A different Monday, thankfully

What a difference a week makes. Maybe just writing about it helps, though it tends to scare the spouse when she reads it. I don't intend that certainly. Anyway, this is Monday twenty-one, and things don't seem quite as bad, though I am not in any better material condition. I don't have any new prospects, actually one less based on some recent news.
My friends at a local tech company were waiting for some funding to come through before offering me a position in their small but high potential company. The technology is interesting, reforming hydrogen from hydroccarbons. This would support any fuel cell to generate power on a potentially 24x7 basis. So, yeah, I was hopeful. They would not have been able to pay me as much as I was worth, but I am in a gambling mood, and there would have been some equity. This weekend I found out that their efforts to raise capital in a somewhat complex Canadian deal had pretty much fallen apart completely. From my vantage-point, it looks like general skittishness over the global economic situation is making all VCs check their shorts for poop frequently. So, with that deal dead on arrival, I am not likely to get on there.
My opportunity at the national laboratory in Richland is like Heisenberg's Cat, neither alive nor dead. Those people either can't make decisions very quickly or don't know how to sever things that are done. I can't figure out which from the information available. My last interviews were on March 12th. Yeah, that's quite a while for a decision, I agree.
I am participating in a group proposal for a big DOE grant to work on some hydrogen sensors. It would give me enough money to put my little product development company in a laboratory at SIRTI, the local technology incubation facility, and pay a reasonable salary for about two years. Time enough to figure out what comes next. But we won't have any fruits from that until October, if we get it.
So why am I happier today than last Monday? I don't really know. I have been taking better care of my body, doing some yoga. Maybe that is helping. I have been enjoying my time with the kids. I am relinquishing control of an uncontrollable situation. I am not trying to contain the whole problem in my chest, like that critter in the "Alien" movie, trying to bust out all the time. I'm not going to go all biblical on you, but I am putting this problem to a higher authority, whether it makes sense or not, because if it works great, if not, I have lost nothing but some stress until I figure that out too.
I mean, really, something's got to give sometime. Someone has to acknowledge that I might be able to meet some need of theirs at some point.

Breathe, you are alive...

Twenty Mondays

Mondays are the worst ones. The days when you know from the moment you get out of bed an hour later than you should that it just doesn't matter. That you are not going anywhere anyway. That there is no time-clock to punch, no project to get back on, no mission to accomplish.

One, two, three, ..., twenty Mondays later it has not changed. The feeling of worthlessness tries to come back every seventh day. It is not me, it is not part of me, I do not own this. It comes like a shadow across the sun every seventh day. It is me, in truth. It is you. We all wonder if we are worth anything all the time, it must be related to mortality. If I could only do something worthwhile before I die, God, that would really be something. Not asking for that much really. We are frequently distracted from this topic, normally, ironically, by the fact that we organize in semi-productive groups of individuals trying to accomplish more or less insignificant goals. We strive against the blackness, toward ignorance of it, by being constantly distracted.

Those without work spend too much time thinking. This is a dangerous activity. Need new distractions that cause no permanent damage. Yoga. Climbing rock walls. Cutting wood. Any opportunity for mindfulness works. A moment of focus, outward and inward, but not on self.

I should take a lesson from my coffee cup. It is no less a cup for coffee, sitting empty and forgotten on a dusty shelf. Its purpose and identity are untouched by doubt or lack of use. It knows its mission will come again, or not. It remains a coffee cup regardless.

It is also an inanimate object. And maybe lucky for that.

Looking forward to Monday #21. But in the meantime I have worthwhile things to do, if I can think of any of them.