Life of Frustration

Yet another long break between posts.

So, what have I been doing over the summer? Looking back, the short answer is not much. No vacations, no travel, no major projects, no friends. I work, I come home, I sleep. Thursdays and Sundays, I go to church. A lot of the time it feels like I could drop of the planet, and the only people who would notice would be my co-workers, wondering why I didn't show up. To this day, I doubt anybody else would really care, including my supposed roommate.

Overall, I'm frustrated. Frustrated in my job, in my church, my personal life, and in politics. I guess I'd better explain those.

My job situation's changed recently. In effect, I've been demoted, though they aren't calling it that. I used to be a Systems Administrator, basically one of 3 people responsible for keeping all the servers at work running smoothly. Over the last couple months, I've been moved more and more into being, and now officially am, a Network Security Specialist -- a fancy term for an overhyped paper-pusher. My job now is to make make sure everyone has access to the network locations they're supposed to (and nowhere else), and that all the little security software bits we use are staying updated on everyone's computers. It's the kind of job that you could hire anybody with rudimentary computer knowledge for, but has to be done by someone the company trusts. I've been selected for this august imbecility because I'm the least experienced person, and because I'm the only one who thinks about security before doing something stupid. It also means I have absolutely zero chance of any advancement within the company, and insufficient experience or contacts to have a good shot at getting a job elsewhere.

My church situation feels like it's going downhill steadily. A few months ago, my church made a decision that I strongly consider un-Scriptural. They asked for private comments from the congregation, so I made my feelings known. The pastor of course disagrees, and we ended up in an e-mail debate for about a week, until I, in a single e-mail, found a self-contradiction between what he was saying and his past statements, and brought out what is probably our base source of disagreement: I take a passage literally, and he doesn't. At that point, he went silent, and I haven't heard a word from him since. The change made doesn't affect me, so I haven't left. In the pastor's sermons, though, he's taken a couple of passing shots at my position -- saying that my position is wrong, but without providing any information or basis for people to actually think about. In some ways, I feel the only reasons I'm still going there are because I have been for years, and the Men's Group is good enough for me to stay around. That doesn't mean I'm particularly happy, though.

My personal life, really, is just going nowhere. All my old friends are gone, and I haven't connected with anybody new to fill those voids. The only person left I have a long-term connection with is Nacho, and he's here for maybe 2 days a month, on average. We enjoy ourselves during those times, but over the last several months I've seen him breaking ties with his former mentor, albeit for very good cause, and it's eating him up more than he wants to admit. Add in that his physical condition is steadily deteriorating, and he's not really willing to make the major changes necessary to improve, and I'm getting tired of having to fill the role of his Keeper. At least he knows where he wants to go, which I don't. But I'm becoming less certain he realizes how much he'll have harmed himself before he gets there.

Finally, there's the always-annoying world of politics. As a hard-line "conservative," I can't remember the last time something happened in the political arena that I agreed with. Then I look ahead to the 2008 election, and it gets worse. I've already found the candidate I support: Mike Huckabee. I don't agree with him on everything. In fact, I'm downright opposed to a couple of his key platform points as being un-Constitutional. However, they're points that are shared to some extent by all the candidates, and I agree with him on the rest of his ideas, many of which I am fervently in favor of, like the Flat Tax. The problem is that he's a "second-tier candidate," firmly in 5th place, and not even close to being a contender on fund-raising. He's operating on a shoestring budget, working off the hope (I'd like to call it a theory or premise, but honestly can't) that if he can win or do very well in the very early primaries (IA, NH, SC), it'll give him the momentum to win the rest of the country. Now, I'll be the first to say he's probably the most likable and personal of the candidates. He's got the relaxed speaking abilities of his Baptist pastor past, and is able to clearly articulate his ideas and make them sound like the common sense they are. However, he's barely keeping his campaign afloat financially, bringing in less than $1M in the just-finished 3rd Quarter, and I think his "primary slingshot" theory is fundamentally flawed. This leaves me in a rather frustrated position, because I don't think that I can in good conscience vote for any of the "front-runners," for various reasons.

So, that's my life. Not very fun. I'm going to Houston for work training next week, so we'll see if I think to post again.