Feeling Older

 Yup, celebrated a birthday last week.  Now I'm just feeling old.  

I've usually been somewhat apprehensive when it comes to "0" birthdays.  It started when I was ten.  Being a kid who loved all forms of reading, I read a lot.  My folks subscribed to a number of magazines, including Time.  And I read each issue cover-to-cover.  And the old TV Guide as well.  And we tended to watch the evening news in my house, which came on at 5:30 pm for the national news, followed by local news at 6:00 pm.  

So I was probably fairly well informed when it came to current events.  And on my tenth birthday, ya know, double digits and all, I won't forget it as we had some sort of get together.  I remember sitting in the living room watching the end of a football game, probably the University of Minnesota against Nebraska, where Tony Dungy, the quarterback, and Rick Upchurch, a wide receiver, were two of my favorite players.  But the news broke in that there had been attacks on Israel by various Arab states.

So yeah, I was not overly surprised to see Israel getting hammered 50 years later.  

Other than that, my "birthday weekend" went well.  Or at least I sure thought it did.  But now that I'm awake and it's Freyja's 7-month Birthday today, I should probably get up and get moving.  And accomplish something useful.  I had a thousand things I wanted to do when I started a week of "staycation" to use up some of my accumulated time off, and I guess there is something wrong with me, as most of the week I felt guilty.  And that wasn't helped much by one of my less-successful side projects.  

I've been working to clean up some of my email accounts, and making desperately little progress.  I've deleted some 3500 older emails, many of which were from back when I was out of work, looking for a job, and dealing with younger children and those attendant issues.  I suppose I shouldn't be overly surprised at the feelings that dredged up.  The kids and the job thing all turned out OK, but the struggles were all right there in my face.  Messages that were important, even critically important twelve years ago sure don't seem all that important today.  Mind you, both children turned out good.  I do wish they had not run into as much adversity as we, as a family, did, but I can say that both of them seemed to have learned from my failures and shortcomings to be better prepared for their futures.  

Which I guess is the point of the exercise.  If I had the ability to hop into a time machine and head back to that time, I doubt I would.  The challenges we encountered, and overcame, belong back then.  I really would not care to repeat them.  Not because they were difficult or painful, but because the mistakes I made did teach me more than a few useful lessons.  Not the least of which is to value any form of employment.  Yes, any form.  I found myself block-deleting messages that I knew weren't of much interest - things like a grocery shopping list from my wife, or an umpiring assignment for my son, but those emails from names I did not recognize were almost always the "thank you for your interest in employer-x, we feel your skill set is better suited to another employer/opportunity".  

Yeah, rejection, no matter how far back, still stings.  I do not remember many of the interviews (I did not stop to count, but a few dozen of the hundreds stuck out), but the broad range of positions for which I was told it wasn't going to happen was a bit surprising.  IT management positions, project management positions, help desk, support, warehouse, retail, fast food ...  I suppose my lack of fluency in any other language besides English wasn't ever a problem I had realized, but when I was told that I was unqualified to work in a McDonalds thanks to my inability to speak Spanish was both an eye-opener and worrisome on so many deeper levels.  If I couldn't flip burgers, the job I had once started out at and worked my way up to management, well, I guess it is what it was.  The one that really hurt was when I applied to Wendy's, where I'd been a manager, and was told that I was not qualified due to my language-impairment, well, I guess that was a real slap.  It wasn't like I was applying to start as a manager, I told the manager I spoke with that I had been in management some 20 years before, and did not expect to step into a leadership role, at least not unless/until I had shown that I could be a good follower.  But that wasn't what they wanted to hear, I guess.

But in the end, it has all worked out for better than it had been.  So long as that keeps going, I'll be quite happy about it.  And the only way I can make sure it does is by getting stuff done.  Which I should probably start.