I remember when a programmer friend of mine by the name of ed maas told me about how he used a thing called theh fibinacci sequence to teach younger programmers how to develop logic. I was a younger programmer at the time and he was older and I think he was trying to impress me with his ingenuity in developing his test. You see, the sequence is fairly simple. You start at 1. You at it to itself. You get 2. Then you add 2 to the previous number (1) and you get 3. Then you add three to the previous number (2) and you get 5. You keep performing an addition and then for the next addition you add the sum of the last one to the first number of the last one….

1 + 1 = 2
2 + 1 = 3
3 + 2 = 5
5 + 3 = 8
8 + 5 = 13
13 + 8 = 21
21 + 13 = 34
etc..etc…

The test was to write a computer program that could accurately determine the 30th sum in the sequence. Ed was very proud of that test, but in actuality it’s so simple as to be trivial. No wonder Ed lost his job…

Last night I watched the Vikings game. It was a pathetic 48-23 blowout that ended when there were 3 minutes left in the second half and the Vikings were down by 7. It was 17-10 and I was thinking, “it’s all good, down by a TD is no big deal” and then in the space of less than 2 minutes they gave up 4 touchdowns. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. 28 points scored by Seattle in 1:51. It’s gotta be some kind of record. Well, then it was 45-10 and the game was pretty much done. It would be unless the Vikings could dominate the second half. Sadly, the DID dominate the second half. Their defense shut down Seattle, limiting them to something like 11 yards of total offense. Their offense moved the ball at will but their recievers dropped 4 separate passes in the endzone that should have been touchdowns. 4. As ridiculous as it sounds, they could have (should have) won that game even after what happened to them. Thank goodness there isn’t a game next week… Of course, the game being on Sunday night meant that Alias’ season premiere was pushed back, and back, and back… It started around 12:30 in the morning. We watched it, but I kept drifting in and out of consciousness and missed most of what was going on. Grrr…

Last night I had a conversation with Manda that reminded me of ones I had with my ex-wife and I didn’t like it one bit. It was the conversation where she accuses me of caring more about Tumblur and Nuclear Gopher than I do about her or Sydney and wishes I would just leave them alone. Of all the people in the world, I never expected her to say that. Never. Tab used to get mad at me because I worked hard to advance my programming career. I had to work harder because I skimped on schooling. I had to study at home because the technology was changing from client/server to Internet. She didn’t understand that or want to accept it. She thought I should go to school, get a job and stay in it, that extra work or study or investment in technology was a waste of my time and money and that time I spent with those things was just stealing time from her. So, as much as I could, I managed to squeeze those things, the learning, the technology, into the cracks in my life. I filled small niches of time with reading books or working on web development. Nuclear Gopher was my practice field, my idea lab. I learned things on Nuclear Gopher and I put them on my resume. Those things are why I still have a good job today, even after some really rough patches. She never thought I could make more than a certain amount of money a year. I’ve more than doubled it and she now realizes that I needed to do what I did, that it wasn’t “stealing time” from her, but rather, trying to do what I had to in order to provide for my family. Now, Manda is different. She encourages my artistic pursuits, Tabithah fought against them tooth and nail (“when are you going to grow up and quit with this music stuff?”). Manda even used to support what I was doing with Tumblur, but she hasn’t seen positive results yet and she’s not patient enough to see it through. So, now she’s starting to think it’s a “dream the impossible dream” kind of thing. That it’s just a waste of time and that I love it more than her. That pisses me off so badly I cannot even adequately express it. No matter how many times I say it I am never believed, but I’ll say it again: I want to be independantly successful so that I can have time to be with the people I love and I’ve felt that way since I was a teenager. It is because I love Manda and Syd that I work on these projects. I want to provide for them, I want to care for them and I want to be able to be HOME to do it. Home, with them. This system does not easily allow that. In fact, the normal situation in this world today is that you and your wife need to be out working full-time jobs. That means a life spent away from each other for all the good hours in the day. That means a dependance on the whims of managers and bosses to keep you alive and fed. That is just sick. How can you have a healthy family life when you never see each other? I realized this long long ago, before I got married to Tab. I thought, “There are four ways of doing things, time, luck, ingenuity and poverty. One, work hard, away from your family, for decades. Retire and spend your old age catching up on everything you missed out on, if you’re still married at all and your kids don’t hate you. Two, win or inherit a bunch of money and join the idle rich or at least be comfy middle class with a lot of time on your hands. Three, use your mind to develop something for yourself that allows you to make your own way without reliance on anyone. Make your own rules and priorities, be a self-made man. Four, forget about anything but the most basic subsistence living. Rely on friends and family for charity and assistance. Drive the cheapest car, work physical jobs at odd hours.”

