Getting Short

I’m starting to get that familiar old feeling: I’m a short-timer.

“Short-timer” is the feeling you get when a period in your life is approaching its anticipated end. Most often it’s about the looming end of a job or of living in a particular place. You know the end is coming soon, and a big change is approaching. Your time in the current job or place is short.

You might have thought about such a change earlier, but it was not certain or was still rather distant. Now the change is real, and you can see it on the horizon. There is excitement, but there is also some fear. The key is to control and minimize the fear while embracing the excitement and letting it energize you.

The reason I have that short-timer feeling is that I am coming to the end of one of the longest periods of my life. In just a little more than a week, I will leave the company I have been working with in one form or another for 11 and a half years, full-time for almost five. And even more significantly I am leaving Ukraine in just about a month, ending an “adventure” that began in 2006 and became full-time in mid-2008. But more about that later in this post.

In the Navy

The first time I was really aware of being a short-timer was when I was in the navy and stationed on the island of Guam. My assignment on Guam, as well as my enlistment in the navy, was coming to an end in December. I was going to be leaving behind a tropical paradise I had become very used to for 18 months and saying goodbye to some of the best friends I had ever had up to that point in my young life.

That year and a half on Guam was one of the most influential times in my life. It shaped me in many ways: some good, some not so good. Early in that time I suffered what was probably the most gut-wrenching emotional trauma of my life (it didn’t happen on the island), and when I returned to the island after dealing with it, I fully embraced the “sex, booze and rock ‘n roll” lifestyle with my friends. But it was just a “crutch” to try to deal with what had happened earlier. They were many wild times, and toward the end I found myself growing tired of the partying and found a new crutch: religion.

I left the life I knew on Guam for one of uncertainty. I returned “home” to Massachusetts for a time, but I had no idea what I would do next. I missed my life on Guam, especially being in frigid New England in the middle of winter and with no friends. I was totally lost. I was insecure. By March, I had agreed to reenlist in the navy with the promise of being sent to language school and becoming an intelligence analyst.

But I still remember the short-timer feeling during the last month or two on Guam. While there was some excitement at the approaching change, there was actually a lot more fear. What was coming after Guam was unknown; I had no plan, no dream. It was a black hole.

The next time I really felt that short-timer feeling was years later when I was wrapping up my six years in Japan, as well as ending my overall navy service. This time, however, I knew what I was heading into: I was going to return to Colorado and attend Colorado State University to finish my degree.

It was all planned and set, so there wasn’t that same “black hole” feeling, but there were still some uncertainties. I was almost 30 and had not really lived as a civilian for most of my adult life up to that point. Plus, I was headed back to a marriage relationship that had never really worked, and I seriously doubted that it could be made to work. You can’t “reinvigorate” something that never really had any vigor.

Although I had plans and knew where I was headed, there was still that odd feeling of having the days wind down toward the inevitable departure date. I had begun to chafe at certain aspects of military life by then, but I did enjoy the intellectual challenge of my work in navy intelligence. I was very good at what I did and got a lot of accolades for it. I would miss that feeling of importance, and I would also miss keeping tabs on all those “commie” ships and aviation units. I had gotten to know some of them so well that they almost seemed like old friends.

Leaving the University

I spent two and a half years at Colorado University completing my degree. Although there were some difficult times, like getting divorced just a few months after I had arrived from Japan, my years at CSU were some of the best of my life, in many ways even better than Guam. Fort Collins at that time was a wonderful place to live. I had my motorcycle, I had some really special friends, I enjoyed the university environment and had more good times then I can count. And I found – and lost – the most significant love of my life.

In that final spring, as graduation was approaching and big changes were looming right behind it, I again began to feel that short-timer feeling. I was leaving a fairly carefree and fun life and headed into the world of regular work days and all that comes with that. I had a job lined up, but still I felt some trepidation about the change. I wasn’t confident that it was all going to work out – and for good reason.

There have been some other short-time situations along the way: leaving the Colorado Lottery and leaving Colorado to return to Massachusetts for a time, leaving the company I worked for there and Massachusetts two years later to return to Colorado, and leaving MTB, the project management company I worked at before I made the move to Ukraine.

