Uninteresting Post About Interests

I get to work very early in the morning, well in advance of even most other people who come in early, but given that my cube is on the same floor as our NOC, which is a 24x7 operation, I don't really receive the benefit* of having the place to myself in those early morning hours.
My cube is located relatively near the elevators, which seems to be an area where a lot of people hang out and chat as they pass each other on their way to and from their shifts, and I sat there one morning powerless to do anything but hear the extended, heated, and extremely loud - for some reason the people who are talking to each other in the morning seem to think they need to make up for the lack of background noise by being as loud as possible - discussion about football or some other horseshit** that I don't care about, which led me to start thinking about the things I do actually care about and am interested in and how little overlap there is with the things that other people care about or take an interest in.
I mean, even to the extent that I identify as a nerd, there isn't a whole lot of overlap there, either.
So, in thinking about this, I made this handy diagram, which - while realizing, of course, that no one would be especially interested in it - I posted to Facebook:

Today, while I was in the comic shop paying for my comics, I found myself stuck in that overlap between nerds and normal people - into which I don't fit - that involved a discussion of football.
I thought, "Have some nerd dignity, for god's sake.  You're not supposed to be talking about this crap, you're supposed to be having the standard Punisher vs. Batman argument or something.  Isn't there anywhere I can go to escape this horseshit***?"
Of course, even the "Who would win in a fight?" arguments among nerds don't much appeal to me, especially given that the answer, is of course, Batman, because the answer is always the goddamn Batman.
But I digress.
My point is that when people wonder why it is that I'm so quiet, well, there's your answer:  I share very little in common with most people.  I can't talk to you about the game, or your fantasy football stats, or that TV show that I don't watch, or about...well, much of anything.
Even within the confines of what should be my "tribe" - nerds - I share very little commonality.  I can't talk about Dr. Who, or that video game, or zombies.
This is exacerbated that the fact that I just don't have it in me to even feign interest**** when people are talking about things that I don't care about.
The other problem is on the more affirmative side:  the number of people who have any interest in the things I do care about is pretty statistically insignificant, and even among those very few people who do share my interests, they don't share them with the same intensity.
As a friend once put it, "No one is as interested in the things you're interested as you are."
It is, perhaps, a bit inelegantly constructed - and was said in a manner that was more than a little unkind - but the idea expressed is sound.
So what is my point?  I don't know, honestly, and I have a feeling that you wouldn't be interested in hearing it even if I did...

*People who work on other floors that aren't staffed at all hours have told me about how "spooky" it is if they come in early in the morning, given how quiet it is with no one else there. I envy them the spookiness. 

 **"Horseshit" seems to be my new favorite word of late.

***See?

****Of course, there are exceptions - that aren't really exceptions - when it comes to my actual friends, but in those cases, even when they're talking about a subject I don't have any particular interest in, it's still not feigning interest, because I am interested in listening to my friends.  Unless they're talking about sports.

$55.13

I keep all of my spare change in this sort of urn/vase thing on a small table next to my front door, and on occasion, when I can’t really find the motivation to do anything else, I’ll spill it all out on the floor, separate the different types of coins into discrete piles, and then proceed to methodically arrange them into neat stacks of even amounts and tally them all up.
The title of this post represents the current total.
I’ve been engaging in this particular ritual for a very long time, at least as far back as my time in college.
Of course, in years past it was less of a ritual and more of a necessity, as I scrambled to scrape together enough money to buy food, or cigarettes, or, more likely, a cheap bottle of vodka.
Still, even in those days it was something of a Zen-ish, mind-clearing, meditative activity, comparable, I suppose, to putting together a jigsaw puzzle.
There are any number of things I could have done – and could be doing – instead, but most of them, like this, involve a little more thought, and I’m not really interested in thinking today.
I mean, seriously; it’s gets to be exhausting after a while, and it’s clear that I spend all together too much time doing it.
The other day someone actually asked me, “Do you think while you’re sleeping?”
…
I didn’t know what to make of the question, or how to answer it.  Is this really the perception that people have of me, that I’m just some sort of relentless thinker?
If so…I suppose that I am.
Of course, the real question is whether or not that’s a bad thing.  As mentioned, it certainly is a tiring thing, but is it bad?
Certainly, in general, people seem to find it off-putting, or intimidating.
As I’ve been dealing more directly with my VP in the absence of the (former) boss, I’m finding that he’s sort of taken aback by the workings of my brain.
I don’t...think it’s a bad thing, but it’s not an entirely good thing, either.
Beyond that, there’s a perception, and a valid one, I can assure you, that too much thinking, if divorced from action, leads to indecisiveness.
It’s true; it can be exceedingly difficult to engage in decisive action when your brain just won’t stop considering and reconsidering options and possible outcomes.  It leads to a kind of mental paralysis as your brain is overwhelmed by its own activity.
That’s why I have so much difficult getting started with anything; when you see so many available paths laid out before you it becomes almost impossible to figure out which one to take.
(I think that plays into why I’m such a creature of habit; if I can make something become routine it becomes something I don’t have to think about.)
The other issue is that the petulant, insistent cry of “Pay attention to me!” that runs endlessly through my mind as each new idea runs through its cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, makes it difficult to focus on anything, particularly anything that isn’t happening inside of my head.
Of course, I assume it’s the same for anyone, and that I’m not somehow special.  If anything, I am, in many ways, deficient.  As much as I talk about how dumb and mindless everyone else is, the fact is I kind of envy their ability to navigate through the swirling chaos of thoughts and ideas much more successfully that I can, and to not fall overboard and drown in the conceptual ocean.
I particularly envy those people who are able to focus all of that thinking onto actually accomplishing something.
In answer to my own question about whether it’s a bad thing, I have to say…let me think about it.
Still, maybe I could use a little more mindlessness in my life.
At least fifty-five dollars and thirteen cents’ worth, anyway…

