Lost Horizons - Post a comment

I love being at work on the day before a major holiday, when not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse. My colleague Chris and I have agreed that a missive must have come down from on high letting us leave at 1PM, but since our immediate supervisor is out and unable to relay it to us, we're just going to go ahead and pretend like we got it.

Tomorrow Jeremy and I are off for a well-deserved vacation in New York. It will be the first vacation we've taken with just the two of us, and I'm thrilled about it (and no, Burning Man is *not* a vacation). It came to me on a whim at the end of September, when I decided it was time to do something fun with the windfall I had received in my severance from LoanSoft.

I hesitated a bit too long in making a hotel decision, though, and wound up with a choice between expensive and dingy, or really expensive and boutique, so I went with really expensive (though, after shopping on CheapTickets.com, it would up being only a bit more expensive than the Chelsea Hotel, my first choice, where we would have had to sleep in seperate double beds). So, around dinner time tomorrow we will be checking into the in the meatpacking district, dead between Chelsea and SoHo and a walk into the Village.

Among the amenities: a rooftop outdoor heated pool with piped-in underwater music, so you can submerge yourself in views of the skyline and the chic ennui of Massive Attack at the same time. Apparently the poolside bar is also a good place to hang out and ogle celebs while having $14 house specials. I think, however, we are more likely to spend our drink money in the Lower East Side and SoHo than here, since the whole upscale thing is a bit intimidating to me.

I've found a promising techno night on Friday at , and on Saturday a club called Mr. Black in SoHo is home to . It looks remarkably like Drunk and Horny, though Jeremy, having listened to a mix by the resident DJ, says that musically it's far better than anything ever heard at DnH.

Both of us are looking forward to this as an opportunity to get some new input and, I hope, inspiration. With the general Winter blahs descending San Francisco seems sleepier than ever, and I have returned to my typical existential ruminations on the meaning of life and what the hell I'm doing with it. I've reached one of those points where it's possible to see everything just moving along in a smooth and inconsequential way, with a steady rhythm of work, going out, watching TV on Sunday evening, repeat, all the way to the grave.

Having anchored myself a job, I need to start plotting a new course or run the risk of becoming permanently moored - and being a technical writer is certainly *not* what I want to reflect back upon as my life's work (one of the most depressing things I found recently, off a tech writer society's website, was a list of "famous" technical writers. That someone felt the need to make this list as some form of validation for the profession speaks volumes). I'm considering (shudder) the necessity of going back to school to provide myself with opportunities for advancement, since there are essentially two kinds of people in the tech industry: business guys with MBAs, and geeks with mad technical skills.

Being neither of those types it's difficult for me to see how I can advance in this industry. Among my considerations is getting a Master's in library and information science (MLIS) from San Jose State, or getting some kind of MBA/Master's in IT Management. I must say, though, that neither of those presents future opportunities that I find particularly appealing; the chance to become "an expert" or the chance to become "a manager.

" As an "expert" there is always the consulting route, though how many times you can do the same job is always an issue, and as a "manager" I don't think I would fit in very well with the culture I have observed prevailing among upper management types (it really, really helps to be a straight white guy with a wife and kids who likes to play golf and talk about sports).

I don't know if going to New York will help me figure all this out, but I do hope that being among a greater *variety* of people will open new horizons. One problem of living in SF, at least for me, is that it's become a much less diverse city in terms of the *kinds* of things people are engaged in doing.

If you look at the gay scene, it's all pretty much the same, with a small handful of people running the show. If you look at the professional world, it seems to all be IT, medical, law, finance. The chances of running into a person or situation from which something new and different emerges seems very low to me (though, admittedly, I probably don't get out and about as much as I should).

San Francisco, in other words, is starting to feel very small-town to me, and I'm not sure of how to go about stimulating my own growth in this environment. I will admit that I also feel a bit of middle-aged complacency creeping over me, this idea that I'm now pretty much where I'm going to wind up and a strong inclination to just go with it, to do my thing, make my money and find ways to increase my personal contentment. If I could accept that this is an OK thing to do, I'd probably be much happier, but I have always been way too ambitious for that (there's nothing like a SuperEgo that keeps saying "really, you can do better, can't you?

Or are you just a lazy stoner?"). In the past these moments have usually preceded some transformation that takes years to unfold, so I'm hoping that New York will serve as the catalyst for one of these periods.

In other middle-aged man news, I've made my first forays into stock investing. Now that I've got immediate savings covered, I figured it was time to do something with the surplus. My goal is to beat the 5% I would make on a saving account (after taxes and fees) and invest only in companies who have a business model I understand.

Right now my holdings are Apple (I got in just before the last earnings release, yay), The9 Ltd (NCTY) which runs World of Warcraft in China, and Omniture (OMTR) which recently went public and does Web analytics. Big business, medium business, small business, all three in the technology/Internet space (a no-no, but I have a hard time putting bucks into financials, retail, big pharma, and all the rest). So far I'm making my goal, but the idea is to hang onto everything for three to five years.

I'll let you know how it all turns out in 2012, by which time the world will come to an end anyway. At least it gives me something exciting to check out when I open My Yahoo! every morning.

I'm taking the iBook with me to NY (yay for free wi-fi) so in between our adventures I may post up a few NY impressions. See you all when we return (if we do).