What’s Next?

I’ve been thinking about what the next project for me is going to be. I’ve got the house bought, all of the financials associated with it set up on auto-pilot, and am just bit by bit getting furniture in the rooms and pictures on the walls. For the next 30 years or whenever I decide to sell it, whichever comes first, I’ve at least got that part all figured out. So now I’ve got to turn my head towards what to do next.

That’s a good question… what should I be working on next? I mean I’ve always got a small project going, something I’m building or some little self-improvement project like trying to read a book a month for the year, but the big projects… the long term goals… those are the ones that I have a hard time figuring out which to attack next.

My thought at the moment is to continue on with my education and work on my Master’s degree in Computer Science. This will be year 8 for me since graduating from college and even though on graduation day there was nothing I wanted more than to be free of the classroom, I’ve been steadily feeling like I need to get back to it. I’ve long been reminded (perhaps pressured) by my folks that I should get a Master’s degree. To them it’s a pride piece, since aside from me the only other person to finish college in my entire family is my brother. He also has a Bachelors of Computer Science, but absolutely no desire to continue on with anything higher. My stepfather, himself a successful IT manager, has always maintained that I would be on the fast track through the corporate ranks with my Computer Science basis and an MBA. I don’t know about an MBA though… getting a Master’s degree is no small task in terms of time, effort and money, so obviously I want to plan this one out and make sure it’s something I really want to do.

What are the benefits for me of getting a Master’s degree? For most people, the obvious draw might be the financial gains that can be had with it. To be frank, that’s not a concern for me, I actually make a very comfortable living with just my Bachelor’s degree. My degree in Computer Science definitely got me in the door in the corporate world, but I firmly believe it’s my mind’s ability to deconstruct problems and find quick solutions that’s been the driving factor in my success there. While I’m sure that a Master’s degree will further develop those skills, it’s not the major goal.

Truthfully, I want to teach at the University level. Yes, I know that this means pursuing more than just a Master’s. I would likely need to continue on with a PhD to be considered a serious candidate as a professor, but I’ve always wanted to teach at the collegiate level. The prospect of being surrounded with intellectuals of various disciplines and working with younger people who have a serious interest in academia, being able to work on the real problems in Computer Science and maybe even get a book or two published. But also there is the idea of personal enrichment… I am a firm believer in education and expanding the mind through the discourse of higher learning. I want to continue my education as a way of understanding our world better. Those are all very real dreams of mine, some that I’d like to realize sooner rather than later.

First things first however, the search begins for a graduate school to start in the fall.

 

It’s kind of a funny…

… and strange thing, but I’ve been spending less time on facebook and online in general. It’s happened pretty much as soon as I got into the house, as I’ve been spending more time working on things, buying things, waiting for things, and most importantly having friends over for good times in the house. To think that it only took $210,000 to kick my internet addiction? Crazy.

Becoming Superhuman

I declared today on twitter that my new goal for this year is to become superhuman. While I’m generally of the belief that anything I want to do can, and will be done, by the sheer force of my own determination and creativity I don’t think I’ll be bench-pressing any Buicks like Superman anytime soon. In fact, when I say I will become superhuman, I’m talking about the meaning of the word is far more realistic and literal way.

What does the word “superhuman” mean? If you break down its parts, you end up with two root words; “super” (adj.) meaning very good, first rate or, of the highest degree; and “human” (noun) meaning a member of the human race.

Chances are that in your life you’ve come across more than a few superhuman people… I know I have. My grandfather was one of them. He was raised in near poverty and didn’t finish middle school. He enlisted in the army at age 17 and fought in World War II in Europe, first as a paratrooper, then as a tank driver, and then a mechanic when the army realized he had a talent for working with diesel engines.

After the war he took a demotion from Sergeant back to Private to stay in the army to participate in the rebuilding efforts in France. He became a Sergeant again and was in charge of the base’s motor pool where he was stationed. He left the army after my uncle was born, returning to the states with him and my grandmother and became the manager of a local garage. By the time he retired from the workforce he was a director at a regional construction company, in charge of the company’s fleet of cement trucks and construction vehicles.

The man was strong and tough as nails too. I remember him breaking his thumb while working on his car, and after a few choice words set the bone, wrapped it in a dirty rage and kept working. Even well into his 70’s, when you shook his hand, his grip seemed like it was strong enough to crush you. Truth is… he probably could have.

