Monthly Archives: June 2005

Trinary Maturity: The Girlfriend (or The Lifestyle)

It’s easy for some­one to asso­ciate an expe­ri­ence with the last mem­o­ry involved. I’m not with­out guilt in this issue myself. I’ll admit that the rough patch­es near the end of my rela­tion­ship with Loo have come to define the expe­ri­ence a lit­tle unfair­ly. Sometimes I have to remind myself of how much it’s helped and changed me.

In real­i­ty, I learned more from my time with Louise than from any pre­vi­ous rela­tion­ship. This was a per­son who inspired (and pushed) me to be bet­ter, but it was­n’t only her, it was the lifestyle as well.

I try not to have too much respon­si­bil­i­ty at this stage in my life, so when I do have it I take it seri­ous­ly. Being a dom­i­nant means that respon­si­bil­i­ty is assumed over anoth­er per­son, anoth­er being, anoth­er liv­ing soul. To be giv­en this respon­si­bil­i­ty, as a bond of supine trust, pro­vid­ed me a sense of con­fi­dence I had nev­er felt before.

And with this trust came a reju­ve­nat­ed zeal for self-improve­ment. She was strong her­self, so I had to be stronger. If Louise’s con­tri­bu­tion was to push, my con­tri­bu­tion was to grow. It helped me fig­ure out what I want in the next few stages of my life. I stopped slouch­ing. I start­ed speak­ing with more author­i­ty. I start­ed walk­ing into restau­rants first, some­thing I could nev­er do before, for rea­sons I could nev­er explain. I demand­ed more out of life.

In the end, it did­n’t work out. The dynam­ic was­n’t right. Unfortunately, I nev­er felt like I was able to com­plete­ly han­dle every­thing until it was actu­al­ly over. Funny how life works out like that. What I’ve lost is only rel­e­vant now.

But what I’ve gained is more impor­tant.

The Trinary Maturity Series

  1. Introduction
  2. The Job
  3. The Girlfriend
  4. The House
  5. (In)Conclusion

Cottage On A Thursday

Thumbnail: Boat upholstery

I got to work ear­ly this morn­ing, around 7:30 or so. It was an effort to make up for yes­ter­day, in which I called in sick. By 8:30, my boss had asked me to go to his cot­tage and help him with his new pon­toon, and we left by nine.

Thumbnail: Boat motor

After pick­ing the boat up from the deal­er­ship, I was charged with the task of dri­ving his car from one of the boat docks of the lake to his cot­tage. We spent the whole day there, and I man­aged to get in a few pho­tos. I like the shot of the uphol­stery the most: the colours are per­fect, and have those lux­u­ri­ous, match­ing cream colours that are so char­ac­ter­is­tic of aqua vehi­cles. Even the motor is pret­ty sweet (4‑stroke elec­tron­ic fuel injec­tion) and only requires the turn of a key to start.

Thumbnail: Cottage dock

I’m exhaust­ed now, but it was def­i­nite­ly nice to be out of the office and on a lake, on a Thursday no less.

A/C For Computer

I already had a new com­put­er priced out — One of the dual-core AMD Athlon X2 4400+ proces­sors (because 0.2 MHz isn’t worth a moth­er­fuck­ing $500 price jump) based on the Toledo core — mark­ing my switch to AMD, 2 gigs of super fast RAM, 200 gig SATA HDD (I decid­ed not to go dual for RAID 0 cause strip­ing appar­ent­ly does­n’t do much), the lat­est ATI Sapphire Radeon series — X850XT Platinum with dual DVI (I was think­ing of SLI nVidia cards, but then I’d want to buy two cards when upgrad­ing), a DVD burn­er, and one of the deluxe sock­et-939 Asus moth­er­boards. I even bought two 19″ flat pan­el mon­i­tors two months ago in antic­i­pa­tion of the sys­tem, and got my par­ents to front me for some of the cash.

Then my air con­di­tion­er broke. It’s one of those grey areas, where it would cost me $300 just to test for leaks (after spend­ing $100 to find out what was wrong in the first place). This, in turn, is to find out how much it would cost to fix it, which could be any­where from $300 to $1000. So instead of tak­ing the chance on a sev­en-year-old A/C that may break again next year, I decid­ed to put the mon­ey towards a new one. A brand-name one that would hope­ful­ly last me more than 10 years, with a 5 year parts/labor war­ran­ty and a 10 year war­ran­ty on the com­pres­sor coil.

