Dreams

While I was in Charlottesville last weekend, I had a couple of strange dreams. In the first one, I had taken up a second job as a bartender at a strip club. Apparently I had a girlfriend working there. And during the slow times, I would get out and dance on the pole some. After awhile, the club decided to have a role-reversal day – the male employees would be the strippers and the girls would be the bouncers, managers, bartenders. But as the time came, a bunch of the guys bailed and I woke up so I can’t complete the story.

In the second dream the following night, someone had recommended a car repair shop that was attached to a restaurant that was overlooking a river.  So I took my Solara there and it was really sketchy. I had to park on a shaky pier and they had to tie down the car to make sure it didn’t go rolling into the river. For some strange reason, I went along with this. Sure enough, while I’m in the restaurant, I see the car start to roll away so I run out of the restaurant to try to save the car but it drowns. However, I go buy a Prius on the spot and drive home happy.

Maybe I should buy a Prius and work at a strip club?

Essential vs. non-essential personnel

Something seems backwards. A couple of days ago, people at work were finally talking about the potential government shutdown and the fact that it probably wouldn’t affect us because we are paid by the project and funding has already been allocated for our specific project while other government workers might get some unpaid vacation time because they are paid more directly.

Aside from that, the government shutdown should affect only non-essential personnel, meaning that essential personnel would still have to report for work, even if the federal budget expires. That would include police, fire fighters, air traffic controllers, and other jobs that directly impact public safety. I am clearly a non-essential employee and honestly, would not mind a few days of unpaid leave even though it is very unlikely to happen now.

Anyway, shouldn’t essential personnel be paid more than non-essential personnel? The simple distinction between essential and non-essential indicates that one group of people is more important than another group of people, and therefore should be compensated more generously for the work. I know fire fighters, EMT’s, and police officers don’t make near what most engineers make but it would be a major problem if they were to all stop working, even for a day, but society could live without engineers for awhile. Eventually, the lack of engineers would cause a problem but it wouldn’t be the disaster of going without police officers for a day.

Turning a Hobby Into a Job

Many times we say that we should do what we want and try to not be concerned about money but no matter how hard we try, money always winds up being a factor. Money is why many of us stay in jobs we have rather than search for something more satisfying or fulfilling. Some of us are able to pursue a passion while not having to worry about money or do mindless jobs to make ends meet but such people are in the minority. In theory, having a job where you essentially do what you love most should be the most ideal situation.

A lot times I hear that having a job you like is the most important thing in the world. It is what you spend most of your waking hours doing and theoretically should take priority over finding something enjoyable for your free time - maybe a hobby or girlfriend or family. If you enjoy playing sports, playing professionally would surely take some fun out of it but would becoming sports writer take the fun out of playing sports or would it just drive you crazy for being on the “wrong side” of things? Or would you be able to view the writing aspect as a job but still enjoy playing as much as when you had a job that had nothing to do with the sport and sort of get the best of both worlds? I don’t know. Everyone reacts differently and it is probably hard to predict how you’d react until you try.

But perhaps taking or keeping a less interesting but higher-paying job that allows you time and money to enjoy your hobbies is worth the sacrifice. Some of us try to turn our hobbies into work, thinking that it might help us to be happy all the time rather than just the time off from work. But what frequently happens is that when a hobby turns into a job, it no longer is fun and often results in a pay cut. Take a baseball player or actor or musician – they can make more money at the start doing other things and keeping sports or the arts as a weekend or night-time hobby and starting to work as an athlete or artist might make it be less enjoyable, so you lose out on income and on the hobby. Of course, there are people who make it big and get lots of money but such people are in the minority.

On another note, are journalists typically people who have a love for something but are not talented enough to be one of the participants or people that get written about but have a passion for that activity or are they people who are over the hill or are they more often people who have the passion and may have the talent but just prefer a more normal life to the touring or nomadic lifestyle that frequently is common among athletes, celebrities and artists? Can a person write a popular article about someone else’s accomplishments while also being the subject of another similar piece at the same time? I generally think of journalists as being experts in a certain field, and therefore people who actively engage in that activity. For sports journalism, that’s less frequently the case because the careers of athletes are much shorter than in other games or industries. But, most popular sports journalists are former athletes, right?

