Better living through apathy

Lately, I've been feeling a strong sense of isolation. My new job requires working from home, which is great. I've worked from home for more than four years, and then spent a bit more than a year at another job that required actually leaving the house to work.

I never really felt isolated before, but I do now. I think it's because writing doesn't require working with a group -- but doing systems admin does require group work occasionally, but I feel completely isolated from my co-workers. I feel detached and not at all connected to the other people I work with. Not a pleasant feeling really.

Not sure the new gig is working out. The job would be a lot to chew on no matter what, but there's been virtually no "training" and there's a lot of custom stuff that requires special knowledge - some of which is easily available, some of which is hard to come by and requires cornering the previous admin to try to pump them for information. Not easy, not fun, very frustrating.

When I was a young kid, I always thought it would be great to get older and be able to make my own decisions - when to go to bed, when to get up, what to do with my days, etc. I thought, at the time, that when you became an adult, you automatically knew what to do in any given situation. And, I assumed, adults knew exactly what life was all about and had a kind of situational compass that would tell them what they needed to do, what was right, wrong, necessary, etc.

I came by this belief because my parents were always telling me that they knew what was best for me because they were older, and that I wasn't old enough to make certain decisions. Logically, that meant that at some point - presumably when I turned 18 - I would just know what I needed to know.

At some point, probably around the age of 21, it dawned on me: my parents were absolutely full of shit. They were making it up as they went along.

Granted, with age comes the benefit of experience. But that just means that you're able to compare current situations against past situations (if you're wise enough to even do this) and make a more informed decision based on past experience. It doesn't mean that you actually know what to do. Just a higher probability of being making a good decision assuming you've learned anything worthwhile from past experience.

At this point in my life, I just feel tired. Tired of always having to plot my own course. Tired of having to make the right decisions, knowing that any decision I make today - like quitting a job or not quitting a job - will affect not only tomorrow and the day after, but likely the rest of my life.

Right now, I feel like my life has no structure. No predictability. Completely off the rails, really. I'm not enjoying it. I want someone to just tell me what to do for a change, and to be able to believe that they know what's best for me - cause I'm certainly not sure I do.

It's been a long time since I thought about a "random Larry." I got the term from my friend Pete, a very, very long time ago. Pete pulled the term from some news item about some loser (named, of course, Larry) that got arrested for something stupid. Somehow, if I recall correctly, it was decided that anyone named "Larry" would be a loser, and so the article could have been about any random Larry.

How odd that I would think of this all of the sudden without any prompting. The term has just been lurking in the back of my consciousness for many years and suddenly decided it was time to be used.

What one person considers friendly, others may consider creepy. Take, for example, finding someone's blog by Googling them. Blogs are inherently public, so it's probably silly to expect that other people would respect your privacy on what is a public forum.

Still, there are some folks you don't necessarily expect to see reading your blog -- for example, a new boss, or your grandma. (Unless you give those folks your URL, of course.) When a co-worker or casual acquaintance pops up on your blog, it may be a might unsettling. (In retrospect, I may have done this on one or two occasions when trying to be friendly. Oops.) I've never wanted to go the password-protected walled-garden route, but I don't want any random Larry to be able to find my blog.

So, I'm glad I decided to go "undercover" with this blog. I haven't had a really good run of posts here, but I plan to keep things here that I don't want everyone to connect to me. Sometimes it's nice to express oneself without being held to those expressions by employers and family who know how to use Google well enough to track you down.

Well, it's not quite 9 AM and my youngest brother is already on my nerves.

(For background, my 19-year-old brother lives with me. I have two other younger brothers, but they don't live here. Thank God.)

He has the sniffles, so he's decided to call in to work. Which means he'll be home all day, and therefore in my way. He's not really very ill at all, but he doesn't seem to be able to distinguish "a little sick, but okay to go to work" and "bleeding out the eyes."

We had agreed to swap rooms so that I could have the basement for my office, and he could take the upstairs bedroom that I have my office in. I had planned to move my stuff downstairs today, or a least enough to write downstairs all afternoon. Now, he'll be laying around like a sloth in the basement all day, which pushes my moving plans back to this weekend, since I have much to do on Wednesday, and I have to finish up at my soon-to-be former employer on Thursday and Friday.

Anyone want a 19-year-old houseguest?

I woke up today about an hour earlier than I wanted to. My alarm wasn't set, but I could hear my little brother banging around in the bathroom (which is inconveniently nestled between the two upstairs bedrooms) and once I'm up, I'm up.

On a scale of 1 to 10, my motivation today is about... 0. I just want to crawl into bed, read a book or sleep, and ignore the world until it goes away or learns to behave itself a bit better. The news is chock full of unpleasantness, as usual. The right-wing assholes are up to their usual hijinks. People all over the world are killing one another because of religious bullshit, and so on and so forth.

What I don't understand, and what I've never been able to grasp, is why people continually do the wrong thing when they could so easily do the right thing. Instead of people who want nothing more than to amass wealth and power, why aren't there more people who want to help people and be nice to their fellow man? I'm not saying that every person should be Mother Teresa, but would it be so hard for them to be decent?

Despite my lack of motivation, there is much to do today. Need to relocate my home office from the upstairs bedroom to the basement. I'm hoping this will be of benefit in two ways -- one, during the summer, the upstairs rooms get unpleasantly hot without benefit of air conditioning. I hope to avoid running the AC unless absolutely necessary, and the basement stays much cooler than the living room or upstairs.

Two, I need to be able to spread out a bit more, have a little additional room for all the computers and so forth. I am hoping that having a little more room will let me be more organized, and therefore more productive.

I'm going to go back to work now, and try to get some work done so I can blow off by 5 PM and do something -- anything -- fun.

Yeah. So I'm trying to start dating again. This, everyone tells me, is good. Too young to give up, etc.

Frankly, I'm not looking forward to it. I hate dating. I like being in (good) relationships, but I hate the whole "getting to know you" chit-chat, where you're on your best behavior, they're on their best behavior and everyone's trying to be liked or decide if they like you or whatever. The point is that my dating skills are rather meager, and I'm tired of the whole meaningless ritual. Who needs it? (Apparently, I do.)

I'd like it to be simple. Like some romantic comedy where boy meets girl and it's blatantly obvious that they're meant to be together and they're immediately in love and yadda yadda yadda, and skip the whole middle part of the movie where something stupid has to happen to cause a misunderstanding that drives the plot until the third act where they realize there's been a huge misunderstanding and they get back together.

It won't be easy, I'm sure, if it ever happens at all. Nothing really good is easy.

Getting settled into the new blog. As you might have guessed this is a nom de plume chosen to allow me to blog in relative anonymity. Having tried the "blogging in public" thing, I've decided that I'd like to have a bit of privacy and still be able to share my weblog with friends. More to come.