I got the job

i got the job in broomfield after a final video interview. im moving to boulder colorado in the next month lol.

Another Plane

A lot has changed in such a short amount of time. I’m back on a plane haha. Did not see this coming. I don’t understand how everyone on this plane can just continue doing what they’re doing as the plane speeds down the runway and LIFTS OFF THE EARTH. I always play the same song and try to time it with takeoff but it always is early. 

I’m heading to Denver, CO. I’ll be here for like 4ish days. I’ll be in Denver tonight, Boulder until tuesday, and then back to Denver for the flight home on Wednesday. I’m here for an interview I have with a Unique Gifting Experience business called Cloud 9 Living. 

I did a great phone interview and did a great job selling myself and who i am, because I was able to be fully honest. The only issue was that in my cover letter, I was the opposite of honest. I understand this was dumb, but who knows if I would have gotten the call otherwise. I told them I was moving to Boulder and I already planned on it before I applied. This is untrue. The only way I can afford to move out is if I get the job. I managed to tell them my housing fell through and that I’ll still be in town to look at places and interview in person. 

It pays 40k a year with full benefits. It has 15 full time employees and they are all super colorado-esque. Outdoorsy, open minded, cool, and fit. It got ranked as a top 20 best places to work by Outdoor Magazine twice. I’m certain I’d fit in and do well at the job. Just have to nail the first impressions with the team and I think I got the job.

This means I have to promptly find a place to live in Boulder and move out west to my dream town. It all feels not possible and none of it has hit me yet, except a panic attack I had a few nights ago. I want to live in a 5 bedroom house with cool unique outgoing people in order to force me to continue growing as a person.

Anyway, a few hours have passed and I’m tired. almost dozed off. Right now I wanna go to a private bed and sleep in it and just lay out but I have a bed in a hostel and I’m determined to go with it. Even if I don’t meet lots of people, at least I’ll have committed and went through with something that gives me anxiety.

I have about an hour left until landing. Not sure what I want to talk about. I said last post how lots of things changed already since that flight. Something mentally clicked inside of me where I’ve begun the process of maturity. My deep core beliefs have been catching up to my lifestyle and are genuinely changing. 

I’ve had to make some apologies to some people recently because I realize how I’ve acted in the past could have hurt them. I used to be so blunt and blindly focused on forcing people to realize the (what’s to me) obvious truths. I come to realize that that is such a juvenile way of approaching helping people. I needed to realize that the average person is either aware deep down of the truth of their situation and are actively trying to avoid all thoughts about it, or they just aren’t willing/ready to face any of it. By forcing someone to prematurely face these hard truths, it can force them to regress and lose progress they were making. Sometimes it’s best to just get what you can out of your friendship with them, and just be there for them as they come to realize their issues on their own timeline. 

So that was the first large mental shift to occur in the recent weeks. The second is that I always thought I was hardwired to be a negative person, but it doesn’t match the lifestyle I have been living. So I am starting the transition of going from a negative person to a positive one! It’s exciting and I have a long way to go for sure. There was a 15 year old comedian I saw who’s family moved her to LA as a 12 year old to pursue comedy. Her standup act is cringey and bad. I immediately thought “ugh that’s so lame and shes so bad” but then a sneaking rogue thought snuck in and asked “Well shes living an interesting life and trying her best and who knows, she could give up comedy at age 22 and then be a really cool girl who can causally say she did standup for a decade.” then another thought snuck in “Who cares if she ever turns cool or stops being cringey. I will statistically never meet or interact with her, so what is the point of having any sort of negative reaction to her? What good does that do for me?” and that’s what sparked it all. 

Now I’m on the flight home. Interview went well and I’ll know if i got the job at some point this week. Who knows, I could have the offer or non-offer in my inbox just waiting for me to turn off airplane mode. I really loved Boulder. It all was very surreal and made me confident that I want to live there for a portion of my life. Whether it be January 1st or a year from today. Who knows. I journaled this whole trip which has proven enjoyable.  

Wrote on Plane, Already Feels Outdated and I feel Differently but I insist on posting still.