Leaving my house in the mountains was a different sort of feeling. I didn’t really face the reality of it until the last few days when I packed up my stuff and drove away.

Leaving Ukraine

And now, here I am as a short-timer again. I have been talking or writing about making a big change for years, but only last year I finally began to make it a reality. I have known for some time that I would be leaving in early 2020 and I set the timetable just after New Year. It began to really hit me in mid-January when I scheduled my last courses at EPAM. It felt strange to know that this would be the last time I would do these courses, and these students would be my last.

And as the time has grown closer, I’ve been feeling it more and more. A few weeks ago I started purging my stuff. I sold my bike and have arranged to sell or give away a number of other things I have collected over the past decade to create a comfortable home here. I can’t take them with me, so better to find good homes for them. But the process of doing this really drives home the reality of the end being very nearly here.

One aspect of being a short-timer that has never really affected me, however, is falling into the “don’t care” mode and just doing the bare minimum at work. In the military, it was common for short-timers to be the least reliable workers. In combat situations (which I never faced) it was understood that once you got short, you had to do everything possible to avoid putting yourself in danger so that you could just survive those final weeks and days.

I don’t think that way. Perhaps in a combat situation I would, but in normal work situations, I’ve always been fully engaged right to the end. In the past few weeks I have still found myself tweaking and improving parts of my courses, as I always have, and even creating a few new things.

This will probably be the last time I will really have this short-timer feeling. I don’t imagine I will ever again be in such a situation. I see the remainder of my life as being more of a free-flowing, independent endeavor in which I do what I want to do where I want to do it (finances permitting). I guess that is fitting because in reality, I have never been a very “settled” kind of person. Staying in one place, as I have for the past decade, seems to be contrary to who I am, and it is probably why I have often felt so much anxiety here for the past few years. I have been overdue to make a change.

So I am short. And very soon everything is going to change. I am excited, though not as much as in my younger years. And I have a bit of fear, but again not as much as a few other times. What I do notice about this time is more sadness than usual. I am not sad to be leaving the company or Ukraine, but I know that there are a few people here whom I am really going to miss – a lot. Leaving them behind is the hardest part.

But that’s life. It’s a short-timer thing.

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2020: The Unimaginable Year

Who would have thought?

It’s just a few hours before the calendar will flip over to the year 2020. And I’m still here. I never thought I would be.

Earlier today I created a new worksheet in my Excel budget and cash flow document. It’s a fresh worksheet for the year 2020. I have sheets for each year going back to 2008. I kept track like that even earlier, but I don’t have those docs any longer, only the ones I’ve been keeping since I’ve been in Ukraine.

As I looked at the year on the new tab – 2020 – I was struck by the numbers themselves. I am about to enter into another decade, just one more on top of the dusty pile. But what I really got to thinking about was years ago when I was in my teens, my 20s, my 30s, and how I could never have imagined even being alive in such a futuristic year as 2020.

Back in the 70s and 80s, even the year 2000 – the next century – was too far in the future to seem realistic. The only things that would get me thinking about it occasionally were futuristic movies and Prince telling us to “Party like 1999.” In the early and mid-90s, it was getting closer but still seemed unreal.

And then it happened: 1999 became 2000. And I seemed to have missed the party that Prince promised us.

If 2000 was too far in the future to think about, imagine how 2020 must have seemed. Twenty years more. I really could not even begin to imagine myself at such a far-off time. To be honest, I didn’t think I would even live that long. To be even more honest, I don’t think I really wanted to live that long. The thing I feared most was becoming old, and – damn! – it has happened.

I guess I should be glad that I am still here. In my mind I don’t feel as old (and decrepit) as I thought I would. My body, on the other hand, likes to remind me otherwise.

Getting back to those movies, they certainly over-promised the future. Back in those glorious days of my youth, we were promised that by this time we would be exploring the stars and have all kinds of amazing and wonderful devices. I fully expected that by now I would be able to teleport instantly to other parts of the world as easily as I walk from my kitchen to the bathroom now. In fact, I probably could have teleported from the kitchen to the bathroom.