Longer Than It Should

I’ve mentioned several times in the past that when people see my artwork one of the most common questions is, “How long did that take you to do?”
I never really have an answer, because I don’t really keep track of the time spent on any given image.  In some cases, if I get into a serious “groove,” I’m actually incapable of keeping track of the time spent, as time becomes one of those things I just don’t notice because my total focus is directed towards my work.
About the only answer I can actually give is, “Longer than it should have.”
This is in part because I don’t often get into a groove, and so I find myself distracted and stepping away from the Cintiq and doing – or not doing – other things.
Mostly, though, it’s due to the nature of working digitally.  At least, the nature of Jon working digitally.
There are so many advantages to working in a digital medium that I would never consider going back to working in traditional media in any significant way.
However, there are a lot of disadvantages as well.  While some aspects of working in digital make things faster, I’ve come to realize that I would probably be a lot faster overall if I were working with pencil and paper.
The major disadvantage, though, is that it wouldn’t look as good, and without buying a bunch of messy supplies, I’d never be able to get anything even remotely like the look and general quality I get from working digitally.
Still, working in digital is slower, because, even with the pencil and paper-like interface of my Wacom Cintiq, I’m just not able to do a lot of totally freehand work the way I would with traditional media.
Part of that is due to issues of lag – minimal though it may be – and calibration.  No matter how many times I go through the calibration setup to try to adjust alignment issues, the virtual tip of my brush/pen/whatever tool I’ve selected in my application does not align perfectly with the physical tip of my Wacom stylus.  So I always have to adjust my perspective, an focus not on where my stylus is, but on the point a couple of millimeters away where the computer thinks the tip is located.
The other part of the problem is that, being self-taught, I picked up a lot of bad habits that I find almost impossible to break, such as resting my hand directly on the drawing surface.
On paper, that always led to smudging.  On the Cintiq, that leads to very jagged lines, as the friction between my hand and the screen prevent my hand from moving along smoothly.
There are other issues as well, such as finding the right “fidelity” settings for a tool, particularly in Illustrator.  Set them too far in one direction, and the software’s attempts to smooth out the jaggedness completely change the shape and direction of the line.  Set them too far in the other, and exact reproduction of my hand’s stuttering movements leads to something that looks like a readout on a seismograph.
(And, of course, there’s the issue where Illustrator, regardless of how you set things, assumes it always knows better than you do, and will just straight-up do whatever the hell it wants.  “Oh, you want to cover that blank space, and figure that you do it by drawing over it?  Yeah, I’m going to add a random curve to your line so that it goes around the blank space.”)
As a result, I end up doing a lot of rework, as I do a very loose sketch in freehand, and then use that as a guide for laying out the Bezier curve to get the line I actually want.
I use Bezier curves – “paths” in Photoshop and Illustrator – for everything but the finest details, or any of the looser areas of color or shading.  For those I use either an airbrush tool, or loosely-drawn selections, which I then fill will color.
Sometimes I just skip the sketch entirely and go straight to laying out paths, but either way, it’s a lot of time-consuming work to go through and adjust the points of the path to give it the exact shape I’m looking for.  If I could reliably get lines line that via quick, sweeping freehand motions, things would go a lot faster, but, alas, the only thing I can reliably do freehand is the wrong thing.
It’s kind of bizarre, actually.  Sometimes I’ll draw a line that swerves too far off its intended path, or is just generally wrong.  I’ll hit undo, and try again, and I’ll make the exact same mistake.  I’ll end up doing that multiple times until finally I give up and lay out a path.
It’s the only thing that’s at all consistent in any of my artwork.  The strangest thing is my hand will follow that same wrong path as though it were caught in a groove on the surface of the scren, in a way that I don’t consistently draw the wrong line on paper, where it’s actually possible to form a groove.
Anyway, just like drawing a picture, posting this is taking longer than it should, so with that, I’ll bring this entry to a close.

