Like many people, I overpaid for a college degree I'm not using. I worked for a predominant beige-and-green bookstore with a penchant for cursive fonts for almost five years of my life. I started as a lead seller of books (in case "bookseller" is trademarked in some way by this company). I should say that despite my anonymousness with the chain store's name, I have nothing bad to say about the company itself. I had a good time.

I started as a lead seller of books (just proving we are both still on track) in Carbondale, IL, and ultimately ended up as a lead receiver down in Orlando, FL. The lead receiver is just another name for the guy who stands in the backroom all day and holds supreme responsibility over the accuracy of the inventory of that store. That's accepting new books in 45 lb. boxes and returning old books to individual publishers, which meant sorting each book by publisher, and packing up the 60 lb. boxes (revenge against untimely delivery guys). With 178 large and small boxes coming in a day, the unconditional standard was to have zero boxes left for inventory at the end of the day.

So my point to all this — without going into my minor addiction to ephedrine, the "kill-your-mother music" as my boss used to call it, and the back-humping I did over these boxes all day, sorting them by category onto 22 different carts — my point is that I thought I was truly experiencing hard labor.

When my magical world of Orlando fell apart, I fled the state with my U-Haul (read: moving truck favoring white and orange as well as trippy 3-D views into the back of the truck painted on the doors. That's door's open! No wait! Shit, are those brake lights part of the painting?). I drove back home to Illinois, jokingly in search of hard labor.

Deep in the heart of San Jose, IL, (700 strong!) I managed to pick up work with the local-in-the-middle-of-nowhere-misplaced-straight-up-Italian named Victor, straight out of Chicago, with no explanation forthcoming. In a town of 700, it has to come to everyone's surprise that the local concrete and gravel guy is a stereotypical Italian, minus the Italian restaurant, with a heart of gold. Will employ anyone if he's got work for them to do. High schoolers to goofy rednecks and the not-so-goofy rednecks. And the strategically and geographically misplaced. That's me. I should probably mention that for the first 14 months I was living with my dad, generally unemployed.

The first day I show up for work, Victor puts me under the tutelage of Adam. Adam is my boss. I find out two days later he's 23 to my 34. My first job is to assist on a concrete job in a basement. We load the back of the pickup with some pea gravel. No big deal. At the job site, however, it became my duty to shovel the pea gravel into a bucket and carry it downstairs to the basement and make a pile. By the second bucket of pea gravel, I was sweating profusely and switching the bucket from hand to hand as every last unused muscle in my arms and back screamed in agony.

By the end of the day, I was dead on my feet. Looking back, just two weeks ago, I didn't really do all that much. Sure, I mixed concrete in a wheelbarrow in the basement on the fly. I swept all of the concrete dust up off the floors and counters. And I carried every unused bit of pea gravel back up those stairs in that same bucket. When I got home that night, I looked at my dad and said, "OMFG." I had to explain the net savvy mnemonic device to him. However, he laughed at his pitiful unfit son lovingly. I went to bed, flat on my back, muscles throbbing I had known nothing about.

The next day, I had to show up an hour earlier. Different job. An hour and a half away. To sum it up: shoveling gravel sucks. Big rocks. Little rocks. Rock that resist shovels. Introduce yesterday's self to the same muscles you burned the previous day and a whole bunch of other ones you knew nothing about. The weather is being a pain in the ass. It's hot. It's cold. At this location, we were adding a gravel run-off ditch to a drain in a horse pasture.