At his funeral there were large collections of photos from his life posted all over the funeral parlor. In fact the photos lines the walls of the parlor, the waiting rooms and the hallways. Everywhere there were pictures of his experiences… images of him in Germany and France during the war, images of him back in Germany and France 50 years later, images of him sailing on the Atlantic, images of him going cross country, and images of him with people I’d never meet in every single one of them. I saw everything that Grandpa had done in his life and suddenly I felt like I was wasting my time.

Comic books and science fiction are one thing, but the real superhuman is the person that by the length and breadth of their experiences, the magnitude of their achievements, and even the grace of their presence invoke in you a feeling of admiration and WANTING to achieve more. These are the sages in our midst, people that sometimes even take on a mystic quality because of the way they seem to both expertly and effortlessly move through and influence our lives. The reason you look up to these people is because they have done things and learned things beyond that of the ordinary human.

The Buddha was superhuman in his compassion for all living things. William Shakespeare was superhuman in his ability to expertly craft words into verses that evoke the greatest of emotional responses. Albert Einstein was superhuman in his ability to see beyond perception and understand the abstract nature of the universe.

There are many more, all of them are superhuman… and I want to be superhuman too.

Great, so what do I do to become superhuman? I struggled with that question for several hours today, trying to figure out what I could possibly do to exceed that of an ordinary human. Some would consider being superhuman based upon a specific skill you do better than anyone else, others would consider it based upon some inherent personality trait that sets you apart from most others. To figure out the necessary step of why I want to be superhuman, I had to think about which of those camps I fell into.

My grandpa was the latter. He had no one skill that set him apart from the rest of humanity. In fact, he was less skilled than most at pretty much everything except for making engines work, and there were those better than him at it as he eventually stopped working on them altogether in favor of managing those that did. Grandpa did have a trait that most people didn’t however… he was so enriched by life and the world around him that he would never settle for any one experience. He fought, he destroyed, he built, he protected, he traveled, he painted, he sailed and he grew with every experience. He could live any one of us under the table, and did.

That’s what I can do to be superhuman… what anyone can do, really. When others say “no” or “why?” I will say “yes” and “why not?” popular opinions, be damned. Endeavor to become fearless in the discovery of life and deriving a meaningful experience from it.

Parts of that mindset had been surfacing recently on their own. When asked by a friend why I had read so many obscure (meaning: boring, to them) books in the last parts of 2010 I replied, “… someone took the time to write them, I may as well read them.”  In the past I never would have even admitted reading them for fear of ridicule. I never again want to let someone else’s opinion sway my decision to do something. The greatest thing I believe you can do to become superhuman is to desire to be master of your own destiny.  That desire is primal in nature, and unfortunately too often given up for the sake of safety, convenience and predictability.

Some people are ok with doing that. I’m not ok with it… not anymore, anyway. I’ll live the rest of this life as well as I can, for my benefit and the benefit of everyone around me… I’ll just have to leave the flying cape on the coat hook at home.

Think about someone that you know, or simply may know about, and how they inspire you to become superhuman yourself. Being superhuman means taking the one chance you have to be more than the sum of your parts. Find out what that is then learn it, love it, do it and live it.

Year in Review – 2010

It’s snowing like a motherf*cker outside, which means that I have time to write a post for this blog, and since it seems that with everything I have planned to do to get my house set up over the next week, this will likely be my last post of 2010. So what better way to ring in the new year with a retrospective on what happened in the previous? Can you think of one? I sure can’t…

• In 2010 I started enjoying my life and my money again. With the whole economic crackdown at the end of 2008 and through 2009, I thought it especially prudent during that time to straighten out my finances. When 2010 started, I had paid off $18,000 in credit card debt, accumulated $15,000 in savings and decided that I would buy a house by the end of the year (more on that in a bit). I also decided I wouldn’t compromise on doing things with my friends anymore when I realized that I could actually accomplish both of those things. At the beginning of the year I had planned to visit Yellowstone National Park and Grand Teton National Park over the summer, as well as go to Oktoberfest in Munich with my buddy Rick. I didn’t do any of those things.

• I went to see the St. Patrick’s Day parade and the ensuing shenanigans that comes with it in New York City, for the first time in my life, with my buddy Rick. A couple days later his wife left him. It wasn’t because of anything that happened on St. Paddy’s day, just happened about that same time. I would however spend the next 9 months on “Rick duty”, with a few other of our close friends, helping him through that endeavor. He came out of it a changed man, whether for better or worse as yet to be determined, but he did come out of it, and that counts for something.

