I remember reading this "Fuck Yes or No" for dating a couple years ago and generally agreeing with the approach. Not just for dating but pretty much all serious relationships in one's life. Love and work, being the big ones, naturally. It does seem incredibly odd that people would spent hours of their day, months of their year, and years of their life on relationships or jobs that are merely OK.

I mention this only because I am Once Again (TM, patent pending) trying to decide what to do with my life. It waxes and wanes, as you can imagine. For five months here I have had steady work as a Lead Developer for two startups on a contract basis. Caught up on all the PHP/Laravel skills and have become a fair hand at using Vue.js for building interactive pages and single page applications. Figured out how to use Homestead locally and even more experience with Forge for provisioning and deploying too. Learning is good. My Full Stack Developer skills remain strong.

All the while I have been hunting for that next opportunity. The job that will make me want to become invested in a company and stay around for a couple years. People like me thrive on intensive projects that we believe in. My Reed degree, EllisLab, Pre-Medicine, the Pacific Crest Trail. I remember these times as the most positive and transformative because I was completely invested in the experience of working towards those goals.

For a short time I thought ImpactFlow might become that but it rather quickly showed its hiccups and once the experience started souring I bailed. No reason to stay around working 50-60 hours a week when you have lost faith, no matter how much money they try throwing at you. My time and energy are way too valuable for that.

So far, no job has really seized me strongly. NY Times, Amazon, a couple startups, a few agencies. Nothing has really pulled me in and said "Go there." Two jobs that I was genuinely interested in did not choose me. Not that I really thought Columbia was going to choose a 36 year old, non-photographer/writer for one of their Director of Toughness positions, but man doing adventures and testing gear seemed like an exceptional way to spend 6 months.

I keep on looking though. Hoping. Daydreaming. Thinking. Eventually something will come along, right? I have the money to do another thru-hike and if something does not come along by June, I am about 50% sure that I will head off for the summer again. Adventure, excitement, a Paul craves these things.

::pause::

Suppose there is always going back to school...