Life is Strange

Having just celebrated one of those half-decade semi-milestone birthdays and finding myself at an age I would have thought ancient in my youth, I think I have earned the right to say that life is, unequivocally, strange as fuck.

Or maybe I'm just making the same discoveries that the millions who came before me have made at the same point in their lives.

When I was in my 20s and 30s, I thought I had the whole world figured out. As I've gotten older, I come to realize I don't—and  never will. It's kind of a relief to accept that, but at the same time a lot of things I see going on just don't make any sense. I often find myself wondering if the entire species is going insane. Understanding how and why I got to this point in my life doesn't change the fact that I still find myself looking and thinking, "WTF?!?"

It also doesn't help that famous people younger than me are dropping dead.

I don't know if this post is going to be a ramble, a rant, or a therapy session on display. Be warned.

Without further ado…

HOME

I find myself living in a city that—save for a brief stint in the late 1960s when my family considered moving here because of my dad's job—was never even on my radar as places I wanted to live. Of course, the reason I'm here now is because five years ago the unthinkable happened: a man entered my life whom I came to love and care for to such a degree that I was willing to give up my very settled and comfortable life to follow on this journey. After two years here, I don't regret the decision to move; it's just that it's not at all what I expected and has been extremely…trying. I've given it my best, but when the obligations that are keeping us here are fulfilled, I will shed no tears when we pack up that U-Haul and move on to wherever.

LOVE

Five years ago, the absolute last thing I was expecting in my life was the arrival of a relationship. Maybe not the last thing because immediately prior to meeting Ben, I had told the Universe that I was ready to love again. It wasn't the first time in my life that I'd done this, but this time it was different; this time I wasn't just paying lip service to the idea—I felt it in the very fiber of my being and I guess the Universe was listening.

For these past five years, Ben has been the light in my life; a joy that words cannot express. He's set my life on a course and has caused me to grow in ways I could not have imagined. He's broken me out of static mindsets. He's exposed me to new music and new ideas and yet none of it has ever felt forced. We've yet to have more than a minor disagreement about anything, and I'm still amazed at how easy we get along. It's sometimes scary at how truly complementary we are. He is the ying to my yang and vice versa. I fully expect to live out the remainder of my days in his arms.

WORK

As much as I bitched and complained about aspects of my last job in Phoenix, there's no denying that I worked with an outstanding group of people and that was probably the main reason despite my bitching that I never made any real effort to go elsewhere. There'd been only one other job in my life where I remained for seven years, and again it was the people that had kept me there.

At [Company Name] I'd proven myself; I was liked and respected by my supervisors, my peers and the majority of people I supported. I pretty much assumed that barring any major shake-up, I'd probably end up retiring from the place. For a healthcare company it was a decent place to work; just how decent I never realized until I came to be where I am now.

While I enjoy being part of a team and crave the support that gives, I do my best work with minimal supervision. I think that stems from my years and years of architectural drafting. When I worked in that field, I'd be given initial design drawings, a set of parameters, and then let loose to complete the task.

My last tech job in Phoenix provided that same kind of independence. I was part of a large, centrally-located I.T. department that was there for assistance and support when needed, but I was pretty much on my own and could schedule my tasks as I saw fit at the facilities I supported.

At heart, I'm actually pretty lazy when it comes to work, and that's why I'm so good at what I do. I work efficiently so I can be lazy. I know that might sound like a contradiction, but if a process takes a certain amount of time to complete, I work on improving the process so it takes half as long and requires a minimum of supervision on my part. That gives me more time to goof off.

At my current place of employment, I have half of what I consider to be the requirements for a good job; namely, the fact that my workflow is basically unsupervised and can work on improving processes to my advantage. The downside is that the company is so small I have no support group. I miss the camaraderie; I miss being able to commiserate with a peer about the ongoing, never-changing abject stupidity of some members of our user base.

This lack of direct supervision is probably the main reason I haven't been pursuing other opportunities with as much energy as I should be. The annoyance-to-goof-off-time ratio isn't high enough yet that it's totally intolerable, although I am entertaining with increasing frequency the fantasy of just packing my shit up and walking out; an option I used on more than one occasion with absolute abandon in my youth. Unfortunately, at this point in my life I don't have such a luxury, and as I've written before, as a responsible adult, I now have to make sure that something else is lined up before I let my drama flag fly.

Additionally, if I go somewhere else, I have to make sure I have the same level of independence I've come to enjoy. I recently interviewed with a large investment company that is opening a new office about three blocks from where I now work; they liked me and were ready to move on to the next part of the hiring process but I turned them down because while it would afford the independence I require, I'd be only one of two on-site techs to support 1000 users with the remainder of our support staff in another state. No thanks. Any new job will need to have that same independence-to-on-site-support ratio I enjoyed in Phoenix.

FRIENDS

All my close and/or lifelong friends who survived the plague-ridden 1990s now live—on average—about 750 miles away from me. It seems that's always been the case to some degree, having lived my adult life in four different cities, but lately I'm feeling especially cut off . Thank the gods for the technology that allows us to stay in touch much more easily now than if we'd found ourselves in this situation in the era of hand-written letters and long-distance phone calls, but it's just not the same as being able to pick up a phone and say, "Hey, you wanna go catch a movie?"

