Cobb

I have exactly $20 more than I need in the bank to pay rent. So I've timed things fairly well, considering. In my whole plan, I expected to be working full-time by December first. It has worked out.

What have I learned from this experience? I'll be thinking about it for a while, but I think the most immediate lesson is an extension of what I learned in August of 2002 reading 'Koba the Dread'. Things can swing wildly very quickly. As one of the millions, I can be forgotten and lost in a heartbeat. Things are more volatile than they appear to be. It depends on which path you take. Analogously, I think of a goal on the other side of the freeway. If you've always crossed at the light, in the crosswalk, you have no idea how violent getting through traffic can be.

I've come to appreciate my computer skills a lot more. The years I've spent doing what I do counts for a great deal. I find it very remarkable that while I know a lot of things about computing, I don't talk about computing much at all. It doesn't take nearly as much of my conversational brainspace. As much as I have learned and forgotten, I still struggle with the niched nature of this industry. It is amazingly compartmentalized and blinkered. It almost defies hierarchy and seniority.

I appreciate old beat-up automobiles a whole lot more than ever. I appreciate Carl's Jr. a lot more than ever.

I have lost some of the romance I've had for the far and out of the way. Just as nations still count the most in these days of cell warfare, big cities still count in this interneted matrix. There is just no real substitute for the connections that are only available in the metropolis. The advantages are enormous. What I've been able to do because of market research and oddjobs via craigslist would have been impossible anyplace smaller.

I worry that I'll never be able to go back to the salary world. If I am who I think I am and this business works out, then I will interpret a lot of my lack of work as something overbearing about me. Perhaps what I feel shows on my face.

I have been fortunate enough to have had some time to spend in aerobics. I took off about ten pounds and got a lot of my breath back. That's a great thing.

All in all I am exhausted but now accustomed to using new muscles of survival. The crisis seems to be past, and while I am still willing and able to work, the future is promising. I've never lived in one place for more than three years since I left home 21 years ago... well, that's another problem. It's very difficult for me to deal with the fact that I have, on several occasions in the past 2 years in general and four months in particular, just knew that I would be planning to move the family to Dallas, no Atlanta, no Detroit.

I've got to make Los Angeles work for me or I'm going to work myself into an early grave. Fingers crossed.