Life-in-Progress

The hardest thing about leaving JetBlue last year was giving up the travel benefits that helped ease the difficulty of living 3,000 miles away from my family and so many of my friends. One of the things I’ve realized lately is that, even though I am really loving being in Austin, I have been horrendously homesick. This is the longest I’ve ever gone in my life without setting foot in California, and I’ve missed it. (Last time I was here was last year for my birthday, after our wedding in Las Vegas.) My family, my friends and the familiar sights that are always “home” to me have been calling to me recently more than usual, and it’s so nice to be here that I can hardly stand it.

It took a while to pinpoint the source of my acute homesickness, but I think it has a lot to do with working from home. It might not do it if I actually liked it, but since I really hate it a lot, it’s been weighing very heavily on me. When I’m working in a more traditional office environment, I find myself getting the social interaction that I need to be happy, and then I am less likely to be as homesick. I fear that, no matter what happens with our business, our clients or any potential employment opportunities, that if I don’t find a way to spend my days working in more dynamic, social environments soon, that I’ll go nuts.

I envy people who can work from home happily – starting with my husband, who vastly prefers it to working in an office. It’s just not something I am finding even remotely pleasant – to say nothing of it being highly unproductive and uncomfortable. It really saps my energy, it requires time management skills that I simply don’t know how to acquire, and it’s isolating and depressing in a way that I never honestly expected. Even worse, it’s starting to make me dread both work and the sight of my lovely, sunny, bright apartment because I’m starting to feel like it’s a suffocating prison with really big windows.

Web 2.0 Expo

I am looking forward to the Expo. I find it more than a little ironic: O’Reilly is in my hometown. When I graduated from college back in 1999, I spent a year doing everything I could to get a job there with little success. Finally, I landed a temp job in the call center with the hope that would get my foot in the door and I could use the opportunity to find something inside on a more permanent basis. Unfortunately, what I discovered is what a lot of people in call centers discover: being in a call center is often very pigeon-holing, and it is hard to convince anyone to let you do anything else. So when an opportunity at MarketLive (back in those days, it was called Multimedia Live) came up in early 2000, I jumped at it.

I didn’t particularly expect that nearly a decade later, I’d be back in a field so heavily dominated by the O’Reilly brand/presence. I’m eternally amused at the cyclical nature of life.

However, in addition to getting to see John (whom I speak with almost daily, but whom I haven’t actually seen in person in about a year and a half), this week does give me the chance to see the brilliant and talented Joshua-Michele Ross. During my last year at MarketLive, Josh, John and I shared an office together, while we were trying to get the Organizational Development team off the ground. Of course, Josh has gone onto some very cool things since leaving MarketLive back at the beginning of 2005 (just a few weeks before I left for New York), and though we’ve generally kept in touch online, I haven’t spent any real time with him since.

I always enjoy spending time with Josh because he’s one of those awesome people who always makes you look, feel and sound smarter than you thought you were. I honestly think that’s what makes him such an awesome interviewer (see his video interviews to see what I mean). Josh has so many IQ points to spare that he almost seems to inadvertently loan them to the people he speaks with, and no matter how brilliant someone is to start with, Josh manages to bring out the best in them.

It’s an amazing quality that I firmly believe is at the heart of why Josh will always be phenomenally successful at anything he does: because he has true humility, brilliance and generosity of spirit that makes brilliant, creative people flock to him, because they just want to collaborate with someone capable of enhancing their own abilities to a degree rarely possible on their own.

Of course, the fact that Josh has a fabulous sense of humor, is a great artist, a wonderful political mind and generally an extremely cool person to hang with doesn’t hurt. He’s also one of the only men I’ve ever met in my life who has truly spectacular taste in shoes.

Food, Friends and Family

As always happens when I come home – especially after it’s been a while – is that just about every meal during my stay is tied to a visit with someone. This is both awesome and a tad problematic at the moment, given that a newly self-employed person is not necessarily able to spend ten days in the Wine Country eating out at all of the delicious restaurants that scatter the rolling hills of my beloved hometown.

So, in the interest of not being a total mooch on my friends, and in the interest of helping keep from being an excessive burden to my parents, I always seem to come home and turn my father’s kitchen into Alora’s Restaurant. Happily this is an unspoken trade-off that no one seems to mind.

There is something truly satisfying about cooking for friends and family. I am very lucky in that I have a wonderful husband who never takes my cooking for granted, and understands that it is a sign of my love for the people in my life to make truly creative and delicious food for them to eat.

But when we were in New York, I didn’t have the opportunity very much because NYC apartments aren’t designed for cooking (so the few times I cooked for larger groups were usually at hubby’s sister’s place in Westchester); and in Austin we don’t know enough people (or have furniture for them to sit on), and so I haven’t had the chance to truly play hostess the way that I love. I may be looking forward to that aspect of this next week more than anything else.

Which means, maybe I should start my trip by visiting my own personal shrine: Trader Joe’s. You think they’d mind if I pitched a tent in their parking lot for the week, just so I can get my fix?

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