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Doesn’t mean they’re not after you

I occasionally have to procure and setup new laptops and workstations for new employees for my various clients. As happened today. I drove into the office this morning to wait for FedEx to deliver a laptop that was ordered on Friday, and I didn’t even have to unpack my gear as the delivery was waiting for me when I got to the reception desk. I grabbed it and immediately drove back home, without even five minutes at the office. Got a good hour of my podcasts in on the round trip. Wasn’t even any slowdowns. Not bad for a Monday.

I got home and went to unpack the laptop, and noticed that the box had been opened. Usually Dell has a small round plastic sticker that goes over the cardboard tab that locks the lid to the box. But it and the cardboard around it had been ripped clean off. Weird, I thought. I removed the laptop, and opened it up, and there was a small piece of orange, plastic tape crumpled and stuck to the case. Double weird. I went to turn the machine on. Dead. Usually they ship with enough charge to run them for a few minutes. Triple weird.

Now I’m not usually paranoid, but this just seemed to rub me the wrong way this morning. Nothing looked damaged, so I plugged in the charger and told my boss about it. We had ordered this thing for an employee that was starting tomorrow, so if we needed to go through the trouble of returning it to our distributor, then we needed to act fast. I called the distributor, they said that the box wouldn’t have gone out opened — they don’t accept opened returns — so it probably happened during shipping. The sales rep said they would send a new one out for a return, but I was torn about our timeline and said I would think about it and make a decision soon.

I was concerned about this mainly for an operational security perspective. What if the machine had been compromised? What if someone had opened it, installed malware, then sealed the box back up? What was the risk? What was the likelihood. I told my boss I was going to call the client and see what they wanted to do. As soon as I got the client on the phone and started to explain I realized that this was a mistake. I told them that I didn’t think there were any problems, but that I wanted full transparency. I probably rambled on for about five minutes before we agreed to let it go.

Since the machine didn’t show any obvious signs of tampering besides the box, I wasn’t worried about physical damage or anything like that. I was worried about the device being compromised. A rootkit, or other piece of malware that would lead to a security breach. This laptop had shipped with a smart-card reader, so it was obviously going to be used in a secure environment. What were the chances that the device had been compromised in the warehouse by an employee? What if my client was being targeted?

I went ahead and set the machine up, and made sure our antivirus deployed. Not that I have any illusions about any vendor solution out there that can catch a properly customized virus payload. A sufficiently determined adversary, if you will. One of our neighbors at my office is a team of ex-Special Forces personnel that specialize in security assessment and tactical training. Physical intrusion, surveillance, all that kind of government/military engagement stuff. I hear enough background chatter from them in the office next door to know that they have access to some crazy shit. And of course Twitter has been all about the DEFCON conference last week. My feed has been full of USB cables that contain all kinds of hidden components that will steal and exfiltrate your data. If had enough proximity to this kind of spook-level stuff in my career to know that it’s out there.

Eventually, what gave me piece of mind enough to forget it about it was that I saw the seal ripped off the box. If it was government or corporate espionage, they sure were sloppy. Must have just been something else, a more plausible, unexplained occurrence.

Nothing to worry about. Right?

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Gaming for dads

I have been a gamer literally all my life. I remember my dad’s IBM PS/2, it had a game that taught me to type, it was like missile command but letters were falling from the sky: a, d , s, f then later: j, k, l, ;. There was another that I was horrible at, it was a robot that turned into a jet and flew around in some underground cavern with enemies. Then came the Nintendo, the Gameboys. Final Fantasy and Mario Brothers. The second-gen consoles, then back to the PC and simulators. Practically taught myself to fly a plan for real — I have the video to prove it! — and still waiting for an opportunity to take a car out on a real track.

The height of VGA excellence in 1987. I was eight.

