Still, it’s not what I expected.

Financially it’s not easier, no matter what anyone told you about your magical new tax bracket. Your social life will change. Your goals will probably change.

All the things people dread about marriage and the changes it brings are true. Sort of. What’s actually driving those changes is the part nobody talks about, and that’s a huge disservice to the instution.

My fiscal belt has tightened, undeniably. It would be easy enough for an observer to compare my frequent nights out prior to marriage, and my frequent nights in after, and conlude that marriage drains your cash like a cannon shell through the waterline of a schooner sinks the dingy… yet the driving factors around WHY my money is less available are almost entirely postive. Where I might eat pre-packaged food 5 nights a week and every lunch, now my wife cooks the most amazing and fresh meals 5 nights a week. I’m dressing better, I have a membership to a gym and actually go regularly, etc etc. Being in a postive relationship has changed my personal goals and standards. It’s not enough to scrimp by in miserly fashion, conserving cash for the guy’s nights out. Now that cash has to work harder to meet my changing standards.

It’s pretty much the same in my social life right now. I have different goals and always seem to have no time for pint night. When your on the other side it can seem like a betrayal, but now that I’ve passed the pale myself, it just seems like a new chapter with new priorities.

Before I go on to describe the experience, a little bling:

Yeah, that’s mine. I didn’t bother putting the MCTS certs on the logo, but I’ve got those, too.

100% success. Now, on to the story!

This was my first ‘boot camp’ training experience. Most employers I’ve worked for in this industry have responded to questions about training with comments like “We prefer the OJT experience here”. I can’t help but feel that that translates to “You’re not really worth investing in” or perhaps “We’d rather sink our money into more visible departments than our IT staff”.

I think it’s both bizarre, and a little reassuring, to find myself today in the smallest IT department I’ve ever worked with, managing the largest direct environment I’ve ever worked in, and to now have a boss who seems to love the idea of sending his IT staff for additional training and certifications.

So after I did my market research on who was offering training, where, how much it would cost, and how long that training would be, I brought my winning pick to my boss, and went through my pitch. I initially wanted to attend an 8 certification camp that would include MCSA, MCSE, CCNA, CCENT, and the Security related certs, but after some discussion, my boss decided to upgrade to this 7 cert MCITP camp.

I was apprehensive getting onto the plane to Atlanta. I’ve been a husband for 8 months, so it’s hard to leave that newlywed vibe and go alone to do absolutely nothing but study and take exams for 16 days. I was also nervous on a professional level, having rarely gotten to work with Windows 7 at that point, and never having had direct experience with Server 2008. I had expected to get to Atlanta and crush the MCSE related exams, having plenty of experience with the operating systems involved. Instead, I got the enviable task of learning mass deployment and upgrade techniques with an aim to move our existing environment over to 7/2008. Terribly exciting, and a bit stress inducing.

The arrangements for hotel and transport to the facility were handled by CED. I flagged down a cabby from the airport and off we went to the hotel.

I’d like to mention as an interesting aside, everybody at ATL airport, the cabbies, the hotel staff and CED’s staff were unfailingly friendly. I felt pretty upbeat after a few days of dealing with all of these people.

I stayed at Country Inn & Suites in Atlanta. I told them my name and got into my room inside of a minute. It was pretty strange looking around the hotel room and realizing I’d be calling it home for 2 weeks. I’ve never really spent a great deal of time in hotels. The room wasn’t huge, but the bed was enormous, and the writing desk was perfect for the shocking amount of studying I’d soon find myself doing. My room had a small coffee pot, a fridge, a TV I never once turned on, a nice armchair that was extremely comfortable, and most importantly, free and reliable wireless access. I didn’t have any problem pulling down Patapon 2 from the playstation store with my PSP (the playing of which saved my brain from total meltdown in between the studying). I brought a webcam with me to keep up with my wife; the same weekend I flew to Atlanta, she had auditions, so it was great to be able to see her and talk to her. It was also great to grab my tablet and spin in circles with the office chair, and watch her get dizzy on my screen. :) That’s the sort of guy I am.

