Given the number of "untreatable" cancers that have been documented to
go into remission when the person changes his or her lifestyle
drastically, I'm surprised that no one's to-do list includes getting
a new medical eval after taking their month of fun and partying.
I'll be 38 soon. Most of the women in our family, certainly the ones
on my direct parental lines, tend to flame out spectacularly with either
stroke or aneuryism by their late 50's or early 60's, without the stress
of the kind of lifestyle I've been living.
I'd rather move into quasi-retirement with a significant downgrade in
lifestyle but a greater chance of living with high function for a
longer period. It's very tough, and I wonder if I'm making the right
choice. But I can see the writing on the wall. If I don't take some
time off and take care of some health issues, I don't think I'll
make it longterm.
My so-called "career" is a killer: the kind of work I do and the kind
of deadlines, emergencies, etc it involves really don't seem to be
compatible with a proactive increasing-load exercise and fitness
program. And it's all too easy to cross that fine line where you
screw up your back, or your knees, or your lungs just once too many
times and can't necessarily handle the activity level that it would
take to just fix the problem by getting into better shape. We won't
even talk stress. Or time demands which preclude some of the things
that are supposed to be the reasons we're all here, like spending
time with one's SO, enjoying the art & culture & great outdoors that
we live within a few miles of, etc.
Was there a point to all this? Kind of. As typically happens when
I'm finishing a contract, the folks I'm working for want to hire.
And as also typically happens, there's a huge discrepancy between
consulting rates and salary rates (well, duh!). At this point I'd
be willing to drop my income substantially to move into a less
stressful position, but it's really unclear if ANY job here in
"the valley" can be sufficiently non-stressful.
So I need to choose whether to try to keep consulting until we're
done here in The Valley (whenever Mike's options recover to a point
where we can cash out of Incyte, or 10 - 14 months, whichever comes
first!) or see if I can find someplace marginally sane to go on
salary with and keep swimming, doing tai chi, and keeping up with
all the political & tech stuff on the various nonprofit boards I'm on,
one of which is now national (sigh) and in transition (double-sigh).
It's nice to have choices, don't get me wrong. It's just hard to
turn away from things that are supposed to be the brass ring, except
that you can see it's electrified at a pretty high voltage...randomly.
If you grab this time, you could be fine or you could be fried. The
longer you wait between ring grabs, the less chance there is of high
voltage, except that there's a wildcard factor that resets it from
time to time, invisibly. Argh.
_SRC
-- ======================================================================== Strata Rose Chalup [KF6NBZ] strata "@" virtual.net VirtualNet Consulting http://www.virtual.net/ ** Project Management & Architecture for ISP/ASP Systems Integration ** =========================================================================
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:18:10 PDT