In the early 1980s, while sitting at the kitchen breakfast bar in the house that belonged to one of those friends's moms, I easily believed we'd all still be friends thirty years later, but I would never have even contemplated that we'd be as far-flung as we are now—or that one of us would be gone completely.

I know new, wonderful friendships can appear out of nowhere at the most unexpected times and in the most unexpected places (Cindy, Allison, and Beth come to mind—all of whom I met at my last job and weren't even a part of my department) so I haven't given up hope that it will happen in Denver, but at the same time I'm not exactly holding my breath. I'm friendly with a several folks at work (I mean, at least I don't despise them as I do the majority of my coworkers), but there are only one or two I would ever want to spend any personal time with.

FAMILY

Like many of those longtime friends, I have joined their ranks as an adult orphan; a concept and term I still have a hard time wrapping my head around.

When my sister and I were young and fighting over something stupid, my mother would often diffuse whatever the situation might be by reminding us that someday she and Dad would be gone and it would just be the two of us—and we'd better damn well learn to get along. It didn't stop the squabbling completely of course, and as adults have had some rifts develop, but that one thought was something that  stayed with us both, always bringing us back together. It's even more poignant now that it really is just the two of us.

HEALTH

Since my cancer diagnosis ten years ago, I've known that my body has had plans of its own that have had nothing to do with what I particularly want to do, and as the years have ticked by it's becoming more and more obvious of who is actually in charge in that department.

For most of my life, I'd been in pretty decent health. The worst things I had to contend with were allergies, asthma, recurrent tonsillitis, and asymptomatic chronic Hep B (never developed antibodies) that was discovered in my mid 20s.

I had the nasty tonsils yanked when I hit forty and that solved the allergy problem along with not being able to kiss boys without suffering through a guaranteed sore throat a week later. But then the cancer showed up and along with it a Type II diabetes diagnosis. (It was discovered when I went in for my first PET scan.) This didn't come as a complete surprise because my maternal grandmother was diabetic as long as I'd been alive. Thankfully I had an excellent primary care physician at the time, and we quickly brought it under control. It remained that way until about four years ago when my glucose numbers started creeping up. The efficacy of the oral medication I'd been taking had begun to wear off, and now—after trying a combination of other oral meds to no avail—have started on an insulin regimen that's brought its own host of issues. Add a bit of hypertension to the mix, and well…yeah.

As Roseanne Roseannadanna says, "It's always something."

AGING

While a teenager I remember often laughing at how inflexible my parents and grandparents were in so many aspects of their lives. As I begin to enter that age range myself I'm realizing it's not inflexibility; it's simply that over the course of your life—through a lot of trial and error—you figure out what works for best you and is most comfortable and what isn't…and then you stick with it.

Back in my 20s, I wouldn't think twice about packing up and moving to a new apartment every six months, just because. My parents berated me for never staying put. This restlessness slowed to 1-2 years by the time I'd reached 30, and by the time 40 was approaching, I was moving as infrequently as humanly possible—and only because for whatever reason I had to.

When I landed back in Phoenix in 2002, I already knew where I wanted to put down roots. (In fact, it was this particular apartment development that contributed to my decision to move back from San Francisco in the first place; the loss of my job in the Bay Area was the push I needed to finally get out of Dodge for the final time.) After moving in, I stayed in that particular apartment complex for almost nine years; staying 6 years in the first unit and only switching to a different one at that point because I'd reached the magic 5-year  cancer-free anniversary and I needed something besides just the tattoo to signify a new beginning.

So being settled—while at one point was almost anathema to my existence, has become very important. And it's something that's decidedly lacking from my current domestic situation.

Another part of aging is that I no longer suffer fools gladly, a trait my friend Cindy and I share and revel in. I know now why many older people have—how shall I put this delicately? "Outspoken opinions." It's because after a lifetime of observing the human condition, they know bullshit when they see it aren't afraid to let people know. Welcome to my world. At times I wonder if the stupidity I see running through in our society (I'm pointing my finger at you, scumbag politicians and people who are famous for being famous) hasn't always been there in one form or another; it's just that I was so busy rushing through the scenes in my own life that I  just never noticed it.

TECHNOLOGY

Being a very impressionable child of the 60s when 2001: A Space Odyssey hit theaters, I grew up with certain expectations for technology, pretty much all of which remain unfulfilled. We have no commercial flights to space stations, moon bases, or manned missions to the outer planets, but still…miracles. We are living in the age of silicon miracles, and together I think we've lost sight of that. Even when I was a teenager in the 70s and designing my first dream home, I knew computers would be a standard fixture in residences of the future. I even went so far as to design a dedicated 8×10 computer room into the basement! Never in my wildest dreams did I think that thirty-some years later I'd actually be carrying around more computing power in my pocket than what sent men to the moon.

Never before has humanity had such instantaneous access to the collective knowledge (and gossip) of the entire species. At the same time, I have to ask, "To what end?" I don't know where this tech will lead; I don't think anyone does, but I know this much: it is still very much in its infancy and is destined to change us in fundamental ways.

SOCIETY

Two words: Kim Kardashian. Do I really need to say more?

And with that I'll stop.