Going Through the Motions

"This might hurt
It’s not safe
But I know that I’ve gotta make a change
I don’t care
If I break
At least I’ll be feeling something
‘Cause just ok
Is not enough
Help me fight through the nothingness of life

I don’t wanna go through the motions
I don’t wanna go one more day
Without Your all consuming passion inside of me
I don’t wanna spend my whole life asking
What if I had given everything?
Instead of going through the motions
..."

This is one of my favorite songs and it's by Contemporary Christian singer Matthew West. From time to time in nearly 4 years here, I've felt the urge to move and do something different but each time before I ended up deciding that I actually like it here. Weekly bridge games with Emory and weekend trips to Atlanta, Columbia, and other places in the Carolinas have been in abundance and kept me happy. But in the last couple of weeks it really became apparent that things are really shaking up here and it is a good time to move before I get started in new stuff that's probably going to be more of the similar unfulfilling work. 3 people have announced their departure from the flight, some to other flights in the same squadron and some to different jobs entirely.

I'm at that time where people usually either move on to something else or they become lifers at Robins. People who have been here a long time typically say that when new people come, they stay about 3 years and them move on or they wind up getting married and staying here practically their whole career. It is a short drive to Valdosta and Atlanta, where I do have several friends, but I have almost no friends here, and as great as it is to be a GS-12 with the great federal benefits and low cost of living in middle Georgia, and I feel like I'm just going through the motions Monday to Friday from 8-4:30. My first-level supervisor knows this and knows that I am looking for other jobs and wants to be kept in the loop on this so it's not like posting this is going to cost me brownie points with her or anything like that. I think I've found a job I want but it's still a long way from being anything official.

Do You Want You Marriage Counselor to Be Happily Married for 30 Years or Struggling Through His 4th Marriage?

There's an old saying that you learn from making mistakes and failuring more than from succeeding. I think we all basically agree with that but does it follow that you learn better from other people's failures than their successes? People who have advice columns and who are in the business of helping people are people with experience who have ultimately experience success but is their road to success generally more or less curvy than normal or ideal?
This morning on the radio, Kid Kraddick and company were talking about how big name celebrities who get in trouble with the law, mostly doing drugs, wind up eventually speaking to kids as a role model as part of restoring their image and supposedly getting back on the right track themselves. I think this discussion got started with TI being arrested yesterday and Paris Hilton last week on possession of marijuana and cocaine. They likely will end up being some sort of spokesperson for some anti-drug organization and be an example of what not to do.

Anyway, I'm not so much concerned with them in particular or people in drug rehab but for the more common person seeking guidance in relationships or careers, is it generally better for the counselor to be someone who found success right away or someone who stumbled and mis-stepped and had several setbacks before being successful. I have no idea who writes the dear Abby columns or whether marriage counselors are people with more or less relationship success than the average person, but I think that would be something interesting to find out. I kind of think someone who had been married a few times, has a few kids, and now finally is in a good marriage would make the best counselor because he's experienced more and can more likely identify with the patient. Likewise, are career counselors mostly people who made it through college on schedule and found jobs relatively easily or are they more likely to be people who changed majors several times, took 6 years to get a bachelor's degree, struggled to find a suitable job, possibly changed jobs a lot before finding their niche?
One part of me thinks publicity for wrong-doings should be minimized - that making a headline out of people being arrested for drug abuse gives other messed up people the idea that they can be famous if they do something dumb. We should publicize the people for doing things well - the 6:00 news should contain all positive stories rather than the way it is not with 90% of the news including someone getting arrested. Another part of me thinks that showing these people and their ensuing punishment might make an example of them and help people learn lessons without having to make the mistake themselves. At least, with some it will help improve the spectator's self-esteem by seeing someone who is even more screwed up. But people are hard-headed - they're still going to have to make some mistakes themselves, often several times, before getting on a good track.

