4/28/2019 in Journal of life stuff

I have been realizing / thinking a lot, recently, about the fact that I am waiting to start my life. I don’t have a life. Not really anyway. You see, I spent my teenage and early 20 years getting an education and career that would allow me to provide for a wife and kids. Because that’s what I thought I was supposed to do as a man. But that isn’t what women wanted anymore. The few I have known who wanted that life have been obese, unrealistic in their desires, genetically challenged, or otherwise majorly flawed. On obesity, I’m the pot calling the kettle black, so that one is fair. But the rest…disheartening is the word I would use.

I don’t own a dog because while I would enjoy the company of owning one, I don’t feel like a dog is worth nearly $100 a month, which is what my apartment complex would charge me to have one. Then there’s the problem that I’m a single guy who works a normal job. Dogs don’t handle being alone 10 hours a day well. Oh, I could get a retired greyhound or some other thing; sure. I don’t want a greyhound. I want different breeds, all of which don’t react well to being alone. And I want to raise that dog, not get one that’d past its prime on day one. I don’t mind adopting, before you get out that pitchfork.

The pet you have doesn’t matter. Gerbil, $100/mo. Fish? $100/mo. Parrot? $100. It’s kinda dumb. No, it’s actually full-on dumb. Not even kinda dumb. Just 100% dumb. So, I don’t have a pet. I lie and say I could bring myself more joy with that $100 than a pet would bring me. “Lie?”

I was, at one point in my life, a sugar daddy. That is to say I paid a few ladies to spend time with me. All interactions were strictly platonic. So in that sense, I was the ideal type of sugar daddy. I was the type almost everyone hopes for. Generous, non-sexual, and not demanding. Being a SD helped me with two things:

1. Saying no.
2. Confidence with women.

When you pay someone a few thousand dollars a month, and they don’t make you happy, it is very easy to tell them to stop seeing you. Because that economic sting reminds you that money has a value and who pays for things that aren’t worth the money they spend on them? Fools, and those who don’t realize the value isn’t there yet. As for confidence? Well, you realize that it’s better to stop being afraid of saying the wrong thing and just say what’s on your mind. If it’s too extreme, they’ll stop seeing you. If it’s not, then you’ll get a gradient reaction from interested to bored and you can learn to talk to women. And that’s really where I was; I needed to just be able to sit and talk to a female around my age just to get over the wall of not having done that much.

Am I happy I had to pay someone to spend time with me? No. Do I miss it? Sometimes. The main reason I miss it is because it did cause me to have someone I could spend my time with. The catch to that is the reality that I also remember just how annoying it was to find someone willing to be my SB. You’d think women would want to get paid the equivalent of a normal office salary for just a couple hours work a week, but they want something even sweeter than that, by and large. Or they want someone rich and attractive. Oy vey. And I think I’m unrealistic. Anywho, it’s the amount of work it takes to get into a relationship where you’re paying someone that really bugs me. It should be easy, it should be like ordering from a menu. I shouldn’t need nearly a month of poking, prodding, and trying just to get a couple dates. Not when that much money is so easy for them to get. And that’s the reason I stopped being an SD. There was value, but I was paying more for the value than I felt the value was worth. Imagine paying $1,000 for something that’s worth $200 to you. Same idea.

I ask myself what sort of life I would like to have. The honest answer is…I don’t know. I set up my life to have a family. When you have a family, you follow their interests, not your own. The worst parents I know are the ones who have their own hobbies rather than embracing their children’s hobbies. My own father was big into rocks and minerals. I hated that. But video games…he hated those, and I loved them. I loved stories, he liked facts. I loved experimentation, he liked reading someone else’s experimentation results. It’s hard to connect with and care about someone who only wants to spend time with you if you embrace their hobbies as your own. Granted, this is a fairly extreme example, but…I don’t do half measures on anything. That’s one part of my father I did inherit.

Were I to pick up woodworking as a hobby, I would have the tools to make anything (reasonably) out of wood. Tables, shelves, bed frames, baseball bats…anything normally made from wood I’d be able to make and make with high quality. That’s my personality. It’s hard to have a hobby like that and have a kid who is into soccer. There’s no real crossover. There’s no way to relate the two. It makes more sense to have your hobby be learning, and when the kid gets into soccer, you can take a step back and realize that watching the match play out is no different than watching a game of Counter-strike or Overwatch. There are patterns of movement, sets of tactics, and ways people think. You can analyze a game of soccer just like you can one of Overwatch. And that’s why I don’t have any hobbies. Because I’m learning about many different things, waiting to see which ones get embraced by other people; my wife and kids.

