did anyone appear to want to connect since they all had lives to live and other places to be. This was a painful lesson because for a long time I held on to these friendships in my mind but they had let go many months ago. It’s the out of sight out of mind thing. Sadly I have found that people these days just don’t have time to spend with others because they are so busy doing something else. I still haven’t quite figured out what is so much more important than friends that causes this draw but it appears to be a reality.
Some of them just aren’t close enough both in distance or connection so I do understand that…the rest…I just don’t.

I also learned that you shouldn’t live your life fast forwarding or waiting until the next big moment where you do meet some goal that you have set for yourself. I did that for a while and have since learned that you must live your life along the route rather than racing from one goal to the next all the while missing the journey along the way. It’s good to have goals but it’s also good to enjoy and learn from the route getting to them.

Other changes on viewpoints:
If you have seen the Matrix, this will make more sense. It’s a great movie to watch…well the first one is the best and what I am basing what I write about here.
I have been extracted from a life and for 20 years, it had become all I had known. I went to work each day and like a good worker bee, fell into the machine that is devised to allow us to fall under heavy control. I followed the steps of being on a regular work schedule and used the mass transit as much as possible to get to work and become a part of that corporate machine. I didn’t travel freely and I was on a schedule…and it wasn’t mine. While it paid enough to survive, the entire system is configured so that you can end up barely making a living wage if you aren’t careful. I used to think I was free.
I have been working in a different system of control and it mostly because I have changed it for myself. I don’t have the looming debt I had before, I don’t have the fear of not being able to afford shelter, I don’t feel like I have to stay at this job anymore but I do because I like the wage and the work. I know that when I go back to the workforce at home I will be able to take on work that I really like rather than what’s available me because I need to funds to keep the creditors happy.

On How “easy” it’s been for me to just pay all my bills off.
Some people I know just say to me that it has been easy for me to take this job here and that I have skills that I can market and make a good wage and getting out of debt is so easy for a person like me and they get tired of reading the “same story over and over again”.
I laugh because they don’t understand or see…or care that I packed all my things that I might have needed into a few bags and one box, hopped on a airplane and left everything I ever knew and and everyone I ever met and left them all behind in an effort to get this goal of debt freedom accomplished. Easy!? Please! It’s hotter than hell here in the summer and there are so many things that you can’t even begin to imagine that you will experience that aren’t really enjoyable unless you have lived here. Try leaving your entire family and all your friends behind only to watch the friendships whither away because you were gone. Try eating the food here and sometimes it feels like Gastronial Intestinal Russian Roulette when you find out that one of your peers almost died because of major food poisoning and what your eating today tastes a bit “off”. Try working in a warehouse setting with pretend cubicles and lights that you could grow some awesome weed under. That light is like sitting by the light of a welder for 12 hours at a time because that’s your workday. Think about the last time you had a new job and the stress was high because you didn’t know the ropes yet. Now throw a curve ball in there and instead…take on a new boss and he is hell bent on changing everything in order to make his mark and it throws the system that everyone had figured out into a tailspin. Yippie…it’s like getting a new job every year…want it or not. Here’s one, spend 48 hours of your meager 3 weeks vacation getting to and from your home. This is also combined with the fact that 3 weeks is an abnormally long vacation and typicall you must break it down into two segments….this means your 48 hours of travel just doubled and you lost a total of 4 days to traveling on your now roughly 8 to 10 days off in a row and let’s not talk about the jetlag where you lose more time because you are trying to adjust to the new timezone you find yourself in. In a vain attempt to stay somewhat synchronized with my hometowm clocks, I have been working the night shift for nearly a year now and that’s a joy unto itself. You walk outside in the morning and the beautifully lit sky is yours for the taking and your internal devices tell you it’s daytime and you shouldn’t be sleeping but rather, wide awake. Now that this mechanism is running full throttle you go home after being up for 15 hours and now you gotta sleep. Good luck with that one. Oh let’s talk about maid service…yeah, they work in the day and don’t often speak much english so you will have trouble getting them to understand “no ringie ringie doorbell in the day, just come in quietly and clean everything but my room cause I am sleeping”. Guaranteed….the doorbell WILL ring and wake you and now you have been awakened in the middle of your night because housekeeping can’t understand you. Here’s more, you get to pick what holiday you want to spend with your family and friends and this year but it cannot be all of them….(See travel and jetlag comments). How about a crappy internet service that take you an hour and a half to watch an hour long movie because of dust storms…or just poor internet service in the first place….why yes sir we have Internet service, it’s a 1.44 meg connection and it’s shared with 70 other tennants. Yes we know that they are streaming movies and using Skype but at least we can tell you that we have the service. Enjoy! You will also need a vpn link out of the country because the movie pirates here can’t get access to Netflix…they would just pirate it all. The VPN…well that is encapsulating technology so you get the pleasure of even slower speeds because of the encrypt and decrypt activities. Thanks firewall guys! You guys rock at blocking my favorite stuph! NOT! You are just an annoying speedbump on the information superhighway!
You will notice that I am not taking issue with the people of this country. It is me who doesn’t understand them and each day I make attempts to do so. Like the guy today who wanted to occupy the same lane on the freeway as I did and forgot about the whole separate matter occupying the same space at the same time thing or neglected to learn or perhaps thought that it was birthright to be there in my position on the road and not me. I really tried to understand this but I am not that capable of understanding how an intelegent society could actually drive in a manner that says they do not understand basic physics.
Back to the point. It’s not easy to do what I have done and I challenge anyone who thinks I am in some sort of priviledged situation to just drop on over and try it. You will likley make more money than you did at home doing the same thing you can do here and according to some, it’s easy. So if you think that after reading my posts about getting out of debt and think here we go again, I challenge you to try it.

Am I bitter about this job and the place I live, not really. Am I glad I did it? Without question, yes! Would I do it again? Probably. Do I want to poke the next person in the eye who says it was so easy for a guy like me and that I am somehow privledged? YES! Was it easy? No, not really. Was it worth it? Absolutley!
I have had an excellent experience here because of what I made of it. I have learned things about myself and would not trade this for the world. I just might look back and wish I had traveled more of it while I was here but this round was mostly for debt payoff.