Step one in accomplishing anything is having a goal

We recently had a meeting regarding our individual career progression. The discussion started out trying to determine if we are getting adequate feedback on our performance and progress and whether our mentors and supervisors are helping us make progress.

Apparently we all have different ideas of what progress means. By and large, people associated progress with more money and promotions. I suppose that is the idea most people have when you talk about making progress career-wise, but the fact is, many if not most engineers will not be promoted beyond a journeyman engineer (where I currently am) because basically the only promotions available are to management positions.

So we had to take another step back and define what progress is. In the scope of the work we do in our current office, it is clearly becoming more knowledgeable of the system and getting the technical work done more efficiently. But in the broader scope of things, progress could mean many different things. For some, that is all the progress that they desire – being content with the current situation and just becoming more proficient. For others, progress might be gaining a management position or a project lead or becoming the technical lead on something. For others, progress might be getting a graduate degree, and for others progress might be finding a new engineering job, and still for others it may be finding a new career that is more interesting.

So we had to take another step back to define what our goals are because we can’t measure progress unless we have a goal in mind. At this point we realized that many of us don’t have clear goals and therefore cannot accurately measure progress.

So we had to take one more step back and see if we can help each other, along with our first level supervisor, determine our goals. Do you know what your goals are? Are you actively working toward them? Or are you mindlessly going through the motions without much idea for what you want out of your career? This all in terms of careers but the same thing can be said for personal/life goals. Hopefully there is some but not too much overlap between career and personal goals.

The decision to go to back to school and possibly return to the days of room-sharing and eating ramen noodles or continue a job that may no longer be as exciting and thrilling as it once was is a dilemma lots of smart people face. How do we decide? Why can't there be some sort of guarantee that we'll be more satisfied with life if we change our lifestyle?

How can we tell if we really want a long term change or just a sabattical to allow us to explore some other interests for a few months? I think I'm not ready to completely give up my WR life but I am so  ready to try a radically different lifestyle for more than just a week or two vacation. i'd want it to be something along the lines of a  professional internship or contract job for 4 or 5 months in montreal or some other place but opportunities like that are hard to find, if possible at all. Then I could comeback here for awhile and then later maybe make a permanent change if I liked the temporary job. Eh. Or maybe a 1 year leave without pay while I get a graduate diploma in journalism from Concordia sounds fun... Or alternate semesters working here and studying for a master's in EE at concordia or mcgill. I wonder if that situation would be acceptable to my boss. Hmm.

Pro-Con List for My Career Options

What do I want? A big part of me wants a nice simple life in a small city not unlike Warner Robins. However, a perquisite for that is having a wife or fiancée. I think ultimately that is what I want. But in order to get to that, I may need to move to a place where there is more of a chance of finding a person to live that simple life with. I mean, practically all my friends here are married. And in the mean time, I want a very different kind of life: either a job that requires me to be sociable so that after work I will be content at home most of the time, or a more active social life after work, a neighborhood bar downstairs with a bartender I can go chill with and talk to and meet more people any time, a city I can live in without have a burning desire to travel every couple of weeks.

Boston and Montréal are the cities in North America with the highest concentration of post-secondary students, with 4.37 and 4.38 students per 100 residents. And that was before I was even considering going back to school. Just living in such an environment would be good for me instead of Warner Robins where practically everyone I know is married and the single people don’t tend to stay here very long, probably for the same reasons I am wanting to leave.

Many more opportunities to travel are coming up as well. How many of these trips I actually take should depend on what I’m going to do in the future as far as work and school is concerned. If I do stay here or get one of the 20 jobs I have now applied for, I can afford almost any trip I want and have the vacation time to allow for it this year. But if I wind up in grad school, I probably should try to save more money, because I have no idea how much I will be able to get in scholarships.

