Posted on my Roadmap is my one-sentence mission: “I will be a contented and healthy man who, upon his 70th birthday, can look himself in the mirror free of the sting of regret.” Easier written than done, perhaps, but thinking about the question 32 years early opens the door for opportunities to avoid incurring regret in the first place.
I’m sometimes asked whether I get depressed about not having married and “settled down” with a brood of crumb-crunchers and a little suburban house with a white picket fence and a used minivan and a slightly dopey golden retriever. Usually well-intentioned, the question nevertheless is curious, insofar as it rests on two rickety assumptions: First, that marriage and family are normative, from which deviation signifies loss or defect; and second, that I am ignorant of what I’m missing so therefore I should pine for it.
As to the first assumption, I can only say that I’ve seen many people marry and remain happy together for a very long time. I’ve also seen friends younger than I who have already divorced. I am aware, through my own family’s experience, of what divorce does to family dynamics. A few years ago, when I more actively searched for a partner, I was dismayed to discover just how many women in the 25-to-35 age cohort are either single or divorced … but with at least one small child. Marriage isn’t the institution it used to be, and most families I know have so absorbed the individualist Gestalt that “family” is perhaps more meaningful as a tribal affiliation than as blood-kin identification.
I am not unaware of the benefits of marriage and child-rearing. Should the right situation arise, I’d get married. But I’m not drawn to the institution and I don’t feel incomplete because I live in an apartment with no one except my feline overlords. I’ve seen too many elderly people in the hospital who bet on a spouse and children or grandchildren to look after them in their dotage — and then see those bets fail. No one is guaranteed a loving family surrounding you on your deathbed when you’re in your late 90s. People die; they grow apart, they feud, they have different priorities. When I did pastoral care rounds in the hospital, years ago, it wasn’t all that rare for the older patients to want me to stick around. To talk. Sure, they had families — but, you know, they were busy. Seems odd to structure a life, beginning in your 20s, on the gamble of what you’ll need or want in your twilight years. Yet that’s the message, fundamentally, of family: They’re the ones who will take care of you when you’re back in diapers. Good luck with that.
Life is a series of trade-offs. There’s no such thing as a perfect existence — just a never-ending churn of decisions balanced against each individual person’s proprietary blend of needs and wants. With marriage and kids, you get better income stability, regular affection, family bonding, life milestones. Without marriage and kids, though, I retain the freedom to make major life choices without getting them approved by someone else — I can come and go as I wish, buy or save as I wish, avoid having to live with the inevitable compromises that come with marriage, and if I needed to take care of my mom when she gets old, I’m not subject to the whim of a spouse who may resist or resent it. And certainly not least, if I were to retire to a sailboat and see parts of the world, no one will try to stop me.
The other argument for marriage and family follows from a basic human need for companionship. To which, all I can say is that I do not want for friends. I have a long-term stable core, a middle-ring network that comes and goes, and a large flock of friendly acquaintances. I occasionally have weeks where I think to myself: Self, you need to start declining some social invitations so you can get some work done. So I’m not exactly a lonely recluse.
The second assumption — that I should pine or grieve for what I lack — flows from the first. When you accept the normativity of marriage and procreation, then not having it becomes an emotional struggle, a challenge of self-worth, a grave problem requiring resolution. I think there’s a fairly strong Christian Reformed, West-Michigan-culture thing at play, there, too: If you’re not married by a certain age, then there’s something wrong with you. I know quite a few people who unduly stress out over their lack of a spouse. Anyone who’s spoken to the aspiring MRS candidates at Cornerstone University or Kuyper College or even Calvin College knows the fairytale: You wait for your prince or princess then live happily upper-middle-class forever and ever, amen. Lots of those women end up, several years after their graduation and their weddings, with OKCupid profiles that feature them with their infants. I know; I’ve dated some of them. That toxic culture has wreaked incalculable chaos on the lives of the young and the innocent thanks to the tyranny of impossible expectations.