Anyways, I don’t have time much for games these days. Not with the side hustles and other projects going on. What I have enjoyed is playing games with the kids. I’ve managed to avoid most of the Candyland and Chutes and Ladders type of games, for the most part. I taught the older one to play Carcassonne. Not that she’s good at it, mind you, but she can at least get the hang of it. Forbidden Island was another that she likes to play, although it’s mostly me directing and doing most of the work. So of course I went out and bought Pokemon for eldest’s last birthday, and ran through a couple games. Takes practically 90 minutes with all the setup and stuff, which is hard to do with the little one wanting to have a hand in it. So I put on the computer version, and so far we’ve been pretty good with that. Safe, from a parenting perspective, but the Pokemon show, and the books, are about the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen. Not to mention the other copycat shows with things like fighting tops and whatnot that are all designed to sell crap to kids. Of course, G.I. J.O.E. and He-Man were just as bad, but we’ll leave that for another day.

So anyways, I decided to let the eldest start taking a play through some of the games on my Steam collection. I put on some simple, E for Everyone things that I thought she would enjoy, and she eventually took to Hexcells, a great logic puzzle game, and has been playing through that for the past couple weeks. Just an hour on Saturday or Sunday. Eventually she started getting up early during the week, doing her chores without asking in order to play for fifteen or twenty minutes before we go into daycare.

Well earlier this week I heard about WOW Classic getting released this month, and I thought I’d see how well she did with that. We had a bad experience with Minecraft where she kept getting killed by zombies and got really frustrated and I had to cut her time short due to a tantrum, so I wanted to keep a close eye on her and see how well she could do with a close eye on her. So I created an account for her, enabled parental controls, — no chat, time limits — and let her play Hearthstone while WOW downloaded. She got the hang of it after an hour. Not that she was very tactical about it, but she managed to play through the tutorial and and a few practice rounds with me peeking over her shoulder and explaining things. So I thought everything was cool.

We took a break and I told mom what we were up to, and BOOM!! Big fight. “World of Warcraft is not appropriate for a six year old!” “Well, maybe, but I’m gonna watch her and play with her and see how she does.” “World of Warcraft is not appropriate for a six year old!” “Well, I turned off the chat and put on a time limit so…” “World of Warcraft is not appropriate for a six year old!” And things just went downhill from there until I was repeating back “World of Warcraft is not appropriate for a six year old”.

So we were done with games for the day, so I cooked dinner, went outside with the kids to let them play while I read, and they went inside while I finished reading, cleaned up, and snuck in an ice cream sandwich. I went inside, to find the three of them sitting on the couch, watching Jupiter Ascending, with guns and shooting and blasting and torture and all kinds of other stuff.

I just sat on the couch and read my book till it was time for baths.

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Hit me like a ton of bricks

I’m several weeks into an experiment, or promise to myself, to blog here every day. It’s part of a continuous improvement plan, if you will, that I made to help keep me motivated or something that I’ve been telling myself. Daily habits that have been piling on top of each other. First the intermittent fasting and meditation for 10 minutes. Then no alcohol for thirty days, — going on forty, now — meditation for an hour. Code. And so on it goes.

I’m not sure what I’m doing to myself, or my family. I can’t say I’ve been content for a while. “Happiness is not something you experience, it’s something you remember.” I’ve said it here before. I’m not sure if I’m engaging in a bit of self-sabotage, or trying to protect myself from it. I once heard a man at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting — or read it someone — say that he was a dry drunk. That they were sober, but they were even worse of a person sober than they were when they were drinking. They were easier to be around when they were drinking. Since they were sober they were just a miserable sonofabitch to themselves and everyone around them. I wonder if that’s part of what’s happening to me now.

