CAVEAT DVMPTRVCK

I solved some amazing, interesting technical challenges for the Sales and Marketing department at ARAMARK, but I’ve created bad blood with my former colleagues in the IT department. Company politics got unpleasant. I resigned my job in December. But I feel ‘successful.’ In 5 years, I’d managed to get promoted 4 times and quadruple my original starting salary, paying off my debts and saving a good sum of money. Oh… and I started This Here Blog Thingy™.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 2004 – it was written in the future.]

I migrated again, with my employer, ARAMARK: I went into the Sales and Marketing department. I developed the infamous National Accounts Data Analysis (NADA) intranet site for my company on my own, and it was a huge hit. I was promoted and recognized for this. I reflected, ‘Failure in life…  success in business.’ I moved into the tiny house next to my dad’s on the hill in Highland Park. I took my first trip to Australia to visit my mother.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 2003 – it was written in the future.]

I rented a horrible apartment in North Hollywood. I lived alone, enjoying the company of my eccentric cat, Bernardo O’Higgins. All cats are eccentric. I was turning into the ‘loner-nerd’ I’d always worried I’d become. Work, however, was going well – workaholically, in fact. I developed a habit of working on Saturdays, and taking time off while at work to go to the infinityplex in Burbank a few blocks from work and watching a movie – so I watched a lot of movies.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 2002 – it was written in the future.]

At my work at ARAMARK, I migrated from the finance department into the IT department. I started working as a programmer. I studied SQL programming and accounting, and combine these disparate fields into a pretty good understanding of my employer’s business model.  I took many long drives around Southern California. I accepted the fact that I was meant to be alone in the world. I deleted a novel I was writing from my computer in disgust.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 2001 – it was written in the future.]

A programmer at my place of work becomes slightly famous for creating a non-Y2K-compliant application after January 1, 2000. In June, Michelle committed suicide. It was as if to say, ‘So there!’ or ‘Take that!’ That’s how suicide works. I worked hard at ARAMARK. I bought my Nissan pickup truck, which was the first and only time I ever bought a new car.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 2000 – it was written in the future.]

I started working at ARAMARK Corporation in Burbank, as a temp in the finance department. I proved sufficiently competent that they offered me a permanent position. Michelle and I occasionally discussed getting back together. We had long, drawn out, long-distance telephone conversations, her still in Philly and me in L.A. (well, Burbank). We both clearly had difficult-to resolve ‘issues.’ I told Michelle that I didn’t think it could work out.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1999 – it was written in the future.]

Things began to break down with Michelle and I wasn’t doing very well with it. In August, we decided on a “trial separation,” but I wasn’t willing to  approach this methodically, and by September, I had quit my teaching job and I ran off (somewhat irresponsibly, I realize) to stay on my uncle Arthur’s land in Alaska. I cut trees and brush with a chainsaw (in the rain), and shoveled gravel (in the rain), and wrote a novel (sitting in a white van, in the rain). In November, I gave up on Alaska and on solitude, and I went to LA to stay with my father, who had recently divorced my stepmother of 21 years, whom I sometimes idolized. This was a very bad period for me, and so, closing out the year with a bang, I attempted suicide while parked alongside the Pacific Coast Highway north of San Simeon, and I nearly succeeded. I spent time in a mental hospital (the parallels with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance are, um, disconcerting).
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1998 – it was written in the future.]

I resigned from the graduate program at Penn, feeling very unhappy with departmental politics. I was awarded a Master’s Degree in Spanish Literature, as a sort of consolation prize for not finishing the Ph.D. program I was enrolled in. I got to try to be a “soccer dad” with Jeffrey for several months, while Michelle put in ungodly hours with Merck, Inc., in her new job as a chemical engineer. I started teaching high school Spanish and Social Studies that fall, with an ungodly commute to Moorestown, New Jersey. Neither Michelle nor I particularly liked living in suburban Philadelphia. We fight a lot about money, and about parenting issues with Jeffrey – a step-parent’s role is very confusing.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1997 – it was written in the future.]

My cat Bernie frequently slept on the bookshelf I’d put next to my desk, and she would fall asleep and then fall off the shelf and into the pile of papers on my desk, surprised by her own clumsiness. Cats are like that. I worked very, very hard at Penn, teaching Spanish to lazy, over-privileged, Ivy League undergrads and taking qualifying exams that summer. Michelle and I finally got legally married in a pizza joint in Minneapolis over the summer, too (the Judge came on a motorcycle). Michelle and Jeffrey then joined me in Philadelphia, after she graduated in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota – we rented a house in Yardley, PA, across from Trenton, NJ. I enjoyed taking the train into the city each day for school/work.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1996 – it was written in the future.]

I worked nights for UPS in Northeast Minneapolis in order to save up money. This means I can say I’ve been a card-carrying Teamster. At the same time, I took a really amazing class on semiotics in the Comparative Lit department at the University of Minnesota. We bought a kitten that Jeffrey named Bernardo O’Higgins, that was declared to be “Jared’s cat” to accompany the two other cats: Keska “Jeffrey’s cat” and Charlotte, “Michelle’s cat.”I applied to graduate schools. My first choice was UCLA, but I started at the University of Pennsylvania in August, at the Department of Romance Languages, because of Michelle’s eventual East Coast job prospects – so I rented a charming, run-down apartment in West Philly.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1995 – it was written in the future.]

Michelle and I moved in together. Then I spent six months studying the Mapuche Language (Native American Patagonian) at the Universidad Austral de Chile, in Valdivia, Chile. I got to see Buenos Aires, Tierra del Fuego, Patagonia, Uruguay, etc. I was back in Minnesota with Michelle and Jeffrey for Christmas. Michelle and I decided we were ‘married.’ We both had apprehensions about state-sponsored relationships, though, so we didn’t do anything legally binding at this point.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 1994 – it was written in the future.]