My Blog

About me

A bio of sorts

Hi, I'm Holger Mueller. I'm a recent transplant to the town of Batesville, Arkansas. This is my first time living in a southern state, and I figured I'd use this blog as a way to record my observations of where I'm living now. Some things haven't surprised me, but quite a few things have pleasantly so in fact, and those will be the things on which I focus on a irregulary regular basis, or is it regularly irregular? Should my wife and I ever move again, I'll document my thoughts and feelings about the new place where we live in this blog as well.

How did I come to find myself here? My wife works in academia, and by virtue of that, we live where she's able to get work. Why don't I get a job somewhere else so we can live there? There're a few reasons for that. First, my whole life, I've focused on getting the kind of job that allows me to work anywhere I wanted. Did I have Arkansas in mind when I decided that? No. And yes, I did have a job before we moved here, which I quit when we moved here. But it was a retail job, so not the kind of job around which you should base your major decisions in life. Also, this job, the one my wife took, is the kind of job toward which she had been working for her entire life, her dream job. Is the location something she'd been working toward? No, the location is a tad far from the dream. But again, in academia, you take the job you can get, and you make the most of it.

What else about me? Currently, I'm exploring new job opportunities. That's the pleasant way of describing it. Prior to this I've been employed in retail sales, selling clothes and books, not at the same time. I've worked as an educator, teaching and tutoring English at a community college in upstate New York. I've also taught English as a foreign language in another country. I've worked as a ticket taker at a movie theater. I've delivered phone books to people who in the best cases were pretty much indifferent to receiving one. (In one case, someone was a tad too angry about receiving one.) (Luckily, I never encountered anyone who was super excited to receive one.) I've written click-bait articles. I've also helped out my parents with their job, running a community care home for psychiatric outpatients from the VA hospital.

Hobbies, you bet I got them. I enjoy watching movies, with a particular fondness for comedies and science fiction. I like music; I'm fond of a variety of genres. Recently I've found myself listening to reggae. The two genres I find myself always going back to are punk rock and jazz. Some would say those two genres are at opposite ends of the spectrum, but if you're familiar enough with them I think you'll find they have more in common with each other than most people realize. I enjoy hiking, which I'm in a pretty good location for, or so I'm told. I like weight lifting, and the act of pushing myself to do things I didn't know I could do that comes with it. And I love reading, writing, and drawing. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention I also enjoy spending time with my wife. And I love traveling. I've got a pretty big bucket list of places I want to visit. The places I've had the pleasure of visiting so far are Korea, Australia, Italy, and France. Hopefully, once I've succeeded in searching through what my options are, I'll land a job that helps facilitate my love of travel in some way.

So that's it for me. I'm sure I left a few things out, but I'm sure those will come up in the writings I post on here. Like I said, I hope to do this on a regular basis. Part of my impetus for creating this blog is to force myaself to write more; it's something I love doing, and even went to school for it. But life gets in the way sometimes. If I get something new up here once a month, I'll be happy. I hope reading it will make you happy too.

Talk to you later.