Ready to start a new chapter in my life. (rant)

Image by Midjourney

My friend in Seattle bought a house in a surrounding suburb, and he wants me to live with him and his husband for very cheap rent. I like where I live now--the only problem is that jobs aren't as varied or plentiful here, and they don't pay what they should considering the cost of housing here. 

I don’t want to trade down, so I did a little digging into the demographics of this suburban town in Seattle. I found out that the median income is over $100,000. 

This might be an interesting experiment for me! I’d get to see what living with rich people is like!

Now, low rent isn’t no rent. I still need to pay my friend his rent when I move. So while I’m still in Arizona, I am applying to remote jobs. But hundreds of other people apply to these jobs, and I never get picked. 

Laying awake one night, because I always seem to contemplate my career choices at 3 a.m., I thought that maybe I could find a suitable job locally in this small suburb in Seattle. 

So I went on Indeed.com and to my surprise, the most in-demand job in the neighborhood is “Cheese Specialist.” 

That didn’t pay enough, so I thought, do I need to make my own job? Do I need to go into business for myself to make a living? 

I did some more digging into this town and I found out that there are some services the town wants that they aren’t getting. They want a florist. The nearest one is an entire town away. 

But the number one thing this town wants is: pole dancing lessons. It’s the number one SEO’d search term on the town’s Yelp. This is not a joke. 

The most interesting part about my market research is that they don’t want to hire pole dancers. They want to BE pole dancers. 

I’m starting to get an interesting picture of this town that demands that its grocery stores hire cheese specialists. These people emerge from the offices of their six-figure corporate jobs, and they’re sitting in commuter traffic for at least an hour. The whole time, they can't wait to take off all their clothes and swing around on a pole. That’s what the whole town is secretly searching for en masse.

And although I have never thought of them in quite this way, I know that this describes my friends perfectly.

But I'm actually a little concerned about how many Karen videos this town posts on YouTube. It suggests to me that there might be an entitlement problem in this town--both entitlement to act up and entitlement to film someone without their permission. I worked in customer service for a decade, but I still generally don't approve of Karen videos. As I've mentioned before on here, I have bipolar schizoaffective disorder. What if something happened to the mental health funding in the area and I couldn't get my medicine? People generally don't think of the immense privilege of not having psychosis. You might be harming someone with a severe disability if you're filming them acting strangely in a store or something. 

But despite the weirdly high number of Karen videos, I think I'm going to take the plunge. I think I'm going to take my chances living a totally new lifestyle in the upcoming months. 

Blogging has so often helped me to feel alright with the world, but I've been frightened of the knowledge that I am not perfectly anonymous on this blog at all. But what's that all about? I'm afraid that other people will know what I think and that they won't want to play with me? I don't think I should live my life in fear of not being liked. That's really getting in my way now that I want to come into my power and explore all the different things I can do. I hope you enjoy reading what I write, but I need to be okay when people don't like it too. And that's not even to mention the opportunity costs of people not knowing you at all. 

Anyway! Be brave and be beautiful, dear reader. It takes action to get cheese specialists and pole dancing lessons established in your town. You've got to know what you want and aim for it.