So I don't exactly do nothing, I just don't have a job. And for someone like myself that doesn't seem to pose any sort of problem of being boring. Some people will whine about not having something to keep them occupied, but those people are not as active as I am, nor as nerdy, nor creative. By no means do I need a job to keep me busy or entertained, because even though I am without responsibility I am still busy.
Surfing is probably the single largest consumption of my time. And not only just the act of surfing but everything involved. A typical surf session probably lasts between two and four hours dependent upon the quality of the surf, but there is so much preparation involved. At night I'm always planning where to surf the next day, so I'll be on the internet checking out the swell directions and the tide. I am always looking for the days when some of my favorite fickle surfspots (like Zuma, or Rights off Point) might awaken. I'm very prepared for everyday. I'm not one of those guys that shows up to the same beach every day at 8:30, I like to surf the best spot around. True, I never really become a local of any break, so I might not get the deferential treatment that some locals get. However I'm a good surfer and have a beard so it is very rare for me to get hassled at any spot, regardless of the protectiveness of the local crew.
The surf does go bad though, so that leaves days like today where the surf is really small or it could be stormy, which means that I have to do stuff other than just surf. Although some of it is surf inspired. A few weeks back I met Skip Frye, a famous surfer from North San Diego and on top of being excited to meet him I was taken aback by how rolled over his shoulders looked and I decided that I didn't want to turn out like that.
So, I've started to do yoga, which is a huge time commitment. It's insanely hard because my shoulders are unreasonably tight from surfing so much. I'm in these classes and all these beautiful, svelte girls and they have their arms perfectly over their heads in these acute isosceles triangles and I'm standing there, elbows bent looking like a pentagon. It's pretty routine for me to be the worst one in the room, but I gaurantee that I'm trying as hard as anybody in there. I can tell that it's helping me out a lot and it's turning out that I might actually do this for my life. I already feel the effects of surfing and other sports being corrected in the first month.
So yoga and surfing, but that is not all. I've been playing pick up hockey with my friends and if I get the rest of my equipment, we're going to be playing pick up ice hockey a few nights a week. It will be the first time I've played ice hockey since I was a preteen and I can't help but be incredibly excited about it. And there is the added advantage that this will help me prepare for my stay north of the border. I know I'm going to have to do something besides surf when I'm in Canada so I've already decided to pick hockey up while I'm up there. I'll just have to switch from Pacifico to Molson and start saying "eh" and my transition will be seamless.
But that's just my jock side. I'm also extraordinarily nerdy. I love books, but more than that, I love words. How weird some origins are (like surfing came from sailors saying that the ocean would sough or make a hushing noise and it eventually evolved into surf), semantics (I always tell my mom that I'm coordinated but not athletic, I can surf, play ping pong, shoot a basketball, but running and especially jumping I am not very good at), and just flat out fun words (i.e. shenanigans, curmudgeonly, tomfoolery, shindig, bamboozle, etc.). Combine my love of books and words with the fact that I am very competitive and love games, it is no surprise that one of my favorite things of all time is Scrabble. I have the deluxe edition with the turn table but I find that I play the most on Scrabulous. Scrabulous is an application added to a profile on facebook.com. It's different from normal scrabble because a normal game does not include challenges so an accepted word has to be played. However, with those rules you can place tiles on and check it out until you find a word that works. This is especially helpful for the two letter words to fit into little spaces. There are people, like my friend Dave, who cheat rampantly on scrabulous with using the dictionary and word generators so it is not as straight forward as normal scrabble but I think most people play honestly (I never, NEVER use the dictionary). So if you ever want to play me online just friend request me on Facebook (I'm Breene Murphy, in the UCLA network) and send me a message to play.
And then there is my loyalty to the UCLA Bruins, Lakers, and Dodgers so anytime a game is on I'm somewhere watching the game. So as you can see I hardly even have time for a job because I'm always busy. But once the money runs out (which is rapidly approaching) I'm going to have to squeeze in a job. Fingers crossed that my prospective job in Canada comes through so at least I can have my desire to muck around with words satisfied.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Thursday, February 21, 2008
I'm Not Doing Anything
Well, that's not entirely true, but it would sum up my father's feeling about my current state. What is true is that I am 25, I live at home with my parents, I do not have a job and I am not going to school of any kind. This isn't to mean, that this is some state that will not have change, just a current description of what is currently true about my life.
This should come with a bit of backstory, seeing as this makes me sound exceptionally pathetic and useless. My name is Breene Murphy and I was born in Oahu, Hawaii during Hurricane Ewa. I'm not sure how that has affected my life, seeing as no injury or malady happened upon me from that event. The reality is that I just slept right through it, or so I'm told. I just included it because it is one of those random factoids about people that seem give particular enjoyment.
Now that you have that little nodule of knowledge, I figure I'd give a more recent history so as to explain my current existence. I lived in Chile last year. I had gotten fed up with working in advertising and needed a change in career path. I had been an International Development Studies major (kind of a cross between international business, history, political science and a foreign language) in college and wanted to seek an opportunity down that career pathway, however the fact that I wasn't fluent in spanish (as that was the language I chose) was quite an impediment to the potential jobs for which I could apply.
