What is something that isn’t a masterpiece?

I have discovered the joy of change in my life. I was not a lover of change in the past, but now I am looking forward to it. Amy is changing things in her life too. She is leaving the Big Company in Redmond at the end of January.

We will be working for ourselves in some form or fashion as we move forward. That is a big change.

In some ways, I expected to be more nervous about.I am suprised that I’m not. However, I am pleased to be adjusting well to this. The peace of mind is, I think, the result of a lot of so-called inner work. For me, that means a combination of talk therapy, what I learned in therapy, and my own exploration of my complex of emotions. Also, a lot of walking.

Now that no one will have any specific working-for-the-man obligations, it opens a scary box of what do you actually want to do? The past two years of working for myself have provided me with a lot of time to think about that too. The results are amazing: I still don’t know.

I have decided that the important fact there is the indecision. Facing the fact that I don’t have clarity of purpose tells me something on its own. I have liked the work that I’ve done recently. In particular, I like working with non-profits. You feel really good helping them (for free or for pay). I also like that size of business. Mostly they have clear problems and the solutions are within the framework of typical business.

I would have thought I would feel more drive to “create.” I really love creating. I love seeing other people do it and doing it myself. And I like doing. Doing soemthing isn’t always an act of bringing something to the universe. It is a contrast to the act of watching TV. But practicing an instrument, a craft, even making a puzzle is a level of engagement that feels good when you do it.

Creation comes in many shapes and sizes too. When Zuckerberg created Facebook, it was a simple act of creation. No one could possible anticipate that it would be come the Facebook we know now. It is essentially a piece of social infrastructure and that is laudable. But he did not conceive of it beyond his college experience.

Facebook has become something that scares me too like TV. I don’t want to depend on it. I want less Facebook in my life and more music. That doesn’t diminish the awe I have for Facebook. I also have awe for nuclear fission. That can be scary and powerful too.

In order to keep an certain amount of optimism in my life, I need to limit the effects of nuclear fall-out and Facebook. One is relatively easy and the other is surprisingly hard. With nukes, I’m just hoping for the best. With Facebook, it is a conscious act of keeping that addictive thing at bay. Not eliminated but also measured exposure, because it creeps into the cracks and suddenly takes my attention from other things.

Maybe it’s music. Maybe it’s writing. Maybe it’s just stillness by a pond. Either way, I am trying to create some space for those things without a lot of expectation that I need to create the next Facebook-level masterpiece.

Change is coming and that’s my intention at present.

We might not make it

I have been “separated” from Microsoft for 18 months. It feels longer. I have forgotten so many of the little things like the phone number I had, peoples email addresses, etc. This is all reasonable and unsurprising.

I have also been working for myself for long enough and with enough variety that it feels normal. It is still a much less regular life. And considering what happened in that 18 months, it surely wasn’t “regular.”

Working for myself has been gratifying, but certainly it has not replaced my salary. Fortunately, I have been willing to forego some of that in the hope that I am building something that will sustain us in the future as our lives continue to change and we approach our 7th decade.

It is very clear to me, now, that nothing is to be taken for granted. There are fewer years in front of me than behind, and that is motivating too. I don’t have a bucket list mentality, but I do have a clear picture of what I don’t want my day-to-day life to be.

Given the current political climate, and also the regular climate, I recently had the thought that I don’t think mankind is going to make it. Funny enough, it didn’t bother me. We are in an age called the Anthropocene: the age of humans. But all good things come to an end. For all of our celebrated brain power, we don’t have what it takes to continue. And you can’t really feel bad about that, can you? It’s like hating whale because they can’t walk. They just can’t.

Chomsky said that there are two big, human-created changes that push us closer to doomsday: the invention of nuclear weapons and the human impact on climate change. The nuclear weapons thing is easy to understand. Everyone understands on the potential devastation of nuclear war. The lack of agreement on global climate change is the proof that humans are, on average, not smart enough to continue to be the dominant mammal on earth.

That might seem pessimistic, but I move from the extremes inward. There is little that I can do about either thing. Sure, I can and will vote. But that’s a tiny drop in the bucket. And I can pick an issue or two and advocate on that. Personally, my preferred issue is an end to the electoral college. I prefer the idea of a popular election because it is more democratic. If we are going to go down in a fight, I’d rather it not be on a technicality. None of the arguments for the electoral college make sense when cast in the light of democratic outcomes.

