#life #reflections #law #cannabis #pkm

A new chapter has started, in a way it's like revisiting a book series you loved and finding a new entry. I'm on my second week at the new job.

I had a shot at something different (working in the casino gaming sector)... But, I knew that it would involve being awake at all hours, and having to devote an inordinate amount of my time to the company.

The law firm I interviewed with offered me what I was looking for: straight forward expectations and a realistic workload. Law offices can be notorious for having to work overtime, deadlines are critical, and you have to juggle hearing dates and things like that. But every so often you find an attorney who has put in enough time (often several years) and has struck a nice balance. I've never worked with this particular attorney directly before, but we know a lot of the same people from as far back as decade (or longer) ago. So I felt comfortable taking the job.

Thus far the attorney and I are getting along pretty famously. Really nice guy, super knowledgeable. I'm looking forward to not only being a asset to the office and utilizing my experience, but also seeing what more I can learn. Legal research is one of the things I love to do, I also love to write. So being able to do both and get paid for it is a wonderful thing. I suppose I'm fascinated by law because it's an endless journey, especially when you get into researching how certain laws came to be or the history of how certain philosophical concepts are interpreted over time. Law is its own thing, but heavily rooted, IMHO, in philosophy. Understanding how humans interact with one another helps to understand why certain statutes are written the way they are.

In addition to the gaming company, I also heard back from one of the cannabis cultivators that I applied to. I initially didn't respond to the email because it was a rudely written request to schedule a time for a phone interview. But, in the interest of being the bigger person, I opted to craft a response to thank them for reaching out while simultaneously informing them that I took another position with a different company. The response that I got back from that message was much more courteous. Sometimes it just takes being nice to someone for them to be nice to you back. I don't know that I'll ever have the opportunity to work in the cannabis industry ever again, especially now that I've gone back into the legal sector, but maybe the two will cross paths? Unlikely considering the type of law that I'm doing, but anything is possible I suppose.

My pkm has officially been gitted. I was using it merely hosted on my desktop here at home, which was acting a server for it. I decided that I wanted to be able to have access to the pkm anywhere, or on any machine. Git made the most sense for tracking changes and incrementally backing up my pkm. I also like the idea of having another abstracted layer of data concerning my personal knowledgebase. Being able to track changes means that I don't have to worry about deleting anything because in a sense it will still be preserved, just in a different way. This video was helpful and informative. I might do a readme file for the pkm that details how I have everything set up with a basic changelog and pin it at the top here on berkough.com. I'm not sure how many people would find my notes on building a pkm interesting or informative, but I took a very programmatic approach, somewhat inspired by this guy.

Primarily I'm using my pkm to organize my writing and keep tabs on random thoughts or ideas that I have. Like this blog post; it started off life as a markdown file inside of a folder called “ideas” that lives inside my “blog posts” folder, which is part of my “main” vault. Eventually it made its way into “drafts” and then “published,” which is where it lives now.

I started another vault for “work”, but I don't have much in there right now. I'll have to start spending more time during the evenings taking notes on different code sections or statutes, opinions, things of that nature etc. It was also supposed to house notes on my programming and art, and different things like that. Those activities are more akin to hobbies for myself rather than being work though.

When I stopped working in December, I never even tried to apply for a frontend developer job after taking the bootcamp from Promineo Tech. It wasn't that I didn't learn a lot, but the program really works the best if you land a junior developer position with a company before you even complete the course, and that is absolutely possible if you're able to dedicate that much focus to the program. I was still working full time, so even though I excelled at the coursework, I wasn't putting much energy (if any) into the social connections, and actually researching the industry. You have to make coder friends and try to work with people, or find open source projects and dig through issue trackers and see if you can figure that stuff out. That's how you meet people who can introduce you to other people, and that's how you build the ability to work with others in a collaborative software development environment enough for someone to seriously hire you for money. I didn't spend any time on any of that stuff, so when I had the opportunity to work on a commercial project, I knew all the lingo for a scrum board and enough git commands to get by, but I didn't have any real practice with it, and didn't have the proper amount of time to devote to it.

Like anything else in life, you get out of it what you put into it.

(In case you're curious, I have been using AI images to spice up this post. I may continue with that in the future.)

A friend of mine and I meet up every week just to shoot the shit and compare notes. We keep each other motivated to continue moving forward and improving our lives. This week he shared with me a “Life Audit” document (specifically, it was a PDF). I was thinking about doing a blog post with basically all the steps from the PDF and talking about my approach to them. But I don't see the PDF publicly posted anywhere, or it's not easily accessible. I would say that the author is a pretty notable internet personality and “self-help guru.” It is branded content, but doesn't appear to be copyrighted... In any case, I'm not looking to be sued (should more than 10 people read this), so I'll spare you the specific steps that he walks through with his system. Instead I'll summarize the process without also promoting any one specific personality—there are a myriad of them online, you're free to pick the personality you like the best, they all essentially say the same things and they're happy to take your money. Sometimes these people are controversial figures, and I have no real context for this guy other than the title of a book he wrote, and this one PDF that my friend sent me.

