Last Autumn, my wife was surprised when a grasshopper found its way into our apartment and jumped up onto her foot. I picked it up and, after orienting itself, it began to gnaw at my right hand. The insect could leap and glide, so I covered it with my other hand, quickly took it outside on my third-story apartment balcony, and since it refused to let go by itself, I pried it off my hand and threw it into the darkness down below. It was gone. The insect's abdomen was about an inch long and it had longer antennae than I was used to seeing on grasshoppers. It looked like a cockroach from far away. It might have been the same grasshopper that I shooed out of the house the day before. I don't think it was being friendly, but I hope I am wrong.
I have not publish0xed a post in a while. In the time that I haven't authored a post, we entered a bear cycle and very likely bottomed out. I also had another daughter, went through two jobs, got a new one, am basically waiting to get fired from it, started a new NFT collection on WAX, and killed the Discord server. The invite and drop links for my NFT collection can be found here: linktr.ee/cmasta, along with some other stuff. Haha, yes, the Discord server looks dead compared to what it was when 1 WAX was 1 dollar, but I still give out free NFTs there at least every other day or so and do bonus drops every once in a while too, so it is still worth your while to join and follow it if you like cool animated stuff, free NFTs, and WAX.
The first person that reads this post and is ballsy enough to follow this claim link will get a free NFT from my collection:
https://wax.atomichub.io/trading/link/wax-mainnet/2077550?key=5HsbeGRRrw8rjvnSK1JnmrB3V5r8ydZMHGpjgPUuLDYm43YAvMX
I am at the point now in my cryptocurrency journey of ignoring meme coins and mostly accumulating smaller-cap blue-chips like WAX, Algorand, Tezos, Solana, and Avalanche because I don't have time to speculate. Hopefully we will see 5x to 10x gains from these sometime within the next two years anyway. That would be wonderful. There is no stopping mass adoption now because the SEC is officially threatened and generating FUD so they can buy in at better prices. Any DCA at this time is probably a good DCA if you are in it for the long run (or at least that's what I'm banking on). You no longer have to pay capital gains taxes in the USA if you hold your crypto for over a year and make less than $40,400 per year as a single person. In any case, nothing I say should be taken as financial advice. Unfortunately for US Mericans, Binance.US just made it harder to dump your fiat into crypto at the best time to DCA as of recently. Mericans always get gypped.
You like to earn cryptocurrency for free, right? You know what banano is, right? Banano (and cryptomonKeys) introduced me to the thriving world of crypto Discord and WAX NFTs, and is still one of my favorite cryptocurrencies. I hold a pretty nice smol bag of it that continues to grow because it is freely distributed. One of the many ways you can earn banano is by watching videos at jungletv.live. That's not a referral link or sponsored advertisement, mind you -- it's just awesome. I find a lot of good music from jungletv. For example, it is where I heard Mallrat for the first time. In C. Masta fashion, here is a good song by Mallrat:
My oldest daughter is four years old now, and she is getting smarter. Some months ago, she reasoned with me that she should be allowed to play video games for most of the day if I can play on my computer for most of the day. At least I am usually doing something constructive, I thought. It's good to make time for your children, too.
The purpose of this article was originally to address workplace incompetence. Even as I write this, there is something else that I probably should be doing. Have you noticed how much less helpful in-store and phone employees have become since the beginning of the COVID pandemic? Perhaps we have all sustained low to moderate brain damage. I started writing this post about 8 months ago, but was never really happy with it. I wanted to say more, but it's already kind of needlessly long. I figured it is so long now that it would be a shame not to post it...
To be fair to the incompetent workforce, a very good reason why there is so much incompetence is because a lot of people either quit, were fired, got new jobs, or a combination of the above. I got really ticked off about incompetent service workers before I worked at my most recent job... as an incompetent pharmacy technician. It took me about two months to be capable of doing stuff without asking stupid questions... At six plus months now, I understand almost everything, but it seems like people get just as angry as when I didn't understand. I've noticed that, in general, the more drugs people are taking, the more irritable they are. It is really irritating to me, too, but kind of funny, when people think they know how to do your above-average complexity sheety job better than you do, but they actually have no idea what they're talking about. It's been two years since COVID was supposed to officially end the first time, and we still have a lot of entitlement issues... Like the woman in her Tesla coming though the drive-thru and receiving government assistance to pay for her drugs.
To be fair to the woman in the Tesla on Medicaid, the Merican government has been not only allowing, but encouraging big business to destroy our health for decades, so the fact that in addition to that, they are also capitalizing on the health problems that were caused by it kind of makes me want to vote for Donald Trump in 2024.
... Lol, just kidding. I fucking hate that guy.
But seriously, very few could present a good argument for the Merican government not being fubar'ed. Since the health insurance offered by my company that took three months of full-time pain to obtain turned out to be pretty sheety, I just applied for medicaid, too. You might expect a pharmacy technician to have a comfortable salary, but you would be mistaken if you did. My local Aldi is offering the same salary to new-hires, so yeah, as I mentioned previously, I'm basically waiting to be fired now. Now I understand why workplace incompetence is so rampant: You can basically make just as much money leeching off the government as you can working 40 hours a week if you aren't lucky nor have been grandfathered into a higher role at your company. Though I was never overly disrespectful to service workers, as a consequence of my return to the service industry, I am now more mindful and respectful to the laborers that I need to talk to on the phone when I am overcharged by some other fucking service.
