joker.iki.fi

It’s again been a while since my last update and the reason, once again, NO TIME. At work I’m no longer at probational period, and work has started to pour in. Currently the workload is rather good, not overwhelmingly much but enough to keep me busy. Surprisingly lots of travel. I have travelled more during this four months than in last year. It’s still ok and I am still confident that this was a right choice for me. Workwise, I get to do more concrete things now than before - less powerpoint and more technology.

Homewise it’s been ok. It’s not too dissimilar from the situation at work. The family keeps me again very busy but there’s a direction for the better now. Even my wife is not anymore constantly sleep deprived and she really has enjoyed her part as stay-home mummy.

Finnish summer is again what you would expect and I have managed to find some free time again, so I guess I should not complain. Let’s see where I am in a month or so…

It’s been an interesting 2009 so far. With my daughter learning to walk and the new job and lots of travelling, every day has been very busy. I would like to take it easy for a change. I fear that there’s no more time available to take it easy - but I will certainly try to organize my time better and concentrate to the things that deserve the most time.

One such thing is friends. It’s been so awfully difficult to find time to meet even the closest ones. It’s not entirely my fault since they are quite busy too, but having a small child and hectic work is not helping at all. It’s easier to meet those friends with children since they typically have similar schedules, but again, having the kids around makes it more difficult to really be together. There’s always interruptions and things to organize and take care of. I have started to feel quite lonely lately, so I will definitely need to do something about this soon. And the fact is still that it’s so damn difficult to make friends that keeping the existing ones should be a priority.

Another such things is peace of mind. I find myself constantly worrying about things that I really don’t have that much control over. I won’t give you examples since those are too personal to be shared in the internet. But nowadays I spend a good part of the day working and taking care of things that I must to do. Things such as shopping for food and clothes, cleaning the house, helping others with their things, maintaining myself in a good shape and generally just trying to manage. During the free time I have, I spend way too much time worrying over things. This needs to stop since it really really makes my life shitty to say at least. I just need to find a way to actively concentrate on things that I can solve and simply drop the rest.

And finally the third topic is work. I will not take it so seriously anymore. This meaning that I will keep demaning that work is done in a sane way and properly and not with the constant fear of failure. The explanation that I hear everywhere: “We’re constantly suboptimizing, doing things in a crazy way and generally acting like  a scared bunch of rabbits because OMG there’s a recession” has at times caught me too. This will change. The recession, when I look at it, seems just like a scam to keep people scared and push them to do even more unpaid overtime and give up benefits and job satisfaction. I have never been paid more or gotten more attractive headhunting attempts than during this so called recession. I don’t know anyone whose job would be in danger because of the so called recession (that being the real reason) or would be unemployed because of the recession. The prices are just the same as before, the people keep buying and selling just as before and everything else, when looking through my eyes, seems JUST AS BEFORE. So, from now on, I make a holy promise to do the work the best I can and actively keep improving the way the work is done because just grinding teeth and pushing overtime is not working out too nicely. For anyone.

Spring is a time of renewal. I’m not entirely sure what this means for a thirty-years-old working nerd father, but I’m extremely certain that I’m off balance. The kind of balance I’m talking about is that of body and mind. Currently they are closing to a divorce, yet both longing for each other but not finding the time to meet and talk things through.

I raise a toast to body and mind and hope you both successful spring!

It’s been a hectic beginning of 2009. Today we are celebrating my daughter’s first birthday. Also, I have signed a contract with new employer which looks like it’s going to be an excellent opportunity.

Although everything is well, everyone is healthy and the recession doesn’t seem to hit me at least yet, I have to say I’m bit sad. Sad and in need of vacation.

I’m sad because I’m leaving a really good company and people behind. I’m sad because I haven’t had that much contact with my good friends because of the hectic schedule. I’m also a bit sad that I don’t really have that much time to spend with my family.

All of my time goes into stuff that doesn’t really make me happy. Cleaning the house, repairing the house, constant ‘gotta do’ shopping for shit that I’m not sure we actually need.

I hope that with the new job, upcoming summer and my wife’s school ending I finally get into a situation where I can enjoy the fruits of all this labor. Life just can’t be this fucking hard constantly.

On a positive note, I have finally found a good RPG, in Ultima-style, for my Playstation 3. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion shows real promise. I’ve been somewhat disappointed to the RPG offerings for the PS3, but this is really nice.

I have also kept a small break from bicycling. I’m really waiting for better weathers and some additional motivation to start this year’s training.

That’s pretty much it. I love you all.

