Decisions

May 23rd, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

So, I applied. I don’t mean I started to apply. I mean the application is in.

The simple fact is that I can’t keep doing this. I am completely burned out. It isn’t just that I don’t like what I do. I could handle that. We all have to do things we don’t enjoy from time to time. The real problem is that I don’t like who I am when I do the job I do. I don’t like what I become and, in all honesty, it is killing me. I spent two days away. Just two. Now yeah, I still did work but I took it easy. I concentrated on getting better not on the job I had to do.

In two days, I started to recover mentally and physically. I worked out this morning. I read a bit this afternoon. I actually laughed. I wrote. I smiled. I even cuddled my wife. I was, in short, me.

I like me. I like the me that is focused on words and stories and the people who tell them instead of machines and corporations and the people who run them. That me is the healthy me.

When I went back to college it wasn’t because I wanted a new job or some high paying career. I went back to find a person I left behind a long time ago. A person I was sure was gone and buried.

I found him. I am sure as hell not giving him up now.

So I applied to a Masters Program up North. I am ending this career and moving on. I am sure it won’t be easy. I may have even have to suffer some serious consequences to do it.

I was about to say that I have no choice, but I do have a choice.

I choose this.

Brushes with Death

May 21st, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

I spent most of the day inside an Urgent Care Facility in Plymouth, MN. About an hour and a half after I started work, I found myself coughing and wheezing a bit. I assumed I had a small cough or something and ignored it, but there was a growing tightness in my chest and that left me concerned.

There are places I am okay dying. I am okay dying right here at this computer in the middle of typing. I am okay dying in my sleep, at sea, in the jungles of Tahiti, in some massive car wreck, even in a hospital bed surrounded by the people who love me. All of those are acceptable places to die. I will not, nay cannot, die in the middle of a grey cubicle corporate wasteland.

So, I packed up and I left. I drove my chubby little behind to the nearest Urgent Care and I sat there until a series of very nice doctors and nurses took care of me.

I felt like I was eight all over again.

That was the year I had an asthma attack at a KoA Campground in Montana. We were supposed to sleep in a Teepee, but I woke in the middle of the night unable to breathe. My mom didn’t have any money so she took me to the onsite laundry because the humidity sometime helped to loosen my airways. It worked and I lived, but I remember that pressure, that lightness in my head mixed with the throbbing.

This time, they gave me a cool tricked out breathing tube with a foul tasting meds that kicked my heart up another 15 beats a minute or so but let me breathe a little better. They loaded me up with my prescriptions and sent me home. I am a good little droogie, though. I went back to work first and updated my boss and moved my cases around. I am working from home tomorrow but I am still working.

It sucks that I hate what I do so much because he is probably the best manager I have ever had. I so wish we were doing something else because, if I loved this job, I would be in absolute heaven. Instead, life is barely tolerable and it continues to take a toll. As it is, Courtney is sure that the job is killing me and I am only half-convinced she is crazy. I know that my health has been in free-fall ever since I went back into this industry and that is a bad thing.

Now, I just need a realistic way out. Before it really is too late.

Lies Sold Daily

May 7th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

The lies we tell ourselves are not always so overt. Sometimes, they come about merely as acts of omissions. These are lies born from the silence that seeps in and quietly washes over the more critical aspects of our thinking. Lies that carry names like denial, ignorance, and passive acceptance. Rather than merely deluding the lied to, these lies deceive the liar and lied to alike. Worse, they have the potential to be accepted as truth. They become a part of our perception of reality and that is where the real hell begins.

This is the path to misery. We see suffering and hurt, and we don’t fight. We accept it as a part of the status quo. We rationalize pain, poverty, and loss. We cease to struggle or care. It is okay to be meaningless and empty. We all are. At least there is food on the table. We believe that the only importance is the job, the position and the money. We spend our lives in pursuit of that. Education ceases to be about learning something new, becoming a better person and a more involved citizen and; instead, it becomes a chase to a better position. Art is about profit margins and creating with a buying audience in mind. Now, we even shape our existence to fit that lie. We sell ourselves. We cultivate our online presences. We build our custom profiles. We share a thousand items a day just so that we can make sure not to share anything real. What a shame it would be if some truth actually made up there.

New Form Tool in WordPress’s Jetpack Means Less CAPTCHAs!

April 26th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

I love the Akismet spam solution for WordPress. It captures the majority of my spam and doesn’t force my users to enter needless garbage just to make comments. Considering my comments have been sparse, after my hiatus, the last thing I want to do is discourage communication. With Akismet, I don’t have to.

Unfortunately, I still had to rely on those completely automated public Turing tests to tell computers and humans apart (CAPTCHAs) for my contact forms or risk the occasional flood of spam email. It was a devils bargain of sorts. I could make communication more difficult or I could deal with a spam sent from my own site. Neither option was preferred.

Enter the newest version of WordPress’s Jetpack plugin which now includes a nifty, new and highly customizable form tool that actually funnels the messages through Akismet and integrates the emails directly with the WordPress dashboard under the Feedbacks tab.

Simply put, it is an incredible addition. I loved what Contact Forms was doing, but the Akismet integration alone is enough to get me to switch. The flexibility and functionality have been truly impressive so far. I can’t wait to test some more complex examples.

Oh you can find Jetpack and all its neat little toys here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/jetpack/.

What Moves Us?

April 25th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

My mother and I don’t agree on much. She is a hardcore fundamentalist and I, on a good day, could be called a secular humanist. For most of my adult life, we have agreed to disagree on many of the big topics that come up. We don’t touch religion or politics since, for my mother, there is no difference between the two. We tend to keep to the safe topics. When we do talk, we talk about the challenges of the day, of family, and then of little else. She is content to live deep in the woods of the Upper Peninsula and while I love the beauty of the place and will always have a warm place in my heart for Northern Michigan University and Marquette, I am very happy here in the Twin Cities.

This isn’t about the distance between a mother and a son, though. This is about the things that keep us going. My mom has a dream. It is a dream that drives her every day. It is the reason she gets up every morning in a little cabin in the middle of the woods and feeds far too many horses on a budget that barely covers her rent. She wants to run a horse camp for troubled and needy children. Now for her, this involves religious outreach which tends to temper how involved I get. I still do what I can, though. I take care of her brochures. I write her an action plan and design her website.

It is the least I can do from my nice and comfy apartment in the middle of the city.

My mom, she lives hard. She told me that this evening. She lives hard and she is starting to feel it. She’s not as young as she once was and the mornings are still cold and the buckets of water and feed weigh more every day. Still, she stands up and she goes. She lives hard, but she lives with meaning.

She lives to help.

We may never be able to see eye-to-eye but I certainly hope I can live a life just as focused.

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