But I digress.
My biggest frustration with friends who do lust after marriage is that the longer they search in vain, the more out-of-whack their thinking becomes. It’s as if there’s some magical ratchet in their heads that, as the months and years slip away, creates ever-more-unreasonable demands for what they expect in a mate — until they come to obsess after an idealized spouse who could not possibly exist in the real world. In a sense, that ratchet is a defense mechanism, with a twofold task of protecting them having to engage in serious self-examination while precluding relationships that might be “good enough” but are nevertheless avoided because they won’t be perfect. The fairytale always trumps, but the drama never ends.
As for me, I guess I have nothing to pine over because there’s not much related to interpersonal intimacy that I haven’t experienced. I’ve loved people. I’ve woken up smiling with someone else’s head beside mine on the pillow. I’ve known the thrill of a first date, the pain of a break-up, the emptiness of a drunken bar hookup and the joy of bonding with someone over drinks. My closest friends have been with me for going on two decades. If I ever woke up at 2 a.m. with a crisis, I can think of at least five numbers to call off the top of my head where the person on the other end of the line wouldn’t hesitate to leap to my assistance.
I am content. So, having weighed the merits and elected my current path, all I can say is — I think I’ve avoided incurring a regret that would otherwise haunt me in late 2046.
Sixteen Days of Freeeeedom!
When I left the office around 2:30p today, I began a vacation that doesn’t end until I return on the morning of Mon., Jan. 5. Sixteen consecutive days of vacay bliss.
This calls for a celebration. Bourbon? Check. Cuban cigar? Check. (Thanks to Scott for the generous gift!)
Ahhhh….
Be Glad and Rejoice, for Grand Staycation IV is Almost Here!
In just a few days, I begin the fourth annual Grand Staycation. With 16 consecutive days off, I will focus on end-of-the-year catch-up and planning for 2015. I’m much more excited for the vacation than I am about the holidays, but in fairness, I’m in generally good spirits about the holidays this year, so there’s that. Anyway, see below for general updates.
VLO E-200. Today, Tony and I hit a four-year milestone with the release of episode 200 of our Vice Lounge Online podcast. The show ran roughly 45 minutes; we were blessed with five calls, plenty of pontificating, a Christmas Martony cocktail and even five minutes of outtakes I’ve accumulated over the last year. VLO has been a wonderful experience for us. Our program — a weekly 30-minute show about casino gaming, premium cigars and fine adult beverages — has grown to literally thousands of listeners each week. We’ve been fortunate to make great new friends across the country and even in the U.K. because of it.
Anthology. I wrote my anthology story; it clocked in around 11,300 words and will be the eighth submission to the Caffeinated Press All Goes Dark anthology project. I’m excited about this effort. We have eight fun stories crossing genres, written by authors local to the Grand Rapids area. Part of Grand Staycation IV includes final editorial prep for the anthology — last line edits to the manuscripts, production, ISBNs, cover art, etc. I hope to be done by the 31st of December, for release on the market by early-to-mid February.
[Intermission: Animals by Maroon 5 just rotated up. Am I the only person who wonders whether Adam Levine still has testicles? No adult human male should make noises that high-pitched.]
Literary Journal. Speaking of CafPress, it looks like our plan to launch a quarterly literary journal will actually succeed. I’ll probably serve as publisher and Lianne as executive editor, with Alaric and John as senior editors. I think — lots remaining TBD. Anyway, the journal presents a glorious opportunity to showcase local writers. As well as the sale of advertising or the acquisition of corporate or grant funding to support ongoing operations and payments to writers. The journal is intended to help grow a well-defined literary culture within the West Michigan market.