I like Robert Reich and I don’t like neo-liberalism if you want to know where I stand. Climate change is real and caused by humans. It is not hubris to think it is human caused, as religionists would have you believe.

Beyond that, it seems advisable to live a life where you are trying to minimize stress. Creating stress is not hard. And yes, some stress is necessary in order maximize one’s long term outcomes. The story the grasshopper and the ant comes to mind.

I’m not setting aside dumb luck either in my thinking and conclusions. I was lucky enough to have a good paying job for a long enough time that I can even ask these questions and take this time to think about it. I’m not starving and living a life of just surviving. But failing to see the stress that was in my life and not changing course, as I was doing, also seems quite dumb in hindsight.

Minor changes to fix some unclear points and mistakes from ealier – July 10

Figuring it out

Right now, I am in a period of transition in my life. Generally, I don’t like that. Generally, I like to control my environment. Some might say over control it. Transitions create a challenge to that control or the illusion of that control.

When I was in music school as an undergraduate, I thought I was pretty smart. In fact, I was told I was smart many times in my life so I believed it. Why wouldn’t I? I also found that if you stick to the plan that someone lays out, most of life’s events unfold as expected. I preferred that to certain things I experienced in my home life where unexpected things happened. It could be hard to predict.

(I am not a “program guy.” That will mean something to some people. I do find aspects of the program to be useful. And that means avoiding bringing other people into your nightmare.
However, if “the program with the secret meetings” means nothing to you, then you will think I’m being vague. I am. You will have to piece it together. But the goal is to avoid blaming other people and also to not “out” people for perceived transgressions. I’m just telling my side so that vagueness is to protect the possibility that I only have one side of the story.)

When I was 19 years old, I was a sophomore at U. Mass-Lowell (then called U. Lowell), in the music school, which was a separate college. The music college was more or less modeled after a conservatory. You studied Solfege, Harmony, Piano, and your instrument. You played in ensembles and you practiced. If you were smart and driven, you practiced a lot. The school primarily produced music teachers as opposed to orchestra players. The schools in Boston were full of people with those aspirations. But we had plenty of serious people trying to do serious things in music too.

At the same time you were doing this, you also were taking liberal arts curriculum. You had psych 101, college writing, etc. In the end, you would have the highest amount of required credit hours because of the ensembles and instrument load, which were extra compared to a normal liberal arts student. That meant you spent a fair amount of time in Durgin Hall with your peers.

During my sophomore year, I had a “come to Jesus” moment when I figured out that there was minimum amount of credits I could take. Why was I taking more than the minimum? I’m not a sucker so I signed up for the minimum. I was still not thinking on my own. I was relying on the idea that if there is a minimum, then there must be a plan. Stick to the plan.

What I didn’t figure out was that, at the minimum, you only stayed in school. You got your financial aid; you stayed on the meal plan; you lived in the dorms. What you don’t do is graduate in 4 years.

Looking back, that’s embarrassing for a “smart” kid. At some point, I did get the clue and increased my credit hours. At the same time, I was realizing that even being smart wasn’t going to fix this problem. I needed to be creative too. I had friends around me who never did things “inside the box” and I really admired them for that. That was completely new to me. I began to completely break down the fact that I always colored inside the lines and began to color outside the lines in some good ways and some bad ways.

I still hadn’t engaged why they did it. They did it because they wanted something. I wasn’t used to thinking that way. What do I want? I had no idea. I almost never expressed myself in that way or any other way.

You might think being a musician was about expressing yourself. Mostly, it isn’t. It is more about mastery of skills that help other people with their expression. You don’t improvise in the orchestra. You play what is written. Interpret it, yes, but the bigger goal is for the ensemble to express something even bigger.

Even in Jazz, which began to take a more dominant place in my musical life, I developed the skills to be a solid member of the rhythm section. That helped me to be in places where I wanted to be, where I got some praise for those skills. I liked that.

Looking back, the only places I really expressed myself were in poetry and song writing. I didn’t expose either of those to large audiences because that is risky too.

