It’s been a long year of travel mixed with some consternation. I have left the borders of my own country twice already in 2004. I had always dreamed of travel but it somehow always seemed out of reach. I’m not sure if I placed it out of reach or if it truly was.

After my return from my initial short stay in London, I lived in a state of gloom for weeks. I had found my life here lacking in comparision to the riches of the world that lay beyond. Everyone I discussed this with took this to mean that I had some desire to live there. Not really. The city is awesome, and I do want to spend more time there, but it was more the adventure than anything else. Were it feasible, I would have already chucked everything and begun my own round-the-world journey by now. After a lot of examination, it’s really not possible now, but the idea is intoxicating.

While I am introspective by nature, the result of all this has been a lot more scrutiny of my life and what I want to do with it. While some seem content with a mediocre work-life, I find that it’s slowly dragging down the rest of my life. I feel like too much of my time has been spent settling for less. This really hit home as I recently searched for a course of study were I to return to school part time. I kept asking myself if a particular subject or another were practical. And then it hit me, I took the practical route already. While my major in sociology wasn’t per se the practical route, I had backed it up with very nearly a second major in business courses. And here I sit in the work-a-day world. I could live the practical route the rest of my life without every going back to school. I’ve been there and have the t-shirt – why go back?

I’m not sure where this revelation is leading me, but I know it’s time to experiment some. One of those experiments will likely be in writing. This was something that I never viewed as practical, because truly it is hard for people to make a living writing, but there are some key characteristics that make me want to work with it a bit:

1. I’ve gotten enough comments, even recently, on my writing to believe that I do have some talent.
2. It comes somewhat easily to me.
3. Yet, I still feel a sense of satisfaction from it.

This is all still very fresh in my mind. I’m still working through the possible variations. There’s a very rough idea in my mind that I want to take some classes in copy editing. I have a fondness for online content and think that there may be something there for me that’s ideal, maybe editing/publishing in an online media. As I said, this idea is still very rough. But it combines my talents in writing with editing skills I’d like to develop and my fascination with the online world.

Running perhaps parallel to all of this is my interest in becoming my own boss. I don’t see a clear connection between the two ideas right now, but I do want to look into small business ownership. I’ve had a mixture of bosses running from great to barely humane in the last six years of residence in the metro area. And in general, I just find that I don’t respond well to other people controlling my fate. We’ll see. I don’t know if this is exclusive from the above idea, but it is something I’m also exploring.

I’m hoping in the next few weeks to find some continuing education classes to take in early 2005. Probably a writing class will be the first. I did a free online class early in the summer. It was a lot of fun. It was really more oriented towards the teachers sending out prompts and then we all sent our responses back to the list. The teachers and, sometimes, classmates would critique our work. It was fascinating for me to see that I did some pretty good work (even had trouble staying under the requested word count) with so little with which to work.

As I said, no idea yet what the road ahead is, but even the seeking of that road has some worth in killing some of the boredom I experience.

And on the job front, there should be some more challenges coming. My department is moving me to a different group where I’ll be helping with the re-engineering of our system. I can’t wait for all the new terminology. I’m not a programmer, so I really won’t be so much on that end. It appears I’ll be helping more with learning and testing the new system – working to move customers over from legacy system, etc. So, at least I shouldn’t be bored, right?