I'm still alive

Hello folks, yes I'm still alive. Hard to believe, I know. Barely, but yeah, it's me. I haven't disappeared into the abyss, though it's been about the same. Work has absolutely consumed my life, I haven't worked this hard since grad school, and I never thought I'd relive those days again...

It's sad, I am re-reading my blog posts from SE asia just two months before, and it's as if I was reading someone else's posts. I can't believe it's only been two months, those memories are so vivid in my mind. I can still close my eyes and recall all those moments, the vibrant colors, the pungent smells, the sweltering heat, the side-splitting crazy stories...but most of all, the people. God, I love the people, I miss my friends from around the world. And I call them "friends", because I really feel like they are my friends, even though the longest I've known most of them is a few days, maybe even shorter. But there's something about traveling that brings people together. To say kindred spirit is to be so cliché, but it's so true. I feel like I've known them for years, that although I may not see them for years, I'll still be able to swing by at the drop of a hat, and say, "Hey, I'm in town in Barcelona/Vienna/Dublin/Oslo/Hamburg/Godknowswhere for a few days. Want to meet up?" And I know they will. And I know they'll put me up, show me around, help me out. It's the bond. The unspoken code of travelers. To a certain degree, being in a foreign land is a great equalizer, where the usual dividers like class, color, money, love, politics, and gender takes a backseat to getting to know yourself, and the world around you. There is something about traveling that forces you to live in the present, because there is no past and no future. So you focus on the person next to you. Because you never know what his/her story is, where they've been to, what they've seen, why they're here. And you also don't know how long you'll be w/ this person, and whether you'll ever see them again. So all you have is now. Now now now. Each "Hello" is precious; each smile an implicit nod, an acknowledgement of "Yeah, I feel you man. I can't believe I'm here too!" Each moment is a unique experience never to be repeated again in the same place at the same time. And so you learn to live in the present, because that's all you have. Sigh.

I miss them so much. I miss traveling. I miss being on the road. I miss the humanity and the human interaction. It's not like I don't interact w/ people now; I deal w/ people every day. Writing hundreds of emails, having dozens of conversations across multiple (3) continents. Yet when I get home at 3am in the morning, I feel like there's something terribly artificial about this. It feels unreal. Maybe because all these interactions are not human-driven by the need to have a relationship, but product-driven to accomplish a goal - to launch a product, resolve a dispute, or come to a decision. 99.9% of the world do not care whether it's better to use bigram or unigram statistics to calculate log likelihoods for a Bayesian learning system. Really. I know, because I've been to places where taking a shower means bringing a bar of soap to the river. They can give less of a flying wombat's shit. Yet this consumes my world, my entire world right now. It feels absurd! I feel like I'm caught in the Matrix, where slowly you forget what real life was like before the virtual life. And strapping on that backpack with that ticket in your hand is like periodically taking the red pill, flushing you out into the darkness, unknown but full of possibilities. Terrifying, but exhilirating and enlivening.

Well, enough of waxing philosophically. I do want to write a more lengthy exposition about my experience at The Company (sorry, I'm paranoid) so far, but I'm just too tired to do it justice. Suffice to say, there are things I really like about this job, that I wouldn't trade for the world. And there are things I'm not so thrilled about. It's very different than what I expected, but I guess that's part of the learning too. Well, till next time then...