During my junior year, I figured some things out. I wanted to finish school so I had to catch up somehow for the courses that I hadn’t taken. And because I didn’t really know where I was going with all this, I took a semester off. I worked for my uncle, with my cousin Jim. I learned a lot there.

I went up to the school once a week to play a group that I thought was cool. I couch-surfed at my friends, mostly Mark, Tom, Paul and Don’s place. They were so cool about it. We didn’t even call it couch surfing but that is what it was. I also took French Conversation and Philosophy at Worcester State College to fix my transcript. That was an adventure because I hadn’t taken anything but French 1 before. Thanks to my grandmother I did ok. She would help me and answer questions and at least try to understand me when I tried to speak French.

It was tough, though. Mostly it was tough because it was all on me to figure out and I wasn’t used to that. That’s how it feels now.

Second week at the Weird Gym

I am happy to say that my real class at Cardio Rehab is nothing like my first visit for orientation.

Mostly, it is like going to a real gym. It is still a lot quieter, and you have an older population than 24 Hour Fitness. My class is mostly men and they wear gym clothes. They sweat. Well, mostly. They know how to work the machines and in fact, most of them, exercised quite a bit in their lives.

My class consists of 10 or 11 people. One day there were three women in it but most days there are two.

I have only met one other person who had a similar procedure as me, valve replacement. Talking to Meg ,she had many complications. I don’t want to scare anyone but it made me very happy for myself and very compassionate toward her. She seems fine now, but it has taken quite a long time for her to get back on her feet. She now has a mechanical valve that seems to be working, and she can once again care for her 3 year old. I think that gives her a lot of peace of mind and it is easy to root for her.

The others in class can be divided into open heart for by-pass procedures, people who have had a heart attack, and people who have not had a heart attack yet and are there to try to avoid one.

We don’t talk much about what happened that brought one here because it can easily turn in to “I can top that.” (If so, Meg would win and I mean crush.) Everyone just supports each other and treats all cases as equal. It is true we are all working toward the same thing. Getting our lives back to normal in a healthy way and learning how to deal with the new reality we face. For me, this is just getting back to normal in a gradual way. For others, it is learning new things.

The class also has a lecture one time a week. This week’s sessions was on anger management and how to control stress in your life. The lectures are optional. So far, I have not attended mostly because it would add an extra hour of waiting to whoever is driving me. Next week, I will drive myself so I might attend. Most of the classes do not pertain to me. My diet is pretty good. I understand a lot of what to expect because this is not my first time around. I already treat my mental health, for example, because I was depressed the first time. Now, I have a lot of resources for building my own resiliency.

I look forward to the class and got my heart rate up to 135 in my third of fourth class. That felt good and safe. I still have sternal precautions until next Wednesday so I’ll be able to use something other than 3 pound dumbbells.

I am off all my medications. That proved to be something of a roller coaster. I am having a bit of something like withdrawal from the beta blocker, mutoprolol. As a result, my heart rate is somewhat elevated at rest and a bit sticky. If I raise it, I have to really sit down and get calm for my body to slow it back down. And, my BP is hard for them to measure. At first, they freaked out a bit. They ended up taking it with a Doppler so they can really hear where the pulse changes.

After a bit of a tense day, and several calls back and fourth to my cardiologist, it appears to be a temporary condition that some people have and perhaps just a idiosyncrasy in measuring my BP.

My heart is loud. Other doctors and nurses have remarked on this too. It probably won’t change much and that’s just my physiology. I certainly can feel that my pulse if faster than normal. That did get my attention. However, I have been assured that it is normal in some percentage of people when they stop this drug. In the meanwhile, we keep tabs on it by measuring a bit more often, and I know what the numbers are when we call someone.

Talking to people in the class is good for me. Mostly it is just what you might expect. Guys who are a little bummed to have needed a bypass but grateful that it was caught in time. These two guys both look healthy and were athletic. One guy was actually riding his bike to prepare for STP when he noticed going up hills was a lot more labored. The other guy had a similar observation while hiking. So you never know. Keep tabs on it. Get check-ups and if you feel weird, go get it check out.

