What To Do, What To Do?
Gee, when Ceej links to my page, suddenly my hits shoot way up. Imagine that!
The crux of the problem, I think, is that I honestly don't know what I want to do, or what would be best for me, or any other spin you'd care to put on it. Although it's been a rocky time for me in Madison the last couple of years, things have been looking up somewhat lately, and I keep having the feeling that I can be happy here. On the other hand, there's a lot about the Bay Area which is very attractive as well.
After the opportunity made itself known to me, I headed down to tonight's SF group social gathering, which was fun. Some of us were in rare form with our verbal banter - including, I think, myself - and we had a great time laughing at the jokes flying around.
And yet... I feel like I have not had much success really becoming friends with the folks in the group - or with most of the other people I've met in Madison. If I think really hard and honestly about it, I would say I consider most of these folks "acquaintances". I don't generally call them up to do things, and they don't call me, and the few times with the few people that we've tried that, we haven't kept it up. They're not people I feel comfortable discussing Important Things with (like, for instance, the "Madison or San Francisco" dilemma). Heck, even when I try, I usually end up feeling that they don't want to hear about my Important Things.
So by the internal logic that my mind uses to define such things, I have felt rather friendless around here for quite some time. There are many people in my life, people I like to hang out with, but it seems like it never goes beyond the "hang out" stage. There are a few people who fit that bill in my life, but almost all of them live out-of-town. And that's hard. E-mail and telephones are not an adequate substitute for face-to-face encounters.
On the other hand, I find California very intimidating. It's a long way away, and it would probably be a complicated move. I've never had to move before with all my stuff at once. It's a big urban area which has a lot of urban sprawl - a very different environment from anywhere I've lived before. And, well, I do have some self-doubt that I could live up to the standards of the job market out there, being - as I am - a programmer. I think my perceptions on that are a little skewed (after all, Sturgeon's Law says that 90% of everything is crap, not of "everything but California"), but I still worry. I worry a lot. You may have noticed.
So, I don't know what to do. Worse, I don't really know how to decide. And perhaps worst of all, I'm scared that my basic problem is entirely internal to me, and that I'd decide to move out there and find that things aren't really any different. Or that I'd stay here and find that things don't really change.
Gyaahhh.
Who am I? What do I want? Where am I going?
I don't know.
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