Unplugged. I've just spent a glorious week utterly unplugged. No shoes (ahh!), No phone (wow!), no cell (eek!), no email (gasp!). Nothing but lazing about, swimming, snorkling, hiking, and volcano watching on the big island of Hawaii. Just back, and paying for my week off with a red-eye hangover and 1598 incoming messages flowing like so much molten lava into my inbox. [raelity bytes [--]]

Oh bitter envy. To be unplugged again. Were it not so tightly tied to the job search, I'd follow suit in a heartbeat... Probably.

Approaching 2 weeks ago I spent the better part of the weekend at my sister's apartment in Weehawken. Now Weehawken isn't exactly rural. They have a view of the Manhattan Skyline which I have to grudgingly admit is better than the one I have from Brooklyn Heights. (But at least my state doesn't smell like that :-P)

They live on the top floor of a fairly old house, complete with an octagonal room, half ringed in windows. It's a wonderful place to be when there's weather. This weekend there was plenty. Lightning and Thunder, rain galore.

They (my sister and her boyfriend) went to bed something soon after midnight, and I stayed up, watching war coverage for a couple more hours (I don't watch television at home. It was pretty creepy. But I digress.)

Most of the windows were open and it was raining like hell, the drops pattered on the roof and the lightning flashed in the window. Occasionally a car would pass underneath, splashing through puddles, making very little noise otherwise.

After a very short while I turned down the volume on the television and closed my eyes. The drumming of the rain and the smell of the fresh moist air instantly filled my senses. I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed that. Forgotten entirely. I drifted off to sleep a few times before moving into their guest bedroom for a more physically comfortable sleep.

My own apartment is on the top floor of a 6 floor building, built in the late 19th century as "low income housing" in Brooklyn. The roof is thick. The walls are straight. It's quite a beautiful building. There is no sound coming from outside ever, other than that of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway which I live directly above. It's a dull white noise, broken by the occasional screech of tires and the somewhat (though not extremely) rare sound of a resulting crash. It's a wall of sound just loud enough that I can never pretend I don't hear it, just thick enough that no sound of weather can ever permeate it.

I've spent the better part of two weeks going frequently back to that hour, sitting on their couch, listening to the rain druming politely on the roof, broken by the odd rolling thunder.

But most of all I've been amazed and aghast that I had forgotten. Forgotten! how much I loved that sound. The smell of ionized air, the occasional flutter of the window treatments as a solid breeze makes you think twice about having the windows open in this storm. It's one thing to miss a facet of living in a more gentle environment; to make excuses, accomadations and compensations for their absence. But it's another thing entirely to forget what it is you loved.

And that frightened me.

It only stands to reason, of course. Your memory of the past is based on where you are in the present. Like the memory of an old lover crossed with your mood. How at times you only remember how blissfully happy you were in her arms, how much at home. When at others you can't rationalize where your syrupy projections could possibly have come from or why they would be directed towards that self-absorbed witch. Same girl, same guy, you get the picture.

All this very much changes the equation when considering whether or not I'm going to leave New York City on the soon (couple-few years.)

Because it leads me to a place I didn't know was there: What else have I forgotten?

Don't get me wrong. I love my city. It's been the closest thing to home for me since the girl mentioned above ;-). I've identified with it for years. I was born in Brooklyn and to Brooklyn I returned after 25 or so years of existing in various suburbs in Long Island, Westchester, and western Connecticut. But it has worn on me, and I'm at a place in my life where I have to ask myself if I want to work on the emotional exoskeleton required to really be at home here. Phrased like that, it's a simple question.

What about you? What are the things you turn around and realize suddenly have gone from your life unexpectedly? Are they worth getting back? Or is that "progress"?

I'm not trying to be pithy about starting a discussion. I'm really trying to understand how people deal with this.

11:18:27 PM    comment []

My ability to manage and use time effectively is among the worst in the known world, I've no doubt. I'll "space out" for hours at a clip, only vaguely moving towards accomplishing anything; an email here, a scribbled note there, some socks picked up and placed in to an overfilled hamper, off of which they immediately roll landing in a more or less permanent position on the floor.

I am not bored. I am not without things that need doing. I've no lack of interests. There are many demands on my attention and my time. Any mood to accomplish I might have is met with an infinity of opportunities to fulfill it. It's not that there's too little for me to do, by far.

It's far closer to the truth to say that I've so much to do that I accomplish virtually nothing.

Commitment phobia of a sort is a real culprit. But even that doesn't say much, giving instead a strange picture of relationship phobia. What this amounts to is that I have so many things going on in my head, especially when it comes to the list of things that need doing, that I fear committing to doing one, lest the others fall by the wayside. Of course, this is goofy at best. It is the most foolproof way of accomplishing nothing, absolutely nothing.