Anyway, speaking of healthcare stuff and quitting my lousy-paying job, I am thinking of trying to pedal people for my biochemistry knowledge because I know that it does pay off in the long run to keep your body in optimal condition. The world is laden with biochemical interruptions like drugs, pesticides, hormones, and other industrial chemicals in our food and water, but by eating and drinking the right things, and also being mindful of the energies around and inside us, we can mitigate a lot of the damages caused by our environment. If you're interested in paying $1-40 for a consultation, feel free to hit me up. It is one of the things I am passionate about, and though I do not claim to know more than a doctor, I do believe the advice that I can offer is no worse that that of a doctor. One thing that I pride myself on is not pretending to know things that I don't. While this tends to hurts my professional career rather than helping it, I know that it is the right way, and for this reason intend to avoid work under another person if possible. Because I have been passionate about health and nutrition since I was in high school and I have a bachelor's in biochemistry / master's in chemistry, I am very good at sifting through medical information (including research papers) and finding good answers on the internet. Also, I accept cryptocurrency as payment. Hopefully I will make a website soon.
But yeah, workplace incompetence...
At my last recruiting agency-sponsored industry job at a gas factory, the seasoned employee that was supposed to be training me wouldn't let me touch his precious GC machine without scolding me for not already knowing how it worked, and the seasoned employee that was training me couldn't read the glass detector tubes that he used every day to test for impurities in their gasses. I detected sulfur oxides in their main nitrogen supply repeatedly (which is a pretty significant contamination), but no one cared. It would be pretty costly and difficult to replace the entire supply of nitrogen, after all.
This was at the peak of the COVID omicron outbreak, and it was at this time that the management seemingly out-of-the-blue decided that their employees deserved free lunch every week... And that everyone should gather in the small break room to remove our masks and eat together. What a kind thing for them to do for us. Needless to say, nearly every single employee got sick, including me. I was just a contract employee, so I wasn't surprised that I was not paid for my mandatory leave until I could produce a COVID-negative PCR test, but I was surprised when the full-timers were also forced to take time off with no pay.
At our monthly team meeting with some higher-ups, I suggested they offer paid sick leave for their seasoned employees, because that's not really something that you would expect to not get from a decent Merican employer. A woman from the recruiting agency called me two Mondays later and told me that I should not go to work the next day because I had been fired. She was obviously not very happy because that also meant she was no longer getting commission from my employment. My manager wouldn't respond to my calls, but responded to my angry text message that he would be saving it for his records. Sure, go right fucking ahead and save it, I responded back (probably without the word fuck, I don't remember exactly). The woman asked me if there was anything I needed from the company and I told her it would be nice to have the headphones in my drawer and a plastic hose. I never got them.
I wasn't that upset, though. After all, I was about 5 minutes late to clock in on most days, despite working for all of the hours that I was scheduled anyway, and the Clock is what we worship now instead of the Sun. Fortunately(?) for me, my manager at Walgreens is usually just as late as I am (or more).
I was rarely late to tutoring, though. In fact, it was a lot more often that the client was late, but I didn't mind. In my first session with my most recent exploitative side-gig tutoring company, the client was about 10 minutes late. I was just standing outside of their house looking through the window when I heard a voice behind me... and it was talking to me! At first I thought it was my phone, but then realized that it was coming from the house. It was the security system. The homeowner told me that they would be home in five minutes. Their neighborhood watch was working, too, because the neighbors also made sure I was not a creeping Charlie. In the past I might have felt offended for being flagged as a potential criminal, but now that I have children, myself, I appreciate their gestures. The whole experience was surreal, mostly because a home security system had never spoken to me.
Before the job at the gas factory, I was fired from an overzealous and indecisive aquaponic hemp startup. Their funding was running low and apparently I was the weakest link in the chain. At that company, I was scolded for trying to make progress on the project while also being pressured to make progress on the project. Similar to the gas factory, whether I was finding something to do with my idle time or doing nothing while waiting for instruction, it was the wrong thing to be doing. One very seasoned teacher was having a hard time going though chemotherapy and probably having caffeine withdrawals on top of that because he couldn't drink coffee, and he was apparently irritated that I was growing into my title as chemical engineer. Another seasoned teacher might have died of a heart attack because he hasn't made any indication that he received any of my e-mails, and my direct superior teacher might have actually stood up for me, but I didn't ask for his help because I didn't want to get him in trouble. I hope their endeavors were successful, however I am doubtful. At one point, the head conman discussed selling a product thought to be contaminated with asbestos, so I probably would not buy their product if they ended up releasing something anyway. It was a tornado that ruined their building; an act of God or a random act of misfortune. I am moderately more fearful of tornadoes in the prairie state since climate change is ramping up now.
One caveat of not driving to an industrial hub every work day is that the chances of death dramatically decrease when you're not driving on a highway full of semi trucks and SUVs. A vehicle is significantly more dangerous than a bullet, after all, and I do value the potential contributions that I have not yet made to this world.
They say nothing is perfect, but perhaps it can be perfectly imperfect. Maybe reality is a linear combination of every possible perfect state (I mean, maybe). It could also be a completely random-chance arrangement of particles, but as humans it is actually harder to see random than ordered in most cases. Who knows, anyway? Maybe they're wrong and some things are just perfect.
