right then and there<\/em>. But I knew at a rate of one pound a week, it would take about a year to get within striking distance of that goal. I didn't want to wait, but I had to. My anxiety subsided by the end of September, when I registered a 10-pound loss. By October, my pants were falling off my waist.<\/p>\nWhen I started recording vocals for my demos, I hated how terribly everything came out. The recordings clipped, I was out of tune, and the sound was dull and dead. I knew it would take years — especially when I could only do any real work during vacations — before I could turn out vocals I didn't hate. Along the way, I learned the ins and outs of my pitch-correction plug-in, and I invested in a number of effects processors that got me the sound I want. Now, I don't mind hearing my own voice so much. (I still think I suck as a singer, though.)<\/p>\n
When I felt the urge to leave my very first job, I knew I couldn't do it without some serious retraining. I had wanted to quit in 1999, but I held myself back from doing anything rash. I took classes in scripting in late 1999 and delved into coding my first web sites in 2000. It paid off when I finally was hired first as a web engineer — someone who could stick static content within dynamic scripts — then eventually as a web software developer. I've now been a web developer longer than I have been a content producer.<\/p>\n
I'm starting to feel resentment toward the trip I'm taking to Japan in November. I've been setting aside money for this trip, and now that I have this definite goal of relocating, I would rather divert those savings to that goal. The trip now feels like something that I need to get out of the way instead of something to which I can look forward.<\/p>\n
But that's just impatience. I have no intention of moving till I have a job lined up, and I don't anticipate the job market improving till the latter half of 2010, if then. I also don't have enough savings to pay for first and last month rent and a deposit. This relocation is a long-term goal, even though I would very much like to avoid the next Texas summer. Objectively speaking, I could get better results by waiting till after the trip, by which time perhaps the predicted economic recovery may be on its way.<\/p>\n
I have this paranoid notion that things change in the time that I'm pursing these goals, and the only instance where such a long wait backfired was with learning web development — by the time I got good, the bottom fell out of the tech industry.<\/p>\n
So I really need to calm down. I can still do some things to get me toward my goal, but I have to stop myself from shooting myself in the foot.<\/p>\n
Still, I don't like waiting. Never have.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(No, this entry is not about David Carradine.) Along with being driven, I'm also impatient. When I first started exercising, I felt anxious to get to where I wanted to be. In August 2007, I was 215 pounds, and I wanted to be 160 right then and there. But I knew at a rate of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Bkgj-1V","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}