But, nope… hasn’t happened.

I was certain that we would have flying cars by now, perhaps even running on nuclear fusion generators (yeah… “Back to the Future”), but that too was just a pipe dream. It’s probably for the best; living in Ukraine and seeing how poorly drivers do in two dimensions, I can only imagine the carnage if we had cars operating in three.

But to get back to the point (not that this post really has one), we are about to step into the third decade of the century. I won’t say how many decades this has been for me. Let’s just say it’s “too many” and leave it at that. It leaves me with a certain sadness that so much of my life has been lost to the past and so little now remains for the future. But that’s how life is.

No. I never thought it would be this way.

As I wrote five years ago in my post, Life at the Speed of Time, the cruelest thing about time is the way it accelerates faster and faster as we get older. Time just keeps passing quicker and quicker – and then we are gone.

I am moving closer and closer to the ultimate abyss. I know this. But there is still a bit of space left between now and that point. I don’t know for sure how much, but some. I just hope I can use that time better than I have for the past decade or so.

The year that I could never imagine is here. It is going to be a year of big change. All the changes that I have been touting year after year since at least 2012 are about to happen. Do I have enough time to make them count for something? Or, as I feared in my youth, is 2020 too far gone?

Time will tell… as it always does.

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This was a pretty random post. But that’s what happens when you sit at the computer with a bottle of wine. I was determined to write my 100^th blog post before the New Year, and for better or worse, here it is.

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Now is All There Is

Imagine a tiny circle of light in a universe of neverending darkness. What you see in the circle is the present moment in your life. Your life runs along a line from right to left. The right is the future coming into the circle, and the left is the past that has exited the circle.

This circle is like a small looking glass that shows you what is happening now. What you see in the illuminated circle is all there is; nothing else is real. Before it gets to the circle, the future part of your life's time line doesn’t exist because it hasn’t yet emerged from the dark. And after it leaves the circle, it ceases to exist as it is swallowed up by the past. It is gone and can never return.

Only what is in the lighted circle is real. The lighted circle is now, and it is all there is.

A Case Study

It sounds cliché because we hear it said, and we read Internet memes all the time that tell us to “live in the now,” or “only the now exists.” But although it has become trendy and trite, it is, nevertheless, true. I have been thinking a lot about this the past few years, and yesterday, as I sat on an airplane jetting from Brussels to Kyiv, it was solidly on my mind.

For the four and a half days of my visit to my daughter’s home in Belgium, my reality was the sights and sounds of the marvelous old house that they are renovating: the smiles and laughter of children who love me (and whom I love); a big, shaggy and gentle black dog; sleep-filled nights in a cold – yet wonderfully quiet – room; the sounds of spoken French and Dutch; a delicious Thanksgiving dinner.

What was not real was my life in Kharkiv. It was in the past and would return from the future, but for those days it was (almost) as though it did not exist.

But suddenly my short-lived reality in Belgium slid out of the lighted circle and faded into the darkness of the past, almost like it had never happened, like it had been a dream. My new reality at the time I wrote most of this in a notebook was my seat on an airplane and the space around me: the tall, young and attractive girl to my left on the other side of an empty seat and the strange old guy across the aisle in the row to my right who had all three seats to himself and took advantage to spread his meal across all three tray tables. More power to him! It was about the nasty guy behind me who kept pushing on my seat back and then complained if I reclined a few inches.

My “now” at that time was the whooshing drone of the jet engines, the ring of various aircraft alerts, and the buzz of passengers, punctuated occasionally by a crying child. It was the deep blue divider curtains hanging in front of me and across the aisle to my right. Outside the plane it was a blue sky above white clouds that had all turned dark halfway through the flight.

But even that was fleeting. The timeline moved again and the flight became lost in the past. Beneath the lighted circle now was Boryspil Airport, a crowded shuttle bus and a race to the passport control line. It was going through security again, and then boarding yet another cold shuttle bus for the flight to Kharkiv. It was similar to the reality at the Brussels airport, but yet it wasn’t the same; that reality had been lost to the darkness of the past hours before.

