works of wanderlust

Category: deeper thoughts

  • actually right

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What was your biggest achievement of the last year?

    Here it is again.

    I find I’m often getting tired of writing about my professional pursuits. And after all, sitting here penning out another post telling you all about them and how great it is going with the tech jobs is the so-called “right” answer. I’m supposed to have a shiny perfect resume. I’m supposed to have academic achievements under my belt. I’m supposed to rack up contract wins and be out her bragging about other business-type successes. At least… that’s what I’ve been railroaded to believing my whole damn life. Make lots of money. Have the perfect LinkedIn profile. Nine to five with benefits, right?

    Yet, I’m so very much realizing that I’m not that person. Not anymore, at least. Or, maybe it’s that I’ve never been him. It’s almost as tho I’m faking it most of the time, doing a solid enough job being a guy who can get shit done in technology or all the related bits and bobs in which I’ve worked for most of my life. I’m not half bad, and that might just be twenty five years of tallied up hours in that field playing out as raw experience, yet… it’s all a mask.

    See I left that world two and a half years ago… even tho the gravitational pull of it almost daily makes it seem like I will never fully escape. I walked away from “The Career” and tried to be something else, and after two and a half years I feel like I’m still explaining that to everyone, even myself.

    I panicked in my transition and I took a University program in Business Analysis last spring, finishing it up as the summer arrived. It looks nice on the resume, but until I actually lock a job in it it doesn’t mean much more than that I passed some tests and did well on some assignments. And I never really knew if it is actually what I wanted to do, but it seemed… again… like the “right” thing to do. 

    I started a small business, too, and most people in that position would be exclusively occupied with making that work and finding new customers and building and growing and on and on. I do work but it’s more just like a part time job I have, sitting over here on the desk, that makes me feel less disconnected from the world in which I was mired for multiple decades. It felt like the next “right” step in whatever this adventure was, but now it’s just there taunting me.

    But then what did I accomplish this year? Actually.

    I didn’t sell any art.

    I didn’t finish my novel.

    I didn’t complete the code for my game.

    I could give you a very unsatisfactory answer to all this tho and it goes as such: this year I’ve broken down the problem even further and revealed the raw skin under the lifetime of metaphorical wounds. I am starting to get it. I am starting to actually understand myself and the purpose of where I need to go, what I need to do, and who I need to be: it’s more than the “right” answer of a professional such and such or a guy in this or that job. It’s bigger, at least for me from my perspective it is. It may mean almost nothing to anyone else, but then everyone has their own to worry about don’t they. But I am figuring out mine… which has never been entirely clear even though I’ve always been told what the “right” answer is.  But then the right answer was never a very good answer, and figuring that bit out might just be my biggest achievement of the last year.

  • ask me again next year

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Compared to this time last year are you happier or sadder?

    At the end of this month it will have been exactly two and a half years since I left that stable job and set out on an adventure of random and self employment. Two. And a half. Years.

    It was a story of burnout and change and balance and adventure. It is strange however, how I always seem pin that transition back to personal happiness—even now, a quarter of a decade later. 

    Last December I was quasi-employed at one of my side-gig adventures. I can’t tell you if I was happy precisely. The job was great on paper, shitty in reality. The people were interesting and fun, but the relationships were fleeting and shallow. The hours were trash, but I simultaneously had a lot of free time to write and code and a kind of routine of stability and hope that it was going somewhere.

    A year later I’ve left that place behind, been through a professional training program, started my own corporation, earned money doing technology things, and seem to have found a bit of professional balance (even if the pay is still pretty sickly.) 

    Happier was inevitable, I think.

    If that is the only measure, though, I don’t think it paints a fulsome picture.

    I am healthier, too. I seem to have solved (at least diagnosed) the problem behind this chronic cough I’ve had for a couple years. 

    I am sleeping better. Or, at least I feel less tired than in a long time and—well, you know how it feels like you had a good sleep because you wake up alert and remembering these vast and rolling narrative dreams that fill your head and heart with a blur of “what was that all about?” vibes. Yeah. That.

    My kid is doing well. My dog is cuddlier. I have good friends.

    The weather is still meh, but apart from moving across the ocean there is not much hope to fixing that part of my life besides embracing the winter.

    What else can I say, I suppose? I started posting here again in the interim between of those two points in time, this time last year and now, so perhaps the very act of routinely writing and posting and feeling like I can articulate the very notion of this passage of time and in doing so step back and look at it with even a bit of objectivity? Maybe that helps. Maybe seeing those notches of my year all lined up and progress being made, tracking the adventure of this thing untethered from some kind of vague professional virtue signalling, maybe that’s the thing that sets the tone of everything else. 

    I dunno. Ask me again next year.

  • on online

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What is your perspective on the culture of 2025?

    Can I write what I really want to write here without getting put on a list somewhere that prevents me from crossing borders? Hmm…

    I mean, you’re online. You’re almost certainly reading this on a screen, in a web browser, through a magic wire that connects you all those other people out there in the world. Online. Participating. Consuming. Having an opinion about things, huh?

    This question is basically a punch line this year. What’s the culture of the world in 2025? Um… yeah, about that.