• My Aunt Nancy died from cancer. I should say that like my father, she didn’t actually die OF cancer, but it was systemic of her demise. She had actually beaten cancer… twice. The first time was a few years ago when she overcame breast cancer and then shortly before she passed away she overcame Leukemia (per test results) to ultimately fall to an infection that her depleted immune system couldn’t handle. She was incredibly positive and light-hearted to the end. Her death also did something that she had been trying to do for the past several years of her life in bringing the entire extended family closer together. She was like a second mom to me… I miss her a lot.

• When I graduated from college, got a job, got a place of my own and discovered that there wasn’t a whole lot of the life milestones left for me to accomplish, I had a sort of breakdown. This was it? This was what I worked so hard for up to this point? Screw this man, I’m handing my adult card back in. Unfortunately that isn’t allowed, and when I turned 30 this year it wasn’t much better. Year 30 brought A LOT of introspection. Part of it resulted in me buying a house. Part of it has also resulted in me realizing that there is an upper limit on what joy you can derive from life on your own. Partly that led to a realization of real loneliness for the first time ever, but also that my family has become more important to me than ever. I’ve reconnected with my cousins and their kids, I can honestly say that my brother and my sister are my best friends. I’ve isolated myself from the chatter surrounding the people I know as well, making those people of good character, by my own judgement, my friends rather than listening to what others say about them. The end result of that is that the relationships I had with my existing friends were not negatively affected, and those relationships with my new friends have gained strength. I dare say that 2010, amidst the turmoil it encompassed, saw the first true development of my “tribe”, and 2011 serves to bring that tribe closer than ever before.

• I finished a large project over the summer. I literally had been working on this project for the past 3 years. In fact it was the reason that they hired me in the first place as a consultant and then later brought me on as a full time employee. For the record, I build Point of Sale systems for retailers. Its not the most glamorous job in I.T., and I’m surely not making any ground-breaking progress for the field of computer science, however it does give a great opportunity to create software and systems that are used by lots of people to do a lot of business. So with the help of a few vendors, and amidst a seemingly never ending supply of delays, my team of effectively 3 people where I was the technical lead built a system to run the business for around 840 stores and put it into those stores in less than a month. The business now runs its daily operations on it. It’s probably the largest project I’ve done, end-to-end in my career thus far, and I found a number of new and innovative ways to get the job done for the business, some that no one else has. I also learned that anything worth doing is worth doing well.

• I’ve read enormous amounts of literature this year. Mostly that is because I bought an Amazon Kindle. I won’t lie, I absolutely love this thing. Its true that the iPad is also a beautiful E-reader in its own right, along with all of the other completely awesome stuff it does, but the Kindle is far less expensive. Also, Amazon’s Kindle store is the shining example of what digital shopping should be… buy an E-book on Amazon or on the Kindle itself and its available online, on the Kindle, on the Kindle app on your computer, on the Kindle app for your phone, and it syncs in your purchases, places in a book and notes online… forever. Also there are literally thousands of classic literature and other out of license books that are available for download for free. Because of buying the Kindle, I’ve read these books:

1. “The Beginners Guide to Walking the Buddha’s Eightfold Path” – Jean Smith
2. “A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way” – Santideva
3. “The Art of Happiness” – His Holiness the Dalai Lama
4. “Pragmaticism” – William James
5. “The Problems of Philosophy” – Bertrand Russell
6. “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” – Adam Smith
7. “Concerning Christian Liberty” – Martin Luther
8. “Summa Theologica” – Saint Thomas Aquinas
9. “Poetics” – Aristotle
10. “The Prince” – Niccolo Machiavelli (re-read from years ago)
11. “A Brave New World” – Aldous Huxley (re-read from years ago)
12. “Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals” – Immanuel Kant
13. “The Republic” – Plato (re-read from years ago)
14. “The Art of War” – Sun Tzu (re-read from years ago)
15. “The Dharma Bums” – Jack Kerouac
16. “Mediations” – Marcus Aurelius
17. “Henry V” – William Shakespeare (re-read from years ago)
18. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” – William Shakespeare (re-read from years ago)
19. “White Fang” – Jack London
20. “The Picture of Dorian Gray” – Oscar Wilde
21. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” – Harriet Beecher Stowe
22. “Frankenstein” – Mary Shelley (re-read from years ago)
23. “Leviathan” – Thomas Hobbes
24. “Dracula” – Bram Stoker
25. “The Time Machine” – H.G. Wells
26. “The War of the Worlds” – H.G. Wells
27. “Diary of a Very Bad Year” – Keith Gessen

