Personal

Long time no post. But you’re used to that. I guess I’m making up for it in length. The biggest thing going on with me in the past year is my employment status.

Last time I updated, I was working for a company called CipherTrace. The time before that, in between jobs (I always like to take a year or so off between jobs if I can afford it), and the time before that, still at SugarCRM.

Now? Well, now I’m retired. At least for the time being.

CipherTrace (best place I ever worked in a number of ways) was a scrappy little crypto analytics startup that got swallowed up by finance giant Mastercard, in the bowels of which giant it only lasted a couple of years before being digested into something wholly unrecognizable and eventually meeting the same fate as everything else that one swallows. That was a painful process, but a surprisingly lucrative one, and when I recovered from the elimination experience enough to get my bearings, I assessed my finances to a level that I never had before and realized… maybe I can take more than a year off. In fact, after taking everything into account, downloading a budgeting app (since Mint died and its replacement Credit Karma is total ass, I switched to Rocket Money, which is excellent) and cutting back from the irrationally exuberant spending of a well-employed Silicon Valley techie to something more practical, I realized… do I ever have to work again?

And that’s my current status, retired punctuated with a question mark, not a period or an exclamation point. My investments are not tuned for early retirement. My personal investment style is aggressive and risk-tolerant, but I tempered this by listening to the experts about the merits of tax-advantaged retirement accounts. Consequently, I mostly hold very volatile investments which could tank dramatically but also hold great upside potential, and year 2045 target date funds locked up in retirement accounts where I can’t touch them without penalties for another decade and a half. (Stupid retirement accounts… I shoulda known, just like most parts of life, what works for most people most of the time is not right for me.) I don’t think I ever actually believed I could escape the capitalist meat grinder early, so I never considered focusing on building a bridge account (the investment account early retirees depend on to bridge the gap from actual retirement to legal retirement age). I have one, but it was never the focus and represents a relatively small percentage of my portfolio. So there are two significant risks to my retired status: my bridge account could run out before the retirement accounts come online, or my volatile investments (or the broader market) could tank. I’m retired… unless it turns out I’m not. The money will last unless it doesn’t. I can live a frugal life without working for an unspecified number of years. (It’s also possible I could be lured back to work rather than forced, but it would require exceptional circumstances.)

I’ve been trying to find the right terminology for this situation.

• Semi-retired is not correct, that implies working less, but still working some. I am working not at all.
• “I have no responsibilities here whatsoever.” – a quote from A Few Good Men, accurate, but not enlightening.
• Freelance Bum – basically my current job title (I stole it from the web comic Sluggy Freelance). Also accurate but not enlightening.
• I toyed with Schrödinger’s Retirement for a bit, because I both am and am not retired simultaneously until I observe how the next couple of decades go. Accurate, but I have to explain it every time, and not everyone will get the reference.
• I’m not “retired”, I’m “retired?”–the question mark is part of the word. Needs even more explaining.
• Sometimes I say I backed into a LeanFIRE retirement (FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early, and the LeanFIRE folks are a subset who focus on getting there sooner by aiming for a more modest standard of post-retirement living compared to other FIRE enthusiasts). I wasn’t aiming to do the FIRE thing (maybe I should have been, given my relationship with work), but I found myself in a similar situation to what the LeanFIRE folks aim for. They would get it, but again, not everyone has heard of the FIRE movement, let alone LeanFIRE.
• So I’ve pretty much settled on “indefinitely retired”, because it conveys the right tone of “maybe permanent, maybe not”.

So, that’s what’s going on with me work-wise. I was notified of my termination in March 2024, was officially off the payroll that May after a couple of months of garden leave, and realized I was possibly not just taking a break but actually retired around the beginning of this year (2025). I’m loving it. I still work on my podcast, I’m catching up on media I missed over the years because work ate my time and my motivation to do things, I’m learning about things I never had time for before, I’m working on code projects (of my own choosing, at my own pace, on my own terms), I’m picking up activities I haven’t done for years (like posting on my web site), I’m getting my house clean and getting rid of some of the too much stuff I have, I’m seeing my friends more often, etc, etc, etc. Without a job, it’s possible to have time for a life.

Schrödinger’s Retirement: 8/10, I highly recommend it. The only drawback is being uncertain whether it’s forever.

Much like the Boys from the Dwarf in series 7, this web site is back from the dead. My hosting provider went out of business in… 2019? …and I’ve just gotten around to getting set up on a new one (after a misadventure in the world of VPSes, I’ve returned to reseller hosting). As you were.

My website is now back online following a long outage precipitated by a rather nasty hacker attack and an almost-as-nasty unannounced decommissioning of the servers my web host was storing my site on. It’s good to be back online!

