quarter life crisis

Is what I suppose the term would be. It's interesting to be at home, quiet on a sat. night. not that it's abnormal just that it was an interesting evening.

I have a conference call tomorrow morning for work. Hopefully it goes well. LD will need to get a router replaced. It should go smooth.

I got to have dinner with Ryan tonight. He finally got to open everybody's Christmas presents which was nice. By far one of the more civil evenings I've had with Renell in a while. Ryan's doing pretty well. Towards the end of the evening right before he fell asleep he had an itch in his eye so there was a bit of a struggle to put some eye drops in. Clear Eyes kind of stuff, no medication but I guess he had a bad experience with some allergy eye drops before so he was scared. It caused some....hesitation on his part. We finally got the drop in though. Then he fell asleep.

Other than that work's been hectic again lately. It's always some minor crisis or another. It's still interesting work, I still like the company. It's just a fundamental disagreement on what we should be. I still think the Starbucks guy was right, we need to be a people company. Where Starbucks isn't really a coffee company, they're a people company that just happens to sell coffee, we should be a people company that just happens to sell voice and data services. And I don't see that going on.

Not sure what to do. Ryan doesn't want me to go. I asked him about it after dinner. Renell's indifferent and I have a feeling that when I start pushing for joint custody things will go downhill there. I don't know. Maybe I just need a change. Something needs to change.

I get it now

You define yourself by being with people. I define myself by the people who I surround myself with. Subtle distinction. Maybe I'm just crazy.

I wonder when honor became a lost value.

angry thoughts

Have you ever had the desire to just fucking wail on something? Right now my neck is sore, my shoulder is killing me, my head is pounding, my left leg aches and all I want to do is hit a wall. Literally walk up to a cement fucking wall and start hitting it until I break something. Hopefully the wall, probably my hand.

I'm tired, I'm frustrated, I'm sore and I'm angry and of all those, the worst one is the one I know how to fix the least. Once again we wander through the doldrums and hope to cross the sea a better person than when we left.

I don't know where I'm going, I've forgotten when I've been and I need to grasp onto something, but nothing's there. It's grabbing for a safety rope and finding only air. I'm getting a glass of scotch. Out.

Decisions, decisions

I've pretty much come to the decision in the past week or so that once the currnet major project that I'm working on is complete and stable I'll be leaving the company I currently work for.

I'm not locked into it yet, but I think for a number of reasons that it would be of mutual benefit for me to leave. It's kind of conflicted. I would hate to leave this project in its current state and I would also hate to leave the company short handed, particularly in tehnical areas. But I also don't think the environment and attitude of the company is compatible with myself.

I'm not actively seeking new employment right now and I don't expect to be in the next couple of months, but I should probably start on it soon. I figure it'll take another two to three months to launch and another month or so to get the project stable and find and train a replacement. I'm not sure what will happen in this time but I figure I'll wing it.

The funny part is that I've told the two people directly above me and the reaction wasn't completely what I expected. Not sure what to make of that right now. Some of it is what I expected, we'll see how well that plays out. I'm not even sure it was a good idea at this point to 'tip my hand' so to speak, but I think it better to operate with openness and honesty than spring it on once this thing is complete and stable and things get a little less stressed.

Maybe I'll go back and try to finish a maters or PhD. Somehow I don't see myself as a doctor. Maybe I'll just go on to do something else. Maybe I'll even go back to my own consultancy again. Who knows. But I'm of the mindset right now that this decision would be in the best interest of both myself and the PLNI.

Expectations

I expect of myself not constant perfection but constant progress.

wishes

So I'm watching this episode of the x-files where three idiots get to make wishes because they found a genie. One ends up invisible then get's smacked by a car then gets brought back to life. One ends up with his mouth removed. Highly amusing, but it does give some consideration to the question,

If you had three wisehs what would you wish for?

I know two of mine, not sure about the third.

1. would be that after my third wish the genie would be given freedom. I think I've read Arabian Nights too many times or something. But it seems like such a shit job to get stuck granting wishes to people. I mean my job is bleh, but that would just suck

2. would be to have my eyes healed and the surgical implants in them removed. 20/20 vision would be nice.

3. I don't really know. Maybe the ability to teleport around from place to place. Save a shitload on airfare and get there faster. Maybe the ability to pee vodka? I don't know.

Dallas, TX

I'm leaving for Dallas in a few hours. Flight is at 8:10 which means I should be there around 6. Watch me miss the fucking flight because I can't fall asleep now. Oh well.