Novel. I’ve had two weeks away from Aiden’s Wager, and in that time, I’ve figured out how the story will end given the change of direction from the original plan that came through the writing process in late November. I’m excited about this project. I’ll wrap up the first draft over Grand Staycation IV and send it off to various beta readers. My suspicion is that some of the material is far enough askance from accepted West Michigan culture that I won’t try for CafPress publishing, but I think there are some niche markets where the premise makes sense.
Project Management. I did something fun at work. We’ve been swirling so much about which teams in our division will use what one-off project management tools (at one point, we were split among Excel, Project, QuickBase, Rally and Clarity PPM) that we needed to just do something. So last week, I wrapped up what my team will use — a home-grown tool with a back end in Oracle. I built seven fact tables, normalized against several more look-up tables, with quite a few foreign-key dependencies and a fistful of sequence/trigger pairs to generate unique primary-key values. I then imported the data model into Tableau, so reporting about investments, activities, updates, issues, stakeholders, file attachments and time allocations becomes transparent to anyone who wants to look. I don’t have a front-end for the tool — I figured I’d just manually update tables using Toad for Oracle — but it’s got a slick presentation layer with strong internal referential integrity. I’m happy with it.
Surgical Site Infections. This coming week will focus on one major deliverable keenly desired by our corporate chief medical officer: An analysis of surgical-site infections undertaken in partnership with our largest partner hospital. The hospital’s infection-control team keeps registry data about SSIs, but they don’t have access to the same administrative claims data that I do at the insurance company. Literature suggests that SSIs cannot be inferred from claims data, so I’ll use the surveillance registry to brush it against claim histories to try to calculate the true cost of SSIs to the community. Fascinating stuff, and a great example of proving the value of analytics for health-care quality professionals.
Emerging Competencies. Speaking of analytics, I’ve been co-leading an initiative about the emerging professional competences in the field of health data analytics, through the National Association for Healthcare Quality. We’re wrapping up our final report. About a dozen leaders within the analytics field, who are NAHQ members, are a part of the project. Interesting insight into where the industry has been headed.
MAHQ. My one-year appointment as president-elect of the Michigan Association for Healthcare Quality has been extended into 2015 given a dearth of candidates for the role in the most recent election. That means I have to plan the 2015 conference, too — which is fine, given that I’ve already booked the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel for October. These things are easier to pull off when they’re in your own back yard!
Socializing. Been a fun couple of weeks on the social front. Yesterday I spent three hours eating food and drinking beer with AmyJo, at HopCat. Last week, we had the “Thank God It’s Over” party for NaNoWriMo. I spent time chatting with Lianne and Stephen a couple of weeks ago. We had our Write On! holiday party a week ago last Friday — the same day I went out to Founders Brewing with Cindy, Steve and Timothy from the office (Cindy bought — the rest of us are helping her as she wraps up her doctoral dissertation).
Texas, Ho! Looks like I’ll be killing two birds with one rental. The Thin Line film festival, in Denton, Texas, occurs in mid February. I also need to get to close to Dallas to bring Duane his stuff currently in storage. So I figure I’ll rent an SUV, pick up his stuff, drive to him, then spend two nights in the Metroplex. I’m looking forward to it!
Routine Disruption. In 2013, NaNoWriMo utterly wrecked my long-standing weekend routines. This year has dome something similar. Instead of having a nightly cigar and cocktail with the news, I’m reading the news every few days and I’ve had a whopping two cigars since Thanksgiving. I think I’ll use Grand Staycation IV to try to enculturate other habit changes. Maybe exercise. We’ll see.
Web Bifurcation. Although I’ll be keeping this blog active, I’m splitting my personal and professional Web presence. I’ll be retiring Gillikin Consulting and instead using one site (this one) for personal stuff, and http://www.gillik.in for professional stuff. Augmenting the new site is part of the vacation plan.
All for now.
Jason's Playlist … Nov. 2014
I do these “Jason’s Playlist” posts annually, usually in late autumn. Writing brings me closer to music.