• Oh yeah, I bought a house. When I turned 30 I decided that I was, at that moment, wholly and eternally done with renting. The idea of having people I didn’t know living on the other side of the wall from me was no longer appealing. And so I went to LendingTree.com and applied for a loan. The next day I spoke to a mortgage broker. The day after that I spoke to a real estate agent and an attorney. Two weeks later I took a week off from work and went on a marathon of house hunting with the realtor, seeing around 30 houses in a week. At the end of the week I had found a house and wanted to put an offer in on it. Before I did, the realtor wanted to show me one more house that she had just seen that day and after I saw it I knew it was the right house. Almost exactly 60 days later I closed, 5 days before Christmas. Its taking me a bit of time for the prospect of owning a house to sink in. I own real property… this is the concept that this country was founded on… at last I understand this concept of the American dream. Today as I looked out at the expanse of driveway that I now own and am responsible for, and heard the weather forecast for snow, I went out to Lowes without hesitation and bought a snow thrower. For the first time in my life I have outdoor power equipment. That’s home-ownership for you.

• I rediscovered the philosophies of the far east and probably for the first time really begin to understand them, most notably Buddhism. I make no secret of my sympathies for the Tibetan people and their culture, and of the admiration I have for the personification of their beliefs, His Holiness the Dalai Lama. What I find most remarkable about him and his faith is that it has enabled him to maintain his immensely positive attitude despite decades of exile from his homeland. But Buddhism itself has brought to the table, for me, a whole different way of thinking about our lives, how we are all connected in an expressly tangible way. All livings things are joined in a common desire in life to be happy. The unhappy truth about life though is that life is suffering. One day everyone will get sick, will grow old and will die. Fact. There’s nothing wrong with that but by not coming to terms with that truth, that all things are impermanent, is what causes our suffering. Its far easier to appreciate the beauty and utility of a glass when you understand that the glass is already broken and that the best you can do is use the glass and appreciate it while there is still time to do so. The goal of the individual is the cessation of suffering in oneself. The goal of the Bodhisattva is the cessation of suffering in others, for the benefit of all beings. “For as long as space endures, and for as long as living beings remain. Until then may I too abide to dispel the misery of the world” – Santideva

Those, in a nutshell, were the highlights of 2010. What does 2011 hold? I couldn’t even begin to speculate, but I intend to make good on my goals to travel to the national parks this summer, even if I have to do it by myself. I also will work on my house and build it into the sanctuary for my sanity (and soul) that I want it to be, as well as a place to create some great memories with all of those I care about. Lastly my major project for 2011 is my health. No matter which way I look at it I can’t fully enjoy my life and be the greatest benefit to those around me until I improve my physical self. I’ve spent the last 30 years improving my mind, its time to spend a little effort on my body.

As for the new year, I greet it with open arms from the comfort of my new home and with the company of my good friends. Here’s to hoping that all of you do as well… Cheers!

A Realization of Failure

“@jeremylyons I cannot believe you gave up blogging AGAIN!!!!”

That’s what my friend and fellow blogger Nicole shot me on twitter when I made that last post on this blog.
When I made that post, I felt that I had failed at keeping task with the fundamental reason I had for starting it in the first place, that I would chronicle on the web my endeavors in living a better life, being the best human being possible and living to my full potential.

Looking back however, I really only used it as a place to write vaguely and whimsically about loose topics and complain about how things weren’t going right for me with buying my house.
What I had failed to do, was execute on my original idea.

And an idea was all that it was. Ideas are not actionable things, they are conceptualized end-products. Plans are actionable, and when I went into starting the blog I had no plan for how I was actually going to do it, what I was going to write about and how it would be of any value to anyone, particularly to myself. It became precisely what I had hoped from the beginning to avoid… a diary.

This blog is not going to die because of my own incompetence and lack of follow-through. The point of it was to hold myself accountable on building a better life for myself and for those around me and it will be exactly that. I will work on this blog for expressly that reason. No excuses.

That being said, project (and priority) #1 is my health. Its something that I’ve been putting off for too long and something of paramount importance. At this point for me, improving my health and fitness isn’t even about vanity of physical appearance, its about the fact that I am unhealthy… that I’m at risk for a large number of weight related, long term health issues like heart disease, diabetes and cancer… and that I have become less active and mobile over the years since the last real time I was in good physical condition at the end of high school. I’ve done a lot of damage to my body from not eating right, drinking and partying too much and its taken its toll.