Going to Dallas for work. I get back Sat. night, well actually Sun. midnight. Whee. On the funny side, Sat. I have a good chunk of free time so I had scheduled a job interview in Dallas for Sat. morning, just for kicks. I'm not moving to Texas, well not Dallas/Fort Worth anyway. Austin maybe...anyway.

Yeah, so Dallas for work from about 4 hours from now until Sun. Good times.

I have always been the one to walk away

Never with enough courage to satnd up for my beliefs and convictions on things that are trully imporant. Maybe because I cared too much, maybe because I have no fucking spine, I don't know. But I've been the one to quit. To give up. At work, I say stuff like that when we're having a hard time and I mean it as a joke. "Ah, fuck it, this PBX is too hard, I give up." With other stuff, I say it and I'm serious. There are a few times I never really gave up, where I wasn't the one who quit. In some ways that makes me stronger and in others weaker. I amy not be the one who gave up, but I'm also guilty of not doing more to make it better. Some things, like my horrid spelling, you can fix with the right tools (that I'm not using) and somethings you just can't fix, or change or will into sucess. Ao I am \stronger for perservering though the crap, for not being the first one to cut out on possibilities, and yet I'm the weaker for it, knowing that it's now failed, what good was it to be the one to cling tohope where there is none? How am I stronger for failing to see what the poorest blind fool could see? I am weaker for not having the fortitude to be the first to leave, even if I am stronger for having hope. Life's little conundrums. Fucktastic.

Oh, incidentaly, a riddle one of my former students was asked today at a job interview. So you're locked in a room made of titanium, there are two doors, one on the left and one on the right. There's also a small window and you can see that outside the left door, is a huge fire-breathing dragon that will burn you to a crisp then eat you if you open the left door, and out the right door is a giant magnifying class that will focus the suns rays and burn you to a crisp if you oepn the right door. Which door do you go open?

there are two godo answers for this and one that i like better. The most proper answer is that you wait until night then go out the right door. The next most proper answer is you wait until the dragon falls asleep then go out the left door (remember the window so you can see if it's night or the dragon is asleep). The answer that I like best is that you open both doors, use the magnifying glass to burn the fucking dragon then see if it tastes like chicken.

Nothing much else of use. Had a short meeting with Renell today, was supposed to go over more stuff for Ryen, some tax stuff, etc. but she was pissing me off. We were supposed to have lunch, she got busy at work, was supposed to meet me in teh evening as I was packing for the Dallas trip but she comes over, spends 15 minutes taking a shit at my place because she doesn't want to use a public bathroom at eh restaurant they just ate at, Rick calls says she has 15 minutes left, and I'm thinking, okay, no, I have a bunch of stuff, 15 minutes isn't going to cut it, can you ask him for more time? No. Okay, fine then fuck you, get out. So she left. That and the phobia about public restrooms. I seriously don't understand this bitch.

Purpose in life

We each like to think we serve a purpose in life. I certainly would like to think that there's a reason why I'm here. But so far the only rationale I can think of for my existence is to suffer in indignation for the benefit of others whom I don't particularly like. Yeah, it's whiny and vain and annoying as all fuck, but sometimes the last thing a depressed person wants to see is a happy person and right now my misery could do with a little bit of fucking company...not bloody likely but still, I want to see some other people around pretty fucking miserable in the very near future.

Milgram experiment

Wikipedia entry here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_Experiment

So basically its this experiment that tries to figure out how people react to authority figures with electricity. Now honestly I don't know how I'd react in the exact case, but I'd like to think that my limited respect for authority would cause me to stop the test pretty early on.

But it does make you think about how far you'd go. I mean don't get me wrong, I'm kind of a sadist, but punishing someone for no decent reason other than some douche in a lab coat telling you to seems...wrong.

The catch is that it's one thing to think through how'd you react and another thing to actually go through it. I mean, shit I act in immoral ways but I usually have rationalization for it. It's a concious choice to say 'go fuck yourself' to the morality that's set by society. My 'immorality' is usually just a disregard for authority in and of itself rather than sadistic in the real meaning of the word. Still it would have been neat to be part of those experiments.

And of course now I kind of wonder if Nuremburg and whatever the hell her name was England that posed for that great Abu Ghirab picture didn't actually decide ex post facto the wrong way...

more food for thought I suppose. Just what I need, more shit to keep me awake at night. Oh and this is prompted by the fact that Primetime is running a show about this now and I'm watching it. Interesting look at social engineering.