Losing Innocence

I've been on this music binge listening to songs by Lindsey Stirling while I've been at work. There're maybe a dozen songs she's written/composed, all of which feature strong violin solo's accompanied by hip-hop or techno-like beats. It's the perfect blend of electronic and classical instrumentation. Not only that, she's got music videos to go along w/ her music (such as On The Floor and Crystallize). The girl's, what - only 25 or 26? She's winnin' awards and doing live performances for people! (Yes, if you hadn't noticed, I'm plugging her music. I don't shamelessly advertise for other people all the time, so you've gotta' know it's good). Check it out.

Watching her videos, listening to her music, and reading the short bio on her webpage, I got to thinking of what it was like for me to grow up. Lindsey came from a not-so-easy life but pursued music and dance b/c she was passionate about and enjoyed it so thoroughly. Now? She gets to enjoy the fruits of her childhood perseverance for years to come. I didn't really have that kind of drive. What I did revolved around mountain biking, video games, working out, or something else not so nearly as cool or exciting as playing violin to nifty dance moves. But I was never driven to be excellent in anything. Mom got on me for a few years in high school to pick up some instrument, so I gave the good ol' guitar a try. I'd practice good and hard for maybe 6 months, realize I was starting to get "good", then slack off and give it a break for a few months. This cycle repeated a couple times until my dad died. I laid the guitar down for good then - not so much out of grief as I just didn't have the time or energy. It's still lying in my room and could probably use w/ some new strings.

That's just one example. There are more.

Childhood's a very awesome, important part of your life. I, being of the ripe age of 22 and of a particularly contemplative disposition right now, see that now. Of all the times in life you can devote yourself to becoming good at something, when will you ever have as much free time and energy as when you're a kid (kid = { age | age < ~21})? You're growing a ton during that time, so the foundations you lay when you're "young" will be with you for the rest of your life.

I guess I just don't see much worthwhile foundation support me now that I've the time to think back to how I grew up and where I'm going. There isn't much I'm particularly good at: I dabbled in all sorts of stuff back in High School but never really settled. There is no one "thing" I can say I'm the best at. Of course, that'd never be true, but you get my point. I'm not really good at anything. Just mediocre. Some might argue that I'm more well rounded, and thus don't have the same kind of depth of understanding that someone of more limited experience might have. But I don't think that's fair. Lots of people will tell you, including me; I'm not very "cultured". I reject all sorts of popular culture. I dislike politics. I refuse to indulge in senseless memorization of sports-related facts/figures/people/stats. That all amounts to a very "boring" me. Sure, I could argue you into the ground about zombies; I love DnD; playing video games isn't just a pastime, but a fun and imaginative role playing experience. Even then: I'm not the best. I'm not even good.

Even my own job - software engineering / programming - I know I'm not the best. I think of myself not as the best programmer, but just a good one. I know I can't measure up to the brilliance that floats around me on a daily basis, nor could I do so in college. All over, there are people better and brighter than me in whatever I'm doing. People who've devoted themselves to something; who've spent the time and paid their dues early on; who can enjoy the benefits of their hard work. And they're my age (or thereabouts). They've had the same amount of time as I've.

I still have things I want to do, but I feel like it's be exponentially harder to do on this end of life (post college). And w/ every day, I know it won't get any easier.

I always wanted to be fluent in Spanish. Not I-can-find-the-bathroom fluent, but truly, really fluent. I used to be good - as good as I ever got at guitar - and even had an above-average accent when I was warmed up. I'd taken it for 4 years when I graduated high school (5, if you count that I repeated Spanish 1). But then, as always, life got busy. I never got that minor I'd always wanted.

And of course, that's just one thing. There're more, as I'm sure there are for you. We all have things we want to do, and that's perfectly alright. I just don't feel like there's anything I'm carrying w/ me today that's really worthwhile.

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The First Post

Yes. It's a blog. I've been toying with setting one up for a few months, but could never really gather up the gumption/motivation to sit down and figure it all out. For me, adept w/ computers as I am, the thought of hosting a "blog" was out of my league. Domains. Servers. Setting up a Unix-based OS to manage it. Wordpress (or some other, exceedingly-easy-to-use blog thing). "Bah," I said to myself, "It's just not worth it".

