I had a conversation with a guy at Choosy’s. His name is Bryce and was a former Wall Streeter. As expected from another customer at Choosy’s, he was middle aged (or beyond), male and slightly cynical. We talked about working and not working. We kind of came to the agreement that it’s a bit early for me to quit working, because if you’ve put 20 years in, you might as well put 5 more in because after 20 years you’ve learned the system. He expressed that it was good working with and mentoring bright, hard working people. Also a few weeks or days later it was Bill’s birthday. Bill’s a regular at Choosy’s. It was his 80th birthday. So I do sometimes feel a little too young for the crowd at Choosy’s.
I started studying again for the AWS Solutions Architect exam. I know a lot of the stuff already but it will take some time to learn the finer points and sit through the videos. It’s nice that it can be done on a laptop from anywhere with Wi-Fi but yeah, there’s only one screen, it’s small, the keyboard is small too, the chair isn’t a Herman Miller Aeron, etc. I do realize that after a bit of studying I get a headache and crave a drink. It does put me in a little bit of a mood. So if I go back to full time work in an office, I will have to find a way to control my drinking urge. So that’s kind of a little weird that working (and other issues) was leading to alcohol abuse.
I’m ok with it. It’s something to do, a few hours a day. If I pass, great. If I eventually go back to work in tech, great, I’ll have to make sure to leave work at home and not carry the stress.
If things don’t work out with the exam and the getting a tech job back in the USA, you know what’s really great? That I have Nerdcation. I could stay out “in the field” meaning wherever there is nerdy content or where I can come up with nerdy content and keep psuedo-working. And maybe get a CDL and work seasonally or part-time as a truck driver or bartender or something so I can have a better budget situation.
Nerdcation – I can continue to nerd out. It doesn’t have to be about the Ramayana. Now that I have the overall “Nerdcation” with “The Soi Doesn’t Sleep” and “Travels with Hanuman” underneath it, I can add more sections. And if the sections are incomplete, as they will be, at least I have something that I created.
I’m not going to take either of these things too seriously. I could spend hours working on Nerdcation and going through my post history on Facebook and putting them in order, but I don’t have to. I definitely can put as much time as I want into Nerdcation as something to do. There is unlimited tweaking and editing to do.
I’m not passionate about Nerdcation, I’m not going to dedicate my life to it, I’m not going to target content to get SEO hits so I can monetize it but it’s kind of my baby. I look at it and think to myself, I made this and it looks okay.