Imagine that?

Maybe for exactly those reasons, the quiet moments in the morning as I wake up, and throughout the day when I look up at the sky, and at night drifting asleep, have gained ever more significance and weight. I am very thankful my life has been moving so positively forward.

The key to all this forward momentum lately seems to be the sort of goofy thing I remember from self help books. Things like going up to the mirror in the morning with a directive from a book to “Be the man you want to see!” may seem bizarre, goofy, and awkward, but there is a seed of real truth in there. It is certainly a fact that acting in a way that is dissimilar from our comfortable default mental posture can help migrate that mental posture more fully to the emulated position, such as a shy kid going to a new school and pretending to be confident and outgoing. To a certain extent he recreates himself, not just in the eyes of new acquaintances, but in his own mental image of himself, the internal reference point he uses to answer the question, Who am I? So my own goofy self help thought of the moment can be summed up with this little blurb:

Positive Risk Taking: It is not really as impressive as it sounds. I simply mean that those moments when a choice presents itself, and the options are something akin to “take a chance that could move me closer to my goals” and “don’t take it”, I have been forcing myself to take a risk. The reasons I have for NOT taking those small risks have kept me from breaking free of inertia and making positive progress on goals very often in my life. The thing that is truly astounding is how small a difference in attitude leads me to take those risks rather than turn them aside.

I believe that difference can be described in a simple statement. Here it is:

“I want to set reasonable goals and make reasonable progress towards achieving my aims. I am responsible for making that progress happen.”

It seems like such a small and obvious thing to say to yourself, but truly this is a radical thought in some ways. I am discovering continually that on every plane of my being, accepting responsibility can be an empowering and motivating decision, one that can really help to ignite drive and interest.

It seems to me that one of the key differences in perspective between a child, a teenager, and an adult, is the way each answers that question, “Who am I?”
A child might shrug and say “I don’t know!’. If we are honest with ourselves, the teenager would be forced to say “I’m working on that”, and as adults we both expect to be and represent ourselves as a finished product, neatly packaged. Sometimes we also project the illusion that we know everything we need to know. Especially to children, but I’ll get back to that another time.

My point here in bringing this idea of how we answer this question, generally speaking of course, at different stages of life, is to expand on it just a bit. As teenagers we are considered to be, and most of us considered ourselves to be, in an experimental phase. We are figuring ourselves out. I suspect that the way we approach this process delimits that phase to a socially earmarked period of time, when in fact this process is a lifelong one. Once a person has decided they know who they are, they become resistant to changing that mental image.

“Oh no, I couldn’t learn to use the internet! I’m a warehouse worker!”

“My wife has always done the cooking, I can’t cook!”

I could go on, but essentially the idea is this:

• In any decision making process, there are many options
• Every decision path is weighted by myriad factors
• These factors can external or internal
• Decision paths that are evaluated as not fitting within an individual’s concept of “Who am I?” receive an negatively loaded value that is difficult for the individual to challenge
• This will hold true even if the choice path receive this negative assessment is best option in furthering goals or immediate concerns

For example, a person might decide not to pursue an opportunity for promotion in which they truly are the most suitable candidate. The real reason could very well have to do directly with that individual’s concept of herself. Perhaps for whatever reason, she understands herself to be a good follower, a hard worker, but not a leader. Even though she phrases her understanding of self in a positive manner, the subtext may interfere with her growth when an opportunity may challenge her very concept of who she is.

I suspect this is increasingly more relevant in direct proportion to the degree that an individual draws on what he does, especially in terms of labor, to provide answers to the question, “Who am I?”, to the neglect of other sources. In our society, were you to approach a stranger at a party and ask him “Who are you?” he would likely be confused, but if you instead were to ask, “What do you do?” this question is interpreted as “What do I do for a living”.

In terms of the purpose this question serves socially, though, isn’t it the same as “Who are you?” It may as well be, “How do you know yourself?”

