A persistent mind

I think I have become an atheist. I say "I think" because I'm not really sure. The Roman Catholic religion is so deeply-ingrained in my psyche that I'm not really sure where the dogmatic imprisonment ends and where my free-inquiring rational mind begins. But I've stepped back far enough from it to gain a bit of an understanding of why religion is useful. It is there to mitigate the deep almost unfathomable feeling of loss, waste, and grief whenever someone we love dies. So one of the difficulties of becoming an atheist lies in coming to terms with its implications -- that we simply blink out from existence after we die.

After a bit of scrounging around I managed to find the building blocks for what is shaping out to be my personal alternative view of what happens after we die.

Dream car of my youth

On my way to the supermarket today a shiny silver 1980's BMW 535i pulled in front of me on a roundabout (note that the picture on the right is just something I picked off the Web). It was beautiful, almost mint condition. I checked around and found that some of these beauties are selling for less than $10,000. But the one I saw today looks like it's had at least that much on top of that in repairs and improvements.

Another crap meeting to go to

God, I gotta go into another frickin' meeting in about 15 minutes. I'm currently in the middle of writing up some project documentation and because part of that work involves distilling, interpreting, and paraphrasing bits and pieces of information scattered across emails and hare-brained PowerPoint "communication packs", it takes quite a bit of concentration to perform. So that is why after coming back from lunch and with fifteen minutes left 'til that meeting, here I am writing a blog instead. It doesn't make sense to me to get a train of thought going only to be interrupted by having to go off to that crap meeting.

Entourage withdrawal

In the last couple of days, I've read quite a few news snippets (most recently this one) about people suffering emotional distress after watching Avatar. If I recall right, there was even one that committed suicide shortly after seeing it.

I can relate to all that as Avatar provides its audience with a dreamy alternate universe. Hmmm, ok, what fantasy movie doesn't, anyway? The Ugly Truth was a gem as far as making us believe that acting like a complete buffoon still gets you the girl. Those Twilight movies, for their part, show us how wit-challenged humourless forever-brooding (literally) pale stiffs (also literally) routinely make nubile teenage girls crazed with lust.

In transition

I'm struggling here. Recall I mentioned earlier how I've accepted a role in another division. Well, this week and the next two or three will be the period that I hand over my portfolio of work to my colleagues. This means doing up generic templates of my spreadsheet models and updating my procedures documents for the benefit of the poor sod who will be running with my stuff.

Trudge. Trudge. Trudge.

Into the salt mines

Last month, a friend of mine had recommended me to the head of a division within the company I work for. They are in the process of recruiting people to staff a big project they are kicking off this year. I sent them my resume and hadn't heard from them until a couple of days ago when I got a call from HR informing me of the interview they were scheduling for me.

This morning I was in that interview. I had a nice informal chat with the head of that group and one of her managers. Turns out they had already checked out my resume, liked what they saw, and just had a few formality questions to ask me. So, yeah, I got the job. First thing I did when I got back to my desk was tell my boss. I think he was a bit relieved as well. My boredom in my current role has probably become quite obvious to him in the last couple of months. In the last six to eight months in this role, I managed to turn what was once a suite of tasks that took the full 40 hours a week to do into one that pretty much takes up one fourth of that. Same (if not more output) for less effort.

My five minutes of fame

I don't know if anyone of you have noticed but lately there's been a glitch in the "Next Blog" functionality of Blogger. For some reason a small handful of lucky blogs are referred to by that function disproprortionately to the rest of the millions of other Blogger blogs.