A year of storms

Not to be trite or exhaust my metaphor, but this blog is called what it is for good reasons.

I can’t say there is any particular reason why I haven’t blogged in over a year. I’ve been busy, for sure. I also began finding my political leanings somewhat tiresome to write about. There was all the chaos and desperation of my personal life, most of which I didn’t feel like writing about. I have to live it, every day after all. Writing about it just makes it that much more inescapable, to some degree at least. In many ways, I’m glad I never bothered to update this blog with that stuff. Talk about a drag to read!

But the number one reason I’ve been so inactive: Facebook. I’ve been more active there in the past year than at any time since I started an account a few years ago. It’s great for keeping up to date with the lives of lots of people, and for wasting time on stupid surveys, playing games, and sharing links about things that interest me.

But Facebook has some downsides to it. For one thing, Facebook is insidious and opaque about the way it collects and shares personal information. Its interface can be clunky, counterintuitive, far too complex, and often changes without warning. People’s posts seem to pop up on my feed at random, with no rhyme or reason with respect to how close I am to them. And, most of all, it is not very good for blogging about things that interest me. It’s just not very good for writing more than three or four sentences at a time.

With that in mind, my New Year’s Resolution is to keep this blog updated at least twice a week. I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to hold to that, or that all of the posts will be worth reading. But I’ll at least try to make it interesting, even if it’s just short thought/link/youtube video/whatever.

So…. by now you may be wondering, what have you been doing for the past year, Matt? Well, it’s been an “interesting” year, in the ancient Chinese sense, and not in a good way. In fact, 2010 more or less sucked for my little family and me.

Well, probably the worst thing that happened was that I lost my job back in February. It’s still painful to me and I’m fairly bitter about it. I won’t go into details, but I don’t feel what happened was warranted or very fair, and I still have some pretty hostile feelings towards TransMontaigne. I was unemployed for about 3 1/2 months until I found my current job (at a slightly higher yearly salary) at Rivet Software.

You might say I have first-hand experience with The Great Recession. I lived through it. Heck, I’m still living through it. Some people might not understand why I feel so strongly about the things I do, or why I can’t be so detached from social issues as people who haven’t had to go through what me and my family have been living through and dealing with every day of our lives recently.

I know I sound negative sometimes. It’s not because I’m a particularly negative person. It’s because I’ve come very close to losing what little I have, and I am still scared to death of losing it all. We are still living a day-to-day existence, forget about the future. And I perhaps am more aware than most of issues that are larger than myself. And for all our travails, I know that my family is one of the luckier stories to come out of the Great Recession.

About the only other thing I have to say about that is that I certainly appreciate Unemployment Insurance. UI, and the kind assistance from my extended family, was my little family’s lifeline. We would’ve been sunk without it. We still haven’t recovered financially.

So it galls me to see politicians playing political games with UI, making things up about how people collecting unemployment don’t want to work or that they are lazy. During those 3 1/2 months, I applied for more than 200 jobs throughout Denver, nearly any opening in my field for which I was remotely qualified. I accepted the first offer I was given, because I was pretty desperate. Yet apparently Republicans think I should have been looking for jobs at Taco Bell (which, btw I am overqualified for and may not have been able to get hired for anyway, which would have resulted in my family becoming homeless even if I did get a job as a fry cook). But I digress….

Other stuff... after a 6 1/2 year-long slog, in May of last year I finally graduated cum laude from Metropolitan State College of Denver with a BS in accounting. While I am happy that I finally crossed the finish line, I crossed it more at a staggering limp than a triumphant dash. I am so utterly sick of school, and then there is the matter of tens of thousands of dollars in student loans that I have no idea how I’m going to pay back. I never want to go back to school again. Wendi wants me to consider going for a CPA certification. Though I am considering it, I am also dubious, for career based reasons as well as “school fatigue.”

For Wendi’s part, she is nearing the finish line of her own long slog through college. She’s on track to graduate next May and has worked hard all this year to make sure that happens. I’m very proud of her. She’s done some of her best photographic work ever this year. She doesn’t like to “toot her own horn” but rest assured she is very talented and her photos are artistic and of fine quality.

She’s done it all while taking care of Simon too, as well as looking high and low for a job. This means she is pretty exhausted most of the time. She can tell you her own stories about what The Great Recession means to her.

Speaking of Sy, he turned 3 years old in 2010. He’s the babble of every brook these days. In the past six months his vocabulary has exploded exponentially, with a corresponding increase in potty humor. He thinks a poop joke is the funniest thing in the world… “I pooped on the ceiling! Poop jokes go bleeaaaghh!!!!” That’s is a typical line of comedy from him, followed by lots of giggling.

He started preschool in August, which we struggle to afford but is providing him with some much needed social interaction with other kids his age. He of course has all the wild mood swings and crazed behavior that any 3-year-old does, but he is also a sweet little boy full of love and affection…. when he’s not beating the crap out of his Mom or Dad.

After 7 years in the corporate world, I am less than enthralled with it, especially given my recent experience at TransMontaigne, which ended so bitterly after more than 5 1/2 years and stellar performance reviews all the way. At some point, I have realized that I just don’t fit into that world very well. I don’t really have the temperament to reach for that corporate brass ring, and I am certainly not executive management material. I am good at what I do though, and I’m currently trying to figure out where I want to go with my skills and experience.

My band, Governors, played 5 shows last year. We really tightened up and I have to say we sound gooood! In August we lost our awesome bassist, Ross, who moved to Utah to accept a music teaching position at Utah Valley University. After trying out a few more people we found our current bassist Abe Willock, who is another veteran of the local music scene. We played one show with him in October and are planning to ramp up our activity significantly in 2011.

This band is the most musically adept bunch of dudes I’ve ever had the fortune to play music with, and is devoid of the personality conflicts and petty stupidity that seem to plague most bands. I don’t think it’s because we’re all older (in our 30s), because all 3 of us generally have the maturity levels of teenagers.

I think it’s because we’ve just been around the block in other bands, and would rather shut up and play music than argue or get mad at each other. Don’t’ get me wrong, there’s plenty in the world that I’m angry about, but it’s all there in the music, baby. That’s how it should be.

I hope 2011 is a better year. I’m tired of treading water in life. So, I’m going to be tentatively optimistic. And I hope at least a few people will forgive my inactive period, and check out my blog from time to time as 2011 rolls on by.