I am so tired. So much for getting to bed at eight last night. My girlfriend and I ended up watching “The Click List” and the end of Final Destination before realizing that it was already almost midnight, which means I got maybe five hours of good sleep. Ugh. Coupled with the fact that it was gray and rainy, this morning’s wake-up call was a bitch. And the people on the roads today were bitches. And I smoked far too much on my commute. And I’ve already had four cups of coffee. Basically, I’m all kinds of jittery.

After work tonight I’m meant to go down to Philly with my girlfriend so that she can pick up her car, a graduation gift from her father. Round trip, that’s four hours of driving. Oh well, at least I’ll get to go to Wawa en route. Mmm, iced tea and meatball subs … *drools*

I need to finish this practice exam and submit my score to Big Boss Man. Until later.

I drove home last night - with very little traffic, woot! - and promptly spent two hours playing with Limewire, digging up songs that I loved in the past and had long since forgotten to put on my iPod. I ask you, what’s the use of having a radio (both FM and XM), tape player, and six-disc CD player in your car if you have one of these toys? Obviously I still have use for those things too (when the iPod’s battery dies), but … I’m definitely in love with it. It has become yet another obsession of mine, in a long list of things to occupy my mind.

I went over to my girlfriend’s at nine to pick her up, and ended up staying there for awhile listening to her and her mother discuss some home problems they’ve been having lately. It’s nice to know they feel comfortable doing that around me.

Anyway, we finally got back to mine at about ten thirty; Chris met us there, and Cole came over a bit later, and we watched the new episode of (what else?) “Ghost Hunters” on the SciFi channel. I’m becoming addicted to it. Hell, I just bought the first season on eBay.

I should not have admitted that.

I am clearly disturbed. And a big geek.

But anyway, after Cole and Chris left, my girlfriend and I got a bit caught up watching Final Destination. By the time we’d gotten ready for bed and … everything … it was already pretty late. And anyone who knows me at all knows I do not do well with less than eight hours of sleep.

Unfortunately, as I am a night owl, I am also incapable of going to sleep before midnight. Hence my 6:30AM wake-up call often finds me stumbling blindly into the shower, tripping over the dog, and being insanely jealous every time I walk back into my room because my girlfriend gets to continue sleeping. Ugh. The garish lighting in the office doesn’t help things, either, as it simply accentuates the bloodshot white bits of my eyes. On the upside, this does make my eyes look very green, though.

Speaking of work, we had a meeting this morning, and while the speaker was getting ready to do his spiel (”this will go up, these will go down, this will implode, they need to sign those contracts …”) one of the FAs leaned over to me and said, “Hey, did you hear about MD? He’s no longer with us.” Now, MD has been practically my mentor over the past few weeks, based on the fact that his desk is ten feet from mine and that he has thirty-six years of experience in the business. Plus, he’s a nice guy. Anyway, he’d talked to me recently about going back into a different sector from the one he was in now, and had arranged a tentative ‘interview’ with a guy at another office in the region. Yesterday, he left the Firm at about two, not speaking to anyone.

I guess the interview went well, and he was offered a position. What confuses me, though, is that a) the FAs all received an email about MD this morning, but the details are rather vague, and b) a lot of MD’s stuff is still here, client files and such. The FA at the meeting said afterwards, slightly ominously, “Hey, if you want to talk about [MD], come see me later.”

C’est un … mystery. But I think he’s left. Not passed.

A new municipal bond issue has a total par value of $80,000,000. A member of the underwriting syndicate has sold its entire commitment of $10,000,000. If the syndicate is organized as an eastern account and there is an unsold balance of $2,000,000, what is the member’s remaining liability?

This is the kind of question that stares me in the face for eight hours every day.

My degree is in international relations. I wrote my Master’s thesis on the effect of McCarthyism on the U.S. Department of State; I focused on courses that included Middle Eastern studies, international law, human rights, and age-old political and diplomatic philosophy. At no time was I ever involved with anything having to do with economics. Yet, somehow, I was able to market myself well enough to be asked to join the Firm as a financial advisor trainee. So, for the past month and a half, I’ve been getting paid to study for my Series 7 certification exam on June 2. Quite a sweet deal, really! I’ll admit I was dubious at first - I’d always believed economics and finance stuff to be pretty, well, dry - but once I started getting a grasp of the subjects involved, I’ll go out on a limb and say that the material is keeping me interested. I’m not kidding.

In any case, though eight hours of studying a day for two months is a rather daunting prospect, it is all necessary. Failure to pass the Series 7 will result in me re-entering the job market, an event that would likely culminate with me sleeping until two every day after staying up ’til the wee hours of the morning, watching lots of crappy daytime TV, and scouring Myspace for random individuals, the job hunt put on the back burner as it was a few months ago.

I will not allow myself to go back to that. Trust me, it’s not as nice as it sounds.

So, henceforth, this will be my outlet for the pressure, the stress, and the little things that make my life somewhat more complex than it could be. It will remain public for the foreseeable future, as events of the past six months have left me with little to hide, and because, as of right now, I’m the only one reading it. And there we go.