Over the holiday break I spent a lot of time thinking about my job and more specific to that, my performance at my job.  A year ago I received a performance review that I was far from happy with, and to this point I’m honestly surprised I wasn’t one of the many in my industry who lost their jobs for one reason or another.  It was bad enough that in a subsequent meeting with my supervisor to clarify some of the things we discussed, I mentioned an “air of inevitability” about my position.  I was lucky, however.  Very lucky, I think.

My problem wasn’t with the quality of my work.  I was told that I did my job as well as anybody else, but I wasn’t as assertive as I should be.  I didn’t disagree with this evaluation at all.  I’ve always been a wallflower, more or less, and if I could sit in my corner, crank out quality parts in a timely fashion and never turn work away, then I was golden.  This wasn’t enough, though.  Right or wrong, I was giving the impression that I didn’t understand the severity of information delays and timing issues as they came up, which was often.

In evaluating myself for 2009, I felt good about the progress I’d made in fixing this, and while I was given some indication that I had improved, it still wasn’t enough and again my review wasn’t as good as I’d hoped.  Fixing this will require a fairly drastic change in myself, and I’m ready and willing to do all I can to make that happen, however, I can’t help but admit that I feel a little overwhelmed by it.  In the few days since, I think I’ve already done well, but it’s been hard.  For ten years I was told that everything I was doing was fantastic, but this snuck up on me.  Again, I don’t disagree.  I just hope I can overcome it and become a better worker.

——–

Now I’m thinking I’d like to learn something new.  Not work-related, but in my spare time.  I used to come home, get on the computer, talk with the boys, play the Playstation, and generally do pretty much nothing before going to bed and doing it all over again the next day.  I took a programming class and I was burned out halfway through the semester.  I don’t think that was the path I wanted to take.

Today my six-year-old and I watched a show about the earth’s climate on The History Channel.  It was awesome.  It measured and highlighted major climatic changes over the last few million years and gave strong theories explaining why these changes occurred and what resulted from them.  11,500 years ago a drastic climatic change occurred that raised the earth’s average temperature by 18 degrees over a decade.  Our current average temperature has increased one degree since 1900.  One.  Look how worked up we are about it.  Can you imagine 18 degrees in a decade?  Holy hell!

Global Warming is a little more of a hot-button issue than I’d like to get into, but it got me thinking.  My son is really interested in science and space right now, so why not something like that?  Maybe the Large Hadron Collider or something.  Maybe find something simple to study, like the sun.  We made a date for the library for Saturday to dig deeper and find something cool to learn about.

I’m open to any suggestions as well.  Hopefully this gets me out of the funk I’ve been in for the last couple of weeks.

The economy kicked the crap out of many industries, businesses and people over the last three years or so.  The doors of many companies closed for good, other companies were sold for pennies on the dollar, and a few lucky businesses stayed above water.  I work for an automaker, and every one of us has been living scared for probably five years now.  Thankfully, I was able to weather the storm and am still employed by the domestic automaker that is leading the way toward a tighter, leaner, and profitable future in the industry.

My wife’s optometry practice seemed to survive the downturn as well, and for her, this is especially impressive considering she lost a significant insurance provider for several months just before the economy went in the tank.  Now, however, she’s dealing with a mountain of debt incurred during lean months over the past year or so that allowed her to not only keep her doors open, but keep her staff employed.  This fact, however, is lost on some people.

From late September through early November I was off work taking care of my wife, who was recovering from surgery related to a melanoma diagnosis over the summer.  I am thankful for the Family Medical Leave Act to be able to provide this time for my wife and kids, but it is an unpaid leave.  Also, as the owner of the company, my wife takes the hit when things get tight, and she’s only received one paycheck since September.  We’ve tapped the 401(k), the savings, even the kids’ college funds.  It’s nothing we’re proud of, and the belt-tightening has been painful, but it’s what we’ve had to do to continue on without her salary.

Nobody else has felt the pain in a manner that would directly affect them.  And while she regrets some decisions and has compromised a relationship or two to keep watch of her people’s backs, her actions have not affected anybody with respect to their day-to-day operation and expectations.

Ultimately, I’m worried about her.  This is keeping her from enjoying the holidays as much as she should be.  I’ve offered my help in any way possible but I know it’s hard for her to pass things on to me, because to her it’s an admission of failure, which it is not.  Still, people call every day.  The office is empty more often than it should be, which is not unusual this time of year, but this is the year where income is needed.  I wish two things – first, that those who are so adamant in their desire to know exactly what “happened” would let her enjoy her Christmas, and secondly, that I knew what to tell them and her that would please everyone.

Sadly, neither of those seem to be happening.

Around Thanksgiving I was somehow not feeling right.  It was nothing I could particularly put my finger on, but something was definitely off.  I knew I’d gotten to a point where I was genuinely worried about my weight and my overall health, but there was nothing especially alarming that supported that feeling, nor did my doctor think I had a lot to worry about.  Sure, he wanted me to eat better and lose weight, and we’d just gotten through several tests that determined I have severe sleep apnea, but really, overall, the status was definitely quo.

