Working in the information technology field, I have signed my fair share of NDAs. Why did I need to sign them? Who knows. I’ve really never been close enough to any industrial secrets that would be worth knowing. Would they hold the weight of a legal challenge? Who knows. Only one thing is for sure: once my paycheck stops having your name up top, I consider your NDA effectively null and void.

Now that that’s out there, it’s a little intimidating to follow up. I’m not unveiling some secret knowledge of a hundred mile per gallon carburetor or some deep dark secret of the San Jose Mercury News. I’ve got no special proof of faked moon landings or atrocities hidden from view. I… Uh…

I met a girl.

It was nice.

I fell in love too fast and too hard, and I wanted too much. But she didn’t seem to care as long as I agreed to one thing.

I couldn’t talk about it. It wasn’t ever supposed to end up here, she was quite clear.

And now it’s over.

I grew to loathe it. I hate feeling like someone is ashamed of me, which is what that secrecy felt like. It didn’t feel exciting, it didn’t feel “bad” or hot. It just felt like I was that thing at your house you put in the garage when company comes over.

I hate the way it ended, I hate how I feel right now. I’m tired of thinking about it. I’m tired of being up at night. I’m tired of feeling this way, and if anything I could do made me feel any different I’d be doing it.

Comments are closed. Keep your opinions to yourselves.

I just faced all the money in my wallet. It’s something I do occasionally, as part of my regular wallet-receipt-purge-and-sort, which is largely an excuse to get a quick count on the amount of money I’m carrying around. Usually it’s $40, give or take, a twenty and some mixed smaller bills. Enough to buy lunch or hit the grocery store without having to touch my card. But today, there are three hundred and fifteen bucks in there. Now, this isn’t a princely amount, I’m not gonna impress anybody if I make $315 worth of “rain” in the club, but it’s not insignificant, it represents five trips to the grocery store. Ten fill ups in the Jarvicar (more like eight as soon as the weather gets nice). One “holy shit” meal with drinks for my whole family. Three hundred bucks worth of immediate liquid spending power is not remarkable, but here’s what is.

If I lost my wallet today, I would not have to prostitute myself to make ends meet.

Yes, it would suck. Yes, I would probably eat some ramen for dinner, I’d definitely not be buying any Beaker and Flask cocktails at full price, but I wouldn’t be stacking quarters out of my change bowl to buy three bucks worth of gas. As a matter of fact, unless another tragedy struck back to back with this one, I really wouldn’t even have to _think_ about the loss of that money. By this time next month, I would almost certainly have recovered from the financial strain by simply keeping the course.

Thanks to Get Rich Slowly and the debt snowball and the emergency fund and ING direct and The Sun’s Financial Diary and all the other resources I’ve found about taking control of your finances, I have made slow progress to _this_. This is the first time in my life when a small financial setback wouldn’t send me scurrying to sell off a savings bond or max out a credit card (or more likely apply for NEW credit). This is the first time in my life when a failed appliance or unexpected car repair won’t send me into a months long fight back to just-regular-broke. I own my car outright. I have a pretty reasonable mortgage on a place I’m only slightly underwater on in a neighborhood I can deal with. I’ve got a job that satisfies my bills and gives me enough left over to save a little and indulge all but my most ridiculous desires. Most days I don’t even know how far away my next payday is, and when I go to bed I’m almost never thinking about money.

I think this might be what wealth feels like.

Tags: finances stateoftheunionaddress oldfart broke

The process of playing Mass Effect 2 goes like this. Turn on Xbox, realize you need to bring laptop out in case you get an email, look down and see metal shavings from project you failed to clean up the previous night. You get the vacuum cleaner, empty it, look around at the floor and see all the fur. Vacuum up the fur. Empty the vacuum cleaner. Forget why we came into the kitchen to begin with. Go over to the couch to play Xbox, brain aching with molten desire. See metal shavings, also notice couch-cover is filthy. Take it into the laundry room. Pick up an old beach blanket and a ruined sleeping bag to cover the couch with, drag vacuum cleaner back with feet. Vacuum coffee table. Vacuum up fur around the coffee table. Vacuum up fur around the TV and Xbox. Vacuum up fur under the chairs and under the couch and coffee table. Empty the vacuum cleaner. Go into the laundry room again because you realize you have a load of laundry idling in there. Sigh about the mess in here. Think about your Xbox. Go into bedroom to look for laundry basket to put clean laundry into to bring into bedroom to fold. Get on computer. Check Twitter. Realize it is now 8:30. This is, however, slightly more fun than _actually_ playing Mass Effect 2. #loadrage #planetscannerminigamesucksballsaftertwominutes

Are you ready to see the sort of shit that makes me wanna set something on fire?

C:\Windows\system32>ping harley
Ping request could not find host harley. Please check the name and try again.

C:\Windows\system32>ipconfig /flushdns
Windows IP Configuration

Successfully flushed the DNS Resolver Cache.

C:\Windows\system32>nslookup harley
Server:  DD-WRT
Address:  192.168.1.1

Name:    harley
Address:  192.168.1.118

C:\Windows\system32>ping harley
Ping request could not find host harley. Please check the name and try again.

THIS IS WHY I ABANDONED YOU WINDOWS.