September 9th

Trying something new with the post title, Wikipedia is a incredible tool, but tools can be only as good as the users. Here's hoping that Wikipedia will be around for a while.

My blog title calls me a 42 year old loser, but I'm not really. I have just about everything going my way. Or at least I think it is. I've got a great wife and three wonderful kids. I'm finally making good money after a very long time. We can afford to send our kids the school we want. We can even afford to take a vacation outside of Canada. We can even (almost) dream of retirement. But, why do I feel that this a just a house of cards that is just balancing on the edge of a cliff and its all about to fall right out from underneath me, because of past history.

I dropped out of college in my 3rd/2nd year ( I had to repeat a year because I had mono in 2nd year). I wanted to be a radio announcer, but since I have almost no sense of humour or at least such a dry sense of humour, I realized this was not the career for me. I went to work at a radio station as a audio tech, while taking night school art classes at OCA. I really believed I could make it as a artist, until I realized that OCA night school marked on a bell curve and that a certain percentage of students/people were being set up for failure and no one (teachers, other students or the school) really gave a shit. That kind of took the luster off of being a artist. Also I realized that I can't produce something on command. Anything I can draw/paint/sculpt comes from inside my mind, not from the "real world" and its hard as hell to get it out. How do you make a living off of that when your looking to get married and raise a family. So I stayed on at the radio station, for 3 years. One day at we were told to go to a meeting, I had tapes to edit for the weekend so I didn't go, listening to the noon news cast as I edited tapes I heard the station master say that the station was going off the air. Wife and I had just bought a house, we were thinking of starting a family.. all put on hold. Well that was the first time I was out of work.

I have been working full time (as a adult, sometimes I even act like one) since 1985, in that time I have worked for eight different companies (3 different Industries)(one was my own, I tried to be a freelancer, what a failure)... almost everyone of them has gone under/downsized or done what's called temporary layoff so they don't have to pay benefits, leaving me to find another job and putting my/our life on hold. The longest I have ever been with a company is five years. While everyone my age got on with their careers, wife had to put up with me constantly looking for work. Each and every time she was fantastic, supportive, giving me a reason to get up each day (I wanted to please her).

Now things are mostly ok. Other than:
a) I live in my mother-in-laws house
b) I drive my father-in-laws car (he's dead by way)
c) my skin is turning white (I already am white, but I mean fish belly white, because of vitilago (try going through life being two face)
d) wife almost makes double what I do, not really bad but hard on the ego sometimes.
e) making less money each year because the company I work for is constantly changing the bonus plan, making it harder to meet your quota
f)constantly living on edge, because your not happy doing what your doing, but need to do it so you can have the life style you want. (when I was 14 my Dad told me that a job was not something to be happy with, you just did it because it had to be done)

So this is a rough idea of why I call myself a 42 year old loser, I'm not, but sometimes it sure feels it.