Then there is the matter of prioritization. Cleaning my apartment for instance, is a task that has remarkably little urgency involved. However this is the place where I live, work (insofar as my job is finding work) and spend most (nearly all) of my "leisure" time. The state of the place itself has to have some vast analog effect on my clarity of mind and ability to relax. For instance, as it stands there is only one place in my apartment where I can actually "sit" and that is in this chair, in front of the computer. It's a shoddy old desk chair (one that's served me well for years, but is about to give up the ghost) and is simply not comfortable enough to "lounge" in.

When seen that way, as for some reason I avoid doing, the solution to the problem seems simple beyond all reckoning. Make a list of what I need to do, allocate some time per, and dedicate myself to the task at hand, pausing only to add things to the list if I'm somehow reminded of things I'd missed.

Why I've not executed that most simple of disciplines I really don't understand. There's just not that much to it. It's no doubt related to the whole ADD thing, but I'm loathe to blame things on that as it really seems like the ultimate cop-out.

However, I cannot ignore the part it plays in my life. Doing that in the past has resulted in very little more than a marginally increased sense of self-riteousness at the amount of responsibility (read: guilt) I'm willing to accept for my inactions and a radically decreased ability to do something about it.

Compounding the problem is that very nearly every aspect of my life is in flux right now. My living situation is made tenuous by the fact that I don't have April's rent (yep, it's April 2nd as of this writing.) My choice of vocation is in rather consistent question. There is no particular seat in which I can rest, take solace, and regroup.

All solutions really revolve around removing things from the swirling vortex of chaos that is my attention. Making lists will achieve that insofar as I am able to place my trust in the list. Cleaning my apartment removes things from my direct attention.

There's no magic here (nor any magick.) It's simply a matter of discipline and common-sense (always be wary of "common sense" unless it's by Tom Paine.) That first bit is what I seem to have trouble with. But bitching about it has no positive effect. It only serves to make me more internally agitated.

1. Post this to The Pulpit
2. Create a notification post on the top-level blog.
3. Refine this over time.

Help?

9:20:22 PM    comment []

"the moment you compromise your own ideas, you're a candidate for mediocrity."
- From the Neil Simon play "Biloxi Blues"

This is a sentiment that rings through my head every time I start to put something down on paper (virtual or otherwise.) I do have trouble understanding how to implement it though.

In the beginning I sought to be complete and thorough in my writing and posting (that latter part being the difficult bit.) "Don't pull punches" in essence. But It's been close to a year and I've made some serious mistakes in determining the content of this weblog.

On one hand, I enjoy the morally superior self-riteousness of posting "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." On the other hand, that's a load of "morally superior, self-riteous" bullshit. If I'm seeing someone, do my innermost thoughts about that really belong on the weblog? (What, you thought there would be conflict in any other area?) Of course not.

There are things I want to throw out there, things I want to discuss, bounce around and speak freely about. Yet the crossover between my online presence and my meatspace presence is in the high 90 percentile, so it's impractical at best, a downright betrayal at worst.

It's been many months since I've made such a mention. It would be pointless to go looking for it because I've retroactively nuked the entries. Suffice it to say it detonated in my personal life with disastrous and irrevocable effects.

But still the things I feel most compelled to write about are therefore verboten topics. That just doesn't seem right either. So I have a (couple) anonymous blogs where I post all kinds of sordid details without names, accountability, or the chance of a trace back to me. But it's tough for me to get it up to post there (to be indelicate) and I think in 6 months I've gotten as many hits on those sites, which tends to defeat the purpose.

So what to do? I feel the very purpose of this weblog is being compromised by it's presence. Of course that's my fault for having had the url in my .sig file for the first 10 months I published. So I've put myself in a situation of such utter incompatable frustration.

I do see one solution that's rapidly approaching. My subscription to Radio is up in a matter of weeks. That's right, no more UCCU unless I decide to shell out the meager $40 to renew. But most of my blogging has nothing to do with any of these kinds of things. It's the "me too" posts, quasi-political punditry, and an increasing amount of actual content on programming projects, etc. These are things I do need to be tagged, for instance, to my Ryze page (ok, the punditry could go.)

The opportunity to start over does exist, and it might not be a bad thing.

Thoughts?

8:02:26 PM    comment []

I'm a "member" of the Yahoo Group New York Metro Technology Jobs. It's really just a broadcast list of tech job recs in the tri-state area. The guy who started it, Jeff Altman, has both a website associated with the group and a blog called The Market over on blogspot, which I just found.

ANYway, there's a story on there that scared the ...err... scared me half to death How a Layoff Led to Lattés And a Happy New Career. It doesn't scare me that someone would have to resort to making Lattes, it scares me that I might be hanging on to software development so tightly that I can't see the forest for the trees. Is not having an opportunity my big opportunity?

Or is "Would you like foam with that?" the 21st century "Would you like fries with that?"

6:03:42 PM    comment []