Classes are stuffed full of people who would probably prefer to be anywhere else, the homework often feels like torture, and the lectures seem endless.

I often wonder if my students feel the same about the classes I teach at the local job centers?

So far my least favorite essay was on Machiavelli’s “The Prince”, although Voltaire’s “Candide” wasn’t that much better. Oddly, “The Prince” was also my favorite essay. Somewhere along the way, banging out 7 pages of glorified book analysis became a bit fascinating, and it was at that point in the writing process where I stopped loathing the assignment and became excited to make the next point. I’d gone from feeling like the task had no purpose, to having an opinion about it, an opinion I was eager to put to paper. With “Candide” that moment came later when I was using it as a source document for an essay on the cultural changes that made the French Revolution possible. When I applied the novel to it’s historical context and began to imagine what sort of impact such a saticial work might have, the story clicked into place. Gone was the image of an unwieldy and unlikely farce, and in it’s place was a cleverly arranged work designed to pull down all the curtains and prod the reader into asking questions.

So maybe the key to learning for me is to find the context in which the little pieces take on fuller meaning.

On the upside, I can attempt to pitch the benefits of extending our AD into satellite locations, especially since our IT staff is stretched so thin.

The biggest problem is that I hate to have lost any equipment, despite going into this laptop pool plan knowing we’d have a few stolen sooner or later. I just hate not having 100% constant success.

I sort of have to wonder why any job seeker thinks it’s worth it to boost a couple laptops from his local job center… I have to blame it on ignorance. The only thing those units could be used for is to pawn them, and the’ve got our asset tags, phone number, warning splash screens and all on them, so they’d need a wipe in order to be sold.

Ah well, the remaining units are as secure as I can make them now.

So I’ve got a couple purposes in returning to my life of blogging. First, I have felt the lack in my life of keeping a journal. Journals can help ground us, sound out our ideas and birth them more fully into our daily lives. Without that service, my thoughts seem less concrete and harder to explain. It’s almost as though, by transcribing my thinking into this written English, I enable a deeper communication with others, something that simply attempting to speak my mind fails at doing, or more accurately, that I feel falls short of my expectations of communication.

I need to clean out the cobwebs, dust off the chairs, and get the oven warmed up, so bear with me as I rediscover whatever sadly neglected writing ability I may still possess.

And thanks for reading.

Now that all that is done, it’s time to head into town and recapture some childhood moments. First stop: Rudy’s Tacos. I can’t wait! After that, el cheapo theatre most likely.

It’s amazingly hot out here, with all the moisture from the lake cooking everyone. Wishing I brought more clothes to wear, I’ll soon be out.

I stopped wanting to blog about things in my life awhile ago. There were a lot of factors, I guess.

I got bored with it.

I had less to say.

I had less i wanted to say for anyone to see.

I had nothing I felt I could say about my career without endagering my job.

Well, I am intrested in writing again, I have something to say now, I am less afraid to blow both mental barrels, and the job I was so afraid to lose, the one I though I could make a difference at, I don’t have anymore, and it could only do those still there good to hear my opinions about the whole kaboodle.

SO WRITE ON, I shall. I need to change the name of this blog, or start having people call me Spooky. One, or the other.

I am on Twitter now, I haven’t twittered often, but it’s the cool part of facebook without all the annoying applets. I need to figure out how Kenny did his tweet bar and copy his goodness.

I’m in northwesterd Illinois right now, visiting Mom and Bob. The lake country is gorgeous, despite the new golf course they are constructing, still. The island I used to swim out to as a kid is now a hole on the golfcourse, and a long bridge connects it to the shore. Ma’s house is still, and even more so, the most amazing home in the area, pictures cannot do this place justice.

I have a whole bunch of stories I need to write down here. How I broke into the neighbor’s house to save the day, for one. For the record, it’s much easier to break into a log cabin the your neighbor’s house. Or at least MY neighbor’s house.

Looking forward to actually writing some more, and hoping you’re going to be there to read it.

~Syd