Onward and upward

Mood: apprehensive
Music: "Lorelei" by Styx was the last song in my head

It's an interesting time of year, September. Things are starting, things are ending, the short is getting colder, and a general mindset shift occurs. A lot has happened in the past month; namely, lots of responsibilities. I start this entry from a train platform on my way home. It's late, dark, and cold, but I don't feel as bad as I should be.

I somehow found myself a member of the Board of Directors of my chorus as the Treasurer. I was asked, out of the blue, and I took the position with little thought. I have much to learn yet, but it's already made an impression on me, and possibly on my career. (More on that next.) Tomorrow I'm supposed to help compile financial data for some grant applications. I don't exactly know what I'm doing yet, but I hope it helps.

I had an interview last Friday. The position at hand: one of three open slots for regional IT store support. I would be responsible for up to three stores' technological needs: PCs, networks, registers, scales, and managing one person per store. And on-call hours. Quite a lot of responsibility, but an almost double pay raise. (But it wasn't much to begin with anyway, and it still isn't much now, relatively speaking.) And I shouldn't have any trouble getting work afterwards when I move on.

I had only three days to prepare. Serendipitously I scheduled a mock interview for two days before the real one, which helped me out a lot. When I told all my coworkers that I was applying to move up, everyone was very encouraging and supportive, which helped my confidence a lot as well. I thought I did alright in the actual interview, but you can never tell. I won't know for sure until Monday.

I bought a MacBook Pro off of some dude from Craigslist. The price was unbelievably low ($380), so I immediately suspected some sort of catch. And there were two: no install disks, and applications quit randomly. I'm not even sure the programs on it (Adobe CS, Logic Pro, MS Office, and the operating system, for that matter) are legal. I'm going to have to spend some quality time (and money) wiping the hard drive clean and learning the quirks of OS X, but I figured that it was high time I learned to do it anyway, since I will need it in the future for my career.

So there's a whole lot on my plate right now, and even more if the interview went right. For now, though, I just need to get to bed fairly soon. I'm now on a train headed to Penn Station, and looking at a two hour layover at the Port Authority. At 1am on a Saturday night. Why does this sound so familiar? Oh, because I've done this exact thing before. Groan. Here we go, another long night in the city.

New Month's resolutions

Song in my head: Ben Folds "Landed"

I'm trying something new this year. Instead of doing one overarching grandiloquently impossible resolution, I am giving myself twelve smaller ones, with a new one introduced cumulatively each month. My goal by the end of this exercise will be to come out a better person than I came in: a person with good habits. As a consequence, each progressive month will be more difficult than the last, since everything is cumulative, but the hope is that the month of daily practice will be enough to make the good habit second nature. The monthly resolution can (and should) be small and doable in scope. Without further ado:

January: no more escalators or elevators (within reason).
This was pretty easy, and a good one to start with, since this kept me going into February.

February: reduce sitting time, especially at and to/from work. This took slightly more willpower to accomplish, but doable. This meant standing up when printing at my desk (which I do on a daily basis) and not sit or lean on anything when waiting for the bus.

March: I wanted to start a daily exercise regimen, in anticipation for the summer, but I failed epically by spraining my lower back. I taceted this month.

For some reason, I was convinced that this home workout regimen I saw in an infomercial would work best for me, so I shelled out the dough and gave it a shot. On the first session, I squatted too low for my back to support, and I collapsed into a pathetic pool of failure on the basement cement floor. I can honestly say that was one of my best and worst moments: me writhing in pain on the cold floor for an entire night until my alarm clock rang the next morning. At that point, I gather every trace of willpower from every fiber of my being and excruciatingly got myself to sit up and eventually stand on my feet. My father took me to the urgent care clinic (I refused the hospital), and got a week and a half off from work. Not my the happiest week of my life, let me tell you.

Long story short: lumbosacral sprain taught me to set the bar low each month.

April: no more taking the car to the bus stop. This forced me to plan my mornings so I had ample (or for me, just enough) time to walk my way to the bus stop going to work. Getting up earlier was a bit of a struggle at first, but now I've changed my daily rhythm enough to accommodate.

May: breakfast. Every day. I'd been skipping breakfast regularly, and knew that it needed to change. I didn't need much in the morning, just enough to tide me over until lunch, but I definitely needed something. So I bough a box of Clif bars and ate one every morning. And it worked! I felt less sleepy in the morning, and I gorged less at lunch. I also started taking a daily fish oil supplement.

June: reduce and eliminate overtime at work. This was tricky. I'd be accruing overtime monthly by missing punch times a couple of minutes at a time, enough sometimes to get an extra hour of overtime pay each paycheck. I knew this was a bad habit I needed to break, and fast. So in the last hour of work you can always see me hauling ass and scurrying about, in a mad dash to get as much done before I clock out at 6pm. It worked for a while, but I usually ended up working past punch-out, just to get things done right. So I essentially broke a rule to avoid breaking another. This one is still a work in progress.

July: embarrassingly, brush my teeth daily. Through my efforts, I had neglected to brush my teeth on a daily basis. It was gross. (I did floss on a regular basis, however, lest you think me a boor.) This is totally appropriate because I found out just a couple of days ago that my biannual dental appointment is this Saturday. Hopefully I won't have any cavities this time around.

I'll write another update when August comes around. Geez, time flies when you're too busy working to notice.

A year later

Wow, it really has been a while since I last visited this blog. Lots has changed.

For one, I'm writing this in the bus because I'm stuck in traffic at the Lincoln tunnel, as usual. But I finally have a smartphone to call my own: an LG Nexus 4. Traveling with in in Canada was a challenge but I've had very few problems with it stateside.

For two, I've been working in the city as a data administrator for just about a year now. It's really helped me get out more. And the money, while paltry, is enough to get by for now. At least I'm really enjoying what I'm doing.

Speaking of what I'm doing, I had an interview yesterday for a data entry position at the regional office. I didn't get the job, but I got some more very valuable interviewing experience. Permits me time to really evaluate where I'm going, where I want to go, and what I should do to get there. I learned that I would enjoy a job where I'm on my feet doing more technical work, rather than be stuck at a computer in a cubicle all day. At the very least, this means I have a LOT of work and proving to do.

Hopefully this new mobile app I'm using will help me blog a lot more.