The cheese stands alone

And so it was that I found myself in the city of brotherly love last night, telephone jammed against my ear as hard as I could push it, in a vain attempt to hear the voice on the other end of the line a little more clearly as I sat surrounded in a pub with fifty or sixty of my closest chums.

It was near 11PM and I was two (Imperial, of course) pints into my evening. My manager called to inform me that we had another round of layoffs that afternoon. The remainder of my group was terminated. I am now the last man standing in my department. Everyone else has been terminated.

Humm.....I can feel the clock ticking louder and louder. Must perform at a higher level, must sell something, sell anything, must...must...must...

The next one out the door is me. Wonder how long I really have before the axe in my direction.

Parking lots

I recall getting out of the car at a shopping mall one day with my two daughters. The eldest must have been around 12 and the youngest around 8. The youngest automatically reached out and grabbed my hand as we walked through the parking lot towards the mall. The eldest stuck her hands in her pockets and walked a little faster to stay ahead of us.

The youngest asked why the eldest wasn’t holding my hand. I explained that one day, she too would be too old to want to hold my hand, and that she would be able to walk through the parking lots on her own without me. The youngest told me that she would always want to hold my hand, no matter how old she was.

Fade ten or eleven years. The youngest is now living in a college dormitory. I feel like part of me has been ripped off and hidden away.

Now I sit here in our empty house, wishing that I had her hand to hold in mind for just one or two more trips across the mall parking lot. Perhaps she doesn’t need my hand to hold on to anymore, but perhaps, just perhaps, I need her hand to hold on to once in awhile.

Get me outta here!

So I started the New Year off with a bang and came to Japan. I spent one week preparing for customer to visit me at my companies manufacturing facilities’, then one week working/wine/dine/entertaining the customer, and now one week cleaning up all the action items the customer was handing out like cookies to anyone who wandered near our conference room.

I'm tired and I wanna go home! I leave tomorrow after having been here for 21 or 22 days. Too long for me. I prefer the two week trips much more than the three week trips. The food is wonderful, but last night I found myself pondering eating from the local 7-11 just because I haven't eaten there yet. (I came to my senses.) Instead, I went to a new restaurant, one with bright shiny pictures of the food. It was terrible! While I paid attention to the menu before I entered, I didn't pay attention to the clientele. 80% school age children. Last week I was dining on Kobe beef, this week-not so much so. Anyway, the food was pretty nasty, but, at least it was somewhere new where most folks didn't seem to be bothered by my presence.

I'm not sure what I'm going to eat tonight....

Tomorrow I fly home, so I can sleep in an extra hour in the morning. Thank goodness. I'm whipped. I think (haven't calculated) that this is two 80-90hr work weeks in a row.

I think I can, I think I can...

Imperial Palace

I took my customer to visit the Imperial Palace. I should get a second job as a tour guide of historic Tokyo. (A tour guide that doesn't speak the native language.) I could just make things up about the tour....

hummm...

Time flies...

I'm tired. I had hopes that I would come back to work this year with a renewed sense of energy and excitement. I haven't. I'm just weary and want to do something else. I haven't sold anything in nearly 18 months. I can hear the clock ticking (my career expiration clock) in the background. Tick tock, tick tock.

I prayed for a few years that God would help me find another job, but at the same rate of pay. I think my prayer this year is just that I need to find another job. I suppose I should start looking, but I don't really even know what else I would do if I wasn't in this line of work.

I've been in (night/distance) school now for almost three years. Last term was a complete bust. My father had a stroke so I spent a lot of time dealing with that, and no time dealing with school. For the first time in my adult life I earned a "F" in a college course. I tried to bail out of the course, but wasn't able to since I had missed the dead line.

So all in all, this doesn't look like a very exciting way to start the year.

Again?

I was home for just a few brief days after my last trip to Japan. Like home for two days and then back on the road. The good news is that I still have a job, the bad news seems to be that I'm absorbing all the travel that my terminated co-workers previously handled. While they didn't travel all that much, their little travel times, combined with my massive travel time, is equating to no time at home for me.

This week I'm back in Japan (after spending last week in California) where I'll stay for four days, then head back to the US on Friday morning. I leave here Friday morning, fly to CA, then present materials to our customer this Friday afternoon. Humm.....customer presentation after about thirty hours of being awake....bad idea.

Ema

In the Shinto religion the Gods are called "kami". Kami represents the spirt of the earth, the wind, mountains, so forth. When we die, the Shinto regligion believes that we become those spirts, the kami. Today one form that the Shinto use for their prayers to the kami is through Ema. Ema's are smalled wooden plaques upon which the living can make their prayers to those that are departed for good fortune, success on a test, and so on.

To me it was very similar to the candles in a Catholic Church.