But I don’t have a wife and kids. And so I’m stuck in a loop where I don’t have hobbies because I want to pick up theirs. And I don’t have them because I don’t have hobbies. That’s not the only reason, of course, but it’s one reason and it’s an annoying reason. All this to say: I don’t have a life, and I don’t know how to make one for myself. Because I spent my entire life making a life for ‘us’…but there is no ‘us’.

I think a lot about celebrities, specifically, being their friends. From the Endgame press tour, Scarlett Johansson has been taking the end of her part in the Marvel Cinematic Universe rather hard. When she talks about losing the family of cast and crew who have worked on the movies, there’s genuine fear and pain in her. A lot of that makes sense. She went through a pretty nasty divorce in 2017 and the custody battle for her child got ugly. I suspect many of her cast mates where there to support her when nobody else was. Her nude photos also got leaked sometime during the past 10 years. There have been a lot of really stressful life events and she’s had that group of actors to call friends and rely on. Now, she’s not in the story anymore, and she’s worried about losing that support system.

For years I’ve thought/wondered/dreamed about a future where I would be a friend to celebrities. Not someone corrupted by the system. Not another hamster in the race. Not another pawn in the game. One person, with one set of beliefs, who is just a good person they can spend time with. No alcohol, no drugs, no quick fixes. Someone to talk to. Someone to call in the middle of the night. Someone who could afford to fly to meet them anywhere in the world.

How many young stars and starlets have gotten a bit of fame and lost their minds because they fell in with the wrong crowd? Remember when Britney shaved her head? Remember when Bieber peed on his fans? The list goes on and on. I could die happy never having a book written about my own life or my interactions with these people. I could die happy never being acknowledged publicly for what I did as their friends. My reward would be the same as it has been for the many people I have already helped, but whom nobody will ever know of. I get to live with the memories that they had a problem, and I helped them through it. Then I got to watch them go off and live a better life than they would ever have dreamed possible. I, like Red Skull, am gatekeeper to a future I cannot possess for myself. Hah, that’s melodramatic. I’d really love to have my own happy ending. Maybe that happy ending is in the lifelong work of fixing hundreds of other people’s lives. Or maybe it’s in helping others until finally someone wants to spend time with the helper, instead of going their own way.

The reason I think about celebrities instead of normal folks like you or I is simple. Access to them is a lot easier. How many interviews can you find of the guy sitting next to you vs interview of Chris Hemsworth? How much data can you find by googling Katy Perry vs your next door neighbor? It’s not that anything makes the celebrities more worthy of my time, better, etc. It’s that they are a more easily known problem than the problems of the people around me. And, because the celebrities are generally more willing to accept help, because the pressures of their life are so much greater.

–-

Work was super aggravating. We got a new CTO. The first thing she did was decide to halt the hardware order I’ve been working on getting approved for 6 months and say “do it in the cloud instead”. She tries to play this game that she’s ok with buying the hardware, but she ‘has to see the costs are justified and cloud is actually more expensive’. That’s bullshit. But I may or may not go into why.

My whole life I’ve been told I have bad people skills. In my heart I know there is some merit to those words, but mostly it’s people being mean, not correct. I understand how to lead others. Lead. That’s an important word. In the military, there’s a distinction between a leader and a manager. A leader is an NCO or general officer. They come up with the overall strategy and vision, then get people to execute that vision. A sergeant in the army is the quintessential manager. They have a set of people, they have a vision from their leader, and their job is to have the soft skills to get a group of people who don’t want to do anything productive to achieve and exceed the details of the leader’s vision. In general, people are either leaders or managers, but are rarely both.

Good leaders have many traits, and there’s a lot of books written about how to be a good leader. At the end of the day though, there are two ways to lead: inspiration and with the stick. Leaders you want to follow will inspire you. They’ll say “you should follow me because together we can achieve this great thing!” “We chose not to go to the Moon and do the other things because they are easy, but because they are hard!” vs “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”

The new CTO is firmly in the beatings category. Her ability to inspire is strictly limited to “This is how other companies achieve greatness. Help me or get the stick.” If my eyes rolled any harder, you could use them for perpetual energy. And it makes me so very angry because this was…if I’m honest, it was never a good job. But it was a job where I felt like I could do something useful right up until she took over. Now…she’s a cancer. And her attitude will infect the managers under her because their primary interest is remaining employed, not doing something right. This went from a job where I could have an impact to one where I cannot. And that’s why I got so damn angry on Friday after my meeting with her. Because I’m an excellent judge of character, and hers sucks.

