As you know now, this is my first ever blog and this is also the second day I write in it, and I find it very difficult to keep focused on one topic only, because my brain behaves like a hyperactive kid running up and down and moving from the seesaw to the slider and then to the sandbox and back. But what I will write about now has been in my head more present than other stuff I want to post about, so I better get it out sooner rather than later...
I made a comment in my first ever post saying I was thinking on doing this for a very long time, and the time was now, well, there are several reasons why the time is now. No, I'm not sick, I'm not about to die (that I know), that's not the reason. I don't have many people I can talk to, and the people I normally talk to, look upon me for advice and as a model to follow (in some cases). I think I'm what many people call a 'nice guy', always helping people, giving advices and writing recommendation letters from scratch to people for new jobs to show them I care and that I remember why I hired them in the first place, this can be a huge task when you had lots of people in your departments and many of them have outgrown their baby clothes and are ready to take on new challenges.
I'm a very positive guy, I never give up and I never let a problem I cannot solve depress me for more than 24 hours, literally, I don't allow myself that. I also try not to bitch about life with the few people who wants to listen to me, because I'm a believer that negative thoughts bring negative things.
I will reveal something here only my wife and my parents know I'm doing. I'm taking classes from 3 different universities online and not just easy stuff, I'm taking a class in programming from Harvard, another one from UC Berkeleys and artificial intelligence from M.I.T., but this is totally not what I want to talk about, but it's slightly related. I've been a manager for more than 10 years now and I'm a happy guy managing people, I love mentoring and transferring my knowledge and experience to people in the hope they will get my job later down the road or better than me. But as a software engineer and assumed geek I also miss the smell of fresh code being brewed in the morning and that's the reason why I started these courses. Two of these courses touch the subject of programming in Python, a very cool programming language that I'm slowly getting to know and like. To make this long story short, I've been reading lots of blogs about Linux, Python and other technical stuff and although the reading was quite interesting, it got me curious about the people who wrote these blogs, because same as me now, they're just doing it as a 'labour of love', no one is paying them, not many people is saying well done, in my case, no one even started reading my blog yet, but they keep on doing it and I wanted to see why and how they are like. Funny enough, I realized they're kind of a community of nice guys, who spend their time trying to help others for no foreseeable reward, but to feel good with themselves and sometimes get a small recognition from their peers. But in some cases I went deeper and I started reading what they wrote about their personal lives, the problems they've been through and they continue going through.
I've been reading about workaholics like me, that now are working less and working out more (I, myself I've been working out a lot more lately), about geeks who became dads and because of that they spend more time with their families (or coding games for their kids instead), about nerdy guys who were happy being nerdy guys, but now because of cancer or other terrible reasons, they are no longer with us or will be shortly gone.
Many of these things I feel deeply identified with, I work extremely hard to be able to maintain my family, sometimes I make lots of money, sometimes I don't, but I always try hard and I always try my best.
I won't give you links to all the blogs I've been reading or talk more in depth about them, but if you're curious, you can see the blog of this guy, Jesse writing about his daughter, he's the writer of one of the blogs I read that convinced me to use my blog as, not only a tool to share my knowledge and love for geeky stuff and management, but also about myself and things that have happened in my life and are still happening, that normally I wouldn't share, not because I don't want to, but because I have no one to share them with in some cases.
I'd say the best example of this is the time my wife was in a coma, during that period (2 months), I slept in a hospital chair, because someone had to be there to authorize any medical procedure that was non-standard, and I'll have to say, that was more than 50% of the things that were done to her. During that time, many people went to visit her, she grew up here in Thailand and since she's such a nice person, there were tons of people who knew her who dropped by to see how she was doing, some of them, a fucking pain in the ass (forgive my French), with questions about funeral preparations, comments like "have you thought of re-marrying?" and other things like that, not counting the innumerable amount of time when I had to repeat the same story over and over again. The most recurrent question was "Does it have anything to do with her giving birth not long ago?", damn!!! That pissed me off big time, but I was able to keep my cool anyway because I know their intentions were good, it was annoying having to defend my little dude, and have to repeat to all these people I barely knew, "no, it had nothing to do with her pregnancy, it was a pre-existent condition that was luckily triggered after Alessio was born, otherwise we would have lost them both".