I can fix it though, this much I know. Others have done it… you see them all over television, the internet and in print, and I believe I can do it too. And why not? I’ve built my career thus far on fixing complex information systems, so surely I can fix my own body’s health and mind’s self-destructive tendencies, right?

And even in the off chance that I can’t, I have to at least try… I don’t have much of a choice otherwise.

(P.S. – The closing on my house is Monday (12/20). One less distraction on the road!)

This isn’t working.

This blog isn’t working out. I’m not doing what I said I was going to do and documenting my steps on living a better life. The blog isn’t what I wanted it to be, and that’s entirely my fault. I’m moving on… thanks for the reads folks!

Dear Dad

Hi Dad… I hope all is well in the hereafter. I wanted to say thanks for all of the times in the 4 years since you passed away from cancer that you were looking out for me, particularly that car crash a couple years ago where my Mazada3 crumpled up like a soda can and I walked away without a scratch. That’s some good lookin’ out for your youngest son.

More than a few people have said to me over the past week as today approached, that being  the anniversary of your death that things must be really hard for me. You’d be happy to know that my smart-ass attitude hasn’t faded at all because I simply replied to them that I miss you every day, and that today is no different.

It’s the truth though… I miss you a lot. I don’t think a day has gone by since you died that I didn’t wish you were here. Its funny too because sometimes I still think it’s a bit surreal that you’re not, like I’m going to wake up from some bad dream and you’ll be calling me to tell me one of your corny, off-color jokes. Damn I miss those jokes.

I’m trying my best to make things right in my world. I’m working to turn a new leaf on the way I live, with both the world around me and myself. I’ve been humbled many times since as you, grandma, grandpa, and aunt Nancy have all passed on. I’ve had the unyielding support of family and friends through all of it, and the hubris of my earlier life is a memory. No one is untouchable and this life catches up with us all… I learned that from your bedside in the hospital, useless and unable to help.

I like to think that I make you proud. I’ve done the school thing, the career thing, soon I’ll be buying a house and I have a swath of experiences from my travels already that I could probably fill a book with. I want to do more though… I want to give back to a world from which I’ve taken so much.  I know that I’ve been given ability and opportunities throughout my life to excel when others weren’t and I feel like I owe something back to the world in return. I’ve often thought that too many of my generation live meaningless lives, only to realize I’ve been guilty of doing the same. I’m going to work on that, I promise.

Sorry this isn’t eloquent or poetic, or anything close for that matter. But knowing you as my dad, I know that doesn’t really matter much to you anyway, so long as it’s from the heart. I miss you dad and I always will. Even now at 30 years old, every time I think of you, I remember playing catch in the back yard as a kid and the smell of the sawdust from your shop on your clothes as you’d pick me up from school. Those are my thoughts of my childhood and of you, and I will never forget either.

Love always,
Your son.

In a Flurry of Activity

Yesterday, in the span of about 2 hours, the housing process moved ahead by leaps in bounds. Where I had heard nothing from ANYONE on my team for the house purchase, I sudden had the signed and returned contracts, the application and disclosures for the loan, title search information and a 49 page document to review and sign several times, scan back into my computer and send to the lender. And you know what? I got it all done, though admittingly with a lot of help from friends of the family who happen to be land surveyors, attorneys, and my dear mother who used to be a residential mortgage officer herself.

Bottom line… it pays to know people.

What I haven’t yet made progress on is going through all 5 years of my crap thats sitting around in my apartment, throwing out what I don’t want or use, and begin packing up the rest. Initially I thought this wouldn’t take much time to do since I believe I lived a pretty minimalist lifestyle. Turns out I just stuffed all the junk in my closets. This is going to take longer than I thought.

The facebook-less world is… still strange. Though two of my friends, including fellow blogger Nicole have jumped on board with the experiment since I went running for the hills on Sunday. Maybe this will catch on? Maybe the next big thing to participate in is NOT participating? Stranger things have happened. What I have found though is that if you are going to try and break the facebook addiction you NEED to stay busy. Yesterday for instance I was reviewing mortgage documents until 10:30 pm, so I didn’t have much time to sit and wonder what people are doing. Nicole is planning on trying to make a dent in her pile of unread books, and when I have the time to do so I think I’ll give that a crack as well.

One thing is for sure, you’ve got to find something to take the information edge off… like methadone to a heroin addict.

Also, sooner or later I will definitely post a new instructional article on the subject of one of my big pet peeves, how to write an intelligent email. Granted I’m by no means qualified other than the fact that I’ve been doing it personally and/or professionally for 20 years, but some things just need to be said… ’nuff said.