The (Anti)Social Contract

I’m not really a fan of “small talk.”
I mean, from my perspective, there’s no such thing* as an “awkward silence.”  Blessed, merciful silence, sure, but awkward?  Ehh, not really.
Of course, most people don’t share my perspective, and so while I don’t generally feel that there’s any inherent awkwardness to silence, I am sort of sympathetically aware of the oppressive awkwardness that other people feel in the presence of silence, and so, to the extent that I’m able, I do what I can to at least try to ease some of the burden of silence.
Sometimes, anyway.
One of the areas in which I do put forth the attempt is in passing while walking along the hallway, or, say, at the sink in the men’s room, when there’s that moment of “I know this person and I have to say something to acknowledge my recognition,” and something more than a simple head nod or “Hey” is called for.
And so, though I don’t always feel a particular need** to do so, I will play along.
Of course, for me, the awkwardness suddenly springs into existence once the silence is broken, because while I’m willing – or at least obligated – to play along, my heart really isn’t in it, and, honestly, neither is the other person’s.
So, in playing my part, I generally keep a list of canned greetings/responses at the ready:

”Hey Jon, how are you?”
”I’m good***, [casual acquaintance], how about you?” – I generally decide in advance whether or not I’m going to make a reference to the person’s name, depending on whether I feel up to the task of flipping through my mental rolodex to recover said person’s name.
”I’m doing great.  Thanks for asking.”
”That’s good.  Well, see you later/have a good day/nice seeing you.”

That’s the most common exchange, but I do sometimes get tripped up:

”Hey, Jon, how’s it going?”
”I’m – “ Crap, he didn’t ask how I’m doing.  “It’s – fine.  How’s it – how are you?”

I do have some canned responses to the “How’s it going?” variation, at least as far as answering it, but in terms of turning the question around, I often draw a blank, because “How’s it going with you?” just sounds kind of odd, and I’ve yet to find a suitable alternative.
It’s with the canned responses I have to that variation -   “It’s going.”  “Oh, you know, like a typical [day of week].” – that things often get the most awkward, because something like this often happens:

“Hey Jon, how’s it going?”
”It’s going.”
”’It’s going?’  What does that mean?  Is that good or bad?”
”I – it…uhh, how are you?”

It’s usually at that point that I want to say:

“No!  That’s now how this works!  You’re violating the social contract.  As a formality, you ask me how it’s going, I give you some noncommittal answer that you don’t pay any attention to, I finish getting my water, and then we both just get on with our respective days.  That’s the deal.”

Of course, I don’t say that, as it would be compounding the violation of the social contract, so instead I just kind of flail about in – *ahem* – awkward silence.

*As with everything, context matters.  There are, of course, awkward situations in which the silence compounds the awkwardness, like a long elevator ride with someone you’re attracted to, or being greeted with silence in response to professing your undying love or something. (Note:  There have been no recent instances of these examples in my life, in case you’re wondering.)

**I am, of course, talking about interactions with acquaintances, not friends.

***I had to eliminate my old canned response of “Not too bad, how about you?” because too many people failed to parse the “Not too” part, and that would lead to, “Bad?  Why bad?”

I Call It "The Jonward Spiral"

Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

One Of Those Things Or Maybe It’s Just Me

There are certain things that happen to me in the course of any given day that I find myself convinced couldn’t possibly happen to anyone else.

Most of them are related to clumsiness or the non-functional nature of my hands, and, to be fair, the “this could only happen to me” thing is a momentary thought that has more to do with being bitterly amused than holding a firm view of myself as the butt of the Universe’s jokes (mostly).

In any case, there are certain other things that happen to me that, given that they have nothing to do with my peculiar physical dysfunctions, I’m not so certain could only happen to me, but I’ve never really observed them happening to anyone else, so I’m left to wonder.

The one in particular that comes to mind is something of an assumption that people seem to make when they’re talking to me.

The first time I really noticed it was many years ago, during my drinking days, and at the time I chalked it up to the nature of interacting – unwillingly – with random drunken strangers at a bar.

I was sitting in my regular bar minding my own business (my own business being getting drunk) and waiting for any of the other people in my social circle to show up when I made the fatal error of making eye contact with the desperately lonely drunk sitting next to me who took this as an invitation to – clumsily and drunkenly – engage in some level of interaction with another human being.

As an aside, the force field of hostility I seem to unconsciously generate usually keeps people at bay, whether I want it to or not, but some people – due to drunkenness, general cluelessness, desperation, or some combination thereof – are able to overcome its effect.

In any case, Drunky McForeverAlone, with whom I had never previously interacted, started talking to me about the time he had broken his leg 38 years prior.

