Happy New Year?
New year, new stuff.
Quick recap: Didn't do so hot in one of my classes during the summer semester. Did great in the other. Had to take the fall semester off as the other network engineer decided to take a job in Texas and leave me to run the whole show. I knew it was coming, but I had hoped it would be another month off. Whatever. Took that and ran with it; we get someone in around November.
Holidays were nice. Family is doing good. Nephews cleaned up this christmas. Shopping season is getting more....frustrating than anything else.
I quit Eve Online, at least for a little while. It was just more trouble than it was worth at this point, and I was getting bored of it--it seemed a second job in many aspects...and I wanted to play other games. Oblivion and Medieval II Total War have been far more entertaining thus far. Wii Sports as a workout tool coupled with the elliptical is a nice exertion/diversion.
We tried to go out to the Hard Rock Casino for New Years Eve, but the place was a mob and the people we were going to meet didn't show up for over 3 hours, so we left. I stopped by at a cigar bar to grab a CAO and a drink. We then had a private champagne toast at home.
New year starts, I get a promotion to Network Engineer II, and a nice 15% pay bump. We have a ton of projects to hammer out this year, so it should round out my resume nicely. VOIP, Exchange 2007, new Cisco infrastructure, new fiber backup drives, etc.
I've also restarted school after the fall semester "vacation." Music Appreciation and Database Application Design. The latter appears conceptually challenging; the former is merely a mental endurance challenge for my attention span--three hours with no breaks, and a quiz at the end of each class on the class content.
Despite all this, I feel...displaced. Probably another one of my wonderful neurotransmitter-induced funks, but I feel decidedly unfulfilled. Bored?
I've been feeling the need for "geeking out" or getting in a good old fashioned goth-ish brood session. Cruxshadows and metal are on my office playlist, alternating with anime theme songs. I don't know--maybe I just don't know what I want. I watched a bunch of stargate and GITS last night and I actually felt a bit better this morning. Then the playlist flipped on Nostrum and I got...wistful again. I was never big in the scene--I went "corporate" early on after all--but I sort of "miss" my goth/industrial phase.
Maybe I'm just reaping the effects of my stunted social skills. I encourage Marian to aggressively pursue a social circle to gain outlets for her needs, but then I fail to do the same.
I do have to be careful here; like I wrote in my started-then-abandoned memoir/manuscript, depression is one of the ultimate forms of self-centered selfishness. You focus on your own problems and feelings to the exclusion of others' (or at least, well before and above others'); with the possible exception of moments of empathy followed by guilt which then in turn is used to feed back into your depression. Wallowing in self-pity is never a good thing...though it does feel cathartic at times.
It's hard to say "life sucks" and sulk when you have so much going for you, but is there a proviso to be able to say it when you're just feeling 'spritually' bankrupt? Even the pills never helped much with that. I've pushed past a lot of my issues and emotional disability, but it always seems to creep back in.
Quick recap: Didn't do so hot in one of my classes during the summer semester. Did great in the other. Had to take the fall semester off as the other network engineer decided to take a job in Texas and leave me to run the whole show. I knew it was coming, but I had hoped it would be another month off. Whatever. Took that and ran with it; we get someone in around November.
Holidays were nice. Family is doing good. Nephews cleaned up this christmas. Shopping season is getting more....frustrating than anything else.
I quit Eve Online, at least for a little while. It was just more trouble than it was worth at this point, and I was getting bored of it--it seemed a second job in many aspects...and I wanted to play other games. Oblivion and Medieval II Total War have been far more entertaining thus far. Wii Sports as a workout tool coupled with the elliptical is a nice exertion/diversion.
We tried to go out to the Hard Rock Casino for New Years Eve, but the place was a mob and the people we were going to meet didn't show up for over 3 hours, so we left. I stopped by at a cigar bar to grab a CAO and a drink. We then had a private champagne toast at home.
New year starts, I get a promotion to Network Engineer II, and a nice 15% pay bump. We have a ton of projects to hammer out this year, so it should round out my resume nicely. VOIP, Exchange 2007, new Cisco infrastructure, new fiber backup drives, etc.
I've also restarted school after the fall semester "vacation." Music Appreciation and Database Application Design. The latter appears conceptually challenging; the former is merely a mental endurance challenge for my attention span--three hours with no breaks, and a quiz at the end of each class on the class content.
Despite all this, I feel...displaced. Probably another one of my wonderful neurotransmitter-induced funks, but I feel decidedly unfulfilled. Bored?
I've been feeling the need for "geeking out" or getting in a good old fashioned goth-ish brood session. Cruxshadows and metal are on my office playlist, alternating with anime theme songs. I don't know--maybe I just don't know what I want. I watched a bunch of stargate and GITS last night and I actually felt a bit better this morning. Then the playlist flipped on Nostrum and I got...wistful again. I was never big in the scene--I went "corporate" early on after all--but I sort of "miss" my goth/industrial phase.
Maybe I'm just reaping the effects of my stunted social skills. I encourage Marian to aggressively pursue a social circle to gain outlets for her needs, but then I fail to do the same.
I do have to be careful here; like I wrote in my started-then-abandoned memoir/manuscript, depression is one of the ultimate forms of self-centered selfishness. You focus on your own problems and feelings to the exclusion of others' (or at least, well before and above others'); with the possible exception of moments of empathy followed by guilt which then in turn is used to feed back into your depression. Wallowing in self-pity is never a good thing...though it does feel cathartic at times.
It's hard to say "life sucks" and sulk when you have so much going for you, but is there a proviso to be able to say it when you're just feeling 'spritually' bankrupt? Even the pills never helped much with that. I've pushed past a lot of my issues and emotional disability, but it always seems to creep back in.