Then I graduated.

Life comes at you fast, right? No kidding. Life really turned upside down for me after that. Within weeks of graduation, I'd moved to "The Bay" (East Bay, for those who care) and had started my job as a software engineer; a whopping 6 hour drive from where I'd spent the first 18 years of my life. Everything that was "me" had been unpacked into a single bedroom in the front of an elderly couple's home. I had no friends, no social connections, no knowledge of bay area geography, and, for the first few weeks, hardly any money.

My first week at work was one horrendous disaster after another. My environment wouldn't work right. The documentation being woefully out of date, I was completely dependent on my co-workers for any/all troubleshooting while I sat in my cubicle corner and stared at screens and configurations about which I had not the slightest inkling of knowledge. Who knew SE was such a complex system? All I'd ever needed back in college was half-a-dozen packages, w/ their own sub-packages to manage a fairly decent Java project. (And that was only after I'd given up my IDE of 4 years - Vim - for Eclipse). And let's not forgot all those conventions that everybody else - nearly all of whom had been w/ the project since or near its inception last year - understood and didn't talk about. I spent that first week trudging through code I didn't understand. While it makes sense now, it sure didn't smack of sense to me then. (As it turns out, we would later ditch that testing framework for one I helped establish w/ good coding practices).

And just about when I was really getting the hang of Selenium, I's plunked down into the job I'd been hired for: developer. I'd thought our testing framework was a decent size: our app was spread across hundreds of packages, each of which was further categorized into..."services"?! The sheer size of the code base was mesmerizing - and they told me this was a "relatively small project"! I'd never be able to handle this much code. There was so much of it I hadn't written. So many foreign coding styles (the terrible violation of the 80-column rule or the "it's-own-line" brace policy), too much code, bugs given to me I had no idea how to tackle: this job was going to be a train wreck. 

Then I proposed.

On January 6th, 2012, I asked Veronica Harvey to marry me. One of the most exciting and harrowing experiences ever. Life has settled down a bit since then, but wedding plans now abound. On top of the life I'm building up here, things are getting packed pretty fast. (Yes, for you sadistic cynics, she said yes)!

With all these things swirling around me, I found that I spent my entire week looking forward to the weekends. I'd get home so late most nights that I'd be too tired to do much more than play some Gears 3 or make a few calls to stay in touch w/ Veronica/Mom/Vince/etc. And now that I was working, the reality hit me hard: this 40+ hour a week job would account for the bulk of my life for the near and distant future. College was gone. Or, more generically, a life w/ 3-month breaks in it was gone. A year-round "grind". Given how work was going thus far (and even accounting for the fact that I knew it wouldn't be that bad forever), I immediately questioned whether this was the profession I really wanted for myself.

Where was the room to live? 32 hours of conscious, weekend time? 10 days of vacation (PTO) a year? What was really the point in it all? I would have nothing outside of work. I could see a working life sucking me into a world where nothing existed outside of it: where I awoke Mon-Fri w/ the sole purpose of devoting the best time of my life to a job.

I guess it was the shock of leaving college that made it so hard. I'd'n't thought about what work really meant and what I had to lose by leaving my college life. It was so sad that my last quarter at Poly was so good. I'd gotten it right. That last quarter was how college should be. Life was good. Now? Working, I barely had time for myself and my fiance, let alone church, work, finances, and apartment shopping.

A few months passed, to bring us to the present. I still look forward to the weekends like before, but I think my attitude's become more suited to the task. It's what inspired the title of this blog. I have to figure out a way to make my life outside of my job; how to find good things in the weekends or the late nights; how to squeeze every last drop out of life, b/c so much of it gets sucked up in making a living for myself and the life I and Veronica are making together.

So I've gotta' live my life in the margins of each day. At the bookends of each week. I've got to make a life at work; develop good, perhaps even friendly relationships w/ my coworkers. My social circle has to expand through my own effort now - not like college, where relationships more-or-less happen. Every hour of free time needs a purpose, even if that purpose is to do "nothing".

I've lost the luxury of wasted time.