It is 6:57 PM on Wednesday September 20th, 2017.
Time is flying by and it is hard to believe the holiday season is almost here again. Summer is now a distant memory as we’re back in full swing of school year routine.
This week started out with a shock as one of my colleagues was let go. He had been with the company for 18 years and nobody saw it coming. I’m very worried for him because the company is all he has known for such a long time. What I learned from this is that your job is never safe in corporate America. He had landed the biggest account in the history of the company and it was only a short five years ago that he was being honored by the company president. Then he took a management job which he held for a year until the company overhauled management structure. They kept him on and he took a new hunter role chasing down big corporate customers. It landed a couple but it apparently wasn’t enough for the company and now he is out. It would have been better if he had stayed in his longtime role as a manager for current large customers.
At first I was shocked to hear the news and we are pretty good friends. Then my emotions turned to sadness and fear, but then finally the realization that nothing ever remains the same and you always have to keep on your toes. Corporate America is a cutthroat business and so you always have to hustle and keep your resume up to date. I shot him a message on LinkedIn which I know he’s read but he hasn’t responded yet. I’m sure he is going through some pretty big depression right now and I feel very bad for him.
Yesterday I was at the SVBTA golf tournament at Cinnabar Hills which is just south of San Jose. It was a scramble and I played pretty well and pretty much carried the team. My drives for the most part where far and straight, I had one chip in from about 10 feet off the green and made plenty of putts. Unfortunately my teammates didn’t do so well so we ended up at two over par.
Then today I was pretty backed up with work having been out of the office all yesterday and the day has flown by. I got a lot accomplished and now just have three more accounts that I need to get squared away and I’ll be all caught up. Today was indeed a blur of work but I was still able to make it to karate with my son at the end of the day. I’ve dialed it back a bit because upper belt classes are hard and the fighting intense. I can deal with it but I think it is a bit much for my son as he has told me over and over he doesn’t like karate. However, just going back to the easy kid classes seem to have been good because now he is talking positively about karate again which is a relief for me.
Like wrestling was for me, I’m hoping karate will be for him. It gives us both confidence and something to be proud of. It also teaches you how to handle yourself and not be afraid of bullies. Bullies target the weak ones and all you have to do is stand up for yourself once and the target disappears. I had a bully when I was in the second grade. I couldn’t stand up for myself because I was afraid of getting in trouble so the bullying continued for a year, the worst year of my life. It didn’t end until we had a ‘rumble’ which the stronger kids wanted to do out on the grass on the playground. It was basically wrestling and cemented which male was dominant. I found courage one day and tossed the bully on his head after which the bullying stopped. Parents and teachers knew the bullying was happening but were powerless to stop it. It took a physical act to immediately bring it to an end.
I’ve told my son that if he ever has a bully to stand up to him immediately. The rules are that you first ask to stop which of course the bully will ignore. Then you tell the teacher and parents but the bullying will probably continue. Then when the bullying continues you take him down by whatever means necessary. My son told me that he didn’t want to get into trouble and I promised him that the teachers might be mad but I’d sort them out afterwards and he wouldn’t be in trouble for standing up for himself. After the first two rules are done, go ahead and punch him in the face.
Fortunately the one I thought might be a bully for my son has backed off a bit and things are normal. As my son gets older I’m hoping karate will give him the tools he needs to be confident and take care of business if it comes to that.
In other news I no longer understand the world. With the election of Trump world news has become a bigger mess and I think it is only a matter of time before the North Korea issue blows up completely. This could alter the world and I think we’ll soon experience a massive amount of death not seen since WWII. I don’t see how this could be resolved in a peaceful manner and things are about to come to a head. And so, I’m not making any big investing moves until it does after which the stock market will plummet and then make a move. I just hope no rockets can reach San Francisco, otherwise things will change considerably. I think at this point if we can make it to Christmas without shit hitting the fan it would be a miracle. I really hope world leaders have something up their sleeves to permanently resolve the situation without a catastrophic nuking taking place. Reading the news it seems as though the American public is being prepared for this sort of thing.
It also just so happens that two regions that are very near and dear to me are places where something big could happen. The first NK attacking Japan with a missile or perhaps a nuke. Then less likely I’m near San Francisco which has also been mentioned as a target. I really hope what James Mattis alluded to the other day is something real and available to save millions of lives, including those of innocent people in North Korea.
As for me and my life, I continue to get older and realize that my thoughts are that of a middle aged parent. When you just have one kid and are in your late thirties you can still imagine yourself to be relatively young. But being 40 with two kids and the toll it takes changes you, makes you think differently. I realize I’ve withdrawn from Facebook and am no longer very much interested in keeping up with everyone. I don’t feel like posting on FB very much anymore and I’m just drained from the day to day endless activities with my boys.
Such is life I suppose. Tonight I’ll go to bed early like usual, and when I awake I’ll take a few minutes to just lie in bed and think before getting up and starting all the usual activities which make yet another day in my life go by very quickly. I step out of bed and before I know it am watching the sun go down again wondering how it is possible that the day went by so quickly.
