Tag Archives: life balance - Page 3

Missing The Creative

Posted by on February 25, 2014 No comments

It happened again.

Quite a while ago, I wrote about inspiration and timing and how life gets in the way of being creative.  This morning, I got stuck in a traffic jam from an accident and was watching some of the cars jockeying for position and stealing any small space they could get.  It got me thinking of the typical sociological study of humans dealing with scarcity of resources.

A short story started to form in my mind with all the elements I typically rant about: overpopulation, class warfare, unwillingness to work together, entitlement (not of the typically-accused have-nots, but of the have-enough-demand-mores), all set in a dystopian future, which seems closer every year.  But the more I built the elements up in my mind, the more they got crowded out by the things I had to do today at work.

Ah, what if I wasn’t working?  I could get out of the traffic jam, grab a notebook and jot down ideas.  Then when I got home, I could start writing a nice, depressing short story.  I recently read a Stephen King book – I think it was “On Writing.”  King talks about his experience being a writer and some of the ways to be an effective writer.  The biggest thing I got out of the book is the balance between being alone so you can create and getting out and building experience and inspiration to create.

I suppose it could be possible that I could carry this idea for the rest of the day and work on it after work, but I’m in a profession where you have to use your brain pretty heavily throughout the day, so I can’t keep these ideas up in the air like juggling balls.  Back in the old days of pizza delivery, absolutely, I could.  But, life gets in the way.

Change For The Good, Right Now

Posted by on April 10, 2013 No comments

In the “these things happen to other people” news, I’ve been a target of a hacker.  As hacks go, it was fairly significant – my EBay account.  The hacker bought a whole bunch of stuff, surprisingly not using my linked PayPal account.  EBay locked my account quickly, notified me, and took care of most all the issues with fees and listings.  Regardless, I felt obligated to apologize to a bunch of people who got caught up in the mess.  One person had actually shipped the product by the time I emailed them.

I’ve been online a long time and my password strength has grown with the ever-increasing threat.  I’ve felt I’ve had a decent password, but I suffer from what a lot of people probably do, and that is password entropy – using the same password on every site.  Well, that’s not entirely true since I do use a variant of my main password for those sites that don’t support the special characters I used.

Now it’s time to get real.  Just before I discovered my eBay account was hacked, I had dealt with some spammer sending me over 7000 emails of random text.  So I was giving consideration to changing my email address, and why not have a different email address for every site?  So my email address for Bank of America would be bankofamerica.com@mydomain.com and for Expedia it would be expedia.com@mydomain.com.  This would be relatively easy to remember and would identify if anyone sold my email address to another company or if my email was stolen or harvested.

But at the time, I felt a bit overwhelmed with the task of changing ALL my emails.  Now, since I have to change ALL my passwords, I might as well go through with it.  In addition, I’ve decided to use a password manager, KeePass.  It seems to be a pretty slick utility and I’m surprised I never gave it a chance before. I think my main reason for avoiding it was that I never wanted to be unable to access a website because I didn’t know my password.

But upon closer inspection of that fear, it is very similar to other fears that keep you from (positive) change.  The fringe cases override everything.  It seems everyone is afraid of the word “can’t,” because it is only interpreted in its absolute and permanent sense.  It’s not “I can’t do this,” it’s “I can’t do this right now.” And the “right now” part is what makes the modern time so awesome, hectic, and dangerous.

So, with KeePass, I can have a password file on my home computer and there’s a version for my phone that I can keep synched.  That should be well enough to let me do what I need when I need to.  And for the other cases, it’s going to have to be the other person disappointed when I say “I can’t” because I’m not going to let it control me.

The Benjamins. Yeah… About Them

Posted by on February 18, 2013 No comments

Jobs are like a second life.  In this second life, you have work to do, you can have relationships, you can have good and bad “existences”.  I’ve seen co-workers come and go in all different manners.  Some people are squeezed out and their departure is no surprise, some leave suddenly, voluntarily or not.  Some people you want to go and some you want to keep.  And in every case of departure, as with a departure in the first life, there is some soul-searching and some situational evaluation.  Very recently, some news was broken that one of our work family members was leaving.  My reaction to the details of the departure  was unlike others I had previously.

