Category Archives: Rants

Things might get a bit heated here. It’s probably a good idea to take these discussions with a grain of salt.

Frequently Annoying Questions

“How goes the job search?”

“Have you heard back from your interview?

“Do you have any leads?”

“Have you looked into other fields?”

“Hey, at least you have a job.”

“I’m sure you’ll find something. You’re meant for great things!”

These are a few questions that, while innocent enough, are really starting to get on my nerves. I hear them a lot, from well-meaning individuals that have nothing but my best interests at heart. But I find myself answering them often enough that it’s really getting annoying. So I would like to take the opportunity today to answer some of them, as well as talk about why they grate on me.

Yes, this is going to be a rant. I’ll trust you’re competent enough to find your own grain of salt.

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Time to Sleep

If you will permit me, I’d like to complain about getting old.

I know, I know; as one of the younger people in my social group, I’m probably going to get a fair amount of crap. So let’s narrow it down a bit.

I’d like to complain about getting tired.

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Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Avatar

In what is becoming an all-too-common occurrence, Minecraft is once again eating away at my free time, time which should have been spent cleaning. In fact, it might not be too much of a stretch to say that whenever I write about Minecraft, it’s likely because the game has sucked me in again.

But Minecraft is not all fun and games, building and exploring. There is the ever-present risk that you may die.

Yes, this is going to be a rant.

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Tech Envy

I have an interesting relationship with technology. It is a huge part of my day-to-day life, but at no time am I anywhere on the bleeding (let alone cutting) edge. My laptop is five years old, and I used my previous one for six years before upgrading (there was a three-year-old used desktop in there as well). I don’t have a smartphone, and I feel no need to upgrade my table to this year’s release. I didn’t get an HDTV until a few months ago. Until late 2010 my most powerful gaming console was a GameCube, and I didn’t pick that up until 2004 or 2005. I can’t bring myself to spend $60 on a video game on release day. I don’t have a Blu-ray player, and my primary camera (when I bother to take one anywhere) is a 3.1 megapixel point-and-shoot I got for my birthday before I left for France (again, around 2004). I have in the past described myself as “a technophile on a budget,” usually out of choice, sometimes out of necessity.

But none of that protects me from the dreaded scourge that is Tech Envy.

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Stretched Thin

I need a break. I am right now most of the way through an 11-day work week, with each day starting at 5 in the morning. My last day off was Tuesday (of last week), and Saturday I had to work in both the morning and the evening. The end result is a creeping level of burnout that leaves me no energy to tackle the increasingly pressing projects that surround me at home. Projects whose deadlines are rapidly approaching. And even when I do finally get a day off, I’ll be traveling out of town. My next chance for real downtime isn’t until Monday, and even then most of the morning will be taken up by getting home. Then it’s back to the grind before the next weekend, when I will be out of town again at an SCA event.

Needless to say, I’m feeling a bit stressed.

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Messy vs. Dirty

I sit in my office, which is not exactly in the best state of repair at the moment. The clothes pile threatens to metastasize, there is an abandoned LEGO-sorting project near the bookshelves, and there is barely enough space on my desk for my laptop.

It’s a good thing I don’t have to look at it (aside from the desk) while I’m writing.

But on some level, I can still feel the chaos. It is distracting, if for no other reason than the thought “Man, I really need to do something about that” is never far from my conscious mind. When it flares into prominence, I tend to respond with a guilty “Yeah…” before surfing back to Facebook or going downstairs to power up the Xbox 360. Not the best coping mechanism, I will readily admit, especially since there’s a mess with to contend with down there as well. And that’s not saying anything about having to pass through the kitchen.

I definitely have a different tolerance for mess than my immediate family (I plan to discuss the dreaded “Mom Clean” tomorrow), that that’s not to say I never reach my limit. But one thing that makes my view of mess and disorder different than the rest of my family is that I do not see “messy” as the same as “dirty.”

Let’s go into some definitions. Messy, in this case, refers to the level of disorder in a space. It can be a random jumble of loose ends, or an organizational system based on heaps and piles. When clothes get strewn around willy-nilly (after I get home from work) or projects peter out in the middle, things end up messy. Disorder can be distracting, but I seem to be able to cope with it relatively well (up to a point, of course).