Maynard from Tool was on Joe Rogan a few weeks ago. Joe was talking about rock stars that have these weird demands for their interviews and Maynard said something like “they want to have control over everything in their life now cause they felt like they didn’t have any control over things when they were younger.” BAM. Hit me like a ton of bricks. I felt like I grew up in an authoritarian household, under my dad, and I rebelled against it with every fucking fiber in my being. Now, I’m the dad, and I’m exercising my authority in the worst way. My wife calls me a ‘bully’. I tell myself otherwise, but usually I’m yelling or barking orders at the kids, or making them do stuff they don’t want to do, eat stuff they don’t want to eat. I think I’m toughening them up, to make them less spoiled, but I feel like an asshole half the time lately. I snap at them when they interrupt me mornings when I’m trying to meditate, –ironic, huh? — in the evening when they’re watching TV when I think they should be outside, or whenever they say ‘no’ to something I’ve asked them to do. I worry about it all the time, but I don’t know how else to act.

But that’s a lie. Number one thing that seniors would tell their younger selves? Don’t be so hard on yourself. Just let shit go, don’t try to control everything. My wife likes to let the kids watch TV a lot more than I would like them to, garbage shows for hours on end. “My mom let me do that when I was younger, and I came out fine.” Like hell we did, I think. Like we haven’t figured out what all that advertising did to our young minds. Like they haven’t refined that model, crafted those shows to be even more potent and damaging than they were 30 years ago? At least with the streaming services we don’t have to watch the breaks. God help me we turn on Disney in a hotel room and be subjected to six minutes of marketing for the most useless, unnecessary garbage made for kids.

Douglas Rushkoff pointed out that marketing is designed to make people feel inadequate, that happy people don’t need to buy crap to make themselves feel better, to feel more desirable. I bought a bottle of wine today, along with rib-eye and crab cakes for some dinner guests tonight. I even told myself that 40 days was a good round number and that it was time to open that bottle of scotch I was gifted. I don’t mind having a drink; I just don’t want to make drinking a habit. I used to tell myself that I didn’t want to give up drinking, cause I like to drink. I just didn’t want to drink too much, or spend so much every week, stopping at the 7-11 every night on the way home. Well, I stay home a lot now. In fact, I don’t go anywhere. I’ve been to dinner or lunch several times now, and only water in my glass. I took the kids to a birthday party today and the adults were drinking. I turned down beer and margaritas. I was a miserable bastard that didn’t look or talk to anyone more than absolutely necessary. I was a hard-ass to my kids.

I spent a hundred dollars at the grocery store, and spent two hours making that rib eye sous vide with the crab cakes and vegetables. I asked if anyone wanted wine with dinner, looking for an excuse to open that bottle. I had fantasised that I wasn’t going to give myself a glass, or that I would pour myself one and not touch it to my lips. But no one wanted wine. After the table was cleared I put out that bottle of scotch, to talk about the gift and the circumstances which I acquired it. I thought about getting the glass, and the whiskey stones.

I didn’t. I put that bottle back on the shelf, thanked my guests for coming over. And as soon as the kids were upstairs for bath I went out and ate two ice cream bars out of the freezer. And a cup of Ben and Jerry’s after the were asleep.

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IDEX staking

During the California gold rush of the 1800’s, the ones who could be counted on to make the most money were the shops that sold the picks, shovels and other mining equipment to the speculators. The same can be argued about the recent cycle in the cryptocurrency space. When Bitcoin took a dive off the all time highs in December 2017, it seemed that the only ones making money were the graphics card and ASIC manufacturers. During the crypto winter which we have just left, one of the biggest success stories was that of Binance, which went on to become one of the largest exchanges in the space. In less than a year, CZ and his team created the premier trading market, and the success of Binance coin (BNB), was one of the few rays of hope in the space, increasing 10x while the rest of the market was tanking.

This reality of the market was not lost on traditional finance players, as even throughout the winter, infrastructure was being built. Coinbase and Gemini continued to expand their offerings and improve their platform, ready to make millions in fees from both the retail and institutional investor.

As an alternative to centralised exchanges, decentralized exchanges (DEX) have held the promise to preserve the decentralization, anonymity and censorship-resistance that the crypto-economy brought. Many of the more libertarian-minded have bemoaned the big money moving into the space, as centralization and regulation have given crypto the flavor of traditional finance.

