It's... Alive!

I am not dead, nor too crippled or sick to type updates, just lazy and preoccupied.

As those of you who read this journal (hi, Han) may know, a while ago I took the step of resigning my full-time job and moving 500 miles away in order to eke out an existence on my savings, while trying to find a niche into which I could lever my ambitions and energies for the rest of my life.

Translation: I wanted to find a new career.

This didn't work out too well.

My most long-running -- and second most lucrative -- commitment thus far has been a volunteer (read: non-paying) job as a tutor for adults. While I've enjoyed it immensely, my material needs (i.e., food and shelter) mandate an actual wage or salary. Living in California, living expenses are rather higher than in other parts of the country. Being a volunteer teacher is not exactly an affordable undertaking, and being an actual salaried teacher is only marginally less so.

One of my other vague aspirations was to become a nurse, with the eventual aim of picking up a nurse practitioner's degree. I gave it a halfhearted go, shadowing at a local hospital, and there it kind of withered away. I think somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that I would be unable to deal with the particular wealth of fluids that sick people generate and excrete in often startlingly enthusiastic ways.

I have a desire to be of help to people, as many others do, but I suspect that these latest attempts are ironic and somewhat self-defeating. For example, I put in a few hours a week tutoring at the local community learning center, but I very much believe that, given the choice between a check for the amount of my net worth and my continued services, their response would be something along the lines of "Bye, Jeff."

Also, since I am an organ donor, I am at the moment probably worth more to society dead than alive.

Indicative of low self-esteem that they are, if considered from a certain perspective, these thoughts are also motivational. I have a certain measure of undirected energy, that currently largely goes into thinking of ways to spend the as-yet unrealized dividends from my Lotto-heavy investment portfolio. Given a direction in which to... uh... direct them, I suppose I could probably make a decent go of something worthwhile.

Despite my altruistic hopes when I embarked on this latest whim, I now have a sneaking suspicion that the despair I felt in my old job was caused by something other than an unfulfilled "do-gooder" impulse.

My general plan now is to try something entrepreneurial. Sadly, such a venture requires capital with which to start a business, and I am the personality type that shies away from taking large risks, so I need a solid business plan before I throw myself wholeheartedly into something like that. Happily, one out of two ain't bad. I have a decent business idea, now I just need to find investors.

In the meantime, anybody care to lend me a few hundred thousand dollars? I'll pay you back next week, honest.