Archive for September, 2007

So, we close on the house tomorrow. Right now, I’m sitting in an almost bare house that’s almost packed and I’m almost asleep. I’m told that closings take a long time, and before I can attend ours I’ll be cleaning and watching the insulation guys do their thing.

This hasn’t been a bad apartment, aside from the heat that went on the fritz last winter and all the bats this summer. At least the neighbors were quiet, even the Ukrainian strippers.

Sometime tomorrow it will sink in that my wife and I are the proud owners of a pile of wood and brick and cement that we bought to put our stuff in. It’s a little absurd, really; I mean, who would have ever thought that I would buy a house, much less one that essentially is in the middle of nowhere. When I think of all the times that I sat in a restaurant here and mourned the death of our anonymity, longing for the days in DC when everyone didn’t know all of your shit, it seems even more odd.

But it’s perfect in a way, really. I’m not normal, so signing on to do a three hour commute for at least another three years kind of fits. Besides, who wants to pay DC rent? And anyone who’s seen my wife–or talked to her about her work, and heard just how brilliant she is–has even more evidence about why I might forgo a better job in a more stimulating town and sign on for a heaping helping of Beigeville. For this, I’ll take the constant waving at everyone we see; the inability to make it out of the coffee shop in under an hour. The trade off is that I have great friends in two cities, and a wealth of people to help us move all our stuff in that aforementioned pile of wood and brick and cement.

Owning a home is just another club to join, like the married club or the having kids club. After years of actively not wanting to be a member of any club that would have me, I think I’m weakening in my old age. As long as I can stay a member of the PBR and sheetcake club, this should be pretty easy.

Several things happened this week to draw my life into sharp perspective. First, I realized I’ve been making tiny changes to the same eight documents for the last eight months; granted these documents make up a larger project and encompass several programming languages. But the damage was done before I could really rationalize my way out of it. This then lead me to the realization that my life’s work as of this moment fits comfortably onto a two-hundred fifty-six megabyte flash drive, a three quarter by two inch piece of plastic attached to my keyring.

Right now, I’m not managing anyone or anything. I write isolated (for now) code that one other designer–despite a good nature and eagerness to learn–invariably ruins when trying to use it. I find myself in meeting after meeting being asked to pantomime some measure of authority or involvement, only to be shown time and again that my only real function is as a pair of hands and a walking CSS reference.

Sometimes this makes me want to start a tomato farm or a pizza parlor. Coupled with my commute it’s all I can do to drag my carcass to the car every morning. It certainly doesn’t imbue me with much enthusiasm about my work, except for being home with my wife cooking and playing XBox 360.

So today I made a mix for my wife. The best code I’ve written in months is part of the package. Here’s to the things that keep us going.