BrockLi Soup

I need to make more time for books. So far in 2007, I’ve only finished seven books, and one of them (the hilarious The Pirates! In An Adventure With The Communists) only took an afternoon. I’ve got two more in the works now, but a quick glance over my book list for the past year and a half shows that my time for reading lately has been woefully inadequate. It doesn’t seem so long ago that I was splayed out on the couch with Everything Is Illuminated or any one of David Sedaris’ books, but I read those in my old-old apartment - the one I moved out of last May. I’ve read so little since then that they’re still relatively fresh in my mind.

I keep hoping that things will calm down soon and I’ll have more free time. I’m back from two weeks in SF, moved into a new apartment, spent this weekend in Buffalo for my buddy Bill’s wedding, and I’ve already spent 35 hours in the office this week. I’ve barely touched my news reader since I left for SF almost a month ago, so I’ve got thousands of blog posts and news items waiting for my attention. There are still a few boxes I haven’t unpacked because I need to get rid of other stuff to make room for them. I got a USB hard drive to store all my crap, but I haven’t even plugged it in yet because there’s a monitor (which also needs to go) on the table I’m going to use for my computer, and I haven’t had any time to fiddle with it yet anyway. The MacBook I got last week (which I LOVE, incidentally) has some 80 GB of crap from my old laptop and desktop sitting in the Documents directory, waiting to be sorted and backed up as necessary. I still haven’t really grocery-shopped since I moved over a week ago, except for a quick trip to grab milk, eggs, apples, and some frozen dinners. I haven’t had time for SNFC - the local chapter I so wanted to start - in a full month, and probably won’t this week either.

And, of course, there’s about 20 books on my book shelf that were purchased in more leisurely times, when their chances of being read were as high as 1 in 6. This one especially bugs me because of the money I’ve invested in my collection and the effort that’s gone into moving all of them from apartment to apartment. That shit’s heavy, yo.

My bowling ball/baby/shark situation has surpassed, “Just get through this quarter,” and I’m not really sure what comes after that. Semi-year? Either way, I just keep chugging along, and hope the train stops before the wheels come off.

My boss was in the military and still uses 24-hour time for everything. He recently sent me a schedule for some conference calls, but he’s in California and put them in his time.

See how long it takes you to figure out what 1430 - 1600 actually means when it’s three time zones over.

About a month ago, my buddy Mace recommended Urban Tribes: Are Friends the New Family? It was incredibly interesting and I’d recommend it to anyone, particularly recent (or soon-to-be) college grads, because it’s really about people our age. The whole idea is that our generation keeps putting off the classic signs of adulthood - marriage and baby-makin’. More people are waiting longer to get hitched and have kids, if they do it at all, and many are finding that friends provide the support structure that a family normally might. I especially liked the author’s own story - his tribe is made up of about 25 people, and by the sound of it (though I don’t think he was explicit on this point), they ages range from the mid-20’s to late-30’s. This sort of social construct was incredibly uncommon (if not entirely unheard of) during the early adulthood of our parents, but today it’s happening all over, albeit in smaller numbers.

Just today, I finished Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes, and the Reinvention of the American Grown-up. This one just caught my eye when I was browsing at the book store just a few days after I finished Urban Tribes. It’s a very different look at a similar trend: adults putting off adulthood and opting to indulge their inner child. It wasn’t as well-written as Tribes, but it offered an interesting perspective on things.

I mention these together because they came along at a pretty good time for me. It’s only been in the past month or two that I’ve come to grips with the fact that graduating college is not the end of life as I know it. For some reason, I’ve always had this subconscious fear that life pretty much stops after that - you get married, have some kids, and fall into a comfortable routine. That’s more or less what my parents did, and seemed to be the trend among the parents of my peers when I was a kid. I really didn’t think I’d want to live past 40, because it all seemed so boring after that.

Obviously, this isn’t necessarily the case, but I’ve never really been able to convince myself of that. I kept trying to figure out what my big project was going to be, how I was going to leave my impact on the world. With graduation looming and no great ideas jumping out at me, I sort of resigned myself to a string of crappy jobs and small apartments. It doesn’t help to look around at the people I went to school with: a couple are engineers for Google, one’s writing his first book, and another is speaking at conferences (still others from RIT, whom I didn’t know, started College Humor and a variety of other successful sites). They’re all off doing exciting and interesting stuff, and I’m trying to figure out whether I even want to be doing what I spent four years training for.

I went into college feeling like I had more time than I’d know what to do with. At the time, I was figuring on spending five years there, which seems like forever to someone who’s only 17. That time quickly dried up, and while I enjoyed it while I had it, some part of me worries that my early adulthood will pass me by just as quickly. I feel like I need to do my big, great thing - whatever that may be - as soon as possible, so that I don’t let time get away from me again.

And now that I actually put it into words, I realize that it sounds just a little insane. I’m enjoying life right now: I don’t have any masterpiece in the works, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life coding, but I have good friends, I’ve got a decent apartment, I’m not totally broke, and I’ve only been out of college for eight months. I’ve got plenty of time to waste, and if I spend all my time worrying about what’s to come, I’ll just keep on missing what’s in the here and now.