When I was in band freshman year I was nervous. Lots of skilled people above me who were intimidating. I wasn’t aware of the drill for marching and in general clueless as to how high school band operated. 

Flash forward to senior year where I was top trumpet player and had the job of leading the section in marching and practices. I was on top but not scared or intimidated. I would joke around and just mess around in general due to my comfort being there for 4 years.

This was not a great feeling, as one may think. The novelties of band were worn off and nothing scared me. I understood everything “high school band” and had become comfortable within it.

I feel a similar way right now with life in general. In no way am I saying that I understand and am comfortable with what life can be. But recently, with my maturity and growth a lot of things I once held special in my head, have become normal and understood. 

I did not go through much growth socially while I was in college. This has lead to me discovering all these new things straight out of college at a fast pace. For example, the idea of dating a girl and not wanting/expecting a relationship, was something I never experienced. I perhaps knew it was common, though there is a well defined difference between knowing and experiencing.

I still haven’t demystified certain things such as casual sex, as most of my friends have. The idea of becoming so intimate with someone I do not personally know a great amount, seems so scary and exciting. I am not opposed, though not experiencing this type of sex before, has made it feel so hard to ‘make the moves’ as others may easily do. Perhaps I am subconsciously keeping this experience a mystery in order to keep me feeling like there’s more exciting things in my life I’ve yet to explore. Perhaps it’s just me being scared and not able to do it.

I know I have so much more to experience and learn from. I just have taken a moment to step back and realize that I have been experiencing so much positive growth, though along with that growth, I’ve had a layer of demystification occur in my life. Not every person you meet is going to make a mark in your life, or perhaps a person you enjoy being with, just isn’t worth the negatives.

I think a lot of these social learnings have been hard and interesting because before, I knew all these classic beliefs and sayings, though I knew deep down, that if any girl showed interest in dating me than I would forget all the beliefs and just enjoy the love and attention. I did this with Kate, whom I dated for two and a half years. I guess now that I think about it, it really has allowed for me to actively avoid those rash decision makings. 

It’s funny because during such great social growth and maturation, I’ve been struggling to find a job and structure in my life. I guess that makes sense. I’m just excited to work and move to a place I enjoy and continue growing elsewhere.

I’m flying to Las Vegas right now with Danny Irving. I got to switch to an aisle seat since it was a couple. That’s nice. I’m visiting my friend Ross Bolesta who is spending a semester at Flagstaff. I hope I like the Western culture as much as everyone says I will.

I did an internship after I graduated and that schedule along with my summer of growth, allowed for me to lose 40 pounds. That’s pretty damn good in like 2.5 months. Since it’s ended I have maintained same weight but it sucks because I have no structure in my current life.

I’ve gone on dates, bought clothes that express who I am, and have created a good balance with utilizing social media in a positive way. I’ve been able to release another silly music album as well as make some money with the digital sketch pad I got for cheap. I have discovered so many super good comedy groups and people, which has been so rare for the years previous.

I guess this is an update on life for the blog if anyone still somehow sees this. I guess it could be cool to look back and see how I’ve finally matured and became the person I’ve wanted to be for years. It’s fun being an adult and I’m so excited for the years to come. Endless possibilities. Just gotta pay loans. 

Also I am officially determined and passionate about starting my own Salvage Grocery company out west marketed towards young cheap shoppers who want to promote sustainability while also saving money in the bank. Never felt more certain about something for my future before.

Chocolate Covered Pretzels.

I am about to publicize a personal mystery of mine that has been prominent in my life for over two years. It began with a gift that my girlfriend had gotten for Christmas from a friend. It tasted delicious, but something strange caught my eye. Here's the picture I took of it:

Nothing out of the ordinary, right? Let me write down what the name of that fickle pretzel rod is: Milk Chocolate Covered Peanut Butter Pretzel Rods. Think about that for a second. They are saying that they are selling you a chocolate covered peanut butter, pretzel rod. Now that is odd, but it could just be a design fluke. Or maybe it allows them to put the emphasis on the Peanut Butter aspect of this tasty treat.

