So I've been a quiet little primate around here recently, and as I was fuddling about with an old mail archive, I found some of my first postings to Brin-L from back in '97 or '98 (!) I cringe reading over the "adolescent" crap I've written over the years; I guess in some ways until I chose to move on with certain parts of my life I was always going to be stuck as an angry teenager, who, regardless of how smart they were, was doomed to always be the frothing anger-ball. I was looking back for old eJournal entries (from my blog, back before someone was hip enough to coin a term for them), doing a bit of self-examination. I've been struggling with a couple issues the past 2-3 months, both of which have really forced me to pull back from communities I once felt a part of, both real life and virtual.
One of them I guess I can talk about, and even ask a little philisophical irregulars Life Advice on. Early last month, I parted ways with Amazon.com.. ok, well, I was fired, by a boss I'd been having difficulty with for some months. Starting 2 weeks after I came out to him with my *ahem* situation, I started getting a series of negative reviews, work loads increasing, deadlines shortening, resources dwindling... in short, before I even realized what he was doing, he'd managed me out of the group and out of the company.
Blah! So I've been dealing with that, this complex set of feelings about the entire affair -- aren't I more than my job? When did I begin to define my success based on my paycheck
Like most everyone else, when you got out on your own and found out just how expensive it is to live, and realized that if you don't earn it, no one else is going to support you any more? :P
and not on my intrinsic value as a very smart, capable, talented human? For the first time in 9 1/2 years I don't have a job or any job prospects, and quite frankly, I don't really feel much like working at the moment.
See, I got a couple months salary as severence, cashed out the last of those dotCom stocks, and Unemployment Insurance, which I've been paying into for 15-16 years is pretty generous to me. I figure I've got about a year to sit and ponder, if I chose to do so.
I've been doing all the things that we're supposed to do in order to fulfill that bumper sticker quote "live each day as if it were your last" -- I learned to knit, I play poker 4-5 nights a week at the local casinos, I've travelled up and down the west coast, I went to Vegas, I went to a meeting of a group of people who make their own absinthe,
A non-poisonous version, one would hope.
I've designed a series of sculptures, I wrote poetry, I wrote the first draft of a puppet show using marionettes of famous villians from sci-fi and built the first few test marionettes of Cylons and Darleks (the Jophur are driving me crazy, mechanistically speaking!) I've reapplied for and been reaccepted at art school.
At what cost does one follow a dream? How do you detirmine when a dream is a directive, a demand, rather than an idle fantasy of what-ifs?
By trying it and seeing what happens?
-kerri, a little scattered, but thoughtful this evening-
IOW, about like the rest of us . . .
--Ronn! :)
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