This person had come to us less than 6 months ago.  He came from a job he disliked and he fit in with us very well.  Moreover, he was a hard worker and had excellent skills.  In my opinion, he was going to go far in our company.  This all ended when he put in his two weeks notice.  In IT, there’s always new opportunities and new challenges to take on.  Developers are eager to apply their skills in a new environment, and many cases, fellow workers wish them well, because they understand the excitement of going off to tackle new problems and come up with great new solutions.

But not this time.  This developer was going back to his old job.  Why?  Because they offered him a boatload of money.  That’s the only reason, and it’s the only reason I need to write him off completely.  He knows he’s going to have to work harder, because the dev team at his old job has mostly quit.  He knows he’s going to have to sacrifice his personal time to be on call.  He knows he’s going to be working with the same management he didn’t get along with before.  For what?  Money.

I can forgive job hopping for money when you’re in your 20’s and 30’s, because there’s lots more time to find the company that’s right for you and you should get good and bad experiences so you know what to look for. But this guy should be old enough (my age) to know a good thing when he sees it. But he sees nothing but money.  He’s a whore.  That designation fits very well since he’s commented about putting in a year and getting $x more.  Giving up an incredible job at an incredible company to plan to leave another company in the lurch after a year after pocketing their generous offer.  Don’t come back knocking when you’re done with that one.

I’m taking his decision very personally.  In a sense, I feel like I’ve been used.  Like I’ve been the best boyfriend/girlfriend ever, and six months in, was told, “You’ve been great, but I’m going back to my old boyfriend/girlfriend because they make more money.”  “But they beat you!”  “Yeah, but it’s not that bad, and I can buy nicer things.” 

Money won’t buy you happiness, and I’m looking forward to the day he realizes that.  I’ll give him about three months for the reality to settle in.

The Violent Life

Posted by on December 27, 2012 No comments

Today, I made a follow-up call to one of my mortgage companies, who confirmed some bad news to me.  I guess relatively, it’s not bad news at all, it’s just information.  Time is quickly running out for HARP refinancing, and my primary mortgage company extended me a really nice offer that could save me a couple hundred a month in payments.  However, when I called to redeem that offer, I was deemed ineligible because my secondary mortgage holder wasn’t on the “approved list”.  So I called the secondary company today and they confirmed that they were not participating in that program.

So what did I do then? Nothing.  I politely thanked the woman and ended the call.  I didn’t rant at her.  I didn’t punch a wall or cry and yell.  I didn’t curse the politicians or banks.  And I didn’t start scheming.  I just kept driving home.  Nothing had changed.  I wasn’t any worse off than I was before I started this re-fi process.  As I drove, I thought of a moment a couple days ago where I forgot to provide my rewards card at a costly restaurant and missed a decent amount of reward points.  Again, I didn’t get angry.  I didn’t insist on having the staff accommodate my mistake.  I shrugged and moved on.

Some people may hear these stories and say “Look at what you’re missing out on!” or “You’re ripping yourself off!”  And that’s what I’m trying to explain.  There’s a certain segment of the population that believes life is difficult and unfair – a battle that must be fought in order to succeed.  They’ve come up with motivational sayings like “Seize the day!” and “Grab life by the throat!”  They implore you to “take what’s yours” and “settle for nothing less”.  Such violent, aggressive images – why would life freely offer anything to them when they are constantly attacking it and taking whatever they can?

However, I feel I am a model case of success caused by working in harmony with life instead of fighting it every step of the way.  When opportunities are presented to me, I take them if I can, and if I miss them, there will always be another in the future.  If you would scoff and say I’m too passive to be successful, what’s your measure of success?  I’m very sure it’s not the same as mine.  If I had to get up each day and mentally plan an attack on everyone that’s out to take something that I might feel is rightfully mine, I would be miserable.  And I’m guessing those that do this are miserable, they just don’t know any differently.

I’m not making an excuse for laziness and total passivity.  You have to be engaged enough to act on your good fortune, and that can mean working and sometimes working hard.  Further, you have to be engaged enough to recognize your good fortune and give thanks for it.  Finally, you have to have the attitude that you are losing nothing.

So I wasn’t able to get a couple hundred off my mortgage payment.  I didn’t lose that offer; it was never mine to begin with.  For me to be upset about something that wasn’t mine is selfish and dwelling on it would make me lose focus on the real facts that I am getting by without that change.  I should be very grateful that is the case, with so many others that are not as fortunate. 

In summary, as cliché as it is, you need to focus on what you have been given and not what you feel you have been denied.