Anyway, here are the songs surfacing most frequently —
45 (Acoustic), Shinedown
Behind Blue Eyes, Limp Bizkit
Blame, Calvin Harris
Call Me, Shinedown
Chandelier, Sia
Cyanide Sweet Tooth Suicide, Shinedown
Dangerous (feat. Sam Martin), David Guetta
Demons, Imagine Dragons
Forfeit, Chevelle
From Yesterday, Thirty Seconds to Mars
Hesitate, Stone Sour
Hurricane (Unplugged), Thirty Seconds to Mars
Iridescent, Linkin Park
Love Me Harder, Ariana Grande
Monster You Made, Pop Evil
Radioactive, Imagine Dragons
SexyBack, Justin Timberlake
Stay, Thirty Seconds to Mars (cover)
The Thunder Rolls (Long Version), Garth Brooks
Thinking Out Loud, Ed Sheeran
See you next year.
An Autumn's Repose
Nights in West Michigan have grown consistently colder — in the 30s, usually — and most of the leaves have descended from their perches atop the now-barren canopy. Autumn’s full, glorious array reminds us to be prepared for the winter to come. A few weeks ago, I went for a walk in a county park and saw the transition up-close and personal: Bees going after every fading flower, greens turning into reds and yellows, squirrels building their stashes. All the little creatures, it seems, are fortifying themselves against the frigid desolation to come.
On Halloween day, I had my annual biometric screening. Most of the content — blood pressure, triglycerides, cholesterol, weight, BMI — met my expectations. No surprises. One measure, fasting glucose, caught me off guard. Not bad enough to freak out over, but not what I expected given that by all lights, I’m in better shape today than I was when I had my first assessment a full decade ago.
The thing about autumn is that the beauty of the landscape proves so charming that you aren’t forced to reflect on the clear lessons hidden beneath the surface. Instead, you repose quietly, enjoying the scenery or sipping the cider and relaxing in anticipation of the busy holiday season to come. So too with aging. We change styles and behaviors, but the danger that counts is the one locked deep within — we obsess about which sweater to wear but never think to check our biometric values. Like the parable of the grasshopper and the ant, at some point, the flurries will fly, and only the well-prepared will make it through. Wellness is a beast that requires daily diligence even in the warm summer sun, because if you come up short when a health blizzard hits … well, it is what it is. Now, then — some general updates, in no particular order.
- Work continues to be busy. I just oriented my first official new hire as a department manager. Went smoothly. Our division is undergoing a significant restructuring, so it’s been “interesting times” around here in the fullest Confucian sense of the term.
- It’s November, which means National Novel Writing Month. I’m again participating, and again hosting a write-in on Saturday mornings in downtown Grand Rapids. This year’s novel, should it be polished to the point of shopping, is literary fiction — a tale of a young wealthy man from a dog-eat-dog competitive social circle who, after he’s cut off from the family money, must develop his own life goals and set of morals while fending off the predation of his former friends, who now see a turn-about opportunity to further humiliate him. The meta-narrative of the story focuses on the main character’s investigation of the various classic sources of ethical meaning from the perspective of someone who’s working through a mash of antisocial and narcissistic personality disorders while drowning in a rich, hypermasculine peer group with similar tendencies. Given the language and very strong adult themes, if I ever publish it, it’ll be under a pseudonym. Probably my porn name, which actually makes a great author name, too.
- The wrap-up activity after my conference took more out of me than I thought. I had to develop and compile surveys so I could issue continuing-education credits. That work, and the resulting time crunch, contributed to my inability to attend a much-anticipated Halloween party at PPQ’s house. CEs are time-consuming.
- The election was … interesting. I volunteered a bit this year for the GOP, given my status as an elected precinct delegate. Did some door-to-door campaigning a few weeks ago for the MRP in eastern Kent County then spent seven hours as an election challenger in one of the busiest precincts in the City of Grand Rapids. Good experience, but it highlights how so much of the ground game is being run by very young people with very high self-regard who lack any substantive political experience.