Both guys are not anything you would call fat. Both guys are in their 50s maybe early 60s. Neither is challenging about this. They both want to get back to normal and start doing things they did before and will work hard in class.

Some of the heart attack and heart disease people (non-surgical) are overweight but not all. They are not all as chipper about being there. I think it is a wake-up call and maybe a bit embarrassing but they do the work. One guy worries me. If anything he works too hard and occasionally is told by coaches to throttle it back. I don’t get it. There is some kind of denial going on there.

I will be a bit happier myself when my body works through the withdrawal. Then I’ll have a better understanding of where I am. And next week, maybe even 5 pound dumbbells.

First day at weird gym

[I hope this isn’t viewed as me making fun of “old” people. After all, I’m old in the eyes of my kids, nieces and nephews. It is more of an observation on a particular set of people who happen to be older than I am.]

I went to the first day of Cardio Rehab yesterday. It’s a very nice facility, filled with fancy tread mills, stationary bikes, and steppers. In the middle of it all is a rack of small dumbbells and some fancy medical equipment. Plus, around the perimeter, there are screens showing the Today show or some other day time TV. In contrast with a real gym, it is fairly quiet. No Zumba classes; no blaring music. No voice over a microphone saying. “10 more…and 9, 8…”

Just off to the side, is a circle of chairs. It looks like a nice gym that surrounds an absentee kindergarten class.

The other difference is that the people at the gym average 83 years old.

Almost none of them are wearing gym clothes. And not a single one looks like they are sweating. In fact, I don’t think they look like they can sweat.

There is one man. He is wearing blue chinos, a checked flannel shirt, white undershirt and blindingly clean white sneakers. They look brand new. His hair is white, full and combed to the side as if he is taken a shower and gotten dressed to go out in the world, not the gym. The only tip-off is that he has the Nikes on his feet. And for some reason, they look like they weigh him down. They look huge and heavy. They are tennis shoes, not running shoes and they look like they are somehow too big and heavy for his frame.

He has a walker so when he goes from the stepper to the circle, it takes 5 interminable minutes. I had the urge to get of my machine and just carry him to the circle.

M, W, Th are heart days. On T and F, it is lung day. It’s Friday and these people all had some kind of lung surgery or treatment. I didn’t see any oxygen tanks. Lung issues are not good. I’ve concluded this from my unscientific observations both here and in the hospital.

My job today is to give my medical history and learn how to use the equipment. Therefore, I’m just getting a private tour in the middle of a normal class. I’ve been shown how to put on the heart rate monitor. It isn’t like the Polar- one strap around the chest. It is like the hospital: four individual leads and a fairly large (think older, heavy cell phone size) transponder. You put that in a neck holder that you wear. Each person has one and there are stations where they monitor your ECG the whole time you are there. At the stations, you can see a list of 10 different ECGs.

I’m riding a recumbent bike for 10 minutes. The level was 2. I pumped it up to 3 and the therapist yelled at me. Ok. This is going to be a slow progression. She also takes my blood pressure three times, beginning, middle, end. They want to be sure that you don’t pass out or have some other issue. This is all my “base line”.

I also do a three minute cool down, which is hard to distinguish from my workout. But they are just showing me how it is going to go each time. This follows a long conversation about my heart history. As usual, they expected a much worse case. That means, most cases they see of AVR are worse than me. They deal from experience. That means, even though I don’t feel it, I’m the lucky one. I didn’t need my valve replaced because of some other big problem, which is more typical. As a single case, I don’t know that.

During the 13 minutes I am on the bike, I mostly get to see the class do their strength training. It is soooo funny. One lady looks like Madea-meets-Hillary-Clinton. Her hair is nicely done up but looks a bit like a gray helmet. She has giant glasses. She’s short but healthy looking except for the glazed look on her face. She never stops smiling but is the face of someone who looks a tiny bit lost.

Most of the exercises are seated. The teacher is younger than me. She cajoles and has a very pleasant way of leading. But if I were to take away your view of the class, you’d swear she was talking to a pre-school. Everyone looks almost surprised to be there. No one looks like anyone you see at a real gym. No one is in charge of their workout. It looks more like field trip of unwitting participants who had no idea that their destination was the gym. They go through the motions pleasantly but as if they find it more amusing than anything else. “Look Martha. I’m making circles with my arms!”

