Mushroom Cynosure

I'm on a quest to enter IT for real. I've been IT-adjacent for years now, working in sales support, but I've discovered that I hate sales. Not the people themselves - I'm quite chummy with a number of ex coworkers who are salespersons - but the whole enterprise of being in sales. It's not an accident that executives are drawn almost exclusively from the sales department, where everything is reducible to a set of KPIs. Those who ascend the ladder do so because they meet arbitrary quotas, deflect blame, speak in comforting platitudes, and take credit for positive outcomes, regardless of any true involvement. It is not actually required to know  anything about a product or service being sold, and in fact, such knowledge distracts from the hard work of arranging numbers in a spreadsheet and then presenting that spreadsheet to a group of higher-ups who will ostensibly make "decisions" based on those numbers, even though most executive decisions have already bee

I started out the day feeling pretty depressed and angry about the state of the world. The more I fixate on those kinds of feeling, the more bad things pop into focus. So, in order to combat this spiral of depression and fixation, I'm going to attempt the opposite and write a list of things that make me happy, here on August 3rd, 2021. A list of things for which I am grateful. Yes, just like that episode of Big Mouth . Here goes: I'm grateful for my wife, Whitney. I don't actually believe in the concept of "true" love, mostly because it denotes a fictional state of effortless bliss. Love is not an emotional state, but a chemical bond. A state of being. Sometimes those bonds are ephemeral. Sometimes they degrade slowly over time before failing catastrophically. Occasionally, the bonds of love change as people change, and become stronger with time, not weaker. Whitney and I have the third kind of bond. I say that without any fear of hubris. Our love for each other i