Personal posts
At birth, we are given a name. Our parents choose it for us.
Later, we can change it. We can take a new name from someone we love. Or change it entirely at will.
Our name in the real world can be different from the names we choose for ourselves.
To my family I am Son, Carl, Honey, Brother.
To my friends I’ve been Carl, C, Big C, Carlito, and Carlos.
To my gaming friends I am peroty.
To the rest of the world I am nothing. I don’t exist and I am no one.
What is Christmas as an adult?
When I was a kid, it was a time of excitement and wonder. I loved decorating the tree and putting up lights. And of course, I loved the presents waiting in their glossy paper and getting to play with cousins I didn’t see very often.
As I got older and waking up the middle of the night was less common and the desire for gifts was less, it was still a good time. It meant a long break from school in high school. And in college, it meant an even longer vacation.
It was a good time to go home and unwind. It got me out of the daily grind. It was a nice change.
Now, as an adult, Christmas is a Friday. Christmas is an extra day off during a work week. It’s a time to sit with family and eat. It’s a time where traveling to see family more than a few hours away is untenable.
It’s a stressful time where traffic and limited time off has to be weighed against wanting to spend time with family.
Feelings are hurt. Money is spent. Christmas went from a time of wondrous merriment, to a balancing act.
I didn’t have much Christmas spirit this year. It was hard to muster much of it. I changed jobs right before the holiday so I had no paid time off. It wasn’t a long enough break to travel and even then, money would be tight and I keep finding myself asking, at what cost?
Christmas as an adult is summed up by John Siracusa on a recent Reconcilable Differences episode (48:35 into the show) where he said:
“You’re ruining your own holiday to fulfill the obligations put upon you by your family to do something you don’t want to do.”
I got to thinking about this because we don’t have kids so there’s no Santa Claus to talk about and no pile of presents to crowd under the Christmas tree. This year my wife and I didn’t buy each other anything. If there’s something we want, we buy it. There’s nothing that I wanted enough to ask specifically for it. And my poor wife’s birthday falls the week before Christmas so I got her a nice present for her birthday.
So Christmas morning didn’t hold any special meaning other than time off from work. It was nice to have a few days in a row away from work. And not to fill those days with fighting traffic, getting folded into an airplane and generally dealing with America’s travel infrastructure.
For people with children, Christmas is a very different thing. For me, the highlight of my Christmas time was driving around Richmond and looking at Christmas lights with my wife. It was a wonderful evening spent seeing about 30 houses from the Tacky Light Tour.
What would I like to do for Christmas?
A quiet day. Spent with my wife. At home. Quietly enjoying each others company. And eating. Pantsless.
Merry Christmas, you filthy animals.
In 2013 I got a 2.5 week unpaid vacation from my job. My start date with my new job was pushed back a day because the government still wasn’t open. And it may happen again. The government runs out of money Sept. 30th. In less than three weeks, Congress needs to come up with an approved spending plan for the next year.
Or it shuts down. Again.
Republicans are going to get blamed for a shutdown, no matter what happens, by the general public,” said Stan Collender, a budget analyst and executive vice president at Qorvis MSLGroup in Washington. “They have too much baggage, too much history and it only seems to happen on their watch. But I don’t think they care.
They don’t care. They think they can “win” somehow by shutting the government down again.
Apparently 2013 is too far away for them to remember?
Q. I hear Ted Cruz is involved. Didn’t he have something to do with the last shutdown?
A. That’s right. In September 2013, Republicans led by the Texas senator — who is now running for president — insisted on shutting off spending for the Affordable Care Act. (You may recall him reading Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” from the Senate floor.) Obama refused, and the government closed down for the first 16 days of October. Hundreds of thousands of federal employees and contractors were furloughed and federal services including national parks were closed. Republicans relented after public opinion turned against them. (Emphasis mine.)
If they shut the government down again, I don’t work.
I don’t get paid.
I don’t get back pay like Federal Employees do.
I don’t get to pay my bills.
I get sent on an unpaid vacation without a firm end date.
It happened to me in 2013.
If it happens again, it’s going to be a huge burden on myself and my family.
I am just one of hundreds of thousands of government contractors working in all areas of government who will be harmed by this. I don’t want it to happen again. I can’t afford for it to happen again.