Day 2

Ugh… This seriously sucks. I really had no clue how much of an addiction information can be, especially when it comes to the juicy,  “I’m with the in-crowd” kind of information from facebook. I honestly think I’m having withdrawal symptoms. Aside from the sudden feelings of despair when I look on my phone and the place where the facebook app used to be is now for the weather, and when people in real life talk about whats going on facebook, I suddenly developed a terrible sore throat that just won’t quit. Is this really happening? Is such a thing possible? Could it be that you can be addicted to a social network just like you can be addicted to a substance?

Maybe its not so strange though… it occurred to me that while I often make commentary in some circles about my complete disdain for the instant availability of information and how we are constantly bombarded by it, I hypocritically can’t be without it. If the information isn’t there at my finger tips as a safety net I just can’t function. The facebook adventure being what it is, I’m also having a very hard time dealing with the process of me buying a house, mostly because at the moment I have no idea what is going on.

A week ago today I signed the contract for the purchase of the house I found, a nice well-maintained ranch with a full basement on the outskirts of town on a peaceful cul de sac. Its perfect for me and I want nothing more right now than to move into it. When I left my attorney’s office I shot an email back to him and to the lender I’ve been working with that the contracts were signed on my end and for my attorney to email an electronic copy of everything to the lender once the seller signed their contract. The lender even went so far as to reach out to my attorney and try and get the ball moving. A week later there has been no movement. I asked the lender if he had gotten what he needed. He didn’t. I asked my attorney for an update, and I got none. I’m not an impatient person, but I have deadlines to meet and I expect others to do their part. These people are working for me and I get very upset when people I’ve hired don’t live up to expectations. For all I know though, there could be a lot going on that I just don’t know about because my attorney hasn’t copied me on any emails.

And that’s the problem… I can’t unplug and worse still I rely on others to deliver the information to me. Even when I’m on vacation I’m constantly looking for the next email, the next text message, the next update from facebook or twitter or myspace or whatever.

Is there any hope for recovery though? I think so… At least, I hope so. I’m hoping that if I can hold on for two weeks and keep myself with distracted with all of the other things I need to do that I can break the cycle. As mentioned in my last post I’ve got a lot of cleaning, sorting, de-cluttering to do in preparation for my impending move out of my apartment at the end of the month. I don’t have a choice in this, I sent the letter back to the management that I wouldn’t be renewing my contract. The clock is ticking.

I also decided that, because I hate myself, I was going to learn Objective-C so that I can better develop applications for Apple products, like Mac OSX and iOS devices. That’s no small task in itself. While I technically know six different programming languages already, for the past 8 years I’ve primarily coded in VB, since it suited my work life. However, that’s the only place I use a Windows PC, everywhere else it’s all Mac OSX and Linux. Time to get real about that too.

I could also spend more time on this blog… you never know, stranger things have happened.

I feel  little better after letting all of that out. Maybe life without facebook won’t be so bad after all.

A Life Without Facebook

I deactivated my facebook account today. I have been spending too much time on the site and with all of the things I really need to do, like going through all of my junk and moving out of my apartment in preparation for getting into my house, and all of the things I want to do, like read more and work on some of my software projects, I just wasn’t getting any of it done. The reason for that was because instead of doing those things I would sit for literally hours in front of my computer or on my iPhone on facebook, checking out what everyone else was doing. I can’t afford that kind of productivity lapse any longer, so I bit the bullet and turned my account off.

For what its worth, I do intend to go back there one day. I’m hoping that when I do that I’ll be able to balance the onslaught of social networking more evenly with what I need to do in the real world. And maybe in a perfect world I wouldn’t feel the need to go back to facebook at all… and I am ever hopeful for that.

I won’t lie, it’s been tough already. Going to check in to facebook and see what’s going on with the world has become second nature. Every time I open an instance of my web browser I immediately went to facebook, only to sit there at the login screen and remember that I turned it off. When I took the iPhone app off of my phone, I went for the empty space on the screen where the icon was within 5 minutes of deleting it. It was at that point that I determined that this is going to be extremely difficult to keep on doing, but also probably one of the best things I could do for myself.

Facebook itself is nothing special. The social aspect of it is what brings people and myself back to it. That kind of thing, the acceptance and approval of peers can be as addictive a thing as any drug, and facebook interaction is an addiction for me. Up until today I felt like I couldn’t live without facebook, but after today I’m going to try my hardest to do exactly that.