- The publishing company is humming along. We’re in the edit phase of our anthology and are actively looking toward starting a quarterly literary magazine in 2015. There’s much enthusiasm for that journal by several contributors, so I hold out hope that it’ll launch with sufficient love and nurturing.
- The boy cat has started tunneling under my blankets at night to curl up next to me. It’s adorable. I get a little ball of fuzzy, purring warmth showing up at unexpected times.
- Hard to believe, but Tony and I are closing in on our 200th podcast episode next month.
Out for a Walk
I completed this afternoon a six-mile nature walk along the Kent Trails near Millennium Park, a favorite activity of mine that I haven’t had much time to enjoy this year. Gorgeous weather — upper 50s, sunny, light breeze. Got to watch, up-close, several bumblebees on a pollen run.
I love autumn. The air is getting a bit more dry, a bit more crisp. The leaves are moving from green to yellow and red and the nights have dipped into the 30s already. October and April are West Michigan’s transition months: We can get very cold, but also very warm, and the life cycle spins afresh. November through March are the chilly, wet months; May through September are the pleasant, dry months. But October and April? The best of both worlds.
The two-hour jaunt also gave me time to think about a handful of disconnected topics:
- Lately my little friend, Murphy d’Cat, has taken to sleeping on me when I’m at my desk. Fine. As of yesterday, however, he’s now also sleeping on me if I should recline on the couch. Cute little kitty. And warm, too.
- I am digging Peter Capaldi’s turn as The Doctor.
- I think I put my finger in why I hate — viscerally hate — telephones. It’s because that now that email and other asynchronous communication methods are prevalent, there’s a certain arrogance in assuming that whatever you need in the moment trumps whatever I might be doing in that same moment. Immediate communications in non-planned, non-emergency situations are, in a sense, an act of aggression that says: “I don’t give a rip what you think/want/need, you must cater to my needs.” Nowadays, I usually keep the ringer off and I never check voice mails, so if you need something … the only effective way of guaranteed contact is email.
- I’m not worried about Ebola, but I am worried about the federal response to whatever nasty disease comes next.
- It’s probably good that Tony and I are moving toward marathon podcast sessions instead of doing two or three every two or three weeks — I enjoy my time with ol’ T-Bone, but I do also like catch-up time on Saturdays.
- I think I might be excited for a decent holiday season this year.
The Serenity After the Storm
I love storms — the malevolence of the sky, the crash of the thunder, the relentless drive of the rain. But after the storm passes, the damp stillness brings its own charms in the form of chirping birds, the smell of fresh rain and the juxtaposition of peace lightly scarred by the storm’s damage. After the deluge, there’s tranquility.
But not all storms show up on Doppler radar.
Two weeks ago, at long last, the Michigan Association for Healthcare Quality conducted its annual educational conference. For this year’s event, we trekked north to The Park Place Hotel in lovely Traverse City. As president-elect of the organization, the role of conference chairman fell to me. Aided by a delightful team of volunteers from across The Mitten, we continued our long, storied tradition of yanking a three-day educational event from ‘twixt our buttocks.
I was worried, though. Paid registrations nosedived — we had no idea what moving from Frankenmuth to Traverse City would do — and as late as one week before the event, much of the important stuff like menus, brochures, etc., hadn’t been wrapped up (i.e., I hadn’t gotten to it yet). And don’t get me started on the damnable attrition clause with the hotel!
Now that it’s over and the results are tabulated, I can breathe again. It appears that attendance was, indeed, down a slight bit — we ended up with 50 total attendees for the main conference plus a healthy eight for the CPHQ review course — but evaluations came back very positive. The attrition clause wasn’t enforced, so not only did we have a highly regarded event, but we probably will end up turning a small profit off of it, too, despite that I spent like a drunken sailor on things like branded messenger bags and speaker honoraria. In other words: The conference went off without a hitch!