So when it began to look like infrastructure plays were the best way to hold value during crypto winter, I began looking at ways to use my knowledge to setup staking and masternodes. Our first experiment was with XDNA, which uses a tiered staking system. We setup an AWS instance, fumbled around with the setup, and eventually had a staking masternode setup, which was earning us a nice passive stake. Unfortunately, we made a mistake with the sizing of our instance, which ran up our expenses. And even worse, we had secured our stake before the bottom fell out of the market, meaning our stake lost 90% of it’s value. So while we are still holding this node, along with the additional 25% in masternode earnings, we have discontinued the node and are holding our stake in case XDNA ever 100x back to our entry price.

Our latest play, that we’re currently evaluating, is IDEX. It’s the staking token for the DEX of the same name, which is currently the most popular of its kind. The iDEX staking roadmap has an ambitious plan to eventually migrate all of the exchange hardware to this decentralized model, and the current tier 3 staking model for trade history is just the first step in the plan. We had purchased our stake many months ago, before the staking software was released, and between now and then the market has taken quite the hit due to a number of factors. Including the broader decline in altcoins, iDEX implemented know your customer (KYC) requirements, which caused a revolt among the community. We also made similar issues with hardware selections, and ran into some performance issues that we’ve since rectified. Perhaps the biggest issue that will doom our participation in this project is that the current minimum stake, at current price and volume, is insufficient to generate a profit. Even though our hardware costs are down to nine dollars a month, the staking proceeds for the minimum 10,000 IDEX (about $200-300) is not enough to cover this cost. Based on our calculations, we would need to increase our stake by 3-4 times in order to just break even. Things are complicated by the fact that IDEX is only tradable against ETH.

So for the moment, we’ll leave our node running, and assess whether we want to add the increased exposure to iDEX. We remain bullish on DEXes in general, but operating a staking node at this juncture, given the risk of more price depreciation in ETH and alt markets, make this a tough play from a risk management perspective.

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Dissent: Summer 2019

This summer’s issue of Dissent focuses around the concept of the nation, with discussions about nationalism, open borders, colonialism and immigration. It’s an interesting edition and has some good articles and reviews as well. There’s an interview with former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, the history of Ghanan independence, and the recent political history of Turkey.

The Frontier Closes In: Perhaps the one article that I’ve found myself thinking about the most is this review of Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. Given the spate of mass shootings that plagued El Paso and Dayton this past week, people are searching for answers to the question why these young white men are committing these atrocities, and how the President’s rhetoric is spurring on this racism and white nationalism. Grandin’s theory is that as American expansionism ran out of room as the frontier was closed, American interests took a colonialist turn toward the Pacific and Caribbean. Following the invasion of Iraq it’s had nowhere to turn, and has since focused on the southern border with Mexico. This historical expansionism has long been used to distract or delay the reckoning of America’s social ills, and now that it is no longer available, we find ourselves having to deal with these problems.

Two Paths for Millenial Politics: Timothy Shenk asks what millenials are going to do next, and who they’re going to look to for political leadership moving forward. As the first millennial candidate for president, Buttigieg gets a thorough critique here, and is contrasted with Bernie Sanders, millenial’s seemingly current favorite. The author is not kind to Mayor Pete, and catalogs Mayor Pete’s political shrewdness and the difference between the presentation of his memoir and his stump speech.

Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara’s The Socialist Manifesto (on my to-read list) gets a good bit of mention in this article, mainly as a riposte to Buttigieg’s liberal posturing. There’s a lot of talk about the ongoing war within the Democratic party and the future of political organizing around climate change.

Share this one with Pete Buttigieg fans.

Ursula K Le Guin’s Revolutions: I’ll admit that even though I’ve been a huge sci-fi fan over the years, I’ve never read any of Le Guin’s work. I may have picked one of the Earthsea novels when I was a pre-teen, but I don’t think I made it very far into it before abandoning it. Sarah Jones’s short piece is a nice homage to Le Guin and the unique voice and politics that she brought to the genre over her decades-long career.

