Also Putting Up

This is my response to my uncle's article "Putting Up", which made me sound cooler than I am. Friends, countrymen, other people, I studied Greek in college. I know right. If you're a girl and reading this, on paper I'm the kind of guy who causes some parents to worry if you bring me home for dinner. Why? Because I'm some strange combination of idealism, impracticality, and imagination. I did manage to finish something that I started once, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was. Despite all of that, I managed to conjure up enough stones to study something that I actually enjoyed in college. *Gasp*. If you ask me what I'm planning to do with that major, I might consider stoning you. I have no idea. Actually, no thats not true. I do have an idea. My idea is that I want to do something else that is totally different than Greek and be awesome at it. I cringed when I wrote the word "awesome" just then because being awesome at what I am about to start doing (getting my ass kicked by my uncle and learning technology/programming/business/??????) is probably just out of reach for me. That means that the next few years of my life will require much more work out of me than I can probably reasonably conceive of. I'm not being dramatic. Honest. I'm starting from scratch with hopes of making a name for myself in an industry that shows no favoritsm, and which requires a body of knowledge to be mastered that overwhelms me when I think more than one day ahead.
Here are my reasons for not pursuing Greek:
1. I have hopes of getting married/losing my virginity legitimately
2. I don't like having a long beard
3. I'm not 70
4. I don't want to write a thesis on beastiality in the ancient world

Here are my reasons for pursuing technology/programming/business/????
1. My internship at Symantec, doing very loosely related things, was the first job I've actually enjoyed. (I would say that I stayed late every night to work more because of the raw passion I had, but that would only be half true. The other half of the truth is that my uncle chewed my ass out for coming in late one morning to work after a bachelor party and I didn't want to have that conversation again)
2. I like my uncle. This point is important. Not because I hope that he likes me more for what I'm about to write (he doesn't read my blog) but because it's true. My uncle is really good at what he does. He also doesn't put up with any kind of anything that isn't called "productivity" or "progress" (or "snoop doog" or "u2"). Frankly, I need someone that I respect to push me to be really good at something that I want to be good at. I know, right, we are all supposed to be self made men. I agree with 75% of that. The best coaches and professors that I've had are the ones that have pushed me to be better until I wanted to throw up in their mouth (Thats a real thought that I've had before), and I don't see why my work-coach-master dude should be any different. Two things: I'm not looking for sympathy. I am looking for help. Someone somewhere once said that if you want to be the best, you have to learn from the best, or something like that. If noone else said that, I just said, so start quoting me. Anyway, my uncle is the best I know who is willing to teach me for 3 months.
3. Technology/Programming/Business is starting to fascinate me. No lie. I've been reading a book called The Object Primer. Don't read it unless you want to do what I'm trying to do. This book is already connecting a lot of those early, structural, "what does that even mean" dots that I need to know about before I even show up to start this gig with my uncle, and I love it. It's a whole new world to me, but its an amazing world and I've been getting more and more excited the closer I get to actually starting my apprenticeship.

So it begins. My options at the end of the next three months will be something like this:
1. Despondency, coupled with abandonment by my uncle.
2. Some sort of mystical job/work with my uncle that doesn't actually exist right now
3. Some sort of work with someone else
4. An honest realization that this stuff isn't for me.

Sometimes, at random moments, I get scared about what I'm about to do. I'm putting a lot of money and time into something that might blow up in my face and leave me looking like Regis Philbin(I don't know how to spell his name, but you know who he is. If you don't, you're lucky). What keeps me going and gets me excited is this: As crazy as this idea is, it might just work. In reality, theres only a huge amount of work and some pre-existing aptitude between myself and being good at this stuff, and neither of those things depress me. My focus has to be on my hour-by-hour work rate, learning rate, retention rate, etc. This venture, if it works, will work because of the focus and drive I put into each hour of learning and working, and if it does work, well, I'm sure you can imagine the level of my excitement.

It's a brave new world my friends, and I'm off to find my place in it.