I went to the doctor the day after Thanksgiving to see if anything else was wrong, and of course, it wasn’t.  However, that was enough to give me a kick in the pants once and for all.  I can’t eat and/or drink with a sense of invincibility like I did when I was 23.  Exercise didn’t count if it was walking from my cubicle to the bathroom and back once every three hours.  Footlong clubs with extra mayo wasn’t the healthy eating the Subway commercials talked about.

I started eating fruit regularly, vegetables as much as possible, and even had a (non-low-sodium) V8, which was pretty much a salt lick.  I’ve been doing pretty well, especially considering the timing of my bodily renovation, with holiday turkeys and cookies and work lunches to celebrate dotting the calendar and stretching my belt.  I will say, however, that I’ve been successful.  I’ve been on the treadmill at least 4 times a week since then.  I don’t know that I’ve lost as much weight as I’d hoped – maybe just about 6 or 8 pounds, but I can really tell the difference every morning I get to the third notch in the belt, instead of busting my butt to squeeze into the second notch.

Today time constraints led me to an unhealthy breakfast.  Holiday celebration led me to a calorie-filled lunch, then I recovered nicely with salmon, green beans and long grain and wild rice for dinner, only to top it off with a few handfuls of chips while sitting on the recliner watching TV.  Let’s also not gloss over the four beers.

For the first time ever in any health kick I’ve been on, I honestly felt bad about it.  I didn’t eat well, but it wasn’t specifically because of that.  More so, it was because of the realization that this is the exact same kind of thing that derailed me so often in the past.  A fast food trip here.  A delay of exercising there.  Next thing I know I’ll be back up over 260 and hating the walk to my car every day.  This is exactly how I fall back in the rut – by allowing myself a “bad” day.

I just hope that this time I have the will power, and more importantly, the self-respect to hop back on the wagon again tomorrow.

My oldest son is two years into his soccer career, has a year of tee ball under his belt, and is currently in the Kid Kwan Do class at the rec center.  In his first year of soccer he was very tentative and relatively ineffective, although, everybody else on his team was as well.  His second year went much better but he still hasn’t scored a goal.  Tee Ball went well and he really had a lot of fun playing it and he was arguably the best hitter on the team.  I’ll have to work with him on catching in the spring, that’s for sure.

He and his younger brother always talked about learning “karate” and when we saw the class being offered at the rec center we jumped all over it.  Their interest, however, has been lukewarm, I’d say.  It’s not unusual for one of them to say they don’t want to go, and we’re talking about a one-day-a-week, 45-minute class.  Still, they’ve not missed one, and they always seem to enjoy the class, so we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.

Tonight during a break in the class, I was minding my own business trying to find a sushi joint in Ann Arbor via Urbanspoon when I turned and saw the instructor sitting next to me.  Now, it’s scary enough that she could probably kill me with one of her well-manicured nails, but to have her stealthily appear inches from me gave me freaking goosebumps.  Anyway, she proceeded to tell me that my son belonged in the older kids’ class.  She said he’s quick to pick up on everything they do, that he listens well and seems like a natural with Tae Kwon Do, and he’s ready to move up.  He’s six.  The older kid class is 8 and up.

Needless to say, I was thrilled.  Visions of The Crane swept across my starry eyes.  I started humming “Sweep the Leg,” by No More Kings.  Unfortunately, the feeling wasn’t mutual with my son.  I called him over and asked him if he wanted to go to the big kids’ class, which was right after his class, and he flatly said no.  He had a busy day at school, so maybe he was just tired, but I really thought he’d be fired up about it.

Later, in the car, after we’d watched a bit of the big kids’ class, I asked him why he didn’t want to move up.  ”Well, maybe after I get a sticker in every column on my sheet for this class, then I’ll move up.”  He likes this class and I think he knows how well he’s doing.  I also think he’s got a thing for the instructor, between you and me.  He struggles with success sometimes, I think, because, honestly, he’s not the luckiest kid in the world.  His younger brother got the first spare when we went bowling.  His brother’s ticket won the pumpkin at the school dance.  It’s things like that that I think gets to him a bit, although you’d never know it by looking at him.

My son is such a good kid, and he deserves breaks, if for no other reason than for validation of how well he handles it when he can’t catch a break.  We’ll talk about Tae Kwon Do this weekend and make a final decision.  I’m pretty sure I already know what the answer will be, and I’m fine with whatever he chooses to do.

I decided during lunch today to crank up the music and focus on getting a task done that’s been pushed aside for just over a week now.  Not that I’ve been procrastinating about it, but rather it’s gotten prioritized behind numerous other assignments that have come across my desk since; assignments of much greater importance than this one.

Anyway, I plugged in the headphones into my iPhone, tapped iPod, then Shuffle Songs.  I was greeted by Radiohead, which was followed by Kings of Leon.  I couldn’t have thanked my phone enough for that, really.  It’s turning into one of those days.  As I’m typing this, the third song comes on – “Wake Up” by Rage Against The Machine.  My phone must like the new shirt pocket I put it in earlier today.