There’s a good portion about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (pdf), which is a short four page story that is one of Le Guin’s best known works. While Jone’s description of it didn’t make me give it another thought, it did coincidentally turn up in my attention a day or two later when I turned on one of Sam Harris’s lessons in the Waking Up app where he read the entire thing. I clearly recall having a visceral reaction to it. Harris’s piece doesn’t seem to be available outside of the app, but he specifically mentions this episode of the Very Bad Wizards podcast, where they discuss the story at length.

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The Nation Magazine – Spring Books 2019

I’ve had a subscription to The Nation for just over a year now. Tom Nichol’s book with Robert McChesney, People Get Ready, was my gateway drug. I was a bit underprepared for the sheer amount of material that they publish, since the articles and reviews are rather lengthy. They have a really weird publishing schedule as well. The schedule is irregularly regular, certain months are four, three, or two issues. I’m sure there’s an story as to why it’s like that, but it’s just strange.

And don’t get me started on the crossword puzzles. Just reading the notes makes me anxious. I’m sure I’ll never…

Each issue has at least two hours of content if one reads cover-to-cover. Obviously, keeping up with the publishing schedule, and my other subscriptions, causes me to get pretty backlogged, and I usually have four or five issues in my to-read stack. I just finished the June 3rd issue, so that’s probably closer to seven. I’ve started to skip through most of the beginning features, the opinion and more recent event stuff, since by the time I get to the issue it’s already several cycles behind. I do read the features, and probably enjoy the book and media reviews in the back the most, since they’re usually more outside of the pressing issues and offer more of a historical context to things and people that I’ve never heard of before.

In spring and fall they put out their bi-annual books issues, which forgo the features in favor of more reviews. This is where I’ve just finished. I find that these reviews, both in these books issues and the regular editions, offer me a pretty thorough synopsis of not only a book or three about a subject or by the same author, but also about the history or background of the subject. I enjoy the exposure.

Everything to Lose: review of David Wallace-Wells The Uninhabitable Earth and Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth. Wells was recently on the Team Human podcast, which is also worth checking out. Since we now live in an age where climate disaster is all but certain, the question becomes what do we do now with our daily lives to adjust to it. I for one, after trying to work within the political process and Democratic party for the past 4 years, have become skeptical that our existing political system can dig us out of this mess. More radical measures will be needed, but we’re not likely to have the organizing power to affect this change until more of the effects are being felt, and more of the old guard has passed on to make way for younger generations. By that time, the amount of climate change that has been baked into the system in addition to what we’re already facing may be more than we can deal with. We’ll see what the next decade holds.

Box of Wonders: review of Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. Ever since I deleted Facebook off of my iPhone months ago I’ve become to realize how toxic much of the online lifestyle has become to the human spirit. I’ve managed to stay away from it completely for some time now — don’t touch my Twitter, though! — and it’s been apparent how addictive these social media platforms are, and the damaging influence they have on society. My meditation practice is a way to cope with this, and in response I make it a priority to be present around my children whenever possible, or when I’m out with others. One thing I’ve rediscovered during this practice is the joy of doing nothing, and the tendency for the human mind to find something to focus attention on, whether it’s discomfort of the body in the present, regrets of the past, or anxieties about the future. Just being content in the moment is a really important skill and one that I am trying to teach to my kids. It’s also helping me break that habit of reaching for my phone during every period of waiting or those transition moments between activities during the day. The algorithms haven’t won yet.

The Language of the Unheard: review of Sylvie Laurent’s King and the Other America. As someone who has been very interested in the work that Rev. D. William Barber II has been doing with the revived Poor People’s Campaign, histories of Martin Luther King’s original Poor People’s Campaign always gets my attention. I’ve written about King’s radicalism elsewhere, and how he’s been sanitized and co-opted by everything from corporations to the conservative right. His tendencies toward social-democratic politics are well documented. Some might even say he held socialist views toward the end of his life. Who knows where we might be today had he and Robert Kennedy been able to keep this movement from failing?