A few weeks pass and I'm at the grocery store and see a bucket of the delectable sweet and salty snacks. This time it's made by Herr's:

That's right, Herr's Milk Chocolate Flavored Sourdough Coated Pretzels. Do I need to repeat that again? Milk Chocolate Flavored, Sourdough, Coated Pretzels. What the hell does that mean? Any way you chose to clump those words together, it makes zero sense. Milk chocolate flavored Sourdough? That's an interesting choice. Sourdough coated pretzels? I'm pretty sure that's not even physically possible. 

By this point I was starting to actively search for other chocolate covered pretzels. Then, I came across Snyder's version:

That's cool that Hershey's teamed up with them, but clearly they were unable to prevent Snyder's from making the same weird faux pas as other pretzel brands are making. "Pretzel Dips Dipped in Hershey's White Crème". Two things stick out: They are calling mini pretzels, Pretzel Dips, and the fact that there is no mention of the word chocolate to be found. It's not as if we all casually refer to Hershey's white chocolate bars as "White Crème Bars". 

This was the moment I started to believe that there's something going on in the pretzel world that everyone around me is oblivious to. I took to social media to ask around if anyone else has noticed this strange quirk, but no one answered me. Weeks later I slowly began getting snapchats and Instagram DM's from people I haven't talked to in years. The theme was common... pictures they have taken of various chocolate covered pretzels with weird labels calling them even weirder things.

I'm going to save some time here and just attach a bunch more of the brands for you to see that I'm not lying.

My personal favorite from these bunch are Utz's "Chocolate Flavored Specials Bite Size Pretzels". It makes my head hurt when I try to figure out how they meant for that to be read. How could such large brands just allow for such messy items to be sold under their names?

I believed it had to do with a trademark/patent/copyright. It would make sense right? Some large greedy brand bought the rights to the words "Chocolate Covered/Coated Pretzels", and now everyone else is trying to avoid being sued out of all their money. The problem with this theory is the fact that there are multiple pretzel companies that use those exact words. Here are a few of em:

To be honest, I have no idea why brands are doing this. What really confuses me is that Herr's has one chocolate coated pretzel titled just that, while another one of their items are confusing and avoiding those buzzwords. Your guess is as good as mine.

Friends Wanted

Interested In:

• Thrift shopping (Goodwill/Salvation Army)
• Slightly Expired or Damaged Groceries (BB’s)
• The idea of Dumpster Diving
• A broad range of music genres
• The many various hats I come across
• Being open to having no idea of what life consists of
• Enjoys an alcoholic beverage on occasion
• Saving money, while also being willing to do fun activities
• Constantly being not serious and in a joking tone
• Absurdist Comedy (Tim and Eric/Eric Andre)
• The art of a conversation (Podcasts)
• Why people do what they do/Why you do what you do

To Be Continued

The Phil. Notebook Pt. 1

This is the first post of my Philosophers Notebook blog project and if you don't know what that means then go to the blog post right before this one. Hopefully that will clear things up.



Can humans ever experience the world objectively?

 My initial thought is no, of course not. We are individuals who were born as certain people or beings. This fact alone makes it seem impossible for anyone to see the world objectively. We only know the world as we see it through our own personal eyes. I suppose one may be "better" at attempting to see the world in an objective view when compared to someone who never attempted to, but even those attempts are futile because it just simply is impossible for an individual to see the world objectively. I italicize individual and objectively because they are not able to come together and form a truth. There is no world where an individual can be objective on anything.

What happens to us after we die?

On a good day, we just disappear and don't exist. On a bad day, maybe just maybe there is some higher power that lets us continue living in some way or another. I say that because on good days I have no reason to sugar coat any of my beliefs because I am feeling good and don't care much. If it is a bad day, it naturally makes me feel slightly better thinking about how there could be something after death. But I would say in general that I have no fucking clue what happens when we die. Why stress about it. I'm alive right now. I will deal with death when I die.

How free are we?

This isn't a main topic for me currently. I would say that we all have free will because if I wanted to set my house on fire and then drive away in my truck right this minute, I could. Would some people say that if I did that then it was meant to be? I guess. At the same time that I believe in free will, I think about how many people are alive and how we are somehow all living our individual complex lives without everyone getting in everyone else's way.

