Personal

Between listening to Josh Harris share Tiffany’s story at New Attitude 2004 and listening to the message preached at church last Sunday, I realise there is a lot that needs to change in my life. From being the poster child for the good, dutiful, spiritual one, I have morphed into a self serving, increasingly desperate, relationship obsessed wreck. Albert Einstein is said to have noted that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. From where I stand, that defines me at the moment. I’m deciding to do things different for the next 90 days, to see if I get different outcomes. ...

*Grosspost alert* I wake up with a disturbing case of the growlies. Last night I binged on chocolate flavoured milk, an impulse buy as I trawled the aisles at my local Coop shop sorting out my groceries. The thing is lactose intolerance for me is hit and miss. Some days I can ingest a lot of milk and yet not get any serious symptoms. On other days, even a little has my stomach in cramps and me passing gas. ...

If there is one thing I have learned from returning to work after a year and a half off studying, it is that there is a very tangible credibility deficit that us early-mid-career professionals have to make up when they switch jobs. I define the early-mid-career phase as that stage of the working life between the five year mark and the ten year mark generally corresponding to the period within which the professional exceeds 10,000 working hours. ...

It seems like a bloke is forever bound to trawl life, f aced with conundrums every step of the way - safety versus adventure versus satisfaction… Sigh… Update: Miss Complicated got married last Saturday.. One less conundrum then.

I suspect that the truest measure of how sensibly one has aged is how well one is able to take a long hard look at choices - and their potential long term effects - before acting. Time, that most elusive of customers, respects no one. From the day that we are born, our share - ladled without so much as an explanation lobbed in our direction - ineluctably runs out like sand in an hour glass. Each passing second once spent is lost, left to float in the seething morass that is the conflation of opportunities missed, acts of omission and of omission and perhaps on the odd occasion windows of opportunity fully utilised. ...

This is slowly becoming a yearly thing on this blog. The 2009 and 2010 Versions are linked. Since 2010 I have opted for focus areas rather than a list.. So here goes the 2011 plan. God/Faith: Failed to make any headway in this regards last year - It’s a new year.. Let’s hope we fare better this year with resolving the God issues and getting back into a church community. Work & Career: I safely navigated getting back into work after a poorly thought out decision led to me quitting my last job. This year the focus is on chasing a couple of certifications to boost my profile as an independent contributor. This is slightly complicated by the Girlfriend being stuck in North America. This year I intend to get my professional membership of at least one UK and one North American Engineering body sorted. People and Socials: Last year was the year I splurged on social media connections. This year, I need to have a strategy for social media interaction. The goal of this strategy is to focus on sharing information, keeping the loose chatter to an absolute minimum. For real life connections, I have been blessed with having a couple of old friends from undergrad in my city, so as a minimum, I should hang out with them once every couple of months.. Health and Weight: 2010 was the year, the bulge finally beat me. The keg ballooned out of control. I bought a home treadmill in my attempt to regain control. This year, I hope to win the battle - running thrice weekly on the treadmill. Family: The family connection hasn’t been great up to the end of the year. This year I hope to call the parents and siblings at least once each week. Financial: The numbers from last year indicated I saved approximately 25% of my gross earnings - in spite of significant expenditure on trips to the US and gadgets. This year, I hope to up the percentage to 30%. In conjunction with a promised pay rise at work, it should be a good year - if I avoid splurging on any new gadgets.

Having earned (if I say so) the right to put my feet up and relax at the end of what has been a particularly hectic year of working, travelling, reading and volunteering, one has the luxury of reflecting on how the year has panned out on a personal note. This time last year I had just packed up my bags, cut my final ties and jumped on the East Coast train service up north to Aberdeen. There was the small matter of needing to restart life on a number of fronts - new job, new city, new house, new friends and all. The first few weeks took getting used to, especially as the job description involved a change of focus - from being the bossy, fastidious-to-a-fault, hard to please client to being part of a service delivery team. January was spent managing the work transition, eased somewhat by having the use of shared company accommodation alongside a colleague with Geordie connections. There were many nights of discussions on a motley of topics well into the night as we both grappled with coming to terms with redemption and second chances - he after invasive heart surgery, me upon returning to daily work after a messy resignation. ...

I think cab drivers are a microcosm of the larger society and that if a sufficiently large sample is analysed, one can gain critical insights into the mind of a city. This has to be the year where I used cabs the most. Tight deadlines at work, atrocious weather conditions, moving houses and a few late night jaunts around town conspired to leave me needing cabs at various times this year. The downside was largely financial – I ended up racking up significant costs on renting cabs over the year. On the plus side, I think I gained a window into the mindset of this city. ...

There has never been anything false about HOPE Except where the HOPEr has blatantly ignored signs to the contrary…,

The final lingering vestiges of self deceit died today. Against the incontrovertible evidence, I had remained hopeful that I had the ability to transcend my well documented phobia for dancing. Sometime between Ose O Jesu and some other Yoruba song which has escaped my memory, I realized that my rather feeble attempts at ‘dancing’ - clapping rhythmically, nodding my head from time to time, and shuffling from side to side - bore as much resemblance to dancing as a bee buzzing through the air bore to a fish swimming.. My sense of unease was worsened by the fact that it was a thanksgiving Sunday and we had to dance to the offering box. Interestingly, if the number of dancing worshippers was a significant sample of the larger community, then I am fighting a lost cause in refusing not learning to dance.