I’ve heard that phrase a few times, so this year I’m trying it out. I used to be a writer — not a professional writer, you understand, just in the more general sense of “a person who writes”, but I’ve been quite inconsistent with it and it no longer feels natural to me. It’s one of only two things I have enough natural talent for to actually be good at, so losing my touch troubles me. Consequently, I’ll begin 2014 by writing, beginning with this post, and intend to go on doing so. We’ll start out easy — 700 words a week, fiction or non-fiction, and as part of those 700, at least five days where I write at least 100 words — no slacking for a week and then having to do it all at once. It’s a low bar — this post is almost 150 words already. But the goal is consistency, not volume. I can raise volume later. Maybe I’ll even work my way up to doing NaNoWriMo this year (which requires around 1700 words a day every day). Also, looking back over this paragraph, I should also plan to work on using dashes less. 😛

I’m not one for resolutions, but I like to think about intentions at least, where I’d like to put my attention in the coming year. So let’s see:

• Writing
  • Consistency
  • Opinion pieces. I’m tired of limiting expression of my views to flame wars in Facebook comment threads — it’s time to be pro-active more often than re-active.
  • Income from it would be excellent. Not necessarily enough to live off of, just a little extra here and there, and if it were passive income, best of all.
• Personal relationships. Meet more new people, date more, connect with my next SO.
• Minimalism. Get rid of as much of the unneeded stuff in my house as I can to ensure there’s room for the stuff that is needed, and space to think and write and live.
• Fitness. Gettin’ old over here, my body is telling me I need to do more to maintain it. 🙁

I think that’s enough to work on for now — maybe I’ll revisit later.

How are you beginning? How do you mean to go on?

Gratitude is so venerated in our culture that it feels awkward to say that, despite my indifference to most cultural norms. Gratitude is one thing that nearly everyone agrees on, from the mainstream (check it out, there’s a whole holiday based on it in November — October if you’re Canadian), to the spiritualists who insist that gratitude is not just a noble pursuit for the sake of others, but the path to well-being for oneself, to the scientists who are publishing studies saying that the spiritualists have it right — there are measurable health benefits to the regular practice of gratitude.

And yet I despise it. The word triggers a powerful feeling of resentment that I doubt many could relate to. It’s a loaded word, evocative of someone making demands, denigrating me (and look at how the word grateful and denigrate share a good chunk of letters — though not, thankfully, a root word), and trying to guilt me into something. “Ingrate.” “You should be grateful.” It’s a moralizing word, an attempt to manipulate through shame, a word used by the powerful to attempt to gain compliance from the powerless, or, failing that, to punish them emotionally for refusing to comply.

The idea of feeling grateful makes me feel sick inside. It’s bound up with a feeling of inferiority, of lack of agency, of inability to do for oneself and neediness and dependence. The powerful may be self-reliant or even benevolent, but the powerless lack the ability, therefore they must be grateful for what is done for them.

Gratitude is a dirty word to me, an evil word, a tool of oppression.

And I’m not sure why. I can’t seem to identify any memories that would account for this visceral reaction, this immediate and instinctive hatred that wells up at the very mention of a word that, to everyone else, seems to represent something wonderful and healing, something that helps them focus on the positive and keep their heads up in hard times.

I’ve considered the words for some related concepts and they don’t have the same effect. Starting on Google with “define: grateful”, I come up with “feeling or showing an appreciation of kindness; thankful.” and “synonyms: thankful, appreciative”. No problem with any of those words. Appreciation is great, thankfulness, when appropriate, is fantastic. These emotions come from a place of equality for me, or at least a power-neutral place.

“define: appreciative” gets a little more complicated: “feeling or showing gratitude or pleasure.” Ignoring the word gratitude (or perhaps substituting thankfulness) makes this a positive thing, but check out the synonyms: “grateful for, thankful for, obliged for, indebted for, in someone’s debt for”. Ooh. Obliged. Indebted. Now you OWE someone something. Oddly, I associate those meanings with gratitude, but not with appreciation.

“define: thankful” is simple and positive: “pleased and relieved”, with synonyms “grateful, appreciative, filled with gratitude, relieved”. Again, apart from the Evil Word, nothing to balk at here.

I almost stopped there, but then went back to that word “obliged” and decided to check it out. And here’s the root of the problem: to oblige means to “make (someone) legally or morally bound to an action or course of action”. Legally or morally bound. Synonyms? “require, compel, bind, constrain, obligate, leave with no option but, force”. Heavy stuff. One moment we’re talking about being pleased and relieved, and it’s only two small steps from there to requirement, compulsion, binding, constraint, obligation, optionlessness, and force. It doesn’t get much more disempowering than that. And, for whatever reason, that’s what gratitude is for me.

I may never be able to have a positive relationship with gratitude. If you do something for me, I may be appreciative, thankful, pleased, and relieved, but I will never, ever be grateful. If asked, “what are you thankful for?”, I may happily relate a long and storied list. But if you ask me, “what are you grateful for?”, I suspect the answer will always be, “nothing, and fuck you for asking”.