The event, though, was just one drip in a much larger bucket. Add to that a bunch of out-of-state travel activity this summer, plus work on the anthology, plus volunteer stuff with NAHQ, plus the promotion at work, plus extra contract assignments, plus a more robust social calendar, plus deeper political engagement, plus, plus, plus … well, it’s been a wild ride. An embarrassment of riches, actually — the “busy stress” wasn’t because of bad stuff, but because of new opportunities.
Starting roughly last October, and continuing to today, I’ve experienced something I hadn’t really felt in a decade: Overwhelming workloads. Especially this summer, I’ve had to-do lists so long that I realized I just wasn’t going to get everything done, no matter how hard I tried. I don’t like swimming in that pond! So some things suffered — including, alas, my plan to attend VIMFP in Las Vegas next weekend.
But things are winding down. The conference is done, I’m getting more settled at work, the contract assignments are becoming more routinized, and the anthology is humming along. This weekend is the first since late August that I haven’t had any calendar commitments to deal with. Although National Novel Writing Month will be here in a scant three weeks, I have an idea ready to go and a plan for making things happen.
So now the storm has passed, and as I survey my task list for the next week, I can breathe the clean air knowing that the list isn’t impossible, or even that much of a strenuous exercise. It can be done!
I therefore sit, blogging, with Murphy laying on my lap and coffee on the desk and Skype open for occasional chats. I’m going to go for a walk today. It’ll be grand.
Long-hidden serenity is starting to shine through the dissipating storm clouds of 2014. At last.
Music, Unleashed
I remember vividly the surprise on Mrs. G’s face when, as a fifth grader, I told her I had memorized all the lyrics to On Eagle’s Wings, a song new to us in the children’s choir at St. Anthony, after just a half-dozen run-throughs. How could I have learned the equivalent of a 30-line poem so quickly? Easy. It was set to music.
Music. Powerful stuff, if you let yourself succumb to its wily charms. Give someone a passage from an epic poem and instructions to memorize it, he’ll panic; put that poem into dactylic hexameter, and he’ll master it in an hour.
Tonight, as I prep for the quality conference I’ll be chairing on Monday and Tuesday, I have my old-but-trusty Sennheiser cans on, streaming my “top ranked” playlist on Xbox Music. Thing is, I’m using my new tablet PC — an HP Split — that has Beats Audio on board. After a half-hour of experimentation, I found just the right “listening experience” settings in the Beats control panel to reveal a whole new dimension to the music I loved, but heretofore had consumed using earbuds on my phone or Surface Pro.
I’m working. Trying to prep for The Conference From Hell. But I keep getting distracted by my ears:
- The raw, glorious talent of Jared Leto’s voice powering through the unplugged version of Hurricane and his cover of Rihanna’s Stay
- The raucous good time of Shinedown’s Cyanide Sweet Tooth Suicide balanced by the powerful message of What A Shame
- The epic anthem that is Imagine Dragons’ Radioactive
- The elegant simplicity of Britney Spears’s Everytime
- The feral masculinity of Chevelle’s Forfeit
- The classic-rock grit of Creed’s My Own Prison
- The haunting lyrical beauty of Linkin Park’s Iridescent
- The subtle harmonic overlays and deep bass counterpoints of Stone Sour’s Hesitate
A recent study suggested that the music that moves us imprints our psyche, which is why people tend to favor the music of their impressionable youths. Fair enough. But I know quite a few people who either eschew a deep love of music, or use music more as a matter of skinny-jeans social proofing than a source of joy and inspiration.
Get a gin-and-tonic or three in me, left alone with my music and my thoughts, and I’ll cycle between the aggressive, adrenaline-pumping animality of The Red and the tear-jerking melancholy of slow-moving acoustic ballads like 45. Then — to the horror of my feline overlords — I’ll sing along to Islands in the Stream or Fast Movin’ Train.
