Another pleasant holiday done and nearly gone, went out with a few people to the Top of the Mark downtown, and it was just fabulous once again. It was later than the normal time for me to have the holiday meal, and also the first time I’d ever been at the Mark during sunset. It was really very lovely, and a great reminder of how beautiful the City and the surrounding area is.

The Bay area is a problematic place live in - especially in terms of expense and traffic congestion. But in the end there’s a great sense of the hope that permeates the place probably all the way back to its real founding during the gold rush. People are here because it’s a fringe frontier, where things are a little bit surreal in general (Castro during Halloween, anyone?), but take it to the edge - being in the hot and heavy crossroads of all things tech (Silicon Valley, Biotech, etc). The notion that someone isn’t a workaholic is almost taken as an odd idea - with that gold mine always just around the next corner. People play hard and work even harder, but always with the hope that the next start up that they spend a few years at, working out of someone’s garage will be the next big thing. It keeps us all hopeful, and thankful.

Even during the great dot com crash of the turn of the millennium, instead of the jumping from rooftops that happens in places like New York when the stock crashes happen, or Detroit when another car plant closes and moves overseas. Here it just keeps on churning, you lose one job, and you go on to another. Or you have yourself and four unemployed friends keep yourselves busy by creating your own new idea and make your millions that way.

It was a surreal fantasy land back in the late 90s. Anywhere that you could literally walk out of your company - look around the block and pick out your next place that interested you, walk in the front door and have an offer before the coffee that the receptionist had gotten you had grown cold.

It’s not that way still, to be sure, but it’s not that far off either. But it is harder to get yourself into the door to begin with when you’re first starting out.

For all the jobs I’ve gone through, I’ve been fortunate to have had a good amount of luck in finding those next positions when the times did start to get rough, but now I’m closer to a position where I can relax a bit and should (god forbid) the time come around that I need to move on from IGN to somewhere new, that it’ll be closer to those experiences of the 90s than it was 5-7 years ago.

I’m thankful for so many things - and I’m not as successful as I’d have liked, but I’m still working on it. I may never “make it” either, but I’ll keep on trying. This is the bay area after all, and that’s what it’s all about. The Quest, not dwelling on the downsides of life.