Wildleaf

So, I am back in New York for work.  The boss decided that it would be a good idea to have me come into the office and work for a few days.  She also suggested that we have a face-to-face review.  That is a little frightening.  I have no reason to fear, I have been working my ass off these last few months since I have been working remotely.  I have even worked weekends and 16 hour days to produce working material.

But even with this extra work, I feel no respect or recognition for my efforts.  I don’t think she sees what I am doing with my time as “putting forth the extra effort,” that she expects.  That is frustrating.  I really hope that this review is all about recognition of my skill and efforts, but I fear that it will be something bad. I won’t know until Wednesday at 1:00 when the review is, but until then, I am tentative.

So, while I am in New York, I get to experience the city again.  It is the same city, with the same things, and it excites me as little as it excited me when I lived here.  It isn’t that the city is bad, I am just not drawn to it as many people seem to be.  I like the food, and it is sometimes fun to be in a huge crowd of people but it is frustrating on an everyday basis.  There is so much to do here, but I can’t afford to do it.  I am not a single artist looking for a community, I am a married computer geek with a budget.  It makes the city a much harder thing to experience.

In a way, my trip has proven to me that I can experience “business as usual” even after 6 months of being away.  The difference is that I am staying in New Jersey with a co-worker in order to save the company some money, and to allow me to stay out for a whole week.  It is not something I want to do again.  New Jersey sucks.  It is horrible.  Once we cross the river on the train, I can feel my soul being depleted from my body.  I am sure some people love it but to me it seems like a place of loss and desperation.  It is not empty, like Buckeye, nor is it bustling, like New York, or even crowded and sparse.  It is as if an entire generation of people lived in Northern New Jersey but left for greener pastures, leaving the leftovers for those who would be willing to live in a sub-standard existence.  It really is dismal.

The next trip I take out here, I hope that I can stay in the city for 2-3 days, and maybe take Jasmine with me because I miss her sorely.  I can’t wait to get home and give her a big smooch and hold her in my arms again.  Until then, I will work my days and retire to Jersey daily.

It has been 2 years since my dad passed away. It was a heart attack and brain aneurism in the middle of the night on May 14th, 2005. I was in shock for the week before his funeral, and it wasn’t until the day I viewed his corpse that I thought I had fully accepted that my father was dead.

Keep in mind; this was not one of those fathers that you grew up with tossing the football around. I barely knew him most of my life. It wasn’t until I was 18 that I began to realize who my father was to me. And even then, he wasn’t someone that I look back on fondly. I don’t dislike him. I love him. But his death leaves me, even now, with a cesspool of undefined emotions.

There are things about my dad that I would rather not share with anyone, or know about myself. There were also lessons that I learned from my dad, even if he chose not to teach them. I learned a little bit about self respect, a little about the ups and downs of life, and I learned what it was like to live one life and have my mind leading another.

I don’t want to be like my dad. I want to take some of his characteristics, but am afraid that even a few characteristics that he held could lead me into the life he led. I want to be strong, I want to have an attitude towards work which treats me as the commodity, not the work. I want to build a beautiful fountain in my back yard.

I don’t want to pass away without having a solid relationship with my children. I want to show them I love them, I want to have them know why they miss me. I want them to miss me reading to them while they sat on my lap, I want them to remember the first baseball game I took them to, I want them to be sad I am gone because of the lost experiences.

I don’t want them to feel the way I feel. I don’t want them to miss all of the things they never got to experience with me.

I haven’t posted in a while but thats because I have been happy. Changing jobs was likely the best decision that I have ever made. I go into work every day excited, I do a lot of work, and I come home relaxed and able to have fun instead of crash. The new schedule, specified in the previous post, has proven more difficult than I had anticipated. I got sick the second day, and thereafter I have had a new job and have been trying to learn a new schedule with that. Tomorrow I am going to try to get back on schedule starting tomorrow.

That isn’t what I was posting about. But, since this post isn’t about my life, I figured I could do a quick “fill in the blanks” concerning life first. The purpose of this post was to explain my decision to make new years resolutions. I have never officially made new years resolutions, and this is only October. So why? I don’t know, I just want to do some things and I might as well make the goals official. Even though they are resolutions for next year, I am not going to wait until January 1st to start them. Why not allow for a couple of months head start? So these are things I want to start immediately, but hope to accomplish in the new year.

1. Lose weight – specifically I want to be under 200lbs.
2. Write more
   • Finish a novel, or at least have two first drafts completed.
   • Post to my websites consistently. Minimum 3 times a week.
   • Focus on writing 1 hour a day.
3. Eat healthier.
4. Pray to God every day.
5. Save money – $500-$1000 a month.
6. Forgo pornography. This one still haunts me, but it is something that I am ready, willing, and excited to have out of my life for good.
7. Learn to write neatly. My handwriting sucks and I know I can change it.
8. Learn to play an instrument. Guitar ocarina, piano, didgeridoo, or the drums, it doesn’t matter what.
9. Learn more graphic design. I want to know what makes something look good, more than the basic stuff I already know.