As far as cold openings for conversations from random, lonely drunks go, this wasn’t especially odd or noteworthy, but what made it stand out was the manner in which he presented the story.  Despite the fact that we had never previously spoken, he related the story to me as though we were old friends and he was simply expanding on the level of detail for a story with which I was already familiar, as though I knew about that time, more than a decade prior to my birth, when he had broken his leg.

He literally started off the conversation with, “It’s like that time I broke my leg…” as though he expected me to say, “Oh, right, that time when you went sledding when you were a kid” in response.

I don’t remember how I eventually extricated myself from the conversation – I ‘m guessing that either my friends showed up or the bartender took pity on me and burst in on the conversation; being a professional drinker, I numbered most of the bartenders among my friends – but I do remember finding the familiar tone distinctly odd, but, at the time, I wrote it off to simple drunkenness and social awkwardness.

However, since that time I find that something similar happens to me a lot with people that I actually know.  Essentially, they’ll tell me something that requires a certain amount of background information which I don’t have at my disposal, but which they assume that I do.

My boss in particular does it to me all the time, but pretty much everyone I know does it to certain extent.

I guess I can understand why it happens, particularly with people I know well.  I mean, they just assume that they had told me the other thing, or that I somehow knew about it through osmosis or something.

The overall effect, though, is sort of like that episode of Futurama in which everyone was skipping forward through time at random and finding themselves in dramatically different places and situations from where they had been just moments before, having skipped over all of the intervening events.  “Off you go…apparently…”

Anyway, I’m curious as to whether this is a Jon-specific phenomenon, or is it something that commonly occurs in the interactions the rest of you non-Jons have with each other?

Get Real

In 1994, post-graduation, my then-wife and I were living in a very nice apartment that we couldn’t afford, and I was trying to get serious about writing, per the agreement the Mrs. and I had that I would devote a year to writing while we lived off of her meager income as a Manager at McDonald’s.

Well, kind of.  I thought that was the deal we had, but apparently she had never agreed to those terms, so rather than getting serious about writing, I was getting semi-serious about writing and semi-serious about finding a job.
What I was getting really serious about, however, was becoming depressed.  Many people think that my depression – and descent into alcoholism – were the result of my marriage ending a year later.  That certainly didn’t help matters any, but it wasn’t really the cause so much as the catalyst.

And even the end of the marriage was not, in and of itself, the catalyst.  There was a lot more going on, and it wasn’t so much losing her that really pushed me into the abyss – it didn’t take long, after all, to realize that, despite our eight years together, I wasn’t really losing much, which may seem cruel and smack of bitterness, but the truth is the truth – but rather, it was the very concept of losing, and, by extension, of being a loser.

That is not, however, the point of this rambling narrative, and I will now attempt to get back on course.
So.  1994.  College graduate.  Nice apartment.

At that time, my friend Joel was a frequent guest in said nice apartment, as he had a girlfriend – whom he’d met through my wife – who lived in Marquette, so he would regularly make the 100-mile trek to visit us, or rather, to drop off his stuff and crash on our couch.

One afternoon while our respective significant others were at work, Joel and I were sitting around watching the 10,000th rebroadcast of the latest episode of MTV’s The Real World.  This was the season that featured the likes of the late Pedro Zamora, the disgusting and irritating Puck, and a young aspiring cartoonist named Judd.

This particular episode had a focus on Judd, with the cameras following him as he pounded the pavement with his portfolio of work in tow, meeting with editors and publishers in a dogged attempt to get paying work.

Joel had turned to me and said something like, “That’s what you should be doing.”

I pointed out that it didn’t actually seem to be working out so well for Judd, and that even if I had an actual portfolio beyond a few unfinished, poorly-drawn pages of a Fontaine comic, and my other mostly-unfinished sketches and doodles – most of which consisted of scenes and character designs from the various unfinished stories I had been writing – I wasn’t certain where it was he thought I should be showing it off.  The mean streets of Marquette, Michigan, didn’t, so far as I knew, contain any sort of publishing district.

(It’s worth noting that Judd did, in fact, break into the world of publishing, though primarily as a writer rather than as an artist.  He’s something of a polarizing figure, and I myself find his work to be of varying quality, but he’s generated a lot of sales for DC Comics over the years, and remains a major figure in the “New 52.”)

In the real world that I lived in, I didn’t have anything to show off, and there was nowhere for me to show it anyway.
And every day I was faced with the growing belief that the reality was that my dreams would never come to pass, and it became harder and harder to muster up the energy to even pretend to try.

As much as I didn’t want to, I recognized every time I struggled to force myself to pick up a pencil, it was time for me to – to borrow a phrase – start getting real.

Okay…So Why DIDN’T You Go To Art School?

In my previous post I mentioned the momentous day upon which I learned of the existence of a school, founded by and named for a legendary comic book artist, which specializes in preparing aspiring artists for careers in comic books and animation, and how it had been my fondest wish to one day be a student there.