I don’t know if they just don’t have any experience at a gym or doing exercise for some meaningful reason or what? As time passes, I begin to think they all look like marionettes. They aren’t in charge of their actions; it’s the people who are pulling the strings. And it’s all just a beat too slow. And there is a noticable lack of eye contact with anyone. They don’t look at the teacher or really each other. Eyes are down or looking out the window in bit of far-off stare.

I finish up and remove my monitor. I don’t know what my class is going to be like. It should, at least, be amusing.

Maybe the Young Ones can Kickstart a Fix – Babyboomers are over.

[This isn’t my usual blog fare. But I needed to get this off my chest. And if no one reads it that’s fine. I still put it out there. Facebook was another consideration but I honestly cannot take the day-to-day noise that is there right now. So here it is.]

The presidential election is broken. Fixing it is impossible for people of my generation and over. We had our chances and we didn’t do anything with it. Good luck with fixing it, young people.

You give me hope because you are not beholdin’ to ancient, sacred ideas like the Constitution being an immutable and nearly biblical artifact. You are problem solvers and you have some tough problems.

The way that I want to look at this is from the top down. Fix the presidential election, and you might, just maybe, improve the confidence people have in other types of elections or the federal government in general. Even if you think the country is already great enough, there is near universal agreement that the campaign and the election are proving to be expensive contests that dissatisfy too many people. Dissatisfied people disrupt. It’s an unproductive cycle.

Here it is: You have to eliminate the Electoral College and return the so-called “fourth estate” to a trustworthy institution. Most young people will not know the fourth estate (the press) because they believe in the fifth estate, social media, etc. How can you blame them? They grew up with it and search engines are fantastic.

Young people are perplexed at how us oldsters held on to the Electoral College this long. It’s clearly antiquated. Why, in light of modern communication, do we use it? How did we ever let it get this broken they ask, and it’s a fair question.

I’m not arguing for any particular party. I am arguing for change. But change isn’t happening because the institution is broken. Just like it is for racism. You don’t see it if you have that blind spot, but that’s your blind spot.

Young people will get it. In fact, they are perplexed at how shitty the experience is. Look at the average Bernie supporter and this is clear.

One way to say it simply is that the game theory involved in the Electoral College (because of winner take all) leads to the entrenched two party system. It is far more cost effective to undermine all truth and your opponent because winning by default or attrition is still winning.

Cooperation among parties is unthinkable. Because of that there is no real room for a third party. If a third party splits your party, then neither has any serious chance in any winner-take-all Electoral College.

The scale of the election and the size of the growing republic exacerbate the problem. It cannot get better. It can only get worse because it isn’t rigged, it’s busted.

If you don’t understand that, or can’t google it and understand it, then you cannot be part of the solution. It’s not your fault. Relax. Just keep doing what you’re doing.

If you can listen to the Freakonomics podcast you might understand it.

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/idea-must-die-election-edition/

And while many of the ideas are novel, they all depend on changing the basic existing Electoral College. I.e. you have to admit that you have a problem. They don’t make as big a deal of this as I wish they did. The ideas are novel and most have no shot.

If you can’t listen because you can’t find it or you can’t handle what they are saying, you are in the same group as above. I’m not saying you are part of the problem but you are not part of the solution. It’s ok. Just like me, there’s lots of things you can’t do but life is still worth living.

Everyone else, you might have a chance to fix this but you have to kill a sacred cow AND (Boolean – you get it) fix something you might think is not broken but it is – the fourth estate.

The amount of conspiracy theory that I hear is astonishing to me. How can you verify or deny that any claim is crazy? Take, for example, the clam that the Democratic primary was rigged. (It wasn’t. The favorite won the contest that is set up for the favorite to win. That’s not usually how a rigged game works.) You really can’t; not in any way that you believe because social media is an echo chamber.

No one can figure out how a vibrant and robust press can exist without advertising dollars. Dollars equal influence. I get it. TV is a business. And they, like newspapers, are losing out to any free content provider on the internet. Everyone can find some outlet that is putting out material in favor of their view.