    If you are reading this and you know me you are probably well aware that while I still poke and prod at the various social media platforms, I have reduced my participation there—all of theres—to about five percent of what it was even a year ago… which itself is a fraction of it was, say, five years ago. I haven’t done this because I’ve become some sort of technophobe or whatever, but for a reason of culture. Online culture is dark and f-ed up beyond explanation these days. It hurts to go online. Literally hurts. I have palpitations and gurgling stomach acid in my throat. This isn’t because I’m triggered or offended, but rather because I’m beyond saddened by the raw evil that has spawned in those spaces, and then almost moreso, the meta-evil that embraces it and fans it and blurts out with joyous laughter at the pain of strangers. If you are a person who think this is some kind of exaggeration then look at the medium you are reading these words upon because it’s probably not a screen and you’re probably not online. 

    Simply put, the culture of 2025, or at least the culture that has dominated and blasted and consumed our attentions is shit.  And it’s not clear it is on track to improve next year. Hold on.

  • puppy love

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Without asking how would
    people describe you in 2025?

    We all want to viewed favourably, don’t we? 

    I mean I’m sure there are exceptions out there, oddball folks who thrive on division and get off on people hating them. Just look at the internet after all: it’s like a zoo for people like that, all coming together to troll out in public and we all clutch our pearls at the things they say and write. They love it. We love to hate it. It drives the death spiral of our society and we keep trudging. 

    But I mean moooost of us want people to think favourably of us, right?

    But I hate this question. Hate it. I wrote this list a long time ago and I’ve used pieces of it on multiple iterations of this blog and each year I ask myself why I keep including it. It’s a dumb validation-seeking terrible question.

    I guess I’m just getting old or something because each year I see this question and I feel less and less inclined to give it a serious answer. I just don’t really care… in that I don’t care to explain any personal need to be validated as a good honest person in the same way that I think we all feel.  And I shouldn’t need to. So essentially this question (and my answer) just becomes yet another whiny self-affirming therapy session out in public, doesn’t it?

    How do people describe me? Hell, I wear a different hat with virtually everyone I know these days so what does it matter, then? I’m generally a mishmash of who I need to be for the people who I need to be that for, and all of it just shades of who I really am and what song I happen to be dancing to on a given date, time, or event. It’s ninety percent performance, isn’t it? Really? When you think about it? Are you the same person for everyone you meet? Or do you act differently around family versus coworkers versus close friends versus the people in that club you belong to versus a waiter at a restaurant? And which one is really you? Or do you save yourself for just you, when you are alone and are listening to music or playing with your dog.

    So I guess in the end that’s probably the better question and answer: Without asking how would your dog describe you in 2025?

    For me, that’s both easier and far more meaningful that the other question: the dog is laying a few feet away opening her eyes just enough every minute or so to peek through her sleepy haze to confirm that I haven’t moved from my keyboard. She follows me around and seems to feel this doting affection for me. I feed her. Walk her. Let her outside to pee. And she looks to me when she wants something… so through her eyes I guess I can’t be such a bad guy, huh?

  • third-place-less

    I’m sitting in a coffee shop trying to do some writing, but first I needed to get some words off my chest: this was fifth out-of-the house writing location I tried. It’s shortly after lunchtime on a Monday in October and the first four locations I tried—including three other cafes and the local public library—were so stuffed full of people that I would have been squatting in the corner hoping for a sympathy chair had I stayed longer than walking in and right back out again.

    We’ve stopped making third places.

    Or, if you want to call coffee joints third places, we’ve stopped making the kind of third places where you don’t need to spend anywhere from three to eight bucks to buy a drink so you can use their wifi guilt-free for an hour… tho, even then, I had to drive in a loop of about fifteen kilometres just to find one with a spare seat.

    First places are where we live.

    Second places are where we learn, work and contribute.

    Third places are where we go to be social and thrive and be outside of the other two places. I like to write and create and think in third places… but this usually means I do most of my writing and creating and thinking over an expensive coffee in a local Starbucks. 

    Fair enough, there’s a teachers strike on right now and the library being packed with teenagers who are off school because of the labour dispute was not a surprise, but I’ve been there on any other given day and finding an empty chair is always a roll of the dice.

    And true, when I go out at 8am with my writing device ready I usually have my pick of places to be a write and create and think and sit pretty much anywhere I want in the doing of those things.

    But we’re not a society that creates public buildings to just hang out in. There’s a local rec centre, but I’ve checked there, too, often and found it just as hopping busy as any cafe or library, it’s thirty or forty seats filled with people who beat me to the punch with their computers or whatever.

    Parks are wonderful third places, as is the bragging rights of the city having an absolutely enormous river valley trail system filled with nooks and crannies. But too, we live in a winter city, so on a cool, late-autumn day when the rain is off and on and the wind is blowing a pre-winter chill, sitting outside is not a great place with a sketchbook let alone an expensive laptop computer. 

    Where are our third places?

    Certainly if you have a few bucks to throw at a coffee or a beer or a hamburger you can sit in a cafe or a pub or a fast food restaurant. Is that the healthiest situation for a society? I have written elsewhere, or maybe even here, on the trouble with losing our third places, the virtualization of our seconds and the isolation of our firsts. The ones we have left are filled with social media trolls and AI ghosts in the machine or pay-to-play hot seats at a bustling corporate cafe, and it all seems a little sickly and sad. Even more so as winter creeps closer day by day and I remember that I’ll be trapped in my house for weeks on end soon, hunkering down and trying to find the motivation that is so much more clear and urgent when I’m out and about in public.

    Either that, or I’ll drive around looking for a warm seat in what is left of the third places, shell out my three bucks for a mediocre coffee and try and feel like the world is not blurring into something even more isolating than in already seems.