One-Third Life Crisis

Now that I’m into my thirties, I suppose it’s only natural to wonder about what I’m going to do with my life. Having a kid is out; traveling is a constant goal even though we haven’t done any outside of the country in the last year (buying a car kind of set travel plans back a bit); I’m not keen on going back to school a decade after I barely squeaked out of it all with a super useful Certificate of Studies.

I’ve worked in front of a computer for the last six years doing interface design, and it’s started to settle in that I’ve got a limited amount of time left to keep doing that before I completely lose my mind. There’s a lot of aspects of my line of work that I enjoy, but cubicle and computer monitor life isn’t a way of life. At least I don’t feel that way much anymore.

I’m sure I’ve had a lot of hare-brained schemes over the years - I seem to remember at age 18 making ‘plans’ with my cousin to spend a year in Australia - but over the last few months I’ve tried to take stock of ‘careers’ and think of what else I’d want to do before it’s curtains on the whole computer-graphic-design racket. The two directions that stick in my mind the most are either running a food cart or becoming an arbourist. In the case of the former, I’d need to learn how to run a small business, and probably invest some of my own money to get something started, but the benefit would be being my own boss and being successful or a failure under my own power. In the case of the latter, I’d need to take some schooling and become certified but would get to work outdoors around trees and possibly land a civic union job. In both cases, it’s a completely different direction and isn’t something I can just start doing, because I don’t really know anything.

Whatever crazy dreams I have right now, I am becoming more sure that I’ll need to make a change of some sort in the next couple years. I can’t quite call it Freedom 35, but age 35 is probably a good target to set as a best-before date on the design job stuff. Or maybe, as the title says, I’m just having a crisis and should just get a mani-pedi and deal with it, girlfriend.

Things I Have Done While Being Sick

Slept. Doctors always say to get plenty of rest, so that’s what I’ve done. I ventured out of the apartment for about an hour yesterday and was totally beat when I got back.

Produced Mucous. I am the Deepwater Horizon of snot - it’s been coming out of my nose and eyes and I can hear it rattling around in my lungs too. I’ve been collecting it in jars just in case it someday becomes valuable, like my 5000 Iraqi dinars.

Popped Pills. Ibuprofen, vitamins, herbal supplements, omegas, and now antibiotics. Basically whatever we have in our medicine drawer.

Watched Doctor Who. I’m in need of science fiction television shows, since I never got into Lost (and never will), so I downloaded some episodes of the newest run of BBC’s Doctor Who. It’s semi-cheeseball, like Star Trek, but so far doesn’t take itself seriously either. It’s ‘jolly good’ as an old British person might say.

Ate Soup. Lots of soup. I can’t do it anymore. I need some real food.

Played Nintendo DS. My video gaming world has shrunk basically to the portable device. While I have a PS2 with games still waiting to be played, and a Wii that hasn’t been turned on since George W. Bush was in office, I can’t say I’m a game nerd anymore. I’m the dreaded ‘casual gamer’ now.

Worried About Work. We’re a week or so from releasing the project I’ve been on for 14 months to the world, and I’m at home sick. Being a UI artist usually doesn’t mean there’s a ton of urgent things to fix at this point in software development, but I haven’t been at work since the 20th. I’ve been reassured that getting healthy again is more important, but part of me still worries that I’m letting others down by not being there.

Picked Hair out of the Bathtub Drain. Once a year or so the water starts draining very slowly from the tub, so yesterday I picked the drain clear of hair and soap and other nasty stuff. Guess what? Didn’t help. Drain still slow.

Picked Lint out of my Bellybutton. This isn’t an only-when-sick activity. I do this every day.

Made Soda Pop. My ladyfriend gave me a Sodastream machine for my birthday, which lets me make delicious soda pop in my own home. It costs less than a dollar per litre, has between 3 and 30 calories per serving unlike  the 100 or so in store-bought pop (because the flavours you add don’t have high-fructose corn syrup), and best of all, it’s fun. The carbonation thing makes cool ‘pssht’ noises and you get to make pop whenever you want. Yay!

We Are Not All Canucks

Until Friday I hadn’t been to a Vancouver Canucks game in quite a while. At about $50 a ticket, and without really having any favourite teams in the NHL (I’m a bandwagon Canucks fan at best) the appeal just isn’t there. What happened on Friday? Well, the company I work for treated about 70 people, all of whom have been involved with the upcoming launch of our software, to seats in a luxury corporate box to watch the Canucks take on the Blackhawks in game four of the Western Conference Semifinals.

Going into the game, the Canucks were down 2 games to 1. They hadn’t played particularly well, losing two games in a row, and going down 3 to 1 in a best of seven series is statistically a bad thing to do if the team’s looking to advance. When the Blackhawks scored 14 seconds in, it was a portent of things to come.

Vancouver went on to lose 7-4, in what was one of their worst playoff performances ever, especially given they were one of the top teams in the league this year. I can’t even pinpoint the problems with the Canucks, because they really didn’t do anything right. I can report that the ‘Nucks won game 5 tonight, so while they’re still alive, I don’t think anyone can say with confidence that they can pull off a comeback.

Anyhow, the big treat was being in a luxury box at a hockey game, something I can guarantee I will never get the chance to experience again. Why? Face value of my ticket was $300. That’s almost as much as I spend on an entire season ticket package to watch the BC Lions. Three hundred bones doesn’t even include food or drink, apparently - the company provided that too, but whatever it cost them was on top of the luxury suite. Overall it was a fun experience, it’s just too bad the home team was beaten like a rented mule.

