Only few months has passed but there are some changes made to my life style that occurred these past few months. With my short vocabularies and lack of proper grammar, it is hard to explain thoroughly how much my lifestyle has changed. But I will still attempt to do my best at it.
First of all, I became independent. For the last 22 years of my life, I have been living under my parent's roof, consuming their foods, under their management, and also under their provision. Many of my friends really have no idea about my relationship with my parents. Don't get me wrong, I love them no matter what, and I know for a fact they love me, maybe little too much sometimes. But for last 22 years, I felt like I was enslaved to my parent's decisions and their way of life. There are so many restrictions against the things that I wanted to do. For example, I have never grew my hair longer than 2 months in my entire life because my mom thought I look like a hobo and so I was forced to cut my hair every month. You can look at this example in 2 different views; My mom probably wanted me to look neat and clean so when other people sees me, she can say, “hey, this is my son and he looks neat and clean.”. My perception is that I have to do exactly what she wants me to do no matter what it is. And this is just over a haircut, just imagine how many arguments I got in with my parents. The point is this. I wanted to create my own life, write my own book, and have my own choice to make my own decisions. And to do that, I must be my own man and first step I thought of is to move out. So far it's working out great. I love the place itself, very modern and way more active than before. I like the people I live with, the late night work-out and chit chat is one of the benefits of living there. There are also much going on in the hood. So overall, these are some good changes so far. I am actually proud of my self that I made the commitment to move out. Which leads me to my next change, responsibility.
Living in L.A is great, but there are many consequences. First, lack of sleep. My sleeping schedule has moderately changed. I used to sleep at 11pm and wake up at 7:30. That's close to 8.5 hours. My new schedule on the other hand, I am sleeping around 12 or 1am and waking up at 6:30am. Which means I am getting about 6-7 hours of sleep a day. That's couple hours of reduction on my sleep. Couldn't really find a reason yet but I need to sleep earlier. I try so hard to wish that I didn't have work every morning but seems like that wish is not coming true for a while. The good thing is, everyone else wakes up around this time(except Kevin) for work, too. So it's not too difficult to work up early. Secondly, I am waking up an hour earlier now because of LA traffic. When I hit the road, it ain't too bad either. It takes me about 30mins to get to work, if I leave the apartment by 7:10. If I'm 10mins late, it would probably take 50min to 1 hour. Now compare that to 3min drive from my Gardena house to my work. It's just one of many benefits of living in LA. When I get to work, there real business begins.
The most change that effected my life style is due to my job. When I first started, I was mainly dealing with customer service. It was a minimal work, but a very high paying job. I announced to the world that I get paid to be on fb all day at work. As the times passed, I took charge of more duties and responsibilities. From a customer rep, I became something called a dispatcher. The simplest description of a dispatcher is baby-sitter. I have been designated to these drivers who are uneducated, unable to speak or write English, and very unintelligent. What I have to do is follow up with them constantly to make sure they're on a right track. I tell them what to pick up, what to drop off, where to go, where to go after, and if there are problems, I have to solve it for them. At the same time, I need to coordinate with the customers how the situations are going. If things always went according to plan, this job would never stress me out. Reality is, there's always problems. The reasons are because we can't predict and control the future and time no matter how hard we try. So in this case, I get yelled at from the customers because of these broken promises. So I yell at the drivers, explaining to them that because of their poor performance, I got yelled at. Then the drivers yell at me, saying how difficult it is to do their job. And so I call the customer, tell them the bad news, and get yelled at little more. After a while, I got used to being yelled at, it's very simple really, you just have to listen to them complain for couple minutes, and than you tell them you'll get back with them with any other updates. Majority of my stress comes from these drivers. I understand it's hard to drive to east coast, delivering people's household goods in this freezing temperature. But MAIN complaints of all customer is lack of communication from the drivers. Well that's never going to change cause well, they can only speak Korean or Spanish. So I have all these Korean drivers just because my Korean is better than my co-worker and he has all the Hispanic drivers. I really can't put this into words how much stress I get just thinking about work. Even if my hours are from 8am to 6pm, I get out of the office around 6:30 to 7pm anyways. If that's not good enough, I get calls from the drivers when I’m not on the clock. Even on weekends, I'm constantly on call. At the end of the day, I laugh about it with my boss. I'm living on a day to day basis. I never know how to day will go, how my boss is feeling, how many customers will be cussing me out in one day, but it's nothing I can't handle. Seems like I'm really maturing as the times are passing by. I can't recall exactly where I learned this from, but somebody said something along the lines of “you need to go through more shit to learn more” something like that. So you know what? Screw these stresses and what not, imma just seize the day. Karpe Diem baby!