But that didn’t end up happening.  In fact, I didn’t go to any sort of art school at all, and I view the fact that I didn’t get any sort of post-secondary art education to serve as a foundation for developing my artistic talents as one of the reasons why I don’t work in a field even remotely connected to art.

So why didn’t I go to art school in general, or the Kubert School in particular?

The answer to the second part of that question is pretty simple and straightforward – New Jersey is a long, long way from Twin Lakes, Michigan, and there was no way that I was going to be able to scrape together the money to move halfway across the country and then somehow manage to pay tuition.

And even if I could have managed that, as a kid from the middle of nowhere with very limited exposure to the larger, more densely-populated world, I was not in any way prepared to venture that far from home.

Does that make me a wimp?  Maybe, but honestly, as smart and as cynical as I was at eighteen, I can’t imagine that I would have done well on my own in a completely alien environment.

And while in hindsight I admit that it’s foolish, my girlfriend was a major consideration in most of the decisions I made back then.  Her post-secondary education options were…considerably more limited than mine, and I wasn’t prepared to abandon her – or try the long-distance relationship thing – so I chose to limit my options as well.

To be clear, I’m not not blaming her – it was my choice, after all – and honestly, I doubt that I would have done things much differently anyway, but she definitely was a factor in my decision-making.

As was the $1,200 per year scholarship I got from the state – provided I went to a state university in Michigan – and the additional assistance I got from another state agency as a result of injuries I sustained in a car accident when I was sixteen.

“Okay…so maybe you couldn’t go to the Kubert School, but didn’t they have an Art program at the university you did attend?”

As a matter of fact, they did.  Further, comic book artist Norm Breyfogle was a graduate of that program, though I didn’t know that until sometime around my sophomore year.

So why didn’t I enroll in that?  Didn’t I even consider it?

As a matter of fact, I did…up until I saw the requirements for enrollment.

“Port-what-io?”

At some point when I was a kid, my mom acquired this huge stack of blank newsprint that had been cut down to letter-size sheets.  I don’t remember where she got it - from the newspaper, I imagine, though I don't really remember the “why” of it - but we used it around the house for years as scrap paper, and, for me, as drawing paper.  It was thin and fragile and gray, and not exactly an ideal medium for artwork, but it was what we had, with the exception of the art supplies my older brother – who had gotten a degree in Commercial Art* before joining the Navy – had left behind.

Later in life, I worked on typing paper.

We didn’t have a lot of money to throw around on things like art supplies.  Not, at least, if I wanted to keep reading comic books, and there wasn’t much of anything that could have gotten me to give those up.

The high school I graduated from was not actually accredited by the state, and did not offer AP classes, foreign language classes, a proper library, or, most significantly, art classes.

Enrollment in an art program required a portfolio, with work in an assortment of media.  If I had gone to a high school that had art classes, I might have been able to assemble a portfolio at some point.

But I didn’t go to such a school, so somehow I doubt that a handful of drawings on newsprint and typing paper that consisted mostly of reproductions of heavy metal album or Conan novel covers and images from comic books, and a few poorly-executed “original” images would have passed muster.

Hell, even the boring, lifeless oil and acrylic paintings I had done in my grade school “art” classes, which were, based on our instructors view of what constituted art, limited to reproductions of saccharine postcard images, had been lost in the house fire we had in my freshman year of high school, so I didn’t even have those to present as part of a “portfolio.”

You may find yourself thinking that none of that matters, that if I’d had enough grit and determination (and pluck and spunk and …) I could have overcome those obstacles.  That smacks of the just world fallacy to me, but even if it’s true, and not a philosophical fallacy…well, I didn’t have those things.  Whether it was a matter of willingness or ability is kind of irrelevant.

And ultimately, the fact is, by the time I was at a point in my life at which I could make the decision to go to to art school, I didn’t really want to go anymore.  Justified or not, I didn’t have confidence in my talent.  I didn’t believe that it was something I could really make a go of, something that would ever be anything more than a hobby.  By that time I had considerably more confidence in my writing ability, and I decided that, between the two, pursuing writing was more likely – if only by a very narrow margin – to provide me some options if and when the time came that I had to abandon any hope of a life of creative pursuits in favor of something more pragmatic.

So I guess that’s what it boils down to:  simple pragmatism won out over hope.

If that sounds depressing, it’s because it is, and you begin to understand why it bothers me so much when people, with the intent of complimenting me upon seeing my artwork, say things like, “Why are you working here?”

*My brother went to a different high school than I did, one that did have art classes.  In fact, Norm Breyfogle was a contemporary of my brother, and had attended a rival high school.  The two of them were often competitors in local art competitions.

Distinctly Vague

In an IM conversation with Scott the other day he made a reference to something – fittingly, I don’t recall what it was – and I said, “I think I vaguely recall that.  Then again, vaguely is pretty much how I recall everything.”