There used to be a time when government jobs were desirable (and I’m sure they still are if you’re a Federal Employee). But for contractors supporting the government in roles they’ll never hire, it’s increasingly a risky proposition.
I’ve often wished I could tell my younger self it will be OK. I grew up in a small town of 2,000 people in a county of about 12,000. My high school was 525 kids and my graduating class was 168.
I knew everyone and everyone knew me. If not personally, at least by name or reputation. Or both. I was a big kid and a freak to boot. The rumors that circulated about me were hilarious.
This open letter to a younger you hit home with me.
An Open Letter to My 15-Year-Old Self Just Before the Start of High School
Get a shitty job. Work in a grocery store, steering shrink-wrapped pallets of cola through cramped warehouses. Spend hours daintily arranging shelves that you will later see customers destroy in minutes. This will pay for your food court lunches and headphones, and also impress on you the nihilistic reality of most of the work out there. Get a good, long, nasty look at how impersonal and irrelevant your role on this earth can be if you’re not careful. Get your face right into it, right into the filthy shelves and bins of expired yogurt and the empty eyes of your manager and make a vow that whatever you do with your life you will always be moving away from all of that.
In High School I worked as:
– A desk clerk in a rec center
– A lifeguard
– A bagger at a Food Lion
– In my father’s print shop doing bindery work
All of these jobs taught me I needed to go to college, get a degree and learn to do something more interesting and valuable.
I still partly regret going to college. I don’t have loan debt hanging over my head. But I feel like I was a different person after college. And not a better person than when I started.
It got me a BS in Communications. Which may not have opened doors. It hasn’t closed any on HR checklists.
Get over any desire to be normal. The desire to be normal is its own perversion. Some people do achieve the appearance of normalness, which means they have successfully hidden or beaten down everything about them that is interesting or memorable in the hopes that they become impervious to criticism. Go the other way. The great joke here is that nobody has ever been normal.
There’s a reason I colored my tennis shoes with sharpies in high school. There’s a reason I worked on a literary magazine and hosted open mic nights. I knew there was no hope for me.
I was 6’5″ 250 lbs. The football coach salivated at my dimensions. But I have the aggression of a kitten and didn’t want to be a human tackling dummy.
I did almost play football once. As a kick and punter. Until I had to choose between soccer and football.
I was popular and cool in high school for about two days.
Then I chose soccer and left the football team behind. Same thing happened when I had a choice to quiet the basketball team and attend my very last open mic night as the Literary Magazine’s editor. Or ride the bench in a meaningless game for a coach that never much liked me.
I quit the team.
Be your own person. You’re much more interesting as you than you trying to be something you think someone else wants you to be.
Long-distance relationships are hard. This is not news to anyone who’s been in one. I’ve spent far too many hours driving through Virginia.
I met the woman who would become my wife when I lived in Richmond, VA and she was in school at Virginia Tech. Almost every weekend this meant driving out to Blacksburg or waiting for her to do the same. These were the longest drives ending in the hardest Sunday nights I’ve had. The tearful goodbyes and painful distance meant the weeks were full of video chats, IMs, text messages and as much remote contact as we could manage.
It didn’t get any better once she graduated. She was in Northern VA and I was still in Richmond. Our weekends were the same long drives, but different destinations. Instead of I-64, it was I-95 into the heart of DC traffic and back again every weekend (or as close to that as we could manage.)
I remember the stretches of three weeks without seeing each other feeling like the longest times of my life. The computer gives bad hugs. And it never kisses me back.
So while we couldn’t be close to each other, I got to know this wonderful woman deeper than anyone else. We talked. For hours. Everyday. About everything. We shared our loves and fears. Our taste in music and movies. Stories from our lives and our daily existences. I knew Annie and she knew me. We grew ever closer as we learned more and more about each other.
We didn’t have silent movie dates followed by mouths full of food. We had talked all week. We knew each other.
It made every moment we had together all the sweeter. We would spend every moment of those weekends together. The delays in traffic hurt so much because they cut into that precious time together.
It was a rough part of my life. And it lasted far longer than I hope it would. But I eventually found work in DC and moved closer. We eventually got married and moved in together.
The long-distance was the hardest part of our relationship but it also made it so much stronger. It’s always hard, but it will pay off in the end. Use the time you have apart to talk and really get to know each other. Make sure the relationship is worth it. You will be richly rewarded.
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