You may be wondering if there’s a point here.  I guess so, I just haven’t gotten to it yet.  A Twitter follower asked me today how I could not accept a friend request from relatives.  It’s actually pretty easy, but made me think a little deeper.  First of all, my family is nuts, but whose family isn’t?  It’s not that I don’t want to include them in my life or anything like that, it’s just that, oddly enough, a place like Facebook is my cave, so to speak.  I love my family, I really do, and I’m sure I bring upon myself many of the impressions they get of me.  At the same time, however, I wish they’d recognize that I’ve always been a quiet, self-contained person and let something like Facebook go as just that.  That’s all it is. 

It’s easier said than done.  It’s inevitable that I’ll get “the call” asking if I’m mad at someone.  I get up in the morning, I go to work, I come home and hang with my wife and kids, I go to bed and get up the next morning to do it all over again.  Last night at 6:30 I decided I wanted to go buy some new clothes.  I fly by the seat of my pants a lot but hardly ever to anywhere exciting.  I love my life and the people who are part of it.  But I also love my time and space, and those closest to me realize that and give me that.  I’m no different than I was 30 years ago.  Just see that.  Accept that.

Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

Regards,

phenom

I don’t know.

It’s like my eyes are being pulled into my head while a frying pan is simultaneously smacking my brain.  It’s strain and pain and frustration and irritation and it just doesn’t. Fucking. Go. Away.  It’s meds that mess with me so I change them and the new ones bring a whole new level of medieval on my ass. 

Worrying about my kids and money and house and trips and my health and my job and did I fuck up when I rejected an escrow account and the mortgage is only nine days late.  It’s I just got home and I’m hungry and I should be outside with the boys but all I want to do is lie on the couch and close my eyes and bask in the silence. 

It’s having to walk through a supernova of flourescent lights to get to the john because design quality moved next to us a year ago.  A 30-inch LCD that has the brightness turned down to a point where shadows are all I work with and holy crap that helped a little bit. 

It’s the break from all that that cool breezes and warm fresh air provide.

It’s the fact that the cool breezes and warm fresh air didn’t help at all at last night’s tee ball game.

It’s that sleep is my only respite and jobs and money and house and kids and cats and plastic keep me from enjoying it as much as I can.

It’s that I can’t fucking do the things I enjoy doing every day.

It’s that my doctor hasn’t called me back. 

I don’t know.

There’s been a number of things going on in my life, including a holiday season that was grand, albeit too short, a fun trip to warm weather with some wonderful friends/family, and the general survival of yet another cold, snowy winter where I wonder why the blue hell I still live in this state.

My toughest challenge yet is, unfortunately, job-related.  Before the Christmas break I got my annual review and it was less desirable than I thought it would be.  This led to some general panic for my wife and I, and considering it came two days before my holiday break made it that much more… joyous (sarcasm implied and expressed).

However, once I got back to work I learned that reviews like mine may have been the norm and not the exception, which I guess is good.  We still haven’t been through the cuts we’ve been told we’ll be going through this month, but I feel a little less vulnerable than I did a month ago.  Hopefully all goes well.

If not, for that matter, even if it does, I’ve been working to sort of reinvent myself in a way.  I have many interests and I’m trying to find ways to make the most of them should the worst happen.  There are a lot of fine people on social networking sites such as Twitter who have, unbeknownst to them, given me a lot of tools to help myself become more reliant on my own skills and talents to make my life more enjoyable and less stressful as it relates to the work I do.

So while the uncertainty of my near future fills my thoughts much of the day, I feel confident that my professional life is headed in the right direction in the long run regardless of what happens in the next couple of weeks.

And yes, you can follow me on Twitter. 

Sounds appealing enough, right?  Sounds like something you might be all over at your local Starbucks, too, I’d imagine.  Being a strictly black (Pike Place, if you must know) coffee drinker means that double chocolate coffee means nothing to me, but let’s just imagine for a moment that “Double Chocolate Coffee Oatmeal Stout” describes what was in your brown bottle.

Yeah, really.

Founders is a Grand Rapids, MI-based brewery that makes some interesting brews, the most interesting of which is the Breakfast Stout, which was introduced to me by a fellow twitterer who happens to live about an hour or so away from me from time to time.  This guy’s pretty hardcore with his brew and regularly sips on what I call “mood beer,” as I tend to have to be in the mood for the beer he chews on drinks regularly.  Nevertheless, I’m always willing to try something new, and after seeing Founders Breakfast Stout on tap at a fantastic Detroit BBQ place, where I was (sadly) there for a work lunch, I remembered to hunt some down.  My local beer store, bless their souls, had plenty of four-packs on the shelf.

I’ll tell ya, this stuff is fantastic.  My wife described its taste as “dark chocolate coffee,” which is spot-on.  It leaves a chocolate coffee aftertaste which is pleasant and which helps keep the flavor consistent.  It’s 8.3% ABV, and it made me want to sit in my cold garage and drink myself warm.  Good stuff.  If you see it, try it.

I’ve decided to start over here.  Right now, however, it’s time to get the boys pj’d and toothbrushed.  My old stuff is still around, but it’s over at http://blog.phenomsworld.com

So yeah, I’ll be back shortly.  Stay tuned.