ODDREE.COM

Liberation

I spent several hours today cleaning out the back of my basement. I actually started digging through the junk earlier in the week placing what was "sellable" on eBay. To date, my earnings are almost $50. The rest of the garbage is not really anything I can sell. For that matter, it would be hard to give most of this shit away. Aside from all the computer junk I have to clear out ... one thing had to go ... my shelves of training manuals.

When you are in the training business, you print a lot of shit. I could never teach from PDF's on a laptop, although I've known many instructors who do. The sheer cost of printing all this crap was actually pretty low. I invested in a $50 laser printer when I started my training business. I was lucky enough to have a toner cartridge full of toner. I have never changed it. Every time I taught a new class I would download the materials, print them out, bind them, and label the binder. I accumulated a few shelves of this bulk paper product pretty quickly. But now what would I do with it all?

I guess the real question is why have I kept it this long? If you had asked me to throw all that shit out when I started my full time job back in May, I wouldn't have wanted to. I like to have a backup plan, and I figured if things didn't "work out" with the new job, the training business was more than willing to take me back. Now I am facing financial ruin, and my house will soon be someone elses house. I could still jump right back into the training business. Or, I could toss this heap into a recycling dumpster and never look back.

Would I ever want to go back to that lifestyle? The cold silence of a hotel room. The funny tastes and smells of foreign places. Calling my family from the road to "say hello". Teaching corporate lackies how to use poorly developed products that will change next year. Never again.

There was a certain satisfaction in slinging the bags full of paper into the dumpster. One had started to tear, and exploded on the inside wall, papers flying around in the cold darkness. I had a choice. I chose my family. I will never regret it. I don't have to ask myself if I did the right thing anymore. I'm free. But at what cost?

Tomorrow I will find out that I didn't get the job at the hospital and even though I know it's coming it will still break me down.

Tomorrow I will contact the recruiters I have avoided all week, and ask them to present me with more jobs that don't interest me, and that I am not qualified for.

Tomorrow I will get a couple more calls from the mortgage company, and I won't answer the phone.