So a few days back, I had occasion to forget how many times I’d flown to California in 2003. Which led me down a Livejournal rat hole spanning from the beginning of 2003 to the end of 2007. Obviously this blog started during that time, and largely replaced LJ because people could syndicate this into their friends feed (what a novel concept!), but there’s a good case to make that LJ was my primary blog for 2003-06 inclusive, and there’s a lot there that had slipped my mind.
For starters, it was three times. March (right on the eve of a return to Iraq that hasn’t ended), May (because my wife’s production cycles in California were longer for some reason and I had to visit over Memorial Day if I wanted to see her) and November (for my second Big Game and second win). That’s after coming out FIVE times in 2002 (March for Tahoe, June for atmosphere and World Cup and the discovery of public wifi, October for a wedding, November for training/my first Big Game and December for my first Christmas with her family). And that doesn’t include FOUR trips to Alabama in 2003 or a weekend at Myrtle Beach with the DC gang or the annual New York run at Christmastime or the family excursion to Disney World and the side trip to Nashville to break up two weeks around them.
It’s more apparent than ever why 2006 felt like a dull moment. It had to. I was down to one phone number, even if I kept whipping through phones (about which more later), I had a wife, I had a house, I had a staff job at Apple with an office, and I had no money to do anything else. We did go up to Portland briefly in ’06, and my surrogate big sister moved in with us, but 2006 was a lot quieter than usual, and it would be difficult for it not to be after the whirlwind life I led from the time I started dating my future wife. And to be honest, it’s hard not to feel like I was shot out of a cannon when Vanderbilt imploded under me, what with a summer in Ohio with occasional trips to DC or Boston before finding myself permanently in Arlington working for NGS, and then and then and then.
I remember those days a lot more fondly than the journal indicates. I had forgotten just how personal it all was, dueling with antagonistic users on a regular basis. Not all of them, but enough of them, the ones who were departmental gurus or just “power users” and refused to acknowledge that the IT department might have a valid role in administering the company’s computers. The failure of upper management to support us in any way – and their frequent kneecapping – makes it ever more clear why I was so miserable here 2013-15, because it was very similar to my struggles to get systems onside for security compliance in the face of recalcitrant users and interference from other IT units and the complete absence of any sort of enforcement mechanism from upper management. All of this has happened before, all of this will happen again.
I remembered other things as well. There was a lot more in-person stuff, whether for football Sundays or last-minute 4P’s trips or, famously in 2005, just flying to LA and back without even leaving the 80 gates so I could keep the status I’d earned from the honeymoon flight in 2005. I was apparently way more into NASCAR for a couple of years there, and was obviously still all in on the Washington Redskins. I was much more conversant with the fortunes of Alabama football than I remember being, although that was the era of the Franchione-Shula drama and the struggle to get over on Auburn or Tennessee; I clearly had far less interest in Vanderbilt for anything football-related (in fact, my running gag was that they should get out of the SEC and license the name and colors to the Tennessee Titans). And – maybe most poignantly – I was still devoted to the basketball prospects of Birmingham-Southern in a way that would end badly soon after leaving DC.
I was also similarly enraged at politics – not at the same scale and not with as much abject panic as now, but you could see the beginnings of it. Not just in me, in the actual politics. By 2006, it was apparent that the future of the GOP rode on making gays and immigrants the 21st century version of the South’s dusky menace from the Jim Crow era, and I was angry about it. But after the Congressional wave in 2006, and then presumably after the Obama election, I guess I must have thought the tide had stemmed and we could switch to containment.
But I was also a lot less secure online. This wasn’t yet the social media era, although I did put my first Twitter handle on LJ in late 2007 so people could see where I wound up (and which is defunct now…of which). I was putting our phone number and address in LJ – not necessarily public-facing, but certainly into their servers whilst being followed by a bunch of people whose real names I didn’t know. Which tempers my indignance at people who fed Facebook all their data blithely. In fairness, I did go first and risk the slings and arrows, and I probably dodged a few bullets from having that much out there at a time when I worked for Apple, so I learned better without necessarily paying the price for it.
In fact, you could argue that this blog belongs to the person I regenerated into at the end of 2005 when the ride came to a complete stop. The LJ belonged to the person I was between 1998 and 2005 – someone who definitely wanted different things and lived a very different sort of life. That person would never have even considered a cottage on the San Mateo coast in the fog belt as his highest aspiration. There might not be signal there, after all. (In retrospect, I went through eleven phones on two carriers during the LJ era, basically a new phone every six months, and almost all in service of being able to get a reliable signal at work – something I wouldn’t get until 2009, two years into the iPhone era. I also recalled why I ever ditched my 703 phone number in the first place: there was no porting it into Apple and I couldn’t justify $800+ a year for a second line for data service when we’d just put our whole ass into a mortgage. I’m sad I lost that number, but I don’t regret it. We couldn’t afford that $800.)
The practical upshot of all this is: there is an old cliche that nobody ever journals about the good times, much like no one ever asks to speak to the manager to say how good their experience was. But it’s important to note the good times too. And I have made my peace with work – I’d love it if it were almost anyone else’s name on the door, but I have reasonable job security, a ton of vacation time, I get all the equipment I need, I can work from home, I’m project driven and not user-facing, and there is an identifiable career path if I do choose to go elsewhere and professional development happening in the meantime. I would have gladly killed any number of people to get to this point for most of the past 12 years, and much of the seven years preceding that. So let me record that I am duly grateful that for the first time in God knows how long, work is (mostly) not a constant contributor to my stress or depression. Cheers.