Retail Therapy

Well, it has been a while since a substantial post and I have made a lot of progress working through Frank's death.

The death has altered very deep and very fundamental areas of my psyche. It is hard to explain because most of those areas aren't really consciously accessible by me (I think I live utilizing the very surface of my personality, rarely delving deeper to the psychological issues. With excess idle time comes that delving, but often in really unproductive ways like picking at a scab again and again until it becomes bloody.). So I have found myself unusually frustrated with my current space in life.

Most of these center on my career: my job is basically to be lubricant in the cogs of commerce making it easier to sell tractors, dishwashers, cell phones and laptops. All of my clients look to me to find faster, cheaper, customized solutions of the age old problem of getting reluctant shoppers to actually put money down. So when Frank died, I thought about my life, and what I want to leave as a legacy to the world. And building tools to help companies isn't it.

I read (or was it heard?) if you want to change your life, change it.

Simple.

So, as a good subject of the marketing apparatus (that I have helped create -- ooh, the irony!), I have started spending my way to a different life. I bought a new Apple Powerbook because I am tired of dealing with crappy Win2k at work. I bought a tangelo bike because I want to start commuting via bike more to work. (Not the most rational thoughts because I have used it all of 3 times before I have decided it is too cold to ride to work. But I did get a good deal on it because no one else is buying bikes going into winter.)

I have started getting my personal skills updated so I can start doing personal side projects -- probably volunteering -- to get a better connection and more importantly, get a better perspective on life. I am spoiled and I need to be knocked off my perch of privilege.

On a related but really tangential note, I think under different circumstances I might have been a religious person. I have been listening to The Life of Pi which has a strong religious undercurrent to it and it has got me thinking to that area in my life that I fill with a melange of other things (consumerism, vanity, hedonism, general altruism, etc.).

So how would my life be different if I believed in god?