“How can I tell if my leader is good or not?” It’s not a clear-cut rule, but one good way is to talk to them and realize who does most of the speaking. A good leader will ask questions and spend most of their time listening. A bad leader will feel the need to explain everything to their listeners in extreme detail, because clearly everyone is too stupid to realize such things on their own. Bad leaders think they should lead because they’re the smartest people in the room. Bad leaders think they should lead because ‘they earned it’, ‘paid their dues’, or ‘proved their ability’. Good leaders want to see others succeed, and spend most of their time and energy helping those around them see the beauty of a world that could be. And in order to do that, you have to understand how the person sees the world right now, so you can show them the road from where we are to where we want to be.

My anger wants to tell this women to stick a cactus up her vagina and then bathe in vinegar. I wanted to quit on the spot, but I know enough to not make decisions when I’m angry. My core decision, that this person isn’t worth working for or helping…that’s true. That’s not an emotional decision. That one is correct and accurate. The thing I still need to decide is whether I want to quit immediately, and leave them up their current shitty creek without a paddle, or whether I want to stay on, learn AWS, and then quit.

I don’t know AWS and sure I could learn it quickly. But there’s a difference between learning a job skill at a job site where you solve real job problems and learning something on your own in a bubble. I want the former. If I stay on and learn AWS then I can put AWS on my resume and have yet another hot button skill that will help me find jobs elsewhere. If I leave now, I get the emotional satisfaction of telling an evil person to go fuck themselves. I need to pick whether I want the short term satisfaction or the long term.

And for those of you reading who think you already know the correct side…you don’t. I am confident we’re in the middle of another crypto boom. I expect between now and December 2021 Bitcoin will go from ~$5000/coin to ~$200,000 per coin. If that happens, I will have all the money I’ll ever need. I’ll be able to retire a multi-millionaire, with decades left to invest my money and keep up with any form of inflation short of (and possibly including) a total currency collapse. I’m not confident enough in the future to risk everything on that outcome. If I was, I would have quit my job already and said “I’m retired” to the next person who asks about what I do for a living. But I am confident enough that I feel that burning a bridge (not that one exists anyway) down is totally acceptable.

“You haven’t won until you’ve won.” is a saying I keep telling myself. I didn’t get it from anywhere that I remember, but the core idea is that no matter how confident you are that something “will” happen, it hasn’t happened until it “does” happen. In 2018, I figured bitcoins value loss was short term and not worth panicking over. I was an idiot and could have pulled out with 400k instead of what is now worth just 75k. I could have held about 200k of that and reinvested for 25% less than I initially invested for. I was an idiot. I thought I’d won before I’d won.

If I quit immediately it makes sense to break my apartment lease and move to another part of the country where it’s much cheaper to live. I could pay literally 1/3 of what I pay now in rent for the exact same thing. If you’re going to spend a year or two living on savings, it makes sense to take as much stress off them as possible. Conversely, I could stay here and take advantage of the good job market to find shorter term contracting roles. The pay wouldn’t be as good as what I get now, but the benefits wouldn’t be any worse.

I spent so much of my life trying to never give another person power over me. I hate being someone else’s bitch. I hate being beholden to someone else’s plan. And that’s why I’m so mad about what happened at work. Because I can’t just tell them to fuck off and die without some form of consequence to myself. I’m going to take it one day at a time until a better path opens itself to me. I don’t like my current set of options, but for now, learning AWS is something that’s useful to me, and if they’re dumb enough to keep paying me, that’s their problem, not mine.

I know, 100%, that I will not keep working for them long term. These people are toxic and the work environment sucks. I will be leaving them, it’s just a matter of when and how. Right now, today, it makes sense to stay. Tomorrow it might not. One day at a time. That’s the plan.

The reason they’re idiots for letting me stay? Because you don’t keep an employee that is ready to leave. You terminate that person. It leads to toxicity at work to keep employees who aren’t on board. I’ve been that toxic employee more than once. In exactly 0 cases have I ever been wrong about the reasons I’m toxic, but that’s a different thing altogether. For my life, I care more about being right than not being toxic. I care about telling people, accurately, what is, is not, and will be, than drinking the kool-aid that everything is fine.

I feel like I have more to say, but this is all the stuff I had on my mind when I started writing, so…I guess I’ll end it here until more thoughts come to me. 3 more miles down.