Dirty, on the other hand, refers to the level of filth in a space. A kitchen filled with half-eaten rotting food cementing plates together is dirty. A bathroom so horrendous that your friends would rather stop by the truck stop on their way home at two in the morning is dirty. Dirty is an abhorrent state, one to be avoided at all costs.

I think my differences with my family come from the fact that I don’t feel that Messiness and Dirtiness are mutually inclusive. For example: a room with piles of clothes on the floor. Messy or Dirty? For me, it depends: if the clothes are clean, then the room is merely Messy. Old, sweaty fighting undergarments that reek of the blood of your enemies? Definitely Dirty. The Messy piles should likely be cleaned up, but it’s less of a pressing issue, especially if you can find what you need in a reasonable amount of time (“The underwear’s in that pile, and the socks are over here!”).

And I will readily admit that the line between Messy and Dirty can be very fuzzy even at the best of times. In fact, it’s probably not a continuum between Clean, Messy, and Dirty. It’s probably more of a series of perpendicular axes: Ordered/Messy and Clean/Dirty. Things can be Clean and Messy, or Dirty and Messy; these two are not the same, although I’m not sure how one could be Ordered and Dirty.

I strive very hard to make sure I stay on the Messy side of things (despite whatever rotten lies my family has told you). It just means my floors don’t get vacuumed as often as they might.

But I do need to at least make room for a new pile of clean laundry.

Good For The Company

Hopefully you’ve all seen Office Space. If not, you totally should. It’s about a guy’s soul-crushing job at an IT cubicle farm in Silicon Valley during the 90s, and feels almost like a live-action Dilbert series. Peter (the main character) spends most of his day staring at the walls of his pod, waiting for time to pass and trying to avoid as many of his six different bosses as possible. One of these, Lumbergh, is the embodiment of all that is dark and unholy in middle management. He is passive-aggressive, an incessant micromanager, completely without empathy, and spouts corporate talking points and catchphrases like they would ever have a place in normal human conversation.

I really didn’t think people talked like that.

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Parkinson’s Law

Has anyone else noticed that you never seem to accomplish as much as you set out to any given day? Because I sure have. It seems that no matter how much (or little) I get done, there’s something that inevitably gets left out. You’d think I would learn to recalibrate my expectations, but no luck so far. Take my one day off this week for example. I didn’t have much planned, but had a few things I wanted to accomplish:

  • Sleep in
  • Watch American History X (since it has to go back to the library)
  • Catch up on webmaster work
  • Write several blog posts (read: more than one)

As of 3pm, here’s what I had actually done:

  • Slept in (6h45 counts as sleeping in when you usually get up at 4am)
  • Explored a friend’s Minecraft server (and got lost, and died while loaded with iron ore)
  • Finished Deus Ex (take that, Bak’laag!)
  • Listened to a Queen cover album by The Protomen
  • Picked up a component cable for my PS2 (which ended up not working)
  • Picked up needed ingredients for dinner tonight Written one blog post (this one)

I might have time to watch a movie before my girlfriend gets home from work, but that would be at the cost of additional blog posts. And that’s without taking into account longer-term projects, such as working on my armor, doing dishes, or picking up my office. So it goes.

I found this to be the case in grad school as well. No matter how much time I left for a project, I ended up stressing out at the last minute, cramming to get everything done. That’s where I decided that it’s a near-universal rule that projects will always take longer than you expect.

Maybe this is just an issue of misaligned expectations and estimates. If that was the case, one would think that the issue would become less severe as it sustained contact with reality. But I have not found this to be the case. The change in thinking, that is.

I have in the past described myself as a former overachiever, and I imagine that most of my anxiety over this planning issue is tied to that. And since it seems to continue happening, I am striving to not let it stress me out as much. I’m done with school; for the most part, my deadlines are self-imposed, and no one is going to punish me if things don’t get done (with the obvious exception of work, official paperwork, etc.). But this is not an easy thing to wrap my mind around. I’ve spent a good majority of my life in school, and I am used to deadlines and outside motivators. To not have those sometimes makes me feel like I’m spinning my wheels.

But writing out my accomplishments so far for the day does put things into a bit of perspective. I may not have accomplished all that I set out to do, but I did get stuff done. I think there’s probably a lesson there, if one can manage to think outside the box in terms of productivity. And I’m starting to realize that it would be much better for my overall peace of mind if I could hold on to that long view. So yeah, something I would do well to remember.

My office is still a mess, though.

(Title reference)

EDIT: Got to watch American History X.  Heavy.