Life is filled with transition points and I have some blurry vision. One problem is that I usually can’t tell what side of a social slope I’m on. Another problem is simply discerning the contours of my own life. If I can’t hack that, then what business do I have wondering about all this long now stuff?
Oh, that’s right. It’s fun. I forget sometimes, but that trump card is always taped to my wrist.
Personal ignorance notwithstanding, part of constructing a narrative from the noise of daily life involves some minor mythmaking. I’m always game for that.
Not true. No. Sorta. Yes. A little. Except for the 'boring' part.
My latest myth includes a few poignant subplots, but centers around my desire to improve my career. This is driven, at least partially, by the simply wonderful state of the economy.
I have a fine job, health insurance, and a steady income, but I still feel the breath of the creditors violating my personal space. We’re buried in debt and stressed out by money, but that only makes us fortunate Americans. It seems silly to bitch. But, at least it’s resulted in an abnormal amount of motivation in a professional sense.
Aside
As if that didn’t function as a lame excuse for writing less, did i mention that I’ve hit the publish button on this damn blog 300 times now? It’s fitting that it follows a period of relative silence. I don’t schedule these ironies, but they sure walk straight into frame with uncanny timing.
Why the silence? Over the past few months, I’ve been putting another layer of bondo on the TransAm. Gonna grow a moustache. Maybe a rockin’ tat. Got a new jacket picked out. It’s pretty sweet. Maybe I’ll grow a ponytail…
Just kidding. Though it’s a glib way to dismiss my current mindset, let me cut the small morsel of the ‘sad’ with the wider reality. That’s all thanks to my wife’s subtle tweaking. She’s a damned fine engineer, by the way. She’s got a light touch. She’s about accentuating what’s already there. As a result, I’m not having a midlife crisis. It’s more of a midlife makeover.
It takes talent, grace, and no small amount of patience to see the potential within me and subtly prod me toward mental, physical, and spiritual health. There’s no cure for me (it’s a managed condition, after all), but the results are still remarkable. How I got from chubby, unrepentant, single loser to healthy, confident, successful family man is a mystery. It’s another one of those things that happened too slowly to note.
What I didn’t expect was to like it quite so much. I figured on just tolerating it. I have always hated getting dirty or muddy. Going waaaaay back. Now we do things like this. What the hell is going on?
Next Chapter
All this new social network hullabaloo has me thinking more about this online stuff. How can I be more efficient? Lots of answers present themselves, but these few bobbed to the top: No alternate blogs. No posterous. Nothing. If it’s an offhand comment, it goes on a wall. Everything else goes here.
Why shouldn’t it? I mean, who the hell has ‘work blogs’ anymore? The key, for us newbies, is that blogs aren’t about one thing. There about a person’s many things. Anyway, my work blog is history following the excise and re-appropriation some of the good stuff.
This means you can expect some more visualization and jobhacking stuff here. I still love long term thinking, geopolitics, and that nature of the cosmos stuff, but I love sweet pens, too.
At this nice, big, arbitrary round number, it’s important to take a moment to thank all the lurkers. I really appreciate the quiet dedication you’ve placed into reading the first few paragraphs of my words before getting distracted by a moth. I will work hard to get that up to three paragraphs. To those of you who have actually commented?… well, I just love you people.
BoingBoing, and a million other awesome writers, are the reason every one of you should skim and/or avoid me. But, they’re also constant inspiration to keep writing in a dark cave. I’m a supervillian. Slowly waiting; biding my time; getting better; wringing my hands.
Damn, it is so fun to wring my hands. Try it.