Thing is, you sometimes just have to let go and let yourself get lost in the moment. The right music, at the right volume, at the right moment, brings catharsis more lasting than a dozen weepy therapy sessions. Music moves us, if we unleash it.
Birthday Retrospective, Part XXXVIII
On Monday I transitioned from a defensible “mid thirties” to unambiguously “late thirties.” I’m more sanguine about the prospect than I might have been a few years ago. Let’s explore why.
First, the last year has been ridiculously busy. I can’t ever recall being this consistently overwhelmed with stuff to do. It started late last October, continued through National Novel Writing Month, persisted through the December holidays and never slowed down. I don’t get days off or weekends off anymore. Yet the stress from doing all that extra stuff is counterbalanced by a sense of mission and progress that’s refreshing. It’s a good kind of busy, for the most part. There’s a method to the madness.
Second, I’m in better physical shape today than I was a decade ago. When I turned 28, I was morbidly obese and on track for a cornucopia of early-onset chronic diseases. Although my calendar’s insanity lately has meant that my waistline has increased a wee bit, I’m healthier today than a decade ago. And that’s a good thing.
Third, my attitude on life has significantly changed. The “been there, done that” sense of serenity about life’s little problems means that the level of daily drama I allow myself to endure has plummeted. The long view makes more sense now than it did several years ago, and the existential stress about aging has given way to recognizing that in the long corridor of life, some doors open, some close — and some open or closed based on the lock status of yet other doors. The path to joy reveals itself in the knowledge that it’s OK if Circumstance bolts some doors, provided you tread boldly across the threshold of newly unbolted doors.
Every year over the eight or so years I’ve run this blog, I’ve written a birthday retrospective. As I look back at prior stories, I’m struck by how adolescent some of them are. When you have the privilege of free time to luxuriate in faux-sophisticated existential angst, I suppose it’s no surprise that faux-sophisticated existential angst should appear on blog posts. When you get to the point when you’re working 14-hour days doing Grown Up work and concede you can’t keep up with everything, then those little luxuries vanish. And when they vanish, so also does the mindset that underlay them.
My 37th year was marked by progress that prompts stretch goals for even more progress:
- I accepted a promotion at work, leaving me with a nice raise and six FTE — as well as a lot of opportunity to grow our team’s portfolio. The next challenge is to make ourselves indispensable to senior leadership.
- I wrote a novel. The next challenge is to finish the editing and shop it for publication.
- I bought my dive gear and got back in the water. The next challenge is to earn master diver certification.
- I started, with a group of friends, a publishing house. The next challenge is to bring it to profitability.
- I attended the Michigan Republican county and state conventions as a delegate. The next challenge is to continue to grow with local political leaders.
- I became president-elect of the Michigan Association for Healthcare Quality, with responsibility for executing next week’s 1.5-day state educational conference in Traverse City. The next challenge is to pull off a more significant conference next October in Grand Rapids.
- I attended various Las Vegas events with other podcasters. The next challenge is to keep those relationships healthy and enduring.
The world is awash in oysters ready to be cracked, but the full flowering of success comes when people realize that the possibilities that seemed so important in their youth aren’t the things that are important later in life.
Labor Day = Day of Labor; Mayhaps a Lesson There?
It’s not lost on me, the irony of spending a five-day Labor Day holiday sitting at home … laboring. I took off Friday, as well as Tuesday; Monday is a paid holiday that doesn’t come out of my PTO bank.
On Friday, apart from joining the call for a quarterly board meeting for the Michigan Association for Healthcare Quality, I ran a few errands and came as close as I dared to actually relaxing. Yesterday was split between prepping for this coming Friday’s inaugural meeting of the editorial committee for Caffeinated Press and doing some contract editing work for a client. Today is “me” day — and by that, I mean catching up on personal tasks and domestic chores. Tomorrow, I do a deep prep dive into the final touches for the MAHQ conference at the end of September, as well as pull together the presentation I’ll deliver in Nashville next week. And Tuesday? That’ll be spent mostly wrapping up my 10,000-word short story for the anthology to which I’ve been invited to submit.
