(man, when am i going to write something about SW on here?)

today at work it's a slow day. i had to do a business run to a bank and a couple of documents, but so far no customers. that obviously gives me time to go online and browse around the SW website, read others' post, do some of my own postings, read the news online...but it also gives me time to wash the windows at work.

i remember years ago my father had commented to me how he had missed doing mannual work. before i was born, my family had lived in the American South--i won't say which state, but it was in the deep South and my parents (being African-Americans) had suffered through Jim Crow laws. anyway, my father was an air plane mechanic, and he and his co-workers were heavily unionized, as i remember. later, my family had moved to a midwestern state for religious reasons before i was born...may be i'll tell that tale later, but a lot of it had to do with a sex scandal with a pastor at a church they had belonged to in the South. among other things.

i remember responding to my father's musing that i would never miss doing mannual labor. for i had grown up doing nothing but mannual labor (janitor, fast food service...) if i remember correctly, he told me that someday i would understand...well, that day is now!

while i was cleaning the windows at the small business store where i work, i thought about how i had missed being outside and doing "honest" work with my hands. it hasn't been that long, though. i got this job just late last year and i had been a janitor before that (amongst other jobs).

don't get me wrong, i would never go back to being a janitor if i can help it! at one of the places where i was a janitor i had worked outside. and, being in the midwest, winters get so cold out here, but i'd still work outside...literally in sub-zero weather! i'd work for a bit, warm up, but then go right back out in that arctic-like climate. during the summer time, i'd get way too hot and sweat pools of sweat as i cleaned a huge structure downtown...so, i don't miss hard labor work that much!

i don't know. i'm still looking over my shoulder, expecting something to go wrong with my current job and i'd have to go back to mannual labor. it sucks. i've worked my way through university at grubby jobs (plural!) and got my degree, and only one job did i have that had anything to do with my Fine Arts degree. i had to leave it because it was an internship and i had to be enrolled at university to keep it. well, i was taking one graduate course at the time and when the semester ended i had to leave the job.

i'm not going to keep griping about this. it's time for me to move on. i'm happily married with two kids (how cliche, huh? i LOVE it!). i'm trying to go to a local community college and study something within the web design field...i don't have my heart in it, but i've got to make myself more marketable and make more money so my kids can go to some kind of university when they're old enough. plus, so my wife and i can have more money for us.

i told my father this about 2 years ago. i wasn't too fond of his remark to me. 'that's good...you're still young...' still young?! why didn't he come out and simply say: 'well, it's about time, you slacker! you're in your 30s and in about 10 years you'll be a middle-ager! you have kids to feed, now...wake up you worthless backslider from the Pentacostal faith!'

you know what's sad about it? my father's right--well, about the job and the "still young" part. i don't give a crap how he thinks about me dropping out of church...and that is a whole other universe of a subject in itself!