Does life have meaning?

We covered this in my philosophy class that I took at IUP last semester. I actually emailed my professor about this very topic and he told me some incorrect information about my beliefs. I will copy and paste what I wrote to him about my view on meaning of life: I fully agree that life is absurd. I've accepted for years now that life is meaningless and any meaning there is in a life, is created by that person. I can understand why some may find that depressing or debilitating but I think it is actually pretty awesome that we are able to control what has meaning for us personally. This belief that life is absurd was first proposed to me years ago and it didn't take long for me to fully believe it. I think that most people are simply too afraid to accept it, and that that is for the better. If everyone accepted that life was absurd and meaningless, society would fall apart and everything would become chaotic. It takes a certain type of person to understand that life is absurd while also continuing to function like a normal citizen in society. As you just mentioned about sitting in a coffee house smoking long cigarettes all day long, I don't believe that an existentialist needs to do that. I try hard to always do what I want to do or at least do what I know will help me get to doing what I want to do. I have always tried to put meaning towards doing what I want to do because why waste a life not striving to do what you truly want to do?

Is the universe intelligible?

I don't know what that is asking. Like for the life of me I can't think of a good response to this question. Maybe later on I will come back and answer this one. Maybe not.

More Posts Coming Soon...

Yooo. It's Jake Gregan here again for the first time in a long while. No one reads these things because like why would they? It's just one dudes free blog on a generic blog website. The blog design is as if it was made in 2006 and I don't plan on changing it anytime soon. But with that said, I don't give a shit if anyone reads this or not because I am doing this for myself. I have missed writing this type of thing and apparently I am decent at expressing my thoughts, so I figured why not keep going. Oh yeah, I use commas way too much in fear that I will forget to use them when they are actually needed.

This is sort of like an intro post so I don't care much about how this sounds.

I went to a Barnes & Noble bookstore today (who knew those were still a thing!!) and kinda just mindlessly walked around for a half hour. By the way that parenthetical text was fake and clearly I wouldn't really write that. It is the lamest style of writing. It's like mom text. Imagine a mom of 3 kids writing a blog about her weekend fun trip and typing that parenthetical text while laughing to herself thinking how clever and funny she is. All of that ideally would be assumed by the reader already because when I have to explain my train of thought it ruins the whole point of why I wrote it. But yeah I walked around browsing books until I settled on a wilderness survival book and some road trip  guides. Then I found a proper seat near the Starbucks cafe (please don't sue me for using the brand name!!) and sat for around 5 minutes. I didn't really read during those minutes and just sort of waited for the perfect moment to stand up and go in line for my white chocolate mocha and sugar cookie. Is that normal? I very easily could have just went right to the line and stood behind a man who was having a prolonged conversation with one of the baristas and got my order, but instead I sat and waited until there was only one person in line and it was an elder lady. I did this so I wouldn't feel an urge to chit chat with the worker since he just got done talking to that dude. I guess I kinda give in to my social anxiety but at the same time, I did go up there and get my stuff with no issues. So I don't think I have any super insane issues with anxiety which is good for my future endeavors.

After I got my coffee and cookie I sat back down and read through the steps of starting a fire without any matches. Now that I think about it, it is almost humorous of me to do that because I will never have to know how to be able to do that, plus even after looking at those colorful pictures of sticks and cordage, if I was told to go to the woods and make a fire, there would be no way in hell that I would be successful. But at this point I got bored and looked at the road trip guides, which was a nice change of pace for about 5 minutes. This is the point where I realized that I have no idea what I am going to do with my life and that I have no proof or evidence that I can excel at any type of career. So while I am browsing through the "Hobbies/Craft" section of this Barnes & Noble, I am simultaneously questioning my life choices and trying to figure out what I want to focus my life goal on. That sentence was meant to show the funny/sad image of a lone man of big stature walking in a bookstore thumbing through a "Collecting Model Planes" book while trying to determine the biggest decision of his life. Long story short I found one book that I ended up buying which I will go into more detail about near the end of this extremely long and most likely boring post.