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Pushing further into the e-commerce world

I took my plunge into the Shopify space today. I was introduced to someone who wants to start a line of clothing and wanted to use the platform to sell her wares. I don’t have much experience with online marketplaces, other than eBay and Craigslist sporadically over the years. I had put together some stuff on CafePress years ago, mainly as a way to get a shirt made for myself, but that went dormant a long time ago. Most recently I setup a prototype storefront using WooCommerce and Printful as an experiment for a crypto project, but I haven’t done anything with it since setting it up.

The technical side of all these platforms seems relatively straightforward. It’s really actually pretty simple. The exercise instead becomes one of branding, marketing, and logistics. The just-in-time distributor models from Printful and other integrators makes the barrier to entry so low that literally anyone can do it. It just takes the time and the will to do it.

I’ve been in sales my entire life, but I hate selling, and have this mental block against the type of soul-sucking standard fare that goes along with promotions these days. It’s like the old Bill Hicks routine: “Anyone here work in marketing? Yes? Go kill yourself. Seriously.” I suppose though that to be successful these days we’ve all become brands and have to manage our online identities. In the past we may have called them ‘personas’, but now it’s all about branding. I really surprised myself on the phone with this young woman today, telling her to imagine her brand as a person, literally to imagine her brand as a person, whether it was herself or an idealised version of herself: twenty something, college-educated, married, earning x-dollars a year and driving a Mercedes. Find her voice and make sure every product fit that story. Was trying to describe what the splash page on the storefront should do and told her to find some pictures that tell the story of her brand. Twenty year old me would have thrown up in his mouth if he had said it with a straight face.

Going back to Shopify for another moment; it only took a few minutes to setup a partner account and link to the existing storefront. Another minute or two and I had my own development site up and running to play around with. Anyone who is familiar with WordPress shouldn’t have a bit of a problem navigating around Shopify’s presentation and theme options. The Liquid templating language was actually familiar to me from my work with Nationbuilder — I had no idea it was originally developed by Shopify.

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Trade wars and crypto gainz

The last couple days have been pretty interesting in the cryptocurrency and equities markets. The Fed lowered interest rates for the first time since 2008, back before Bitcoin had been created, and CryptoTwitter has been abuzz about what it means. Most see it as a devaluing of the US dollar, and ultimately good for Bitcoin. The Trump tariff chaos is also being seen as ultimately good for Bitcoin, assuming that its ‘store of value’ thesis holds up and it’s used as a hedge against US markets tanking. That’s how I’ve been acting, anyways.

The US economy — at least as measured by GDP and the S&P, we’ll leave broader economic issues for another day — has been in a bull market for much longer than we traditionally see in the market, and prominent investors believe that we are overdue for a pullback. There are claims that the Administration fears a downturn before the next US election, and that the fight between Trump and the Federal Reserve over interest rates is because the President wants to give the economy a boost in the hopes that any impact won’t be felt until after his re-election. With last week’s rate cut, it looks like he won that fight, but we’ll see if things play out like he wants.

The lower interest rate will have a devaluationary effect on the dollar, and seems to have pissed off the Chinese, who have since decided to devalue the Yuan in response. This sent Bitcoin prices flying as the Asia markets opened, and it continued upward after the US markets opened and proceeded to tank about two percent. Whether the Bitcoin price increase is due to capital flight, Asians trying to hedge their capital, or just speculators anticipating such a move remains to be seen.

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America’s original sins

Well, I forget whatever it was I was going to write about today, cause today is the day of the El Paso shooting, and last I’ve read there were 18 people killed by a white supremacist who was worried about hispanics taking over Texas or something. I really don’t know what it’s going to take for us to get some reform done here in this country. It’s despicable.