I used to have a good memory.  I don’t know – or remember – what happened to it.  I would say that it was probably booze, but I think my ability to remember things had started to fade long before I started drinking heavily, so who knows?

In talking about the amazing memory I had when I was younger, a woman who had worked at my elementary school made a reference to her belief that I had a “photogenic memory.”  I can’t say whether or not that’s true – I don’t know what pictures of my memory would look like – but I certainly never had the photographic memory she meant to say that I had.

Still, it was a pretty decent memory, I think.

To this day, there are still some things that I remember distinctly, even decades later.  I don’t think it would surprise anyone to learn that most of those things actually revolve around comic books in some fashion.

Not all of the details are clear – I don’t remember specific dates, necessarily, or even issue numbers – but there are a lot of surprisingly specific things that I do remember clearly.

As an example – and as part of the ever-lengthening and roundabout path I’m taking to get to my actual point – I remember a Friday in May of 1982* that was a good day in general, and a kind of momentous day as well, which is why, almost 30 years later, I remember it as clearly as I do.

It was a good day, first of all, because it was Friday, and summer was rapidly approaching.  Reason enough for a 10 year-old to be pleased, I should think.

But it was also a good day because my mom had made a trip to town and picked up a bunch of new comics for me.  This was always a dangerous proposition – my mom didn’t keep track of my comic book purchases or the titles I was most interested in, so there was a good chance that she would, in her random purchasing, buy me something I already had, or something that I wasn’t interested in, though the former was more a danger than the latter.  After all, as I often say, there’s one thing that could be said about my taste in comics when I was a kid:  I didn’t have any.  I happily read pretty much anything back then.

In any case, on this particular day my mom had done very well, picking up the latest issues of  Swamp Thing, The New Teen Titans, and The Flash, which, at the time, were all favorites of mine (I mostly liked The Flash because of the Dr. Fate backup story that ran in every issue).

Still, while the selection of comics was very good, they were not, in and of themselves, what made it a momentous day.

At least, not for the stories they contained.

That month, all of the titles published by DC (such as the ones listed above) ran an ad for something that, to my young mind, was the most extraordinary thing in the world:  The Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art.

A school.

That specialized in teaching people how to draw comic books and cartoons.

It was on that day that my fondest wish was born.**

”In eight years,” thought young Jon, as he looked at the ad over and over again, “I will be living in…Morristown, NJ, and will be a student at that school.”

And, of course, as we all know, that’s exactly what happened, and I went on to put my education to good use by becoming a superstar comic book artist.

Oh, wait.

So, yeah, that didn’t happen.  Still, at the age of ten I could hardly be expected to think, “One day I will be an Integration Manager at a cable company and will be a Subject Matter Expert*** for something called Netcool and will spend most of my time developing and conducting operational readiness testing and creating document templates and writing Ops Guides and looking at spreadsheets.”

What is the point of this stroll down memory lane to the cul-de-sac of abandoned dreams?
I suppose that, in part, it’s an attempt to answer the question, “How did I get here?” and possibly the follow-up question, “And how do I get out?”

Mostly, however, it’s my very circuitous way of getting back to examining another set of similar questions, not asked by me, that keep popping up:

”What are you doing here?”
”Why aren’t you working for Marvel, or Disney, or someplace like that?”
”Why are you wasting your talent doing this?”

…and so forth.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I understand that these questions – and the assertions, such as “You’re in the wrong line of work.” – are intended to be complimentary, but they feel more like criticism, or an indictment, and they’re not questions I can quickly or easily answer, and hearing them over and over again begins to wear on me after a while.

”I have my reasons,” I say, which is usually greeted with puzzlement, or dismissive head wags.
One of those reasons is that I didn’t, as young Jon had hoped and expected, move to Jersey and go to the Kubert school.  Or any art school, for that matter.  I never developed a formal basis from which I could fully explore and develop my talent.

This, of course, raises the obvious question of “Why not?”

That is, I’m afraid, the subject for a later post.

*I must confess to cheating a bit here; I remembered that it was probably 1982, and I knew that it was sometime in late spring, but I had to actually look up the cover date for one of the comics I remembered getting that day in order to narrow it down.
**That is, until later that summer, when my reading of X-Men, and the discovery of one Kitty Pryde, dovetailed with the onset of puberty, and a whole other set of fondest wishes developed…
***The notion that I’m a “SME” for anything – and I’m actually considered to be a SME for a lot of things – is laughable, given that most of the time I have no idea what I’m doing or talking about.

