I'm feeling really crappy about my job right now. Not that I don't love what I do and I'm not proud of what I accomplished. And I certainly wouldn't trade it for all the money in the world to run IMAC (not that I was even offered that option anyway). I just finished getting lectured by my father about how when I go home at night, I can go jogging and have a life. And when he goes home at night (and what he "has to prepare my son, the heir apparent of IMAC, whether you like it or not to do"), he has to think about how he's going to make payroll in two weeks, and how 20 families depend on him for food, and how he's going to pay that nice man in Canada who dad has known since he's been 15 years old $15,000 so he'll keep doing business with IMAC for another 30 years and make the decision if he should pay that or write a check for Nick's next semester. It made me feel really guilty until I remember he was out shopping for 60" plasma tv's last weekend (value: $12,000).

In case I haven't mentioned it before, my father is a salesman, and he's very convincing and persuasive (even when I can think of a hundred arguments against what he's saying). Which of course, makes me feel really crummy and makes me feel that what I do is completely unimportant (who really cares anyway what the cross range requirement should be for a new space plane? or whether there is one chance in a million of a piece of debris hitting your re-entering space ship?). It makes me wish I could see a more direct impact of what I do on other people's lives.

Obviously, that wasn't the whole focus of our conversation. We were really talking about my brother's irresponsibly and poorly-chosen holiday plans. But I have no control over that, except to exercise my own form of pursuasion (definitely inherited!) to convince my brother to visit everyone in the family rather than pick sides.

The List

Shower rod, replacement toilet seat lids (this time they fit), a shampoo dolly, AND I unpacked 95% of my clothes and stocked the 'fridge (my new, beautiful, ice making fridge). Oh, and discovered I was more poor than I thought.