Maybe it was always this way with the “free press” but again we have scale working against us. And a tradition, the fourth estate, that is nowhere now. And it ain’t ever coming back. It shouldn’t. Times have changed.

Young people might be able to get rid of the Electoral College because it is easy for them to see how broken it is. They also trust other ways of fixing the problems and see no reason to stand still when they can iterate towards a better fix.

Young people don’t put the founders on a pedestal like they are canonized saints. In fact they don’t know what that means. And they are problem solvers. They do stuff like kick starter and get on with using whatever bathroom is open.

Us oldsters trusted journalists and “the news” to be a proxy for the truth. That notion is completely gone. Kids don’t know that Jon Stewart was a News parody. They just thought it was a funny show. They never watched the news.

Young people have some responsibility for killing this. Their devotion to the fifth estate – Facebook, Twitter, and social media in general – gives everyone an equal status for their ideas.

This leads to everyone checking everything on the internet. You think the election is rigged for Clinton, right? Look it up. You will find information that supports your idea. But is that reliable? Has that article been vetted by other parties? No. But you will never know that because you already posted it to Facebook and gotten 37 likes by other similar thinking people.

That forces everyone to become unrelenting fact checkers who must be omnipresent. In light of that impossibility, we start to trust charlatans pedaling snake oil. Or we start making “feelings based” judgments about what is true. That’s not how to run a country. Too many people end up unhappy.

To recap, young people fix two problems: eliminate the out of date Electoral College and establish the fifth estate as a robust replacement to the fouth estate in a new 21^st millennium style. Good luck. I will support you but I, and many people my age, probably can’t help you. Where the hell is my phone?

Final pre-surgery meetings

Thursday this past week were my final tests and meetings before surgery. I didn’t know what to expect and I’m not sure what to make of that fact. Usually the UW Med Center is very prompt and organized about sending phone messages before appointments. And, because heart surgery is a big deal, they send snail mail too. So I received on message on my phone and had two meetings. Wednesday night I told Amy this and she said I should have called.

Everyone is nervous. Everyone I talk to show and expresses this concern in different ways. I know people care or they wouldn’t get so emotional about it. I have, over the course of my life, learned to take this all in. But it took a bit of time before I could see this as fear and concern and at the end of the day, simply love and humanity.

But I’m a child of the late sixties and early seventies. Some of us actually believe that stuff.

The hospital meetings were routine and/or not great. My second surgical consult was contentious and, as people out here say, very east coast. Amy and I compared notes about it afterwards and it affected us each differently. But, we both agreed the doctor was a bummer. Perhaps it was his job to point out all the options and risks but we didn’t have any good chemistry. And I had a toss-and-turn night thinking about it.

At the end of the day, nights like that are inevitable. It’s a big deal. There will be sleepless nights.

After the scheduled tests, they sent me to some unscheduled tests, “if I have the time.” This is almost funny because it is sort of like saying, “if you want to step over here, you can avoid getting run over. You know…if it’s not too much trouble.”

Amy had not planned to be at the hospital all day (neither did I, but this has happened before). We grabbed some lunch in the underground cafeteria, straight out of Scrubs. It is here that you see the hospital is, for many people, just where they work. Wearing scrubs is a great equalizer. They make doctors look like janitors and vice versa.

The next two appointments were walk-in. These places in the hospital are funny low spots too. Everyone is treated the same, and you see a cross section of everyone at this urban, teaching hospital.

Most people are not doing as well as I am. They are blind, limbless, breathing heavy or slumped over in a wheel chair. They are wearing masks or dressed in suits, old and young. Usually not too young as most of the young ones are over a Children’s hospital. That’s probably a good idea.

Amy said after I got blood drawn, “I now know what it means when they ask if you are short of breath. You aren’t.” She had seen a couple people for whom walking to the clinic made them essentially pant.

When you are asked the same questions over and over, you start to doubt your answers. “Wait. I do get a little winded walking up that hill by our house,” I thought. Well, not like these people. I am fine by comparison.

It makes you grateful but it also sad. I am speaking from privilege in some respects. My heart ailment isn’t causing me to live a grossly different life, yet. But eventually that’s where I’m headed. If not now, then some day.