Even In My Dreams

I took a nap earlier today and ended up engaging in a certain level of lucid dreaming.
I've managed it a few times in the past, though the degree of control I've been able to exhibit - as was the case today - has always been spotty at best.
The thing I've always seen about lucid dreaming is that the key is planting some sort of idea in your subconscious that will, when it appears in your dream, clue you in to the fact that you're dreaming.
(Because apparently the fact that things are constantly shifting and don't really make any sense isn't enough for our brains to figure it out.)
At that point, having recognized the fact that you're dreaming, you can begin trying to assert control over the world inside your own mind.
Most of the suggestions I've seen for such dream signals are things like specific colors or items.
For my part, what I've found to be the surest indicator that I'm dreaming is that somehow everything is even more of a pain in the ass than it is in the waking world.
For example, I might find myself in a dream trying to put on my shoes and discovering that it's taking me hours just to tie the laces.
That's usually the best indicator - in the dream I'm already late for something, and my attempts to try to make up for lost time are stymied at every turn, in ways that are just too outlandishly over-the-top even for me.
I can't help but wonder what it says about me that my dreams are where I find myself getting even more frustratraed and having even more things go wrong than in my conscious life.

More Of Whatever The Hell It Is I Do All Day

Because I don't feel I've bored you enough, I thought I'd post more about my job, starting with some of the acronyms I encounter on a daily basis:

PMO
OSS
VSS
CMDB
CMTS
ORT
UAT
EMS
PMS (No, not that kind)
RNOC
TOC
EOC
RACI
BTS
BPS
OMSE
SLA
MSA
SWOT
KPI
MARS
...and so forth.
Are there even more than that?  Oh yes.
Do I know what they all stand for?  Yes, actually.  (To make matters even worse, some of them stand for more than one thing.)
Do I find that sad?  What do you think?

He Who Laughs Last Department:
Post-reorg, our group has been trying to focus on quantifying the work we do in the form of easy to understand metrics, in part to show how overburdened we are.
As part of that - and to help better align the enterprise-wide processes, and to account for our new responsibilities - we're putting a major emphasis on definining our processes and requirements, and requiring other groups to adhere to them when they engage us.  (It's actually a major victory to have them engaging us at all, and even moreso that we're getting them to engage us before new products launch.)
Towards that end, we're looking at ways to streamline the engagement process and to make it easy for external groups to know exactly what we require and to provide it to us, and, in my estimation, the best way to do that (right now, at least) is to put our Entrance Checklist online on our SharePoint site, so that people can have a single location where they can go to fill out the Checklist without having the confusion of e-mailing files around and running into version control issues.
Unfortunately, our current deployment of SharePoint is...not great.  So while it's a workable (in theory) solution, it's far from ideal, but our only option is to turn the Checklist into a survey.
A new project was recently announced, and my boss and I agreed that this would be an ideal time to (finally) get the revamped Checklist online and start directing people to it.
So that's what the hell I was doing all day yesterday.  Well, for most of the day, at any rate.  I also rewrote and revised some process docs.
I ran into some problems - due to the limitations of our SharePoint site - right away, so the whole thing took longer than it should have, and finally I had to tell my boss, "Yeah...let's just send them the actual Word doc version of the Checklist; I don't think I'll have this up and running today."
However, I kept working on it until the bitter end.  Or at least close to the bitter end.
A bit before 2 my boss came around and said, "Get out of here, willya?  Go, have a good weekend.  I'm not stressing about the Checklist."
I wasn't exactly stressing about it either, really, but I had come to feel that the survey was mocking me.  I could hear its derisive laughter.
Still, I don't argue when the boss tells me to leave early...especially considering that I had to leave early anyway because I had an eye appointment.
On the way to my car I had something of an epiphany, and realized that I'd been approaching the survey all wrong.
So I thought, "We'll see who's laughing come Tuesday morning, survey!"

Technically Incorrect Department:
Boss:  You're more technical with that than I am.
Me:  Yes, I'm more technical than you in general...which is bizarre, considering that you have an Engineering degree and I have an English degree.

At The Movies Department:
On Tuesday my department had a joint "team outing' with another department, which involved going to the fancy new theater here in Leesburg and having a catered lunch, and then taking in a movie.  We each got to choose whatever movie, playing within the outing timeframe of 11:30-4, we chose.  I opted for Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
It was okay.  It was certainly better than being at work, and it was free, so I hardly have anything to complain about.
Plus I worked from home in the morning, as it hardly made sense to drive in to work for a few hours, then turn around and drive back to Leesburg.

