Last year aside, I've never been the kind of person for whom anger was something that kept me going. Its an emotion I feel from time to time, certainly, but never one I tried to hold onto. I had a bit of an epiphany today though--sometimes its just what you need. And on reflection there are plenty of times it was exactly that--something that gets me going, tells me something about the world is not right. Just the way pain is your body's way of telling you something is wrong, anger ought to be a way of discerning an imbalance in the world around you, and more importantly a clue that you ought to do something about it. Once when I was living in Birmingham I was driving home from work for lunch and passed by a Kenny Roger's Roasters on Hwy 31 where they had a couple of guys standing out in the median passing out coupon flyers to the motorists stopped at the intersection of 31 and IH 65. I remember thinking, "God they must hate their job... its like 105 degrees outside and they're standing in the sun in the median of one of the worst intersections in the area doing the shit work... wonder who they pissed off?" When I got up close I saw that they both had some form of mental retardation--one of them clearly had Down's Syndrome, and the other had some other kind of non-specific disability. I was just flabbergasted. I wasn't sure exactly what to do right that second, I was so floored by the audacity of whoever stuck them on that detail. By the time I got home though I was so mad about it I called DHS right then and reported them, just before I drove back to it, asked to speak to the manager on duty (some greasy haired 20-something who weaseled his way up to shift leader--apparently the store manager was at a different store or a meeting that day or something) and crawled his ass in the middle of the restaurant. I'm sure getting chewed out by a 19 year old kid was probably one of the more emasculating experiences during his illustrious tenure, but it was also one of the last. The manager called me at work the next day to tell me the guy had been fired. And offer me a bunch of coupons for free food. Give me a break.

so anyway, now i'm just angry enough about the state of affairs in my life that I'm tired of making the "smart" choices--which more often than not are not smart nor do they bring me any sense of fulfillment to my life. I've had it with chasing jobs that pay good money for a miserable self-serving career--time to start doing something worthwhile. So... anybody know of a good non-profit that's hiring?