Lots going on. And the new job brings its own expectations that I’ll do a lot in a short period of time. Challenge accepted.
Yet one thing is abundantly clear: I have to scale some stuff back. I’m doing too much for too many, without enough time to attend to the things that fall into the “important but not urgent” quadrant of Life. Some of my cigar time the last few days has drifted toward what I need to pick up and what I need to set aside — on the choices I need to make to succeed instead of merely to tread water.
Still, it’ll be good to knock a bunch of stuff off the to-do list.
In other news:
- I now have a nerd paradise going on in my home office. My “normal” computer — a Toshiba all-in-one with a huge touch screen and Win 8.1 — sits where it normally does. Added on the side desk are the iMac I bought last week (yes, I bought an old but excellent-condition iMac 5.2 running Snow Leopard off Craigslist; the value-add was the legally licensed copy of Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Master Collection). Next to it sits my old, frail HP laptop; it’s actually a decent machine but the on-board display occasionally goes out. So I hooked it up to a gorgeous 21-inch monitor that Duane gave me, then wiped it and installed a copy of Elementary OS (a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu). I’m typing this post on the Linux machine, in fact. All that notwithstanding: From one chair, I can access a Windows PC, a Mac and a laptop running Linux.
- Enjoyed dinner and drinks on Friday with my friend Stash. She became a manager a bit before I did; we had a lovely conversation about the leadership culture of our employer over happy-hour margaritas on the outside porch of a lovely Mexican restaurant.
- Duane has moved to Texas. He’s an interesting fellow. Every three years or so, he develops the wanderlust bug and has to basically reboot his life somewhere else. I first met him more than a decade ago, in Kalamazoo. I hired him to join the opinion staff at the Herald. Then I helped him get a job at the hospital. Then he went to get a second master’s degree in California, then to Korea. Then I helped him get another job at the hospital. Now he’s off to be an assistant director at a small university in east Texas — and I wish him well. I helped him move a week ago, and I’m planning to pack the stuff he put into storage, into a U-Haul and bring it to him sometime in October.
- Speaking of jobs: My friend Rick has moved on from the hospital. He’s plotting his next career moves, but he’s in good spirits and I wish him the best.
- Last weekend, I attended the Michigan Republican state convention in Novi. I’m glad for the experience, although the event was a bit … anti-climactic. Only one round of balloting. Despite contention for the lieutenant governor role and pretty much all of the academic stuff (state board of ed, Wayne State trustees, Michigan State trustees, U of M regents), the results were sufficiently strong that the losers on the first ballot moved unanimous consent to seat the victors. All of my preferred candidates won — I’m especially pleased that Lt. Gov. Brian Calley showed so strongly despite a well-organized Tea Party effort to boot him off the Snyder ticket. Credit where it’s due: Today’s MI GOP under Bobby Shostak has shown a considerable amount of adeptness at not being complacent about potential political threats, and also for having a keen eye for optics. Dave Agema — our state National Committeeman who made waves earlier this year with his vitriolic anti-gay comments — was basically shut down for both the Kent County and the state conventions. On the upside, Rep. Justin Amash is growing on me. He was one of the few high-profile elected leaders who spent a lot of time being visible among the delegates from his district.
- I bought a Fitbit last weekend. The biggest insight from its tracking data so far is that my sleeping patterns suck. I am averaging slightly more than 6 hours per night despite being in bed for about 7.5. I have “restless” periods around 2 a.m., and I have a sneaking suspicion it’s cat-related. (Says the guy writing a blog post while the Boy Cat sits next to me, meowing.)
Anyway … full plate this “vacation,” but the upside is that it’s better to be busy making progress than lazy being complacent.