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 The documentation being woefully out of date, I was completely dependent on my co-workers for any/all troubleshooting while I sat in my cubicle corner and stared at screens and configurations about which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.