The Westin in Detroit is a very nice hotel. Which is good since I'm working from it today. Instead of flying home this weekend, Aron is flying out to Detroit to hang out with me. He's got a friend in Ann Arbor so we're staying with his friend for the weekend which should be fun. It's nice that I don't have to get on a plane this weekend but it kind of sucks that i'll be out of New York for 2 weeks straight. But then Thanksgiving week I don't have to travel which should be awesome. If I stay in NY and don't go home to Boston early, it will be the first Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday I've been in the city since the middle of August. That just blows my mind. I will have traveled every week for the last three months without a single week of reprieve. And some people do this for years and years, leaving behind families every week. I can't imagine.

My job itself is fine. If I were doing it in New York, I would be happy (or at least unhappy about something else). But this constant feeling of displacement is just too much. I'm going to give it a year (until next July) and then re-assess. I'll hope for a local project. Last night i was having the beginnings of a quarter life crisis, thinking about what I want to do with my life, where I want to live and work. And I just don't know. My brain traveled from city to city, industry to industry without settling on anything. I don't know what I want to do or where I want to be. I don't know how much energy I want to put into work as opposed to friends and other priorities. I don't know how important money is to me.

One of the directors on the project, his wife just had a baby a couple months ago, and she's unhappy about going back to work. And he was talking about how they both feel trapped in jobs they don't love because there are so few positions that will pay them enough to keep them at the life style they enjoy and pay their expenses. This is a guy who probably makes 300-400,000 a year and his wife is probably at 100-200,000. How do you get to that point where you need 500,000 to support your lifestyle? I guess you start by living in New York. I don't want that trap. I want to make enough to save. But at the same time, it's hard to resist. If I just make anotther 5,000, 10,000, 20,000..... And then where does it end? There's always someone higher up.

I think I could be good at consulting in the right situation. I'm pretty good now but not amazing. But that's not because I'm doing bad work. In a large part, it's because I don't fit in with the team. They are all guys, 10 guys, and they communicate by talking about football, basketball, baseball. They follow teams and compare fantasy draft picks and talk about players. It's either sports or work talk almost all the time. When we get on interesting topics like politics or religion or business or the news, I do fine but I feel excluded from almost all of the small talk that goes on and I really think it works against me. If I stay in this industry (manufacturing) I'm going to have to pick a fantasy football team. Which is too bad because I like manufacturing, especially operations.

It sucks too because my job has become almost the only thing in my life. I have very little going on outside of it. I feel narrow and boring 90% of the time. I don't want to live like this forever.