And so it continued. I was once again on an airplane, and all that was real was what surrounded me for that 50-minute flight. Then it was gone, and reality became snowy Kharkiv and a taxi ride back to my apartment.

Finally, the entire trip – from beginning to end – had slid under the lighted circle and run off into the oblivion of the past. It was gone, and once again, my reality was my apartment, road noise and neighbor noise, trying to sleep but finding it hard.

And so it continues. “Back to reality,” as they say. Today it was work, classes, and everything else that makes up my mundane daily reality. But that too will become just a memory one day soon as it fades into the past for good, replaced by yet a new reality.

The Nature of Our Lives

The now keeps shifting along the timeline of our lives, and only what is happening now is illuminated by that little circle of light. It is the only thing that is truly real. And each reality, each “now,” constantly fades out of existence as it is replaced by a new now. And it seems to me that as I get older, this process happens faster and faster.

Vacations really drive home how this transition works, and they also present us with a certain sadness over how the now can never remain. I touched on this in a blog post called, “Post-VacationBlues,” the final installment of my series on my “Dream Vacation” to Portugal and the Azores in 2016. I noted how during the vacation my regular life didn’t seem to exist, but once I was back in Kharkiv, the entire two weeks of travel felt like little more than a dream.

Like everything else, vacations move out of the little circle of light and speed off into the darkness that becomes the past. We remember that it happened, and we have photos and souvenirs to remind us. So, in a respect, it did exist – but it doesn’t exist any longer because it’s not the now.

In another post, “Life at the Speed of Time,” I also looked at how time just flies by faster and faster to the point that most of my life just seems like a series of dreams, sort of like movies I might have seen. The further in the past certain events, places or people are, the more I question whether they ever happened at all. Once again, I know logically that they did exist, but I understand that they no longer do.

So once time rolls past that little illuminated circle and into the past it stops being real, it just doesn’t exist any longer. And the future, likewise is not real, at least not until it reaches our little looking glass and – briefly – becomes the now. Plans, dreams, hopes, expectations: none of them exist, until they do. And then they too are fleeting and are soon consumed by the past.

In those cliché admonishments about “living in the now,” we are told to focus on what is happening at the moment, to enjoy it and to get the most out of it. The reason is that once the time has slipped past the small lighted circle, it is gone forever. Most of us really don’t focus on the now and make the most of it.

I have to admit that for most of my life, I have been too busy worrying about the future or fretting about the past to really enjoy the now. And that is my loss, because someday the future will stop coming. Someday, there will no longer be a now.

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Klass Has a Big Problem

Note: This is going to be more of a photo article than anything else. Since we all know that a picture is worth a thousand words, how better to tell this story?

Klass has a real problem – with parking.

To be honest, all of Kharkiv has a problem with parking. In fact, all of Ukraine has this affliction. This issue stems basically from two things. The first is having way too many cars for the available infrastructure. The second is a “me-first” mentality among too many people here that says, “I can do what I want, and I don’t care about anyone else.” And the more expensive the car, usually the worse this mentality becomes.

For the unindoctrinated, Klass is a chain of higher-end supermarkets in Kharkiv. I suppose they are in other cities too, but I never go anywhere, so I don’t know. In the spring of last year, a new Klass store opened right across the street from my apartment building. It’s very nice and has everything I could need, although the prices are a bit steep.

In preparation for opening the store, they completely remade the parking lot in front of the building. The lot was expanded, nicely paved, and marked with plenty of parking spots, including 12 handicapped spots close to the store. They even included five special spots with recharging stations for electric cars. Besides Klass, this parking lot services a row of new stores that were built on the southwest side of the lot, and it also services some shops that had already existed on the northeast side.

During that first spring and summer, parking didn’t really seem to be a problem. People pretty much parked where they were supposed to, and at first they even honored the handicapped spots. But this didn’t last for long.