I can pretty easily summarize the average day of my life. The following things happen during the 24 hours.
8 hours or work. This includes the work done to earn the money to pay everything.

8 hours of home. This includes the household chores, like cooking, cleaning, going to the store to buy necessities like food and clothes and so forth. Also, taking care of the baby is part of this. Changing diapers, feeding her and so forth happens within this 8 hours. Then there’s also the maybe 1 to 2 hours (maximum) that I can actually spend with her. Like playing and going outside to play and walk and such things.

Then there’s the last 8 hours, which goes to sleep. Or should go to sleep. If I want to do anything extra, like play a game, write some open source code, watch a movie or read a book, it’s away from the sleep time and it’s not possible to do for a long time since at some point the lack of sleep catches you.

I’m pretty certain that this can’t be it. The content of life I mean. I also consider myself being lucky enough to have a work that every now and then actually feels like it makes sense. I couldn’t imagine what it would be if I just spend my working hours doing some repetitive trivial bullshit.

Many people say that after a while it all gets easier. I wonder if they mean like it gets easier like you accept it as a fact that this life only gives you so few hours of fun time and rest of it is just work. Or, do they mean, that there starts to be more good hours. I wonder.

Anyway. I would not like to live my life like this, really. I mean the ratio of fun, even if you count sleeping as fun, is just not good. I think I should write a facebook application where people could record their ratio and we could compare. If people constantly score the same figures as I do, let’s commonly agree that the world is royally fucked and call the UN.

Now that our daughter is starting to move by herself more, the nights have gotten more restless. On average I think that I barely get 5 to 6 hours of sleep per night and surely my wife gets a lot less. By all standards this is not enough.

I do know that lack of sleep causes a lot of problems, apart from general bad feeling, that is. Basically weight control becomes problematic, learning and general cognitive capabilities are affected, one is more prone to accident and so forth. Depression being one that I fear the most. I am perhaps not the most cheerful person but I have been also quite far from depressed. I have now started to see the tell-tale signs of sleep deprivation in myself and it’s really worrying.

I would like to believe that this is only temporary, but I would like to know if there’s any academic research being done of young children’s parents and their sleep. Are we above or below the average? What’s the mean age, in months, when an average baby starts to really sleep full nights. Don’t know how much the information would be worth to me since the variance is probably quite high, but it would be interesting to read the stats.

And like always, it’s not the absolute amount, it’s the relative amount when comparing to others that matters. It does not feel so bad if everyone else is in the same boat.

For a long time now, I’ve been meaning to do an entry or two about my feelings and thoughts on being a father. I have many times thought what are the areas I want to cover in the entry and what is best left unsaid. Turns out that there’s surprisingly many things that actually need to be left unsaid. And this doesn’t seem to be a cultural thing, it’s more like an evolutionary thing. I intend to make a list about the things that are best left unsaid. I know this has the potential of making a lot of people pissed off. Nevermind, it tends to be so when you criticize things that are better left unsaid.
In the first part I want to mention the lack of freedom of expression. No matter what you do, you can’t speak about feeling bad, at least in public. A man is supposed to take care of the family no matter what. It’s a completely binary thing. You either are a bad father (meaning that you express any negative thoughts publicly) or you are a good father (if you keep your worries to yourself and never open your mouth). Society has advanced enough that it’s ok for a mother to say that she’s tired or is feeling down or downright depressed. This is fair and ok, after all, this is healthy.

The same does not apply to fathers. It’s ok to sigh and say “Wow, I have not slept in three nights. Man, I’m tired.” However if you say, “Wow, I have not slept for three nights, because I keep worrying whether we can make the next payment of the mortgage and I worry constantly about work. For the last three months I have spend either working in the office or at home and I don’t think most of the people I once held dear even remember me.” NO you cannot say that. This would make you a bitch whiner who is not a man and as such not suited for a father. It actually goes beyond this. This is where evolution comes into play. It’s not ok to say this at home, at work, at the doctor’s office.

It’s not that I personally feel all these negative things. But what I gather from observing the environment is what makes me argue the point of part one. It’s quite obvious really. The age-old “stop whining and be a man” argument applies to being a father more than to anything else. It’s hard to point the finger who is to blame because it seems to be an evolutionary thing, so I wont even try.
Nevertheless, it’s good for others to understand this the easy way. For me, since I have always bit naively thought that being a man is not such a binary thing, it has taken a while to realize this. It’s really that easy. Never speak negatively of fatherhood, mothers, children, family or anything related to these. Don’t believe in equality or that anyone would understand your pain. In the end, you are always alone with that since you can’t fight evolution. If you are lucky enough to have friends with whom you can talk freely, they will listen and understand, but the problem is that they can’t do anything about it. Talking may help, but so may the realization that this one is something that you just need to take and be happy about it. Even if you are not. Or then there’s the other side of the coin. You don’t take it - and then you need to face the music.