A couple of times, maybe 3 times, my own friends came to visit, Keenmeng, Kai, Ken, Keith and Handino (damn!!!, lots of my friend's names start with K), a couple of times I was able to chat with one of my childhood friends from Chile, Juan Carlos, but even with them I wasn't able to empty my head, because they had questions and I had to answer them and take care of them, I've got to recognize, I did bitch about stuff and had negative comments about the amputation of my wife's leg, nothing too bad and nothing really to do with her, just about feeling useless and wishing my idea of bypassing the catheter would have occurred to me earlier so I could have saved her leg. I even wished I would have listened to my mom when she told me she wanted to me to be a doctor, but it was all too late, all I could do now, was Google stuff and read medical books to prepare for when Stella was up and I had to explain her everything, and show her that life goes on, even on one limb. Due to my positive nature, I never prepared for what would happen if she didn't make it, in my positive mind, that was not an option, I'd do whatever I could to avoid her not being here anymore for my little dude, talking with the doctors in medical terms, going into meetings with them and tell them about treatments and ideas, sometimes freaking them out, sometimes giving useful observations and other times just pissing them off.
Now looking in retrospective, I think that was my way of coping with all that, keeping myself busy, reading a bit too much, playing way too many brain teasers and sudoku online.
In conclusion, I had a rough time, in some cases I'm still having it. Many things in my life haven't been going the way I wanted them to go, but reading these other guys have made me feel a bit better, I always knew I wasn't the only one with problems, and many times I wondered why the universe was punishing me, if I'm a 'nice guy', I thought of being an asshole for a while, stop helping people, stop playing by the rules, maybe that way I could make more money and be happier, but the truth is, nope, I won't be happier and it's in my nature helping people, makes me feel good with myself, and I'm not doing this to go to heaven, or to improve my karma in next life, because I'm not religious and I don't believe in these things (my mom will flip if she reads this after raising me as a devoted catholic :P). Reading these guys I found out there are many people with problems who are not quitting because they have problems, guys who don't blame god or bad karma or the Newtonian laws of cause and effect or bad luck, they just go on with their lives same as I'm doing because we know life is not easy, and because we know we can maybe change a little corner of the planet for our kids or even just for ourselves, because being negative and bitching about things brings nothing back.
This may sound stupid, but reading about their problems make me feel a bit better about my own problems, reading about them being 'good guys', 'good dads' and in general just 'good people' just for the sake of getting on with their lives put a smile on my face more often than putting some tears in my eyes with a bit of emotion, sometimes putting myself in their shoes thinking 'what if that was my son?'. Fuck, I don't know, I'm used to solve problems and find solutions, these things are hard for anyone, but seem to hit harder on people like me and some of them, socially impaired... When I post more things in the future, you will find out I have lots of troubles expressing my feelings, I can write a business plan like nothing, I can write a quarterly report with my eyes shut, I can design a full new software and a database schema in a few days which another guy would take weeks or months, but I can't say 'i love you' or 'thanks' or take a compliment with the same fluidity, I've got the feeling that's why many other guys a bit like me write blogs, they need an outlet just like me, to express their geekiness and creativity as well as to talk about their feelings.
This post is for you geeks, nerds who keep technical blogs and share your life with strangers in your personal posts, most people may not give a damn about what you have to say, but from time to time someone like me can stumble upon one of your posts and learn, and through your words feel a bit more connected with the world and his own feelings... if you're reading my post and you also stumble upon one of these geeks, say well done to them (if they have the anonymous comment option enabled), I think many of them will appreciate it.
From me, if one of those geeks stumble upon MY blog, just want to say THANKS! Keep up the good work! :)
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