I still think I’m right about those four options. The only option that has ever interested me is #3. Ingenuity. My father is a good example of #1. He’s worked at the same job for something like 30 years. He’s comfortable and stable. He was always gone during the days. He’s waiting for a pension. Through hard word and patience he’s supported his family for years. I respect that very much, but he also has not seen much of the world (he doesn’t travel, having not the freedom or the money or the inclination). He was gone often enough that he missed major warning signs in his first marriage (to my mom) that lead to a divorce. (I’m not saying the divorce could have been prevented or that my dad was a workaholic, it’s just the nature of being away all day every day). I don’t know anybody who is an example of #2. I do have some friends who come from wealthy parents who get a lot more for a lot less effort than the rest of us, but being lucky is not something you can plan, it just happens. Then there is ingenuity, but I’ll come back to that after I talk about poverty. Now, I personally think that poverty and ingenuity go well together. I would rather be broke and single, working on my projects than married with a good job. I’d actually rather be a married man, butsingleness makes the projects easier in a way and makes you hungrier. Still, poverty can be it’s own end and my brother Rhett is the best example I know of it. He works harder than anybody I know, holding down multiple jobs, never sleeping, rarely seeing his wife or kid just so that they can stay afloat. They live in a tiny little apartment, drive junk cars and manage to make it somehow. He loves Jehovah very much and it was a desire to avoid materialism and worldly influence that caused him to not get an education and to work cleaning jobs instead. He was pioneering, which is fantastic, and he never managed to develop the skills he needed to care for a family financially. So, life is hard on him. He’s aging prematurely. He has to rely on Jehovah a lot. Poverty is kind of fun when you’re single, it’s much harder when you have a wife and kid, because now instead of being a broke pioneer, he’s just broke. Finally, ingenuity. No matter what your current situation, there must be some sort of way to think your way into a better one or become reliant on yourself altogether. When I was in middle school and thought of this stuff for the first time, I decided the thing to be for me was an inventor. I figured I would invent some great things, get them made and make my living that way. Then, as I got more artistically inclined in high school I switched focus to being a writer. I figured writers had it made. They could live anywhere, needed nothing but their own minds in order to make a living and got paid royalties for life. I still think that, but my career as a writer has not been stellar so far. I’ve tried fiction and can never quite get to where I want to be. It’s a far more difficult craft then is seems when you are an avid reader. Non-fiction is OK and I’ve written portions of 6 different non-fiction books. I even got paid for the work. However, it’s a tremendous amount of work and it’s extremely difficult and boring. I could never do it quickly enough or well enough to quit my day job. So, being a writer is out for me. Which leads me to Tumblur and NG. What I know about myself are the following things:

- I love music, always have. It’s not hard for me to write music, like it is prose.
- I still like to invent, to solve problems, to unravel mysteries, but I have no interest in “building a better mouse trap”
- If I give up on using ingenuity to make my way through life and settle for putting in time I will lose all in my personality that attracted my wife in the first place and she will not like it and neither will I

It’s not a coincidence that Manda and I met when I was self-employed, trying to solve the big riddle of how to make online indie music successful. I was happier and feeling more naturally myself than at any other point in my life. When that went away and I went back into full-time work, Manda was crushed and so was I. She has missed the guy that I was ever since. So, I’ve put myself back to work to get there again. If I could do it once, I can do it again, and this time without making the mistakes that ended it for me last time. I believe that. Manda has given up. She thinks that the way it is now is the way it will always be. Me, working as a software developer, going away in the morning, returning in the evening, spending a few hours together and going to sleep. And if I try to change that, she now thinks that my efforts are a waste of time. It’s defeatism and I’ve seen it before and I just didn’t expect to see it again. However, when Tabithah thought I was wasting my time with my programming stuff, I turned around and got a big raise and a new job. When she thought writing was a stupid idea, I got writing work that paid. Now it’s time for me to take the things I’m best at, problem solving and music, and make something that uses those skills and is successful financially. It’s the only way that she will believe in me again. I’m so freaking sick of “what have you done for me lately”…

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RyanSutter has content marketing with Arkayne Socialize.

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