Tuesday, September 25, 2007

not like riding a bike

I haven't written in a long time. Longer than I think I've ever really taken a break from this thing, whatever it really is. It's been a big roller coaster these past few months. Stressful, busy days at work. Depressing, difficult stuff in my personal life (family stuff, not Amanda). Life's been hard. One or the other is okay. At least you can deal with personal stuff if work isn't demanding 100 hour work weeks from you - or at least you can deal with work if you personal life isn't constantly nagging at you for attention and clouding your focus.

Things have been hard. Work has been a bit of a safety net, to be honest. Work is emotionless. Work is predicated upon professionalism and financial decisions, not shaky concepts such as loyalty, respect, and love. And the more I work, the more I can not focus on the depressing personal stuff that I don't have any control over, input into, or even real-time interaction with.

The problem is, the more I work, the worse things get for other elements of my personal life. I hate how much my work effects my ability to spend time with Amanda. There are times when I feel like a workaholic. And yet, I know that I would be totally fine handing this work off to someone else, if only there was someone else to hand it off to. I want to have a normal life back. I want to do things like go to the grocery store, or iron, or eat dinner with my wife. Normal stuff. But after working so hard for so long, I find it very difficult to go back to "normal."

I feel like I'm slacking off if I leave work at 6. It feels like I've only worked a half day. And then I go home and part of me is always thinking about work - what do I have to do tomorrow, what do I have to manage, what needs to be delegated/reassigned/put off until some other aspect of something is cleared up. I go to bed thinking about work. I dream about work. I wake up thinking about work.

I just want separation from it. I want to get back to a point where I'm able to leave the office at the office, leave the office at a normal hour and not feel guilty about it, and then go home and enjoy my time with Amanda.

Right now, I don't have that. And more depressingly for me, she doesn't have that either.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

christ ...

It's been one fucking difficult week, and it's not even over yet. I haven't written at all because I honestly don't know how to put down what's been going on. Suffice it to say, there's some bad stuff going on in my family right now. Really bad stuff. Problem is, I'm not even sure I know how deep the bad actually goes. Unfortunately for me, that means that my imagination is running wild.

I'm not sleeping. I'm distracted at work. I spent Monday and Tuesday feeling like a zombie, got better by Wednesday, and then found out that things were worse than I originally thought and now I feel like a zombie again.

Amanda's been very helpful and has been trying to talk me through the jumbled mix of emotions I'm going through right now. Ry gets back from his whirlwind tour of the world today. I'm actually going to meet him at the airport between flights in order to just sit down and talk him through everything, since he's just getting back home to the situation now.

This sucks so bad.

Thursday, September 06, 2007

how many em bees in a gee bee?

While I wish my mom would just get remarried to a nice IT guy, in the meantime all of her tech support issues fall onto the shoulders of Ry or myself. Ry, particularly, is where she usually goes for help - much to his discomfort and annoyance. I only tend to get called if Ry is unreachable. So, with Ry out of the country right now on tour with NOFX, I become the second string family IT guy.

Tonight I had the pleasure of trying to diagnose and trouble-shoot setting up a home wireless network over the phone. This is how things always go. Everything is always over the phone and it's always like trying to talk an infant through ... well ... setting up a home wireless network.

Me: Okay, well ... there are a number of things that you're asking me that I don't know because I don't know your computer's system specs.
Mom: I have a PowerMac G4. It has 512 em bees and 128 em bees.
Me: (long pause while I figure out that she means how many megs of RAM the computer has) Okay.
Mom: And I'm using OS X version 10.2.9. The software the man sold me is saying that I need OS X 10.4. Do I need to buy a new computer?
Me: No, mom. You can upgrade your system software without having to buy a new computer.
Mom: You can?

Etc. I'm convinced that when wicked IT people die and go to hell, they have to spend eternity helping my mom turn her iMac into a stand-alone web server.