This morning at Cafe Venezia, while enjoying a cup of coffee, and reading my book -- the feeling came back to me again. The feeling of learning and developing myself, the feeling of the moment in life being well-spent...yes, this was the feeling I longed for when I was doing mind-numbing work at SiBeam. This was the motivation of quitting my job. I should keep this feeling in mind whenever I feel confused and lost during this period of "undefinition".

This is the dog I saw outside of Cafe Venezia. He followed me and came next to my bike. I'm happy that he was curious about me.

The First Day of being Unemployed

Today is my first day of being unemployed. Well, it is voluntary unemployment, as I want to try free-lance work, and give myself the time to explore other adventures, interests, and full-time opportunities that are different from my previous software jobs.

Feeling lazy and lenient of myself today. This is my day so far:

- woke up at 8:30

- jogged from 9:00 to 10:00, which I'm proud of

- had breakfast

- read Shakespeare for an hour

- took my car for an oil-change (9 minutes only!)

- had lunch

- met Adrian and Valerie at Stanford to discuss the SMS project from 2:00pm to 4:00pm

- surfed the web for the next 2 hours. I need to find a personal project management tool to manage my free-lance project.

Still lots of love-to-dos, want-to-dos, and should-dos in my head, which leave me anxious and overwhelmed and often not knowing what to do next. I should pace myself, and learn to organize my unemployed/freelance life. Good luck!

What the heck, these are my love-to, want-to, and should-dos, since I haven't found a good way to keep track of lists.

Love-to-dos:

* go rock climbing

Want-to-dos:

* clean up my desk, my house

Should-dos:

* start on the Stanford project

* get a booklet to track my mileage to/from clients

* create a folder to organize all paperwork/receipts for the Stanford project

Btw, I love listing things, which annoys Roy.

If it be your will
by Leonard Cohen

If it be your will
That I speak no more
And my voice be still
As it was before
I will speak no more
I shall abide until
I am spoken for
If it be your will

If it be your will
That a voice be true
From this broken hill
I will sing to you
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing

If it be your will
If there is a choice
Let the rivers fill
Let the hills rejoice
Let your mercy spill
On all these burning hearts in hell
If it be your will
To make us well

And draw us near
And bind us tight
All your children here
In their rags of light
In our rags of light
All dressed to kill
And end this night
If it be your will

If it be your will.

Well, I just read this from one of my daily must-read blogs.

有人问我为什么写博客。我原来的想法很简单，一来和朋友交流，二来我想记下现在的生活，等老的时候可以回过头来重温。之所以公开，是为了给写作增加动力。

Very true. I should do the same, huh?

I'm also thinking I would like to make this blog bilingual (english + chinese), since that allows me to be most expressive.

I'm often distracted at work, instead of reading documents or writing codes, I involuntarily just turn to the computer and start surfing. ( I wonder how high the productivity must have been before Internet was introduced into work place). What do I normally surf? Well, for the past 1.5 years, my obsession has been everything Israel, e.g. Israeli news sites - Haaretz, JPost, Ynet. Today, I started from one article in Haaretz, jumping from link to link: euphemism by Michael Handelzalts -> Wislawa Szymborska ->Michael Handelzalts -> deadsea scroll -> and I came upon this interesting blog by an Israeli woman. I really reading her ranting and views. So the idea came to my head, why can't I do the same - blogging? Especially, everyday, I have so much thinking and pondering going in my head and I have no one to share with (therapist can't see me everyday), I should just write them down. Also, hopefully blogging will get me out of this confusing and depressive state I have been in. Good luck to me! It might be fun, I've never done anything creative, like writing, because I've been such a boring computer nerd all my life. Let's hope my English will be good enough for me to express myself. Let's see how it goes...just like everything else I'm doing, fumbling in life hoping for the best.