{"id":2434,"date":"2017-02-27T11:44:08","date_gmt":"2017-02-27T19:44:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2434"},"modified":"2017-02-27T11:44:08","modified_gmt":"2017-02-27T19:44:08","slug":"not-only-is-that-mother-big-but-he-packs-a-45","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2434","title":{"rendered":"Not only is that mother big but he packs a .45"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here we sit, 365 days on, and everything is just as it was the year before, and the year before that, and the year before that. \u00a0The goal is the same, but I seem to be falling shorter of it with every passing orbit round the sun. \u00a0Ever more cognizant that the world, or God, or Loki, or whoever \u2013 <\/em>nobody owes you a happily ever after. \u00a0Stephen Schwarz\u2019s Godspell notwithstanding, it\u2019s not always all for the best. And the days may be long and drag on, but the years go flying by, each one faster than the last.
<\/em><\/p>\n

I felt it more this year than ever before. \u00a0Friends and family leave town \u2013 over the hill or up the coast or across the country. \u00a0Others fight through health issues, of increasing seriousness. Work becomes ever more intolerable, to the point where I not only despair of it ever getting better, but despair of it being any better anywhere else. \u00a0I feel like I\u2019ve been spinning my wheels for too long, marking time, treading water, abiding by what\u2019s safe and secure even as the safe ground slowly crumbles beneath us.
<\/em><\/p>\n

Right now, if the Old Scratch himself appeared before me, offering to jump me ahead to age 60, but I\u2019d be retired, with my wife and a healthy pension, and a cottage in a cold seaside town where the cops still carry revolvers and the coffee shop is still where you go for bacon and eggs and gossip, and where the one dive bar in town has a fireplace and doesn\u2019t sell anything more exotic or complicated than Guinness, and where the sputtering air-cooled VW can get us around without the hassle and strain of walking on a bad back\u2026I\u2019d have to think long and hard before turning it down. \u00a0Assuming I would.<\/em><\/p>\n

Feb 27, 2014<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Not a lot has changed in the last three years, it seems. Work isn\u2019t as bad as it was – the day-to-day doesn\u2019t involve user-facing support any longer, and the turnover in org structure has left me with less annoyance and more peace and quiet (for now). But the one big project that I\u2019m consumed with is something I genuinely don\u2019t find that interesting, and other people are carrying it further and faster, and it\u2019s still at the same terrible employer in the same terrible town. And when my boss and I discuss my future job prospects looking five years down the road, the options seem to be JAMF administrator here, or JAMF administrator in the larger organization, or JAMF administrator in another private-sector larger organization\u2026and maybe if I was moving into a place where I didn\u2019t have to build the underlying server from scratch (with no help from what is ostensibly a data center group that hosts and administers Linux systems), and be somewhere it would be possible to use the bulk of what JAMF can do without political obstacles or the interference created by a cockamamie networking infrastructure, it might<\/em> be more desirable. But right now, barely hanging on to keep up with an unnecessarily complicated system that will eventually let us do 25% of what it\u2019s capable of\u2026it isn\u2019t what I\u2019d planned on.<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t what I\u2019d planned on.<\/em> Carve that on my tombstone. Not that I ever had a plan. Just a sense of where my life ought to have been by now, and you can argue that the two biggest mistakes of my life were just that because they each cost me three to four years. Better college choice means I don\u2019t waste three years in grad school trying to make up the difference. If I stay at Apple and let myself move away from being technical all the time, I don\u2019t lose four years between a government subcontract with no benefits and then trying to work my way up to the salary I walked away from in October 2007. And to be honest, looking at my present life circumstances would be a lot sunnier from age 37, say, than it is from 45.<\/p>\n

Because the future doesn\u2019t look bright. We\u2019re going to be stuck with a weak, stupid, selfish, obnoxious prick with a 70-year-old Fox viewer\u2019s worldview in the Oval Office for years. Not only does that mean hell to pay on immigration and foreign relations and health care, it means that by the time the smoke clears, Comcast and AT&T and Verizon might be the only three providers of Internet access in America. And Caltrain might never have any increase in capacity while the roads get even worse. And we could wind up with a screaming cable pundit on the Supreme Court. God only knows what my retirement or health care might look like – and how grateful am I that I had the nose surgery last March and find myself much more able to breathe than ever I was before? – and it\u2019s to the point now that I don\u2019t feel confident that I could go visit Ireland and come back without some meathead wanting to dig through my phone. The whole entire world is on the edge of a knife, and will be for a long, long time. And that makes it impossible to exhale, to relax, to say \u201cit is what it is\u201d – and I\u2019m white and male and well-off. If everyone else reacted like white men, we\u2019d already be in a shooting war in the United States, because if Hillary Clinton had been made President with three million fewer votes than Trump and the Congress was under Democratic control, I guarantee you the redneck white trash would be spraying bullets in every direction.<\/p>\n

My instinct is to escape. Find things to take refuge in – the books, the pub, the dozens of California\u2019s Gold<\/em> episodes on the DVR, the return of baseball. The only problem is that every time I escape into something, the real world is right here waiting, and it won\u2019t be fixed in a day, or a week, or a month, or a year, or possibly several years. If ever. Given that this is twenty years since I embarked on this career – and ten years after that second big mistake that set me back – it\u2019s hard not to look behind and be angry at what the view forward looks like. Because you can\u2019t say \u201cit\u2019s all going to be OK in the end.\u201d There\u2019s every possibility it isn\u2019t. And right now, all I want is to make sure that in my despair and rage and depression, I don\u2019t make another five-year mistake. It\u2019s bad enough being at the midpoint of my working life without the prospect of not having age 65 as the get out of jail free date.<\/p>\n

So\u2026what now? Try to reach out to old friends. Try to find some way to make new ones. Try to find something to be interested in, something that will be a distraction without making things worse the way my brief Vanderbilt sports blogger career did. Turn off the news, cancel the Twitter account, keep the world at arm\u2019s length and just try not to think about it. Whatever it<\/em> may be.<\/p>\n

Because if there\u2019s one thing that\u2019s never helped me in my entire life, it\u2019s having too much to think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here we sit, 365 days on, and everything is just as it was the year before, and the year before that, and the year before that. \u00a0The goal is the same, but I seem to be falling shorter of it with every passing orbit round the sun. \u00a0Ever more cognizant that the world, or God, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Not only is that mother big but he packs a .45”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2434"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2434\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}