This week I have been re-acquainting myself with the Tao Te Ching and exploring meditation. In this short time, meditation has already improved my mood noticeably. I look forward to seeing what it can do over a longer period.

I have also unearthed some memories, personality traits, and motivating forces that were buried under the detritus of years of living, such as the desire to write which inspired this post. I also look forward to seeing what further surprises of this nature lie in store.

Doctor Who One Word Test from Duke Skymocker on Vimeo.

This scene made a good impression impression the first time I saw it.

It appeals to me on a more practical, minimalistic level now.

I shall work on being concise.

The media are in a frenzy today with stories about the Boston Marathon bombings. KGO Radio’s coverage this afternoon was entitled, “Terror in Boston: The Aftermath”. The portions of this broadcast I heard were characterized by discussions of how little we actually know and descriptions of “high alert” security measures being enacted in major cities across the United States.

I don’t wish to make light of the events at the Boston Marathon yesterday, and I very much look forward to hearing that the perpetrator has been caught and brought to justice. My heart goes out to the families who’ve lost loved ones and the individuals in pain as a result of these events. But with those things in mind and in light of how little we actually know about what happened and why, I feel it necessary to say:

Let’s keep a sense of scale here.

Here are some notable mass killings in the United States in the past 20 years, in order of increasing lethality:

Name	Date	Location	Dead	Injured
Centennial Olympic Park Bombing	07/27/96	Atlanta GA	2	111
Boston Marathon Bombings	05/15/13	Boston MA	3	183
Batman Shooting	07/20/12	Aurora CO	12	58
Columbine High School Massacre	04/20/99	Littleton CO	15	21
Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting	12/14/12	Newtown CT	28	2
Oklahoma City Bombing	04/19/95	Oklahoma City OK	168	680+
September 11 Attacks	09/11/01	NY VA and PA	2996	6000+

That really puts things in perspective, don’t you think?

The Boston Marathon attack yesterday was one of the least fatal attacks in recent history. We have no idea whether it was perpetrated by an organized terror group, a single unbalanced individual, or some other sort of organization altogether. We have no concept of what the motive was or when or how or where the attack was planned and prepared. It much more closely resembles in scale the 1996 Olympics bombing (perpetrated by an American member of a Christian terrorist organization) and last year’s shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado (in which the shooter was a single individual of unclear mental health status working alone).

What all of this adds up to is one simple conclusion:

DON’T PANIC.

In 2001, the September 11 attacks resulted in a dramatic curtailing of our liberty, which has done little to make us more secure and much to make us less free. Those attacks were also used as a flimsy pretext for an unwarranted war in Iraq (an act of terror which has killed significantly more Americans than the 9/11 attacks themselves).

What was described on the radio today as taking place across the nation today is what we call “disproportionate response” (everywhere except for Boston, where immediate response is warranted). People are already talking about terrorist groups, speculating about war, grounding flights because they hear people speaking Arabic, and just generally allowing the terror to take hold.

STOP IT.

If we allow the terror to take hold — if we use this as a pretext for more unjust killing, if we allow our government to use it to deprive us of more of our freedom — the terrorists have won. You’re doing EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO DO.

Wait for the investigators to do their jobs and to come up with some information that’s actually worth acting on. Until then…

Keep calm and carry on.

“The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.” -Mark Twain

A quick search of the interwebs turned up several instances of this quote on different sites, but no context. As such, I can’t be certain whether it was intended solely in a literal sense, or if Clemens was using it as an example and a metaphor for a broader idea. I prefer to think the latter, however, as it seems equally true for pursuits other than reading.

To generalize the sentiment, we could say: The person who fails to wisely apply their talents has no advantage over those who lack them.

I think I’ve been stuck in a rut lately of allowing many of my talents to fall into disuse, and thereby deriving no value from them. Fulltime employment (perhaps paradoxically?) increases the challenge of making use of any but a narrow subset of my skills, as few of them are relevant to my position. Employment consumes more of the time and energy available to me for such pursuits than I actually have, leaving me destitute of one or both at the end of each day.

I am not sure what to do about this, except to try to squeeze in a little bit here and there. This blog entry, for example, is a baby step toward keeping my writing skills sharp. It was begun on the bus this morning, tapped into the keyboard of my phone, and completed this evening, in a narrow slice of time between finishing the laundry and heading to bed. I’ll try to do likewise tomorrow. The “micro-blogging” medium of Twitter and Facebook is suitable only for the most superficial of updates; to say anything that has any meaning to either myself or anyone else requires more space. So I suppose I’ll try to do “mini-blogging” instead. Not the long, detailed posts I would prefer to write had I the time and energy, but whatever words I can wring out onto your screen in the space between the things it seems I have to do.

Like going to bed, roughly now-ish.