Guns are such a part of this country. There’s a tweet I saw about how America is so fucked up, it’s almost like it was built on an Indian burial ground or something. But the fact of the matter is that America was founded on slavery and the genocide of the Native Americans, and guns and the 2nd Amendment were a part of that. The militarism of this country and our love affair with guns is a direct effect of this racist history, and I see no sign that we’re dealing with it at all.

A couple recent pieces that I’ve read lately about the American frontier, or really the myth of it, has enlightened me to a bit of the violence that is endemic to the American story. This last Fourth of July, I re-read Howard Zinn’s chapters on the American Revolution, and noted that one of the main reasons for the revolution was that the British were preventing colonists to expand westward. This was to ally with the Native Americans against the French, but the colonists wanted the land. So the story of American expansion through the frontier becomes the Trail of Tears and so on. But the closing of the Frontier as Americans reached California didn’t stop the expansionist aims, so we had wars with Mexico, invaded the Philippines, Guam, Virgin Islands, et cetera.

Of course this all plays back to what Trump is doing with the resurgence of white Nationalism, and the El Paso shooter and his manifesto. America’s sins continue to be America’s tragedy, and until we can reckon with that past we’re not going to do a damn thing about the tragedies today. These shootings will continue to occur and we will continue to lament the deaths while doing nothing about it.

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Pity party

I was listening to James Altucher this morning while making the commute into the office this morning. I usually work from home, every two weeks or so I have to go into the office to pick up equipment so I can do an onsite job for a client. On a good day with no traffic I can make it in 25 minutes, most days the commute is about twice that, and on most weekdays, if I’m not careful to beat the afternoon rush hour, I’m stuck for an hour or more. Anyways I listen to podcasts in the car, and that’s how I happened to be listening to Altucher and Scott Galloway on the way in this morning. 

Galloway is the author of “The Algebra of Happiness”, and has a lot to say about fulfillment and meaningfulness. A lot of what he had to say made me realize what I feel like I’m lacking in my life right now, mainly the lack of meaningful relationships in my life. In the last eight weeks I’ve had maybe three conversations with people that have lasted more than five minutes. My wife and I talk, of course, and have conversations on the phone or in chat through work, but I think I dumped all my friends years ago and haven’t maintained any close social connections in a long time. 

A day ago I was re-reading When To Leave Your Job, and was just checking off the boxes:  you can no longer influence positive change? CHECK. you can no longer engage in what you do? CHECK. You’ve lost faith in the vision and direction of the company? ABSOLUTELY.  And I realized that August is here, and I had planned to be gone from this job last Thanksgiving. And this past week has just been more of the same. Frustration from the same problems. 

Not to sound like a pity party, but Galloway really had me thinking as I was listening. I realized that while I felt like I had brushed off June’s loss, I really hadn’t. I’m still mourning. I may have rationalized it or whatever to seem too cool, but I’m in that dead zone following a failed project where I’m still struggling to figure out what’s next. So I threw myself at various things: fasting, meditation, sobriety, coding. Trying to fill what’s missing with something. Maybe I’m being too hard on myself. Maybe there’s some self-loathing or low self-esteem that’s still lingering from when I was a child or something that’s holding me back. I don’t know. 

Maybe I’m conflating failure with rejection. Maybe I’m having a mid-life crisis. Maybe I’m just cranky from giving up the drink for a month and going on and unplanned 36-hour fast. All I can do is recognize what’s going on and try to be cognizant of my behavior. Maybe I’m on the downswing of the pendulum of happiness. Maybe I’m just being to hard on myself. 

My wife accused me of being miserable the other day as I was being Mr. Bossypants to the kids and yelling or something over something trivial. I’ve often repeated the refrain that “happiness is not something you experience, it’s something you remember.” I’m not sure if that’s the mind-blowing insight that I thought it was when I first heard it, or whether it’s just a load of crap that I tell myself to justify being a miserable bastard half the time. I don’t know. My usual stoicism doesn’t seem to be doing the trick. Maybe I just need to get laid.