While I can, I will breathe in deeply and try to taste it. I hope the pre-surgical needs are mostly filled. I look forward to recharging my batteries a bit in the next few weeks and then spending my time, post surgery, figuring out how to live a life that feels like the right balance of personal fulfillment and love.

Encore! Encore! Encore Career

I was introduced to a phrase recently that I found interesting, the “encore career.” Lately, that’s how I have been thinking of my own time.

I have found it hard to focus on the idea of building a business because I need to have some surgery. Without going into a lot of detail, I don’t have any idea how long I will be out of commission. I’m hoping it is the minimum time but how much can you aggressively go after something and then say, “Wait. I need like 8 weeks to feel better. I’ll get back to you.”

Right now things are just not at a point where that is feasible. And I don’t really want to do to do that. I find it is rare for me to really know what I want. Perhaps it is early conditioning to realize that you have to participate in a family or not being wealthy, but what you do and what you want seem to frequently be on different paths.

In the encore career, the idea is that you are in a different financial place and you can take the time to pursue something more in line with what you want. But what do you want? Some people know already, I want to travel. I want to train for a marathon. I want to practice the piano more and teach tuba lessons.

I don’t really know what I want. I would love to know what I want. Do you? Am I the outlier? Rather than that, here some ideas of things I would enjoy doing:

teach some tuba or bass.
write some music
play in a quintet
teach some adult swimming lessons
work with small companies to get their business stuff in the cloud (accounting, web site, etc,)
write about my experiences
do some writing projects in technology (i.e. my old job)
develop an app or two
play a little golf
exercise to stay healthy
eat good
hang out with my wife
see my family and friends
write one book – the history of Franco-American
spend a little speaking French, Italian, maybe learn a little Spanish
work in my garden (I used to love doing this and lately it feels less rewarding and more like work – why?)

That’s too much to focus on. That’s no encore. That’s more like a season’s worth of repertoire.

So I don’t know, am I just too scatterbrained? Or is the encore idea just not that well-formed. My goal in starting a business was that it has been something that I wanted to do since my first job in a start-up, Graphx. My personality has not been conducive to thriving a corporate environment. I was good at doing the work but not the politics. And my motivations to do better didn’t fit with the means of promotion in the company.

Over the years, I have worked in number of organizations that kept making the same mistakes. I would like to try to create a place where we avoid those mistakes but maybe that’s just impossible.

Sometimes a person asks the right questions

I called my old buddy Mark last week. I expected to vent and hear him say, there, there. Pat me on the back over the phone but he didn’t.

Frankly, I wasn’t helping him much. Whatever I was saying, it was not eliciting the response I wanted. This is not our normal conversation style. That is, I can always count on Mark. I hope he feels the same way. Mark and I have been having “deep” conversations since the 6th grade, in Mr. Feldt’s homeroom.

That’s a lot of conversations. That’s a lot of expectations. And we’ve been through some shit over that time. And our conversations were more frequent and in many forms. Does anyone remember Prodigy? It was like an early Skype. Later it was AOL. Also, like Skype. For anyone young enough, it’s all like texting.

Anyhow… I was beginning to think this conversation was not going to help me. I was getting a little frustrated because Mark kept asking questions. It threw me. And I don’t remember which question exactly, but it was about lesson plans or business plans, maybe Excel. In my head, it was a minor reprobation but a question that betrayed disapproval. I think in his head, he was just asking questions appropriate for the situation.

I heard, “aren’t you the guy who once made a spreadsheet to calculate your ‘disposable time’ in a given week just so you could be depressed about it?”

“Yeah. I did that. But that was the old me. The anal-retentive guy.”

“And you don’t have a spreadsheet for your start-up business? God, you are such a disappointment.”

But really he was just going through a mental check-list of things that he thought I might have done. And it was actually the perfect question. Eventually, I started to see the wisdom of the questions. He was helping me to find my keys and asking if I checked in the car, on the counter, in my pocket, on the dresser? What were you wearing? Did you have coat?

Instead of getting annoyed, I started to listen and he was right. The big hairy beast that was causing me anxiety and tweaking my depression was amorphous. You can’t grab what you can’t see. You can’t pick up a pile of parts. What goes with what?

