5774 - Taking Stock

[From today's entry at OhLife.]

04:00. So with today being Erev Erev Rosh Hashanah, I guess I will make this my official last post at OL.

I passed the 801 exam yesterday, quite to my surprise, and I'm set to take the 802 this morning. Getting closer than ever to that A+ cert!

The past seven months have been (by turns) busy and restful, and I've appreciated the solitude and freedom from the constant distractions and annoyances that attended life in SF with G. But I am also forced to admit that I have been quite lonely a lot of the time. Especially the past few weeks have just dragged.

I'm starting to rebound from that now - maybe the tech school helped, or maybe it was just the passage of time - but I'm starting to feel a sense of energy and purpose again. Well, and I'm really looking forward to going to school next week! Having that to look forward to has been the main thing.

Maybe it's just the loneliness, but I found myself missing G a lot. Never missed the craziness that went along with having her in my life, of course, but I missed having her there to talk to, to look at, to be with. I'd have done anything even to just have a good one-on-one Skype call with her for a half-hour.

Meanwhile, in the outside world ... The news from across the world has been unspeakably horrible over the past few months, and that hasn't helped my mood any. As a Jew who claims Israel as my spiritual homeland, and as a combat vet of the previous Iraq war (USMC 1989-1993), the Middle East is not an abstraction for me. And as an American, I am deeply worried about the forces now threatening the free world. So those matters have been weighing on my mind.

And so, I've gone through a few rounds of depression - both in the sense of a persistent feeling of sadness, and in the sense of a lack of energy and motivation. But it hasn't ever gotten as bad as it was in years past. I haven't had any visits from Ben Loman. (Ben Loman being my nickname for that voice in your head that tells you to end your problems the easy way; the reference is to the sinister ghost of Willy Loman's brother in 'Death of a Salesman'.) Years ago, Ben used to visit my with all kinds of creative ideas involving pills, rope, blades, and so on, but these days he's been keeping his distance. That, too, may simply be the passage of time.

But in any case, as I say, I've been feeling better, and I have concrete plans for the future. That right there is probably the single biggest change in my life in the post-G era vs. the pre-G era. Before I got involved with her - that is, up until the end of 2006, when I was still living in Portland the first time - I had lots of ideas for things I wanted to do, but I did not have any concrete, long-term plan for my own future. I just took the weeks, months, and years as they came.

By the dark days of 2009, when it was clear there was no future in my relationship with G and all I wanted to do was get out of there, I realized I had to formulate a plan. I had no job, no place to stay, no independent relationship with the outside world - and G had ALL OF MY STUFF in her garage! So I had to start thinking in terms of "first this has to happen, and then that has to happen", and it became a habit.

So I guess that's another unforeseen, unintended consequence of my relationship with G - it forced me to finally start thinking seriously about my own relationship to space, time, and the world.

That's all I have time / energy for now; I'll continue this train of thought later in the day.

Passed!

I barely squeaked by, but I did indeed pass the 802. Lots of command-line questions! Anyway, I am now on my way to being A+ certified - have to wait five business days for CompTIA to process my scores, and then I get a certificate.

Now to start preparing for Network+ and Security+ ...

5774 - Taking Stock (2)

16:00. Amazingly enough, I passed the 802. Though truth be told, I just squeaked by - I scored 708, with 700 needed to pass. But that's OK, I did it, and I'm on my way to an A+ certification!

I want to focus on looking forward to the coming year - looking forward meaning both "eager anticipation" and "active planning". The school year at PSU starts right after Rosh Hashana, so at last I'll have something to get me out of the house and meeting people on a regular basis.

After the civil New Year I may move to another part of town. I like the NW okay but I'm not attached to it. I live near two Jewish congregations but they are liberal, rather than orthodox, synagogues, and are populated largely by aging baby boomers. I don't feel at home in either one.

About two miles from here there's a little cluster of Jewish-related institutions - the JCC, the Chabad bookstore, a Sephardic synagogue - and it's all close to a residential neighborhood where most of the active Jewish community live. Besides the Jewish component, it looks more family-oriented generally, which will be nice for Sophie when she comes to visit. Perhaps more pleasant for me, too; it'll be nice to be around kids. There's a big apartment complex I've got my eye on - they have a pool (nice for Sophie) and a gym (nice for me) and it's only a 5 - 10 minute walk from the Chabad. And the rent is on the order of HALF of what I'm paying here. I wouldn't mind going back to apartment living for a while.

More broadly, in terms of planning, I want to be better anchored in a community. I like living alone, but sometimes I hate it; I'd like to have some kind of steady relationship, whether a "marriage" in the traditional sense or otherwise. I'd like to have a circle of people that I'm close to, but still have enough space of my own. And I want security for the next phase of my life, whatever that may be. (Raising more kids? Who knows?) I feel we're living in dangerous and unstable times, and much of the world we've known may crumble in our lifetimes. What we build next will be up to us.

The Book of OhLife

It was a simple idea: an online journal that nobody else reads. They send you an email every day, and you type whatever's on your mind and hit reply. Their server stores all your entries, and you can go back and review them at your pleasure. (Or, if your diary makes you cringe as mine often does, displeasure.)

Is it secure? I imagine it's no more nor less secure than anything else you do via email and internet. If you are having an affair and your spouse works for the NSA, it's probably best to be prudent. But if you are a journaler, as I am, you've got to put your personal thoughts somewhere.

I liked the idea and signed up as soon as I heard about it. TechCrunch liked it too:

'It’s hard to believe, but in the days before blogging and Twitter plenty of people still found a way to record the personal (and sometimes mundane) details of their daily lives. But instead of sharing them with the world, they simply jotted them down in a book kept hidden in the sock drawer or under a pillow. Turns out, the personal journal is still alive and well, and now Y Combinator-funded startup OhLife thinks that it can make it even more popular by bringing it to your inbox. ...'

But I'm idiosyncratic and tend like different things from what the bulk of the population like; and in this case, there just weren't enough users to keep the project economically viable. So the personal journal may still be "alive and well" but OL is not, and the Book of OhLife will be sealed for good this Yom Kippur.

But OL got me in the habit of writing daily journal entries on my computer (and, eventually, printing them out - I have a big archive of binders now) and I will probably continue that habit here at DW.

One of the things I've found inconvenient about DW (as compared to LJ) is they don't support uploading pictures directly. But maybe that can be a good thing? After all, a journal is about words.