I find it hard to understand how life is like it is nowadays. This week is a good example. I have to plan everthing I do EXACTLY since otherwise I miss something that I need to do. Like, if I talk on the phone an extra 10 minutes, this makes me miss a meeting where I need to be. If I spend 10 minutes longer than planned changing diaper for my daughter, that makes me miss my bus which again makes me miss the metro and this makes me miss an appointment where I need to be or is away from the time I can do productive work and if I miss that I start to miss deadlines. If I miss deadlines I need to play catch up with the tasks which again makes me miss some freetime.

It’s a vicious thing really. I know it’s only temporary. The work can’t continue like this forever. My daughter is not so demanding when she’s older, at least I hope so. My wife can’t make anymore so much plans (for me) when she needs to start working after maternity leave. But I feel that I’m really running on fumes now.

I’m just about thirty years old. There’s no way I can keep this pace up until I’m fourty. Or I could, but I feel that I would not see fourty if I tried. Another thing that’s a big problem with this insane hurry, is that it’s by no means efficient. It’s just absolutely impossible to be creative and motivated if you are constantly just bouncing around trying not to miss anything.

The complete lack of free time is very frustrating. All of the things I know I enjoy in life, I cannot do. I probably need to stop writing now since I don’t have anything positive to say now.

A short summary why joker.iki.fi has been offline for quite some time now.

• A new baby in the the house takes all of the free time
• I got fed up with the problems the old web server had
• I purchased a new server
• Didn’t have time to configure it until today

What else? Nothing much. Lots of changes lately, mainly due to new baby. During bad days, I at times feel that I’m ready to shoot myself in the head because I just can’t take this anymore. During good days it’s ok though.

I have been worrying a lot about my mental and physical health lately. Combining a busy job and busy family life, while trying to stay in shape and to educate myself has turned out much more difficult than I thought. I still have some resources left but I have constantly a feeling that the batteries will just run out at some point.

Ok, enough ranting. I’m going to go to sleep now, otherwise I’m history.

All of this vacationing has made me really lazy. I really haven’t been accomplishing anything for many weeks now and this causes me to feel a bit anxious. It’s a funny thing really. I relax the best when I have something to do. Just sitting on my ass doesn’t seem like an option.

Yet still I have problems getting stuff started. I have one Symbian OS coding project which progresses really slowly. Also, I keep getting some light pressure from my wife to finally start the home multimedia center thing going on. Currently the only way to record anything from TV is this old VCR and since Finland is going to be all digital really soon, this is something that would be nice to do. I don’t want to buy a DVB recorder since my own MythTV box seems more appealing.

Then there’s the next Nordic Underground Digital movie production which I feel is not faring all that well currently since the vacation time keeps us from finalising the filming.

Then there’s the travel journal thing that I’ve been promising to do for some time now.

Then there’s a ton of small repairs to the house and all sorts of improvements. I totally need to get stuff done since most of this stuff will get more and more difficult to do when work starts in August. I think I will have a hard time adjusting to the office life after this much vacation.

Hi,

Sorry again for the deadly silence in the blog. May and June were insanely busy so I didn’t really feel like blogging and didn’t really have time at the rare occasion that I felt like it.

But now, I have vacation all of July. Today we leave to a tour of Italy with my wife and I have high expectations from the trip. I have never been to Italy and the goal of this trip, apart from the obvious quality time and relaxation, is to see a bit of Italy.

I try to keep some sort of travel journal and do some blogging when we have internet coverage. I have a lot of gadgets, including cameras, laptop, GPS and my trusty old Nokia E70 with me so I guess I can do quite a bit. That’s the good thing when travelling with my wife. We actually stay sober and peaceful enough to do some intelligent and educating stuff as well. When travelling with friends, at least with most of them, there’s typically too much beer-drinking and stuff to actually sit down and do something that requires a focused thought.

Anyway, have fun you all and I hope that the server stays up and functional for the two weeks that we are abroad. I am not really worried about the server as such but our DSL connection has been quite unreliable for some reason in the last months. But alas, let’s hope that everything will be fine and ok, both in Italy and back home.

See you all.