The last day of the year is here, so it’s time to look back.

Work

I lost my job this year. I knew it was coming for most of this year, but it has been surprisingly painful. It took a while to sink in, but it has definitely affected my mental health more than I thought it would. I thought I was prepared. But I wasn’t.

I do have an interview in January, and I’ve had a couple call-backs. I’m a bit hopeful, but we’ll see. The interview is for a job I’m 100% sure I’m not qualified for. I only got the interview because I know people who work there.

I like to read. I like to listen to music. I like to watch other people build stuff and make cool things. I have a lot of likes. I think that’s true of everyone. The question I’ve been asking myself recently, however, is what am I passionate about?

This feels like the wrong time to ask myself “What do you want to be when you grow up?” But that is essentially the question. 40 years old, and now it feels like I have no direction. I’m looking for new jobs, and I’ll be happy with whatever I can get, but will I be passionate about it?

The sad truth of the matter is, you don’t matter. I don’t matter. In the grand scheme of things, our lives are meaningless.

Now if that isn’t the most fucking depressing start to a blog post that anyone has ever written, then I don’t know what is. But I do have a point, but I need to talk about some personal stuff to make it.

The health of my family has been on my mind a lot lately. My brother is suffering from kidney failure, my mom’s health is declining, my dad is up there in age. Nobody lives forever. I, myself, will turn 41 years old in March. With the way I take care of myself, I’m probably well over half way through my life. Granted, I can’t know that for sure. I may croak tomorrow or I might live another 60 years.

My lack of blogging recently has bothered me. Part of it was that I was a little burnt out. I just had very little to talk about. But there was something else. Around that same time Umami decided to go to version 3.0. For those of you who don’t know, Umami is a Google Analytics alternative that is self hostable and privacy focused. The problem is, the new update is garbage. The new UI is unintuitive an requires more work to get around to stats you’d like to see.

Yes, this is late. It has been a busy few days.

Work

Wait. Work? Yeah, kinda. I got a call back a few days ago, and now have an interview scheduled for January. I received another call back today, but no interview with that one yet, they had some questions about the C/V.

I’m honestly surprised about both of these given the time of year and how shit the economy is.

I was so close, y’all. I promised myself that I would blog every day from mid-September to the end of the year. But I’ve failed. I wanted to write yesterday, but I had nothing to write about. Same with today. It’s not like I have no ideas, but nothing that I’m motivated to actually take up.

I’ve learned a few things during this process. First, forcing it is a bad idea. Most times I did fine, but there were several times where I just did not want to blog but forced one out anyway. It never felt good nor did those blog posts turn out well.

Normally, it takes until about the middle of February for me to get sick of Winter. Usually, in mid-December we still see some 40 degree days. Almost never are we under 20 degrees. This year, we’ve seen -8 Degrees (these are all in Fahrenheit). More than once. It has been effin’ cold. And we have a ton of snow on the ground. In some places near me, we’ve already had 50 inches of snow, which is damn near unheard of here in the lower peninsula. The UP, sure. Those backwoods mofos are used to this kind of shit. Down here, we’re basically Florida.