Where is Nathan??

Well, it’s Labor Day weekend. That means summer is over. That means school is starting. And that’s exactly how I feel. Elizabeth had some sort of training this week at a campus different to the one she’ll be teaching at.  This caused her to wake up at 5:30 this week to get ready. So I started getting up at 5:30. Every day this week I wake up get a cup of coffee and immediately open my laptop and start working on flash tutorials or reading flash books.  This week has felt better because I’ve  been focusing on my real goal which is to become a developer again  (if I ever was to begin  with). Klickable needs an ActionScript developer, so I’ve been working as hard as I can to learn it as fast as I can.  I was talking to my dear brother this morning (who pleasantly called me out of the blue) and told him if feels as if I’d fallen down a rabbit hole and fallen out right after graduation, yet I’m six years older and six years more forgetful.  Looking at code is like flexing an atrophied muscle. Two things give me hope at this point; I had excellent teacher at Harding, and coding is like riding a bicycle. Except the bicycle is constantly changing color, size, the number of wheels it has, the direction it moves in and how to re-fill the tires.

So dear friends, just as the haze of culture shock is starting to solidify into a hard mass (New York is a very different culture than any other I’ve ever lived in). Tomorrow I will be 30 years of age. Even as a child I remember thinking how vast the space between 29 and 30 is.  Standing on the precipice of unquestionable adulthood. The space does seem vast indeed.

But I don’t fear 30. I am exuberant to have finally arrived. In your 20’s you are a clumsy impression of an adult. But in your 30’s, that’s when life begins. Everything up to this point has been training wheels. Tomorrow, the training wheels come off and life becomes a live fire exercise. Your 30’s are when you set the course for the rest of your life. I don’t know many who have decided at 45 to be something completely different (although I do know some).  But in your 30’s you are just wise enough to know some things and still young enough to do anything. It seems like a great time and I’m looking forward to it.

So the timing seems perfect. My 20’s have been a strange ride of running from hurricanes, moving constantly, adapting to cultures within cultures, being rich, being poor, being a teacher, a technician, a manager, a wicket keeper. But now, I have washed up on the beautiful shores of the United States, in a country that is my home, but a place that I know very little about to try and settle in and carve out a life for my family at the tail end of the worst recession in 70 years. But tomorrow begins my 30’s. The decade where I  will make my mark. With adaptability that has been forged in the fires of a vagabond lifestyle, I am ready for anything!

I’m probably not making any sense. To be honest with y’all, I’m sitting on the stoop of my brownstone where I’ve been for the last 2 hours because Elizabeth’s not home yet and I took the wrong set of keys to work. So really I’m writing this out of boredom. Or at least I started it out of boredom.

Oh yeah, PAX is this weekend. I really really really really wanted to go, but since I still don’t have a paying job it didn’t seem like a great idea to spend hundreds of dollars going to Seattle. The thing that finally swayed me not to go (besides the fact that I can’t afford it) is that there’s talk of a PAX east in March. I would have loved to see my friends in Seattle, but serving as an Enforcer at PAX east seems much more realistic. So to all of you who will put on the black this weekend, may peace favor your sword.

Well, Elizabeth’s  got to be home any minute now so I’m going to wrap this up. If she doesn’t show up in the next 20 or 30 minutes, I might post again. We’ll see how it goes.