I got a summer job which is good. I have tried decently hard for years now to get a job in Oxford and for the majority of the time I completely failed at that. I got a job in USC and two jobs in IUP but if you ask my friends they would say they aren't "real" jobs. But now it's different, I have an actual job. I am going to be a camp counselor at the YMCA for 11 weeks. For anyone who knows me they know that this is the perfect job for me. I am always a positive, happy go lucky, extroverted guy! Nah, not really. I applied for the job, got an interview, read the dude interviewing me and told him the answers that I knew he wanted to hear from me, and a week later, got a call saying I got the gig. I don't have an urge to write much about the new job except that I have gotten through almost all of the orientation type trainings and am actually looking forward to the actual camp. I just hope it isn't a complete mess like it apparently was last year, but if it is, then I will just get fired or quit and then apply for other jobs.

I transferred colleges. I'm unsure if I wrote a blog post about that but I did and I am not yet ready to write freely on that topic because I don't think my mind is prepared for it. "I am happy at IUP and happy with my college choices so far." <---- That is a bullshit sentence and whenever I think about college and my past choices my head hurts and I don't feel good. I will deal with that soon enough, but alas, I will go on another day in blissful ignorance and just enjoy the summer sun while I can.

Okay I think that is enough for this post. Earlier I mentioned that I bought one book at the store and that I'd go into more detail about it later on in the post. This is the time where I will do that. It is called "The Philosopher's Notebook: A Creative Journal for Thinkers and Philosophers." Pretentious as shit right? I don't think any legit philosopher would buy this 8 dollar bargain book. This book essentially gives you little mini lessons on some of philosophies most basic beliefs and theories and then gives you writing prompts based on your thoughts towards those theories. I plan on reading through the book and answering those questions on new blog posts instead of writing it down in the book. I guess one could call it a writing project of sorts, but I would just say that it is a way of forcing me to think and form opinions on some deep topics that are important to dwell upon in life.

Alright I just thought of more things to write about right now but I gotta just end it here and then move on to the first post on the philosophy book prompt series of blog posts.


Jg


ps: here is a post that I just found a draft of which I wrote a few months ago.

         I went to USC last semester. This means that I traveled a very far distance many times in order to get to there. Without going into too many details, I spent most of that semester counting the days till i got to visit home. I was alone for months and failed completely at making any good friends. I stayed home every weekend and was completely on my own. I was not who I am when I am in front of people. It was a huge learning experience for me and it forced me to become alright with living my life completely on my own. Anyways, the week before I would go home always flew by because I was so excited. Then comes friday night where I pack my carry on and set my alarm for 6 am in order to get to the shuttle at 6:30. That shuttle ride was always packed with people who were blatantly hungover and sick but I didn't give a shit. I was going home. I always got to the airport and quickly made it to the self check in. By the last few trips, I was able to do it in my sleep. Then I would prepare for my least favorite part, the security. I would be constantly checking my pockets to see if i left some sort of metal in them. After successfully getting through the TSA I would get this rush that I have never felt anywhere else. I'd always pull out my phone and snapchat me walking on that conveyor belt thing that people walk on. I always had at least 2 hours before my flight and would love walking around and eventually settling in and buying an overpriced sandwich that tasted like mush. I watched the planes take off and land over and over and it never ceased to amaze me. I love my time in the airport the most because of its atmosphere. Everyone around me has some reason or excuse to travel somewhere far enough where a plane is needed. Lots of "big moments" happen in airports like a kid saying goodbye to his dad who has just gotten through a rough divorce and needs to leave town, or a couple who is leaving each other for a long time because the girlfriend needs to go to visit her mom who is not doing well, and so on. There are very few "small moments" that go on in an airport. Finally it would be time to board the plane and I would quickly find my seat. It truly is an amazing thing, flying. I strap in my flimsy seatbelt and then look through the emergency packet because better safe than sorry. Then we begin to take off and I blast this one song right as we lift off and it gives me the most enormous jolt and then we are tilted upwards into the sky and everything is getting smaller. Eventually we land and I rush to see my smiling dad ready and waiting for me at the departures. Then I am home. It is an experience that I will always miss and have the urge to do again.