Been a While…

April 4, 2008 · Posted in General

Just realized that it’s been over a month since I last posted; figured it might be time for a little bit of an update here. Let’s see….

For starters, I’ve all but forgotten about Like Glass and writing in general. Not that I don’t want to, it’s just that there’s way too much other crap going on right now. Maybe in a couple of months once things get sorted out.

And it’s official: Patti and I are moving back to El Paso. Next Friday is going to be my last day at my current employer. I’m flying down there for a couple of weeks to get familiar with the company, then coming back up here for about a week to tie up whatever loose ends we might have.

Things are really weird around work now because of that, and it’s probably just me. It’s very much so a “lame duck” period — there isn’t much point in getting started on anything major, and there isn’t really anything minor to work on. Sure, there’s always documentation, but seriously, who documents their code? That’s not something real developers worry about, I mean c’mon…

It’ll be nice to get back home. The weather up here’s been quite schizophrenic, going from snowing during the first official week of spring to around the 60’s this past week. El Paso’s got some strange weather too, but I dunno … I don’t seem to be able to handle the cold like everyone else. In El Paso, it’ll storm like a hurricane for twenty minutes, then be the most beautiful day you’ve ever seen for a few hours. Then it’ll get windy for a while, then another storm, then back to being nice and clear. Maybe it’s just because that’s what I grew up with, but that’s easier for me to deal with.

Another thing I’m looking forward to is the lack of politics back there. At least, the crowd I used to hang out with — and Patti’s family as well, if I remember correctly — weren’t very political. I can’t seem to get away from it up here. And I’m sure it’s just my imagination — I’m sure not everyone up here really cares a tick about liberals or conservatives — but it seems like it to me.

Even my own mother’s become quite political in the time since she’s lived up here — I think it’s probably mostly because of the guy she’s with now, who’s quite conservative. And that’s one of the things that really gets under my skin. I consider myself an “extreme moderate”, leaning towards being a liberal I guess. For the most part, I really don’t care what happens in D.C. Hell, I don’t really care what happens in Olympia (or, rather, Austin now). If asked, yeah, I support gay marriages. I’m also pro-life. I’m all for universal health care but I want the government to keep their hands out of things as much as possible. I’m for assisted suicide, and against organized religion.

At the same time, that’s putting it too black and white. I really don’t care enough about any of that stuff to worry about it. It just doesn’t interest me, sorry, and you can say what you will about how it should interest me, how it should be important to me. It just doesn’t. And quite frankly, I’m tired of hearing about liberal this and conservative that. It’s old. People have their own ideas, that may or may not fit under a certain dogma. People may even have their entire belief structure under one umbrella term like either of those words. I don’t though, and most of the people I know personally don’t either.

Okay, enough of a build up here. What’s been eating at me lately — really eating away at me — is that my own mother has taken to fighting the conservative fight. For the most part, like I said: it doesn’t bother me. But a couple of weekends ago, Patti and I were over there for dinner (a rare event in it’s own right, especially with my sister and her husband there as well), and somehow the conversation moved to a point where I could mention that I listen to NPR on the way to work and the way home. I like NPR — the station up here at least. They have a lot of interesting stories that seem mostly apolitical (seriously, how controversial could the Seattle Times food critic be?), and the news coverage seems — to me at least — to be a lot less biased than a lot of the other news stations around. That and there’s no commercials, which is probably the main reason I listen to it.

I mention that though, and she (and her significant other as well, mind you) gets this disgusted look on her face. “Ugh. Why would you want to listen to that? They’re so liberal.“ Probably not verbatim, but whatever — that was the gist of it.

So I still listen to NPR every morning and ever afternoon, but there’s this little part in the back of my mind that keeps saying “You shouldn’t listen to that — it’s liberal.” WTF? It’s just a damned news broadcast. It’s stories about Americans — not liberal or conservative or republican or democrat or whatever, but “people” who did something that may or may not be noteworthy.

Anyways, that’s one thing I can’t wait to leave. I need to get running here though — it’s a little late and I’m not feeling too hot today (think I’m coming down with a nice weather-change-induced bug).