Or roughly 1161 days, 14 hours and 31 minutes, depending on how you look it. That’s how long I have lived on Montreal island. It doesn’t seem that long though… Has it really been 3 years since I left Ontario?
And what I have accomplished in that three years… I started off as a part-time worker making just above minimum wage (under $12,000/year), then I moved up to a managerial position at a private Library, doubling my income ($27,000/year), and now I work at the job I wanted to work at over a decade ago, a server administrator. Now making just under $40,000 to start, I am finally on the right track.. Not a bad accomplishment for 3 years.
Time flies by at a fast pace these days. I can remember when I was younger, back in school, how long the school year went and how much I look forward to the summer, but it just couldn’t come fast enough… Now in my mid 30’s, I long for the days when the seasons were slow… now, it seems to blur from summer to fall to winter to spring and back to summer… I keep meaning to get up to the old cottage but by the time I have a chance to go, the season is over and my brother has already closed her up for the winter. Making plans follows a similar feeling… You make plans for a few months form now, next thing you know, its all happening next week and you are unprepared.
Not to mention the spinning feeling in my head… suffering from Busy Lifestyle Syndrome, which is pretty much suffering from System Overload. I manage to control is with binaural beats at night; without those, I would never be able to calm mind long enough to sleep. Its to the point where I have become almost a workaholic, even when I am off, I am thinking work related ideas… How to loadbalance servers, how to improve cloud server response time and resource usage, how to server clusters, etc… The life of a tech is quite a mind tangler for sure. But I love it. Although I do long for the days or resting on the dock, watching the loon pass buy with its children as the mirror like water reflects the forest on the other side of the lake… funny thing is, although I long for it, I know deep down in side I wouldn’t last more than a day without technology.
What i wouldn’t do to go back 20 years, to a time when things were a bit simpler. The internet hadn;t really taken off yet, DVD’s were just hitting the market, but VHS still reigned supreme… Online streaming and Movie Pirating didn’t exist… You created your own entertainment, you went outside to visit friends and play games. There was still a lot of social contact. These days you meed up with your buddies on teamspeak and the only image you see of your friend is their character in what ever newr-life-looking game you chose to play. We have let technology overtake us, to a point where most of us don;t know what to do without it. I know for me, leaving home without my phone leaves me feeling a little ill, like a nervous twitch in your stomach. Its an addiction we don’t even realize we have. I remember hearing a quote form one of the many anti-tech/pro-social videos I watched on youtube… “Smartphone, dumb people”… and I realize how true that is today more than ever. We’ve created machines to do the thinking for us. “Siri, how to I get to the nearest grocery store”, “Hey Google, what is biomorphism”… We don’t do anything for ourselves, we get technology to do it for us… We don’t use our brains anymore… we are de-evolving with ever new generation, We no longer need to do our own research, hours at the local library manually looking though books and reading the information to write your own report… Now you can do a quick search from your home computer, run it through a re-writer and voila, instant report that meet the no plagiarism guidelines. All done in minutes, printed on nice white photocopier paper.
Do any of you remember the days of having to type your reports, on a type writer? No spell check, no auto correct… You have to know your language and know it well. Now you type a word wrong, and if its not auto corrected for you, its underlined in red to let you know its wrong… you can then click it and select the word it should be. No brain power, well maybe some, but not like it used to be.
Meh, getting off track… fucking busy lifestyle syndrome, where was I, Yes, Time, more specifically how much of it I have spent on the Island. One of the other things I am doing now is volunteering at my old job… giving back to the community, something I haven’t done in about 20 years. It feels good to do something for nothing, just because you want to. I like the environment of The Library, quite, peaceful… in my 4 hours shift I can almost sort thorough and organize my thoughts… almost. Buts it’s a good feeling… seeing old friends, staff members, other volunteers. I like it here… I like it here not only at The Library, but on The Island in general. I made a risky choice just over 3 years ago, coming here with almost nothing to my name… No job, no money… Leaving the province of Ontario, the proving I called home for 33 years. Now I feel like I am sitting on top of the world… Especially when viewing the city from the plateau of Mont Royal. I miss my hometown of Ottawa, but Montreal is just so beautiful.
You can add another 4219 seconds to my life on The Island.