kad.

Jorge Gallegos' blog.

On being 32


So, back when I was young and carefree (that has to be around the high school years probably) I, for whatever reason, got the strong feeling that I would die at 28. Don't ask me how, and don't ask me why, I am no psychiatrist but there's probably some name for this disorder (there's a name for everything in psychiatry after all, right.)

Fast-forward a few years: I am now 32 years old, already 4 older than my imaginary time limit, just as lost and confused as I was when I was still in high school. Many things have changed in 16 years, to wit:

  • I finished high school (duh)
  • I broke up with my (then) girlfriend
  • I successfully wooed who (still) is my wife
  • I started college, along with my best friend... He would later drop from college and move to the US, lives in Las Vegas right now
  • At some point during my college years, I learned about the existence of Linux, which may seem a trivial milestone but believe me when I say that this particular event has shaped my life a lot more than many others
  • I met a bunch of awesome friends, learned a bunch of valuable lessons (mostly about will, and how much the human body can go on without food)
  • Finished college! Then started working right away. Yes I was very, very lucky to land a job just with my associate degree...
  • I got married! And about 1 year later v2.0 was born (incidentally, we just celebrated her 10yo anniversary last week: yes, it's been 10 years already from then until now)
  • I went back to school to finally get my bachelor's degree. A little harder to accomplish this time because there were so many things happening at the same time. I finished tho! And I gotta say I even had some fun and got me some new life-long friends from here
  • ... And then v2.1 was born. If v2.0 is my pride, v2.1 is my joy, and she makes sure of that every day
  • At some point, I finally decided that I was never going to get the job I really wanted if I stayed where I was. That is, up to that point in my life I'd been a (arguably successful) web developer, and even had climbed up the corporate ladder a little bit, but that was definitely not what I wanted to be
  • I had the chance to work for Google and I took it. There were some snags during my (11mo) contracting gig, but all in all I think it was a net positive experience
  • After 2008 and the totally-not-a-recession I went back to being a web dev for a while, but at that point my path was set and I somehow landed a job as a full-time sysadmin at digg in late 2009

Fast forward a handful of years to the present: second gig after digg and I am still working in San Francisco as a systems administrator.

I am now 32 years old, and I wanted to start this recap of my life from the last binary-significant number in my life: 16.

Here's then to however many days I have left in my life thread. I stopped caring about the day I would die a while ago, I have enough worries in my life to care about a thing that is 100% certain, it'll happen when it is time, I guess.

Let's rock.