We Don’t Need No Handicapped Spots

Sometime last summer, a few of the “I’m too important to follow rules” types began parking in the handicapped spots. Why not? After all, there are no handicapped people in Ukraine, right? And once this started, the floodgates opened. Now the handicapped spots are often the first to be taken (and never by anyone who really needs them).

To make matters worse, because these spots are wider than the normal spots, it’s not unusual to see three cars take up two of these spots. And it gets even worse: sometimes a car will park with two of its wheels barely in the spot and the rest of the car extended out into the travel lane, making it difficult for traffic to move around it.

And this is made even worse by cars that crowd up to the front of the store – where there are NO parking spaces – and park so that they also contribute to blocking the travel lanes. This has been happening more and more since early last winter.

Another thing that happened was that cars began to park all day long in the travel lanes on the northeast and southwest sides of the lot. They reduce what should be two lanes of travel down to one on each side, making it almost impossible for two cars to pass each other coming in opposite directions.

And, of course the parkers don’t stop with taking handicapped spots or blocking travel lanes. They have occasionally even taken to hiking their vehicles up on to the sidewalks or grassy areas. Often they even block pedestrians' ability to get by.

Of course, there is a grand tradition of parking on sidewalks in Ukraine. You see it all over Kharkiv, and I understand it’s many times worse in Kyiv. Who cares if you block pedestrians on their own sidewalks? If they don’t drive, they aren’t important.

And remember those special parking spots with charging stations for electric cars? Well, imagine owning an electric car and coming to Klass for a recharge, only to find that all the spots are filled with nonelectric cars. Yep, these drivers have no respect for anyone or anything.

Why Has This Happened?

As I mentioned, Ukraine suffers from a lack of parking infrastructure. But even when sufficient parking is available, there are still too many drivers who will park illegally just to save themselves a few steps or perhaps just because they believe rules don’t apply to them.

But I think the bigger issue at Klass, at least from Monday through Friday, is that the parking lot has increasingly come to be seen as “employee parking” for a number of businesses in the area. Every morning, I walk along the northeast side of the lot on my way to work, and I usually walk the same route home. And I have come to recognize a lot of the same cars parked there every day. They are not Klass customers, they are using the lot for all-day parking while they go to their jobs. Sadly, I suspect that a lot of people at my company are guilty of this.

All of this extra parking chokes the parking lot and leaves a lot fewer spaces for store customers, the people for whom the lot was built. And it’s just plain ridiculous to see how the intended purpose of this lot – to service store customers – has been superseded by selfish dolts looking for free all-day parking.

At night and on weekends, it’s an entirely different story. There is plenty of space. In spite of this, people still crowd into the handicapped spots and in the area in front of the store that was not intended for parking. Bad habits are hard to change.

But Klass Does Nothing

What sort of surprises me in all of this is that Klass does nothing about it. They don’t seem to care about what goes on in their parking lot, which shows in turn that they don’t give a damn for their customers. Well, I guess that shouldn’t surprise me: no companies here give a damn about people, even their paying customers, and there is no such thing here as social pressure to do the right thing. And there is certainly no such thing as obeying laws where driving and parking are concerned. If they can’t make money on it, Klass (and the police) could not be bothered.

But this is where Klass is missing a huge opportunity. This parking lot has a single choke-point entrance that would allow them to completely control ingress and egress. It would be a no-brainer to set up a system with gates to control the entry point.

People could take a ticket when they come in, get it validated when they make a purchase in Klass or one of the other shops, and then use the validated ticket to go back out. It would be fast and easy. And they could even offer longer-term (weekly or monthly) tickets for those who are willing to pay to park there during the day. The price could be high enough to dissuade the casual parkers, and it would reduce stress on the available spaces.

What’s more, Klass needs to clearly mark those travel lanes and the area immediately in front of the store as no-parking areas. Then they need to pay for some real enforcement to keep cars out of those areas and out of the handicapped spots. Enforcement should have teeth: tow the violators away.

Will Klass ever take such action? Of course not. It’s just a dream. Assholes will simply keep on being assholes.

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