He was persistent and he pushed through. He might have sensed my frustration, but he knew that the only way to help was to keep trying. Anyone could get annoyed looking for their keys. This was no different.

Thanks, buddy.

This week I did start writing a business plan for eehoo. And it makes sense. I showed some preliminary stuff to a couple people and got good feedback. I was able to begin making it into projects. Funding, writing, etc.

Mostly, though I was able to feel better. And that’s a priceless reward. And it was also proof that a gentle reminder of what you already know is still sometimes worthwhile. Mark said that too. We were talking about politics and he said that he realized something, lately. That people make decisions based more on feelings than logic because that is what they are trying to improve. That makes a ton of sense. It also sound a bit treacherous but that’s for another time.

The planning that I’ve done now, as a result of the convo, doesn’t guarantee success of the venture. Success is never guaranteed. You can’t know the student will learn but you should still make an excellent lesson plan or you won’t even get through the hour. Recalling all this stuff from our past is also something that is precious. I really value it.

Every day I feel busy

Being unemployed has been a tougher transition than I first thought. I don’t have super-crystal thoughts here but let me distribute some of them shotgun-style.

One of the bigger transitions in my thoughts has been self-identifying as an employee of my own company. Thinking of myself as employed by myself is harder than I thought. I haven’t update FB or Linked-in yet to reflect that. Why? Because that is scary shit.

I’m realizing just how much fear plays into the concept of my work identity.

For a long time, as a tech writer, I had an editor. I miss having an editor. Editors are awesome. I get a lot of confidence from having an editor and the relationship I’ve had with my editors has been so productive and inspiring. Not having one makes feel? Afraid.

I’m learning that fear is a big deal if you haven’t already grokked that.

I wake up every day and get a little overwhelmed at what I have to do. And I don’t really have to do anything. I have only felt this busy a couple times in my life. 1) returning to school after taking a semester off, 2) graduate school and 3) now.

I would love to say the problem is “Lack of Structure.” I’m sure it is. But saying it so definitively makes me afraid too. Why? Because declaring it so strongly could cause a me to go down the wrong path. I could make an argument, though less strongly, for maybe you just have “let go. Give yourself a break. Order will emerge from chaos if you let it.”

Actually, this is starting to sound a bit like Kurt Vonnegut. Good sound conclusions that lead to blind alleys.

As I use this blog to clear my head of thoughts and share. I’m doing that. I don’t really want an answer or a suggestion. Maybe a little support and a little understanding. I am putting it out there because this type of “analysis paralysis” is not that uncommon.

Anyhow, if you start seeing some changes with my subtle acceptance that my world exists apart from Microsoft, you will know why.

One of the images I’m working with is the root ball. When you dig up shrub or a small tree, it is amazing how bit and tenacious the root ball can be. I had no idea that my Microsoft identity had such a strong root ball. It has grown in and over a lot of obstacles. It is entangled with lots of my psyche and my personal stuff including my phone. Stuff like that is so basic that you don’t understand how much you rely on it. I had to get a new phone recently and switched to Android. You can read about that at my other blog.

Giving up the Windows Phone was surprisingly liberating. I don’t love the new phone but I feel better using it. Can you believe that? It’s just a phone. So I’m working on it.

I would give people this advice now that my lay-off is hindsight. Keep learning new stuff and keep a world outside your employer. For instance, go get a professional certification for something. Maybe even pay for it yourself. You will feel like you are more valuable. You will feel more independent. It’s worth it and should you need to explore a new employer, you will have done yourself a service like talking a walk for your health. It’s not that big a deal but you almost always feel better afterward.

I was stupid about that stuff. Musicians think if you have the gig, then you have the gig. You don’t have prove anything more. That’s true. But taking a course or going to the community college is for a different reason. I passed up getting certificates in training I took at Microsoft. Why? Because I already had the gig. No one was ever asking me if I was a Certified Scrum Master. I was a scrum master already. But I wish I had completed the paper work to get that certificate. It was offered.

But mostly, I wish that I had expanded my knowledge and breadth of contacts to continually show there is life outside my narrow little view. That’s what I wish I did differently. I would have helped me now and I would have felt good doing it.