Whatever The Hell It Is I Do All Day

I often refer to my job as being “whatever the hell it is I do,” upon which I also often append “all day.”
I refer to my job in this fashion because 1. My job, while often hectic and challenging, is pretty boring. 2. The actual details of what I do are difficult to explain. 3. I try not to take my job (or myself) too seriously.
Well, prepare for 1, because I’m about to take a crack at 2.
(Nothing is going to change 3.)
First of all is my title:  Senior Analyst – Integration.
The obvious first question is, “Who gives a shit?”
However, the second obvious question is, “What does that mean?  What sort of integration are you analyzing?”
Well, the thing to consider is…I mean…well, it’s kind of like…hm.
If pressed, in a more serious setting, I generally respond with, “I’m essentially a Project Manager.”
That’s all well and good if you know what being a Project Manager entails, but there are, no doubt, plenty of people out there who don’t.
So.
I suppose that I should first explain a term and concept:  NOC, or Network Operations Center.
Longtime readers may recall that for several years I worked in a NOC – particularly those longtime readers who worked in that NOC with me.
In any case, here’s one definition of NOC:

Stands for "Network Operations Center." It is the central location where a company's servers and networking equipment are located. The NOC may reside either within a company's campus or at an external location. Smaller businesses and organizations often have an internal NOC, in which local technicians administer and monitor the servers. Larger companies may have a NOC setup at a location developed specifically to house server equipment.
[…]
While NOCs are used by all Web hosting companies and ISPs, they are also useful to companies whose services are not related to the Internet. Many companies use a NOC to manage internal communications, administer employee e-mail accounts, and backup data. Because maintaining an Internet connection is vital to most businesses today, most NOCs are monitored 24/7, with automatic alerts that notify technicians when servers or network connections are down.
(Source)

This definition is essentially correct, with the caveat that in some companies, such as the one I work for, the NOC isn’t necessarily where the actual equipment is located.  Actually, I’d say that’s the case with most companies, or, at the very least, it’s not where all of the equipment is located.
A NOC is, however, a centralized location for monitoring, troubleshooting, and repairing issues.
In any case, as a cable company, my company provides a wide range of products and services to individuals and businesses, such as Internet access, telephony, and video.  As a result, there are all manner of devices, data connections (fiber, coaxial cable, etc.), and software applications that can – and do – stop working at any time, for any number of reasons.
And that’s where the NOC comes in; they need to be aware of the breakdowns, and have to work to restore service as quickly as possible.
And that’s where I come in.
My department’s function, historically, has been to ensure that as new products and services which require monitoring and troubleshooting support efforts from the NOC are rolled out to customers, the NOC is ready and able to provide that support.
In terms of actual deliverables, this means providing support process flows, operations guides, training and training materials, ensuring that the NOC techs have access to all of the necessary tools for monitoring and troubleshooting, escalation contacts and procedures, verifying that all of the previously-listed items actually perform their intended functions, and, ultimately, getting the NOC management to say, “Yes, we are officially ready to support this product or service.”
And that would be the “integration” mentioned in my title, though to be honest, “integration” is a holdover from our group’s old name, “Integration Services.”  (We’re now called “Operational Support and Readiness,” and we’re part of a – slightly, for the time being – larger group called “Service Transition.”)
In terms of day-to-day activities, this entails reading through technical documents and network architecture diagrams that describe what the product or service is and how the associated equipment and applications it runs on actually work, identifying the potential failure points, attending lots and lots of meetings with the cross-functional project teams that are actually designing, documenting, and implementing the new product or service, and working from there to determine what the expectations are of the NOC, what the NOC will need to do in order to deliver on those expectation, and how the NOC will do it.
Understanding the specs and architecture documents requires being at least passingly familiar with the terminology and device functionality – you may not know exactly how a switch works, for example, but you do understand what it does – or at the very least an ability to identify the people who are familiar with it and can explain it to you, and you have to be able to translate all of that into terms that someone who may be only slightly more (or even considerably less) technically skilled than you are can understand.
So other than going to meetings and reading through technical documents, what do I actually do?  Well, as mentioned, I write operations guides, I develop training materials – sometimes I actually provide the classroom-style training – all of which I’ve distilled from the information gleaned in the tech docs and meetings, but also through a defined requirements process and checklist that spells out exactly what I need to have in order to provide the NOC what it needs.
That entails managing individuals and groups outside of the NOC and my department who have – in theory, at least – the information I need, which can mean wading through office politics, departmental rivalries, personality clashes,varying levels of expertise and knowledge.  And sometimes the information, for any of those reasons, and many, many more, might never become available to me, in which case I still have to ensure that the NOC can support the new product or service.  How do I, and the other members of my team do that?  Honestly, I don’t know, but somehow we manage.
Mostly I think it’s creativity, a high tolerance for frustration, and a stubborn refusal to just let things drop.
Of course, there are all sorts of other activities beyond what’s involved in preparing the NOC to support new products or services, such as documenting and refining our internal processes, archiving project materials, serving as a SME (Subject Matter Expert) on various processes and tools, administering our internal Web site…
Recently, after the reorg – or “Functional Realignment” – the scope and or scale of what my team does has expanded a bit to include other groups, which means we’re no longer as exclusively-focused on the NOC as we had once been.  Basically, while we have had three people added to the team, and some of our old responsibilities have transitioned to other groups, the net result is still that we’re doing much, much more work with very few resources.
So, yeah.
That, in a wordy nutshell, is whatever the hell it is I do all day.