Gotta Conn?

In which our Hero feels like he’s back on the bridge, but not sure if it’s before or after he jumped

If it really takes as little as writing a few entries to recall me to myself then I’m baffled as to why I don’t just make it a personal rule to write in in my diary at least once a week. Except that the reality is that there are deeper things than just the writing; it’s not about the words, it’s about self-knowledge and self-confidence.

Here’s a thing. Not the thing, just a thing, presented for your consideration, Gentle Reader: Uncertainty is a destructive force in life. Uncertainty erodes confidence, adds stress, and generally comprises your ability to deal with reality. Most of the time, this isn’t a big deal, because we mostly have routines and we only disturb them for minor perturbations, like a move or a new job. And a lot of the other time, I think we’re engaged in the change, it’s something that we want, that we seek out.

So it’s only some of the time that we hit neutral or unhappy uncertainty. And then with the various cycles of confidence and change, there’s only so many times when it all coincides, when work and home and life and all become uncertain.

I’m dealing with change and uncertainty at work. My project of the last few years is over and now I’m sucked into a project that’s a lot like swimming blind in the ocean. I don’t know where I am or where land is, and worse, there’s things in the water with me, and I don’t know if they’re whales or sharks or icebergs. Just that something brushes against me once in a while, and so far I still have my limbs.

Stopping to think about it, there’s more uncertainty than that in my life, and maybe that’s worth an entry later, but for now, the thing is that I was talking to a childhood friend about the fact that I kind of woke up a little while ago wondering… where did I go just now? That feeling after you’ve been day dreaming and someone says something and you realize that you haven’t been here being you here for a while.

I don’t know how much of it has been my summer-o-hell at work, I don’t know how much of it has been general malaise related to the age-that-must-not-be-named-(today) but kind of like looking up and seeing birds and budding leaves, I’m here, and it’s spring and I’m… here.

Fuck.

Where have I been? And why are my trashbins so full? And what brought me out of it? Is it the mounting righteous anger at work? Is it the beachhead of Girl Guides that I had to fight through to get to the bus yesterday? (seriously, it was like the storming-the-beach scene from Saving Private Ryan except that instead of German soldiers, it was tiny cute little girls yelling incomprehensibly while aiming boxes of cookies at the incoming streams of commuters).

I’m getting really bored with this cycle. It’s hard not to be angry with myself for feeling this disjoint, even if it’s after the fact.

But my very rusty brain is getting back into very rusty gear and I’m feeling energized. Is it a false start? Beats me. I hope not.

I especially hope it’s not a false start because I’m looking at taking on one of those projects I mentioned. It’s a funny-not-haha circumstance, where someone else might say the project is cursed, but essentially, my friend put in a bid, with a contracted partner. The bid was accepted, my friend called the partner to start work and discovered the partner was medically invalided. No partner.

So when he called me, explaining all this, he told me he didn’t have much flexibility on price but that I could have the whole project, just for the relief of having someone to help and because it helps keep him anchored at the client. It’s very generous of him to offer but it wouldn’t be a righteous way to treat a stranger. I don’t need the money so much as I need to be invoicing other clients, and I told him as much. So he knows he’ll at least make something, I know my books look better against audit risk.

Maybe later I’ll find out if and what I stand to get paid for the work. For now, I’m just amused by the fact that I’m pretty close to agreeing to build a system for an unknown client using a technology that I don’t know for a fee that’s fixed with a deadline set by someone else.

We’ll see. Need to figure out just how far my ass would be hanging out.

Batman, er, Serin, out.