Midnight Stream of Consciousness...

It's midnight. Sandy and the kids are asleep. I was gonna go to bed around 11 but I realized that I had to fold up some clothes and put the dishes away. Makes it easier to wake up knowing I don't have much to do except attend to the dog and cat. After folding clothes and putting the dishes, I went down to check on my little DVD project, and wound up browsing the web waiting for it to finish. It was still going when I came up about a half hour later. . .a lot of nights are like this. I want to go to bed early, but there is stuff to do. A lot of nights, I think it would be great to hit the pillow right after Annika does. . .some of the best experiences of my life have been going to bed early, and waking up a few hours later, completely rested and ready for a night of work. I think I do my best work between the hours of midnight and 4 am. Seriously. I don't think that my mind is wound too much differently than the average person, but maybe it is, I don't know. Sometimes I think I'm different. Sometimes, like when I'm mowing the lawn, or staying up late, I think my synapses really start firing. When I was in college, my mom took me to the Marshfield Clinic in Wisconsin, where I was diagnosed with ADD. That was back when ADD was just getting to be diagnosed kinda often, so I don't know if this place was right, or I was being falsely diagnosed with all the other kids who just couldn't get their homework in on time. One of the tests they did on me was to have me look at these flash cards and pick out an object that was different than the others, and I couldn't pick out the pattern. They told me that I should have been able to pick out the pattern after just a few cards, and after like forty or something, I had no idea. Anyway, I didn't take the medicine I was prescribed regularly. When I took it, it made me jittery and I'd stay up late planning things. I'd be successful at what I was doing for like a half a day or a few hours. And that's messed up. I stopped taking it soon after I stayed up last night designing some fucked up contraption that was a bed and a study area and a closet. It just got out of control.

Anyway. So nights like this when I am up by myself my mind can really start to wander. I don't know what to do about my job. I've had the same job for almost eight years now, and I don't have a long term plan for my success. I don't really care what I do. I just want to enjoy it and put food on my table at the same time. I think that's what everyone wants. You might be a teacher, or a firefighter, or a senator, or a dishwasher, but at the end of the day, if you are a normal person, you just want to go home. Unless your homelife sucks or something, which mine doesn't. So at night sometimes I wonder about what will happen with me. I start to play a game with myself where I take a long look away. Like I fly up a few thousand feet and look down. I look down and I can see myself and my family going about our lives. But I don't see myself changing. And I don't know if that's good or bad. I mean, change is normal, they say. Our cells are constantly dying and being reborn...except brain cells. When those are gone they're gone. So change is normal--the world heats up a little, things change. A baby is born, things change. I look at Sandy, and she looks as great as the day I married her. Even better. I look in the mirror, and I see the same kid I saw when I was in high school dabbing Oxy-10 on my pimples. I don't see myself changing. Why not? I don't think it's because I can't see the changes that are happening slowly. That stuff is easy to see because we know what to look for. I think I don't notice it because when I look in the mirror, I don't see Kurt, but I see me. The person I think that I am. And I'm not changing.

I should clear up something. I love working at IBM. I have a great manager and my co-workers are very nice people. I think I have the dream job, really. What I meant by writing this portion of it was that I have been doing printing support for my whole time here, and for the past few years I've felt a pressure to persue a new direction within IBM. But the problem I have is:

1. I really like my current job.
2. I don't want to just do one thing at IBM. If I ever had to go and get another job, and all I wrote is that I'd been doing printing support for 10 years or something, well then it looks like all I'm good for is supporting printers.
3. I really like my current job.

I wasn't to say that I didn't want to work at IBM anymore. :-)

I'll post this later "today." That is one of my pet peeves, actually, people who nitpick about the phrase "later today." Like if it is after midnight and you say you're gonna do something tomorrow, they kinda act so surprised and say "you mean later today." People who pull that kind of crap don't deserve to be talked to in the first place. If they can't ascertain via context clues what you actually mean, well then they're no wiser than that pimply faced kid at the Marshfield Clinic failing at reading the flash cards. Only in their case they would have been complaining about the cards or something.

Today after swim class, Annika and I went to Perkins to eat some ice cream. Afterwards I was pretending to race her to put my seatbelt on, and she lost. She said she didn't want to race, but I clicked in my belt after some faux fumbling and said something like "I totally wasted you." I think it sounds better and more fun than "I beat you." Anyway, she said she didn't want me to race her and I told her that if she wasn't racing then there was never a race in the first place. "Annika," I said, "if someone says they are racing you are you don't want to race, if they say they won, just answer by saying 'whatever'." She thought that was pretty funny and was saying as we got out of the car. "Um, Dad?" "Yes?" "Whatever." Then she laughs.

So it's 12:45 am. Maybe you got something out of this post. Maybe it was too big and you didn't read it. Maybe you reread it. Maybe you liked it. Maybe you thought it was lame. No matter. To you I say -- whatever.