Becoming fluent in spanish, or any language I suppose, requires that you can speak it right when you wake up in the morning. If you are tired or hung over (or both) and you can flow in conversation that means you're alright. I know it sounds weird, but if you can speak under those conditions it means that you are no longer thinking through the language, it is more of a reaction than a thought process. And the only way you can create that situation is to live abroad where the language is spoken
For that reason, I lived in a small fishing village/seasonal getaway town with a family where no one (save the eldest son, but he was at college) spoke any English. I could have done it a much more formal way, by going through a university or some private school in Santiago, but I figured a university would have me live with other english speaking students and a private school would probably just be an english student tutoring spanish to gringos to pay the bills. I figured this person wouldn't be any more qualified than another spanish tutor somewhere else and there was the additional fact that I wanted to surf.
At first, living with the family was really hectic because there was so much family staying at the house and the two teenaged daughters spoke so fast and with such unique slang that they were rendered completely unintelligible to me (it also didn't help that three quarters of the women in the house were named Pati). However, with the help of my spanish teacher, the diminutive Tati, I made progress. And after a while the extended family returned to their homes and extra time with just the family and the girls allowed me to finally understand what they were saying the whole time. Apparently I'm going to marry one of the daughters.
But more on that another time (I'm going back to visit the family in two weeks so the subject will be revisited), I'm making an attempt to stay on track. So, back to why I don't do anything. While I was staying in Chile I decided to write a blog about all the craziness that occurred (should you be interested http://breenesadventures.blogspot.com/ ). I had planned to come back and find a job that would allow me to use my spanish and travel like a state department job or working for the international division of a surf company but a really good family friend liked my blog. This may seem inconsequential but he is in show business and is currently working on a project where the main character is a early-mid twenties kid who has traveled...2+2=4... so he invited me to work on his project with him. Only thing is, the project hasn't quite been greenlighted, so I'm basically hanging around waiting to see if it's going though. I'm not going to apply for other jobs because I'm an honest guy and I would feel like an asshole if I quit after two weeks if I found out the project was going to start up. And for similar reasons, I'm not going to get an apartment because I wouldn't want a lease a place knowing that I would have to leave it behind. So where does that leave me? 25, jobless, living with my parents and writing about it.
This should come with a bit of backstory, seeing as this makes me sound exceptionally pathetic and useless. My name is Breene Murphy and I was born in Oahu, Hawaii during Hurricane Ewa. I'm not sure how that has affected my life, seeing as no injury or malady happened upon me from that event. The reality is that I just slept right through it, or so I'm told. I just included it because it is one of those random factoids about people that seem give particular enjoyment.
Now that you have that little nodule of knowledge, I figure I'd give a more recent history so as to explain my current existence. I lived in Chile last year. I had gotten fed up with working in advertising and needed a change in career path. I had been an International Development Studies major (kind of a cross between international business, history, political science and a foreign language) in college and wanted to seek an opportunity down that career pathway, however the fact that I wasn't fluent in spanish (as that was the language I chose) was quite an impediment to the potential jobs for which I could apply.
Becoming fluent in spanish, or any language I suppose, requires that you can speak it right when you wake up in the morning. If you are tired or hung over (or both) and you can flow in conversation that means you're alright. I know it sounds weird, but if you can speak under those conditions it means that you are no longer thinking through the language, it is more of a reaction than a thought process. And the only way you can create that situation is to live abroad where the language is spoken
For that reason, I lived in a small fishing village/seasonal getaway town with a family where no one (save the eldest son, but he was at college) spoke any English. I could have done it a much more formal way, by going through a university or some private school in Santiago, but I figured a university would have me live with other english speaking students and a private school would probably just be an english student tutoring spanish to gringos to pay the bills. I figured this person wouldn't be any more qualified than another spanish tutor somewhere else and there was the additional fact that I wanted to surf.
At first, living with the family was really hectic because there was so much family staying at the house and the two teenaged daughters spoke so fast and with such unique slang that they were rendered completely unintelligible to me (it also didn't help that three quarters of the women in the house were named Pati). However, with the help of my spanish teacher, the diminutive Tati, I made progress. And after a while the extended family returned to their homes and extra time with just the family and the girls allowed me to finally understand what they were saying the whole time. Apparently I'm going to marry one of the daughters.
But more on that another time (I'm going back to visit the family in two weeks so the subject will be revisited), I'm making an attempt to stay on track. So, back to why I don't do anything. While I was staying in Chile I decided to write a blog about all the craziness that occurred (should you be interested http://breenesadventures.blogspot.com/ ). I had planned to come back and find a job that would allow me to use my spanish and travel like a state department job or working for the international division of a surf company but a really good family friend liked my blog. This may seem inconsequential but he is in show business and is currently working on a project where the main character is a early-mid twenties kid who has traveled...2+2=4... so he invited me to work on his project with him. Only thing is, the project hasn't quite been greenlighted, so I'm basically hanging around waiting to see if it's going though. I'm not going to apply for other jobs because I'm an honest guy and I would feel like an asshole if I quit after two weeks if I found out the project was going to start up. And for similar reasons, I'm not going to get an apartment because I wouldn't want a lease a place knowing that I would have to leave it behind. So where does that leave me? 25, jobless, living with my parents and writing about it.
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