I’ve made a weighted list to compare things. There are 12 criteria, scaled according to importance, including the bridge scene, the quantity/quality of young people there, money, the weather, the potential interest I will have in the work, the friends I currently have in the various places, and what my friends/family think. Montréal scores the lowest in Friends I currently have there and Weather but wins in a landslide among places the people who know me best think I would like to live, and the vast majority of people think I should get a Master’s degree somewhere. The current results (out of 220 possible points):

165 Grad school at Concordia or McGill
152 Engineering/CS job in Montréal
136 EE job at Hanscom AFB in Boston
131 Stay at Robins AFB and grad school at Mercer
128 Stay at Robins
126 Job in Washington DC
123 Job in NYC

Quarter Life Crisis?

A couple of weeks ago, a friend sent out a link to an article about the quarter-life crisis phenomenon. http://www.eyeweekly.com/article/55882 The having meaningless sex part of it certainly doesn't apply to me, but for the most part, this describes how I feel, sentiments I have expressed in recent posts. This should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me: I tried to leave Georgia for college but I only considered top-notch engineering schools that are in the south, of which there are 2 and Caltech only waitlisted me; I tried to leave Georgia after college to work in California or France but job acceptances kept me in the Georgia. And I'm not wanting to do make this move to be nearer to any particular person, as some of you may think - the cities I am considering have been on my mind for quite some time, it just hasn't been something I ever acted upon or spoke much of before because I knew I would be here no matter what until at least this summer.

Everything Can Change in a New York Minute

Even though I had visited 48 of the 50 states in the US by the time I was 14, I still have yet to visit several major American cities, but the list of such cities I need to visit has definitely shrunk a lot in the last couple of years. I can’t tell how serious I am about moving. A big part of me is really excited about possibly moving. Another part of me still feels like a Georgia boy, terrified to leave the state that has been my home for nearly 25 years.

I sort of feel like all the little weekend trips I’ve taken since I’ve been living in Warner Robins have been kind of test drives to see if I’d like to make it my next home. While many of the trips have been for bridge, many have been just to “visit” friends. Over the last 3 years, I’ve taken weekend trips to Boston, NYC, Washington DC, Dallas, Las Vegas, LA, San Diego, San Francisco, Nashville, Seattle, Saint Louis, Chicago, Pittsburgh. Boston, NYC, and San Fran definitely stand out as my favorites but I don’t think I want to move out west anymore. Maybe I was influenced more by who I was with when I visited (Mila, Megan, and Dana), but those 3 cities have a lot of character and seem to cater very well to single 20-something males. I have been told Vancouver and Montreal are great places, too, and it is kind of surprising that I haven’t been to Montreal. With the heavy French influence in Montreal, I should like the place. That’s tentatively on the calendar for an August visit but I may have to move it up sooner than that.

Don’t get me wrong. Macon/Warner Robins is actually quite a great place to live. I could totally be happy settling down here if I had someone to settle down with. In the mean time, I want to go exploring, even if it means being miserable a lot and starting my social life over, which may actually be harder in a big city where friendships may tend to be less intimate. At least I already have a few friends who live in the places I am looking to move to but who knows how long they will be there.

I hear about some of my other friends, 3 or 4 years removed from getting their undergrad degree looking for a new adventure as well – some starting their own business, going back to grad school, taking a sabbatical, or just changing jobs – it makes me not think I’m so crazy for entertaining these thoughts so much.

Future Career in Journalism?

The one thing I regret most from my 4 years at Tech is not getting involved with the Technique, the school newspaper. Writing is something I’ve always liked but actually being a journalist never really crossed my mind and no one encouraged it, probably because most people didn’t know about my writing skills/interest. As I stay here in Warner Robins, I’m thinking that when I make a job/career change, it will be to teaching or writing – teaching French or writing about sports or a critic of some sort. That time certainly isn’t here yet and I don’t know when it will come, but there will definitely come a time that I want a new full-time job and I want to be prepared for a smooth transition when that happens. I am glad that I got something formal from my interest in France – a minor, which will qualify me to teach French or get into a Master’s program in French at some point. As for writing, I don’t know. Maybe these blogs and a few articles I have on associated content will be a good starting point for getting a journalism job or admission to a graduate journalism school in a few years, but for the forseeable future I'm an engineer.