A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Forum

Eleven months ago I started working at Vision Critical, on a six month contract. When that expired, I got another six month extension. As the end of that contract came near (meaning now, in case you’re having trouble following along at home) I started to dust off the ol’ portfolio, update the ol’ resume, and start up the ol’ networking in order to land myself a new gig. Well, this past Friday I was quite suddenly given permanent full-time employment status at VC, given a raise, and some company share options, effective immediately. Obviously the look-for-work duties have stopped.

I’ve come to realize a couple of things over the last two or three weeks. First, had my job at VC ended and I’d moved to something else, that would have put me at four different companies in the last four years; not really a career I can be proud of. Related to that is the realization that I should find more reasons to enjoy the job I’ve got rather than looking for greener grass on the other side of the fence, because that attitude is probably why I quit two of the last three jobs I’ve had. And almost every time, the grass was only green for about half a year before I started thinking it would be different somewhere else. History has shown me that, for the most part, the things that irk me about my line of work are not different anywhere else. I’ll still complain about outside influence and subjective opinion no matter where I am, because it’s inherent in graphic design. So essentially I’ve told myself to buck up and start looking for positives in my current situation rather than daydreaming about what’s essentially the Holy Grail (psst - it doesn’t exist). Besides, the job I have now is actually pretty decent compared to some of the previous places.

History’s also taught me that employment can’t be taken for granted either, though, so having an up to date resume and portfolio is still a good idea.

Speaking of history, work, and the Holy Grail, please enjoy this clip of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

TWIG Notes XXII

Yikes, it’s been more than a week since my last post. Time to catch up.

- Last weekend I got snow tires for our car. They’re mostly for any trips outside the city, since the city parts of the GVRD only tend to get snow for maybe a week or two every winter. As I type this, the snow’s already started falling. Tomorrow and Tuesday are supposed to see even more snow. Maybe one of those two days will be a ’snow day’, where the city basically stops functioning.

- Christmas shopping is pretty much done, thanks mostly to my ladyfriend. No one’s given us ideas for gift wish lists this year - and we haven’t given ideas to anyone else - so there’s no highly personalized or extravagant gifts this Christmas. And to be honest that’s the way I’d like it this year. I’m totally not into accumulating (or contributing to other peoples’ accumulating of) stuff. The wife and I have both said to those that ask, if you’re really stumped for what to get us, take the money you would have spent on stuff and donate it to charity.

- Is there a better Christmas show than Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? Okay, Charlie Brown comes close, but he never battled an Abominable Snow Creature. Plus, Rudolph is stop motion animation, which is inherently awesome.

- Thursday night was the Vision Critical company party. I hadn’t been to a company Christmas party in three years. I had a good time, despite being lame and leaving before midnight. The only really disappointing parts? The hors d’oeuvre style food served even though the party started at 6:30, a known dinner time, and the fact that a glass of champagne and three vodka tonics, over the course of four hours, didn’t get me anywhere near drunk. Remember, I’m the guy who comes home from work, opens one or two Smirnoffs, sings TV show themes to his ladyfriend then falls asleep at 10pm. Anyway, it did feel good being able to take a cab ride home, on the company dime… a $72 cab ride. Hooray for suburbs!

- It’s coming up on the halfway point of my hockey pools. How am I doing this year? Dead last in one (which was expected, and actually a good thing, for reasons I won’t bother to explain) and 2nd last in the other (unexpected and totally frustrating). I haven’t won a hockey pool in about fifteen years now. Next year … there’s always next year.

- Last week, CBC held an open house at their newly remodeled Vancouver location. I got to meet Gloria Mackarenko, and we saw Ian Hanomansing eating food from McDonalds. Also spotted: Natalie Clancy, Shane Foxman, and the ghost of Bruno Gerussi.

Make It Stop

On Monday, my former employer Electronic Arts announced two things: one, that they’d bought a ’social gaming company’ named Playfish for three hundred million dollars; and two, that they were going to lay off 1,500 people between now and the end of March 2010, with a lot of those layoffs effective immediately. This comes less than a year after EA had laid off over a thousand people.

EA as a corporation isn’t doing well. They’re still a juggernaut in the game industry, just not as big of a juggernaut as they were five years ago when they were pulling down three billion dollars a year in revenue. A lot of the change has to do, obviously, with the continued recession. Video games were always thought to be ‘recession proof’, but that theory has basically been proved false. Game sales are down, just like any other purchasable thing on the planet.

Three things make me upset about this: first, one of my favourite people was laid off. There’s only maybe three or four people left at EA that I still care about, and while I certainly would never wish for anyone there to lose their jobs, those three or four people deserve the best, in my opinion. Unfortunately one of them no longer works there, and that makes me sad. Second, EA has a long and sordid past of doing exactly what they did today: buying a studio while shuttering another that they had previously held in high regard. It seems like a horrible business practice and does little to earn any credibility that the company actually values its workers. The other part that upsets me is the fact that EA no longer seems to know how to operate. It’s axing almost anything that isn’t a proven commodity, which means more sequels and yearly sports releases and less (if any) new projects. EA isn’t just digging its own grave, it’s going to have Activision and Ubisoft throwing dirt on its coffin.

Anyhow, to cheer my beloved readers up, here’s an ad for Jack In The Box’s Mini Sirloin Burgers.