I am sure there are more, but this is all that was on the top of my head for now. Maybe I can achieve three or four of them but I really want to get all of them covered. Like I said, I am going to start now, and maybe the extra couple of months will help me attain my goals. Any way you slice it, I still have a long road ahead of me.

When I turned in my letter of resignation on Monday, I was slapped in the face. That slap was in the form of my boss saying he was not accepting my resignation. In the following 2 days negotiations happened. Well, I wasn’t really involved with the negotiations, but my boss at Bear Stearns kept offering me alternatives to me leaving.

I was pretty well set up to leave, and I had decided that I would not look back at his offers. One thing, however, kept popping up. He kept asking me, “What is it that you want?” And I continued to dodge his question and come up with answers. In reality, I didn’t really know what I wanted. I didn’t know why exactly I was unhappy with Bear Stearns. I also didn’t know what I wanted to do in my future.

I had dinner with Jasmine last night, and I brought this up. I want to be able to provide for a family. I want to be happy. I want to be able to play with my grandchildren. I couldn’t put my finger on what I wanted to do for a living. I love working on web pages. I don’t know how far that will take me, and I also don’t know what will happen in 10 years when I need a salary doubled what I need now. Will it progress like that? And even if it does, will I remain to be happy?

I first moved out to New York for the reason of broadening my horizons and get new material for writing. There were more reasons than that, but in that I had failed so far. I have been working on learning to write. I can already write, but I wanted to learn how to do it right before I dove in head first like I had in the past. I bought a new library of books on different aspects of writing. There was the one on learning how to write, the one on character development, the one on plots, and a ton of others. I have been reading how to write for 3 months now. I have been thinking about my characters, the story I want to write and I even began some character outlines for them. What I haven’t done, though, is set apart time to actually write. I needed to be more professional.

So, I spoke to Jasmine about my dilemma. It was a dillemma because I didn’t think I could fit in any more time for my day. I wanted to work out, study the bibile, devote an hour to writing, work, sleep, spend time with my wife. That is a whole lot. Especially considering all I have had time for the last few months has been work, wife, and sleep. We talked about it for a while and decided on some priorities. First is God, then wife, then health, then writing, then work. That is a pretty good order. Now, this isn’t saying that work isn’t important, it is just the easiest to schedule around. I know there are certain times I need to be in work, and outside of that it needs to take the back seat to the others. With that in mind I have planned out a schedule.

5:00 / Wake up
5:00-6:00 / Study Bible
6:15-7:15 / Go to the Gym
7:30-8:30 / Prepare for the day (Shower and Eat, etc)
9:00-5:30 / Work (this could be anywhere between 5:00-6:00 when I leave)
6:00-7:30 / Write
7:30-9:00 / Spend time with wife and read the Bible together
9:00 / Go to sleep for next day.

And that is it. I have ingested some sleeping pills tonight at 9:00 and am setting my alarm for 5:00 to try this new schedule out. It is something completely different than I have ever done before. Hopefully this will encourage some positive change in my life. I should also have a novel completed by next year. That will be exciting.

So, I promised a few of my friends that I would try to update this page as often as possible. I would update every day, even, with the current happenings in my mind. This last week I have not lived up to that promise, but I have good reason. I have been working on finding another job in the past few weeks.

What does that mean? Well, I can’t talk about looking for a job on a public medium like a website (though I seriously doubt anyone from Bear would have even come across my little website to find out I was looking elsewhere). I have had an offer from a web development company and I decided to take it.

Ultimately the pay will be less at this new job, especially when you take into consideration the bonus structure, long term raises, and all that stuff. I know this, but I was still looking for a development job where I wouldn’t be sitting on a large trading floor with people who have been working at this company for well over a decade. The offices that line the perimeter of our trading desk environment are a taunting blow to pride, heck even cubicles were beginning to look like an endeavor to achieve.

The environment was not something that I would normally leave a great job for, but the work wasn’t rewarding either. When I turned in my resignation, I believe I said, “Hacking Perl is bad for my soul,” or something like that. I have been working with PHP/HTML/CSS for far too long to simply roll over and work with Perl. I am a programmer, I can code in any language so this isn’t a deal breaker per se, but it definitely not ideal. Heck, if they put me on an ASP.NET or C# project I would have been happy.

But I wasn’t happy. And that is kind of the point of this whole thing. It was a mixed blessing being unhappy. On one side, I came home tired every day and just wanted to melt into the couch, on the other side my mind wandered at work because I was so bored (busy, but still bored). When my mind wandered I happened upon a lot of things that I wanted to write about. A few have already showed their faces around here. Others, however, are much larger projects that will come out in time. Will I lose my Muse when I leave this job? I think not, but I will have to try to capture her as frequently as possible. That means I am going to have to be a bit more purposeful about writing. Novels are not ideas, they are not works of magic, they are stupendous examples of concentration and dedication.

Anyway, you can see a bit of the work this company, that I am about to join, has produced at their webpage. isoCurve seems like it is going to be a lot of good work ahead of me, and I am ready to have that influence on the web that I have fought for, but never had the business minded backing to actually achieve. I am ready to start coding the front ends and back ends. I am ready to start building dynamic systems people can use. I am ready. The question is: Are they?