Unfortunately, it’s going to cost me $3500. This means that instead of sav­ing for a com­put­er, I’ll be aim­ing to pay the A/C over the next six months. I could have stretched the pay­ment over a year, but it’d be at 5% inter­est, com­pound­ed month­ly. My finan­cial goals are being put on hold now. I don’t need a new com­put­er, although I could eas­i­ly take advan­tage of a dual-core desk­top, and it would cer­tain­ly be inspir­ing to use such a sweet machine to work on my projects with Aaron. This has only made me more deter­mined; I’m going to save all the mon­ey myself now, and think­ing over a longer term.

Trinary Maturity: The Job

The first cat­a­lyst involved in my “trans­for­ma­tion” was my job. It could be said that the only rea­son this job was so sig­nif­i­cant is because I had nev­er had such a job before. Perhaps things would be dif­fer­ent if I start­ed my cur­rent career at a dif­fer­ent time, although the same could be said about the oth­er two fac­tors.

I was hired to work close­ly with one of two own­ers, a man with the dri­ve, mind, wit, and per­son­al­i­ty to run one of the top com­pa­nies in the indus­try. I see myself as a tool, an exten­sion of his per­son, respon­si­ble for things that he does­n’t have time to do. By free­ing his time, the com­pa­ny is able to grow faster, because his resources can then be put to bet­ter use.

My role is as a sort of sub­mis­sive. This works out well, because in (most of) the rest of my life I’m dom­i­nant. Like me, many sub­mis­sives at work are also dom­i­nants at home, and vice-ver­sa. People want change from the every­day life of their career, and in fact, my sub­mis­sion in this role is what makes me a bet­ter dom­i­nant in oth­ers (more on this extreme­ly sig­nif­i­cant point in the forth­com­ing part of this series).

I don’t have the per­son­al­i­ty to run a busi­ness, the way my boss does­n’t have the per­son­al­i­ty to work for some­one else. Our roles are clear­ly defined, and I’m much more pro­duc­tive as a sub­mis­sive in this sit­u­a­tion. It’s this pro­duc­tive­ness that has giv­en me so much con­fi­dence. I know how good a work­er I am, how inte­gral my role is in the com­pa­ny, and how dif­fi­cult I would be to replace.

Relational roles aside, how­ev­er, there are sev­er­al oth­er fac­tors of my job that con­tributed to what I con­sid­er explo­sive growth. The respon­si­bil­i­ty I have was a big thing. As the only IT per­son there, I have to make sure that all our hard­ware and soft­ware is suf­fi­cient for what we’re doing. When the nature of the busi­ness changes, the upper ech­e­lon comes to me for a solu­tion, whether it’s upcom­ing VOIP imple­men­ta­tion to save on long dis­tance, wire­less track­ing of our pick-ups and deliv­er­ies, or some­thing as sim­ple as a serv­er upgrade to han­dle the mar­ket growth.

Even things like mak­ing phone calls have changed me. I was nev­er com­fort­able on the phone. Only a year ago, order­ing piz­za was a dif­fi­cult thing to do, and Trolley can attest to this after get­ting him to call for me sev­er­al times. The only expla­na­tion I could come up with for this behav­iour is that there are peo­ple on the oth­er end, but I still can’t real­ly make sense of this aside from poor self-con­fi­dence. All I knew was that my tele­phone shy­ness was a prob­lem. I got over it by forc­ing myself to make phone calls at work. After all, one does not stop a project at a tele­phone con­ver­sa­tion when one’s boss wants some­thing done. I still have my off-days, of course, when I avoid mak­ing calls alto­geth­er, but those are few and far between.

Not only has my job sparked a change in me, it’s paved a way for oth­er growth as well. Even finan­cial­ly speak­ing, I now have the free­dom to pur­sue my oth­er goals and hob­bies.

Every day I work, I’m thank­ful.

The Trinary Maturity Series

  1. Introduction
  2. The Job
  3. The Girlfriend
  4. The House
  5. (In)Conclusion