Woohoo! As of yesterday, I'm officially an owner of real estate. Or as a colleague of mine said, welcome to the club of the high debtors. :)

Sometimes I wonder if there is any truth at all to my claim that I love to write. Can I say that I have ever done it consistently over a longer period? Can I say that I am ever pleased, or even satisfied with what I have written? Can I even say that I have ever derived any pleasure from it?

The answers to those questions are: Absolutely not, on very rare occassions, and only if you regard “a constant struggle with your inner self” as a form of pleasure. So let’s recap: I haven’t done that much writing in my life in the first place, and when I do write, I only manage to produce a few crappy pages, even after hours of frustration. Even in all my imaginations (and boy, do I have tons of those!), that is not how I would define love.

Yet I always feel uneasy inside whenever I haven’t written for a while. This blog is a good example. I’m not updating it as often as I originally thought I would, but I keep thinking about it EVERY SINGLE DAY. It’s so frustrating. I can have a very satisfying job, lead an extremely rich and full life with all my friends and family around me, but as long as I don’t write, I will never feel as if I am ever really complete.

Writing. I can’t live with it, but I sure as hell can’t live without it.

Hmm… On second thought, maybe what I feel isn’t that far off from “love” after all.

Yikes, it’s almost been a month since my last update. I have been busy, but not in an excessive way, so I can’t use that as an excuse. It’s just that I don’t really know what to write about lately. I don’t think my personal life is interesting enough to justify updating 2 or 3 times a week. I’d probably just bore you to death with my ramblings (much like I’m doing now). And to be honest, some things are still too personal to share with the entire Internet community. I’ve been very open in some of my previous posts (for me anyway), but it always scares the hell out of me to publish them.

Work has been great lately. I’m working on several reports which the marketing department will use in their strategic decision-making (in case you’re wondering, yeah, I used the phrase ‘strategic decision-making’ just to sound important). But the best thing is that the company is developing a new database, which we recently started using. There is so much more data available in the new database than in our current database and we just barely scratched the surface on all the potential possibilities the database offers us (and it’s still a work in progress!). It gives quite a kick every time we discover something new we could use (I guess getting excited about databases now officially makes me a nerd. Btw, did I mention that Excel really kicks ass? :). I just need to radically improve my time management skills, they really suck.

The funny thing is, about 10% of the skills and knowledge I’m applying at my job is acquired through my education (and that is a very generous estimation). The other 90% is acquired through work experience and personal interest. I’m not saying that an education is totally useless (because it’s not), but I think it’s subjective for every person. Modern society is way too fixated on degrees. My ability to write a thesis has absolutely no correlation whatsoever to my ability to write an SQL query. In fact, I’m willing to bet that 90% of all graduates will never do anything that’s even remotely similar to writing a thesis in their entire future careers.

But I’m boring you to death again with my ramblings. This post certainly ended up being totally different, not to mention much longer, than I originally intended. Must be the effect of not writing in such a long time :)

P.S. See how cunningly I managed to write a conclusion that refers back to the beginning? As some people would say, the circle is round (or is that a Dutch expression?) And you thought this post was jumping all over the place and going nowhere.