For only being a 17 page document, it's not a bad way to approach the task of getting your life in order and pursuing your dreams, however simplistic his approach may be. The main idea being that you take serious inventory of your time and make sure that you're taking steps to fill your time with things that are productive and also fulfilling; emotionally, spiritually, monetarily, etc. I'm not sure if the PDF cost my friend any money, so it's possible that the PDF is just a marketing gimmick to get your buy into a larger course. That being said, simple is not always easy, and that's what is emphasized at the top of the document. So, in that regard, I get it. It would be foolish to think that any system is going to hold someone's hand until they become a millionaire, that's absurd. If it were that easy, we'd all be happy millionaires.

As I was reading through the steps, it's really sort of what I'm already doing. I'm doing it by building a personal knowledge management system though—or, interactive journal—which is a great way to organize bettering your life. The PKM stuff did come up for me when I started journaling last year and keeping a physical notebook. But, I never dove into PKM because I didn't feel that I really had the time to devote to it, after getting a recommendation from a friend for Obsidian, I decided to dive in with the new year. I still like the feel of a leather cover, cotton pages, and fountain pens—but digital is much easier to navigate and revisit things you've written. The major trade-off being that you really have to think about what you're writing when you put pen to paper. Digital is much more ephemeral. The documents you write can be heavily edited, and whatever the finished product is might not necessarily reflect what it is that you sat down to write in the first place. It's easier to edit your emotions.

Stage six of seven is taking action. This is where I'm at, and that has to do with finding a job. Something to finance this website and let me work on other projects, but also something that gives me some purpose.

Not sure what I was expecting, I had a really short interview for a law firm earlier this week, and I couldn't get a read on what the woman interviewing me thought of me. I almost got the impression that she didn't want to be interviewing me. It's not a particularly large firm. Personally, I know that I am much more comfortable with someone in-person than I am over the phone, or even over a webcam... The one thing I did like though was that she gave me time to write out answers to some interview questions rather than having to come up with answers on the spot. Obviously, if you're reading this, you know that I like to write. I'm not always a good verbal communicator.

One of the cannabis jobs that I applied for, they had me record a short one minute clip to add some “personality” to my profile. I noticed that she was using “Breezy” which is a an HR software platform that companies can use to find candidates to fill positions. It's actually really interesting. I would love to pick her brain about the types of information that she has to keep track of in the software for hiring decisions to be made.

The one portion of the frontend web design course that I took—where I did not focus a lot of my energy—were the things they wanted us to do on LinkedIn, and to promote the weekly videos we were doing for our projects. I was afraid that if I did, my employer—the one I just left—would have not acted in a supportive way. So I never really engaged and built the content that headhunters and recruiters could use to fill their HR software suites with.

More and more people are relying on software and algorithms to make those types of decisions anyway. One of the jobs I'm really interested in is as a cultivation technician. I'm dying to see what they use, I know some of it has to be tech-driven. If you haven't seen some of these grow closets that people have built, hooked up to raspberry pis to control moisture and nutrient sensors and such, then you just don't realize how sophisticated this shit can get.

Ideally, cannabis is the business I want to be in. However, I do know how to work in a law office, so I've been applying to those jobs as well. So far the first actual interviews that I've had have all been law offices. We'll see if I get any traction with any of the cannabis companies out here. But if a good offer comes along I'm going to take it, regardless of where it comes from.

I had another phone interview with a different law firm, and it was much better energy. By the end I was thinking that I probably have the job. Just a matter of waiting out the three-day weekend until I hear back on Tuesday for when they want to schedule an in-person interview.

#ProgressiveMetal,#TOOL,#cannabis,#marijuana,#storytime,#music

There are probably a dozen different draft posts that I've written where I talk much more in-depth about cannabis. As of the last incarnation of berkough.com though, it has never seemed to be the right topic to bring up or talk about, ever. I have a lot of things to say about the plant, I just feel that a lot of people tend to think of marijuana as being a juvenile and lazy drug that people indulge in. But the plant is sort of from two different worlds, and it always has been. With legalization happening across the country, I feel that we're finally getting to a place of reconciling the two plants; the herbaceous flowering annual, and the psychotropic drug—a near perfect propaganda dichotomy. The truth is obviously much more nuanced than evil weed or a miracle plant. Nothing is ever just black and white, it's Joseph's amazing technicolor dreamcoat with different tones. When viewed as a medicinal herb—in the same way as St. John's Wort or Echinacea—the effects are moderate. You would never swallow or consume an entire bottle of Echinacea, right? The same is true for cannabis, the dosage is different for every person. So you have to learn how to control your intake. But the beauty is that it's impossible to overdose on cannabis, the worst that will happen is that you get a little too paranoid, or you fall asleep.

Going back to at least Bill Clinton, it has been in the mainstream zeitgeist that even though the plant was illegal (or still is for some), it still plays a non-threatening role in a lot in our early lives, the late teens and early twenties, at least.

Blame the American war machine for the Counter Culture of the 60s that has continued to ripple through our existence, and this timeline. Hunter S. Thompson's high and mighty wave... I would argue that it didn't roll back so much as it has fed the tributaries of thought that all of us elder millenials grew up on.

That is to say, it's not uncommon for people to freely admit that they have smoked at one time or another in their past. Slowly but surely all of society is coming around to seeing cannabis in much the same way as alcohol. So let me tell you a little about my own experience.

Tool is by far my favorite band of all-time... Trolling around Reddit I found an interesting prompt on the Tool sub: What’s your first time hearing Tool experience?

I don't know that I remember exactly the first time I ever listened to Tool, but I do remember the first time I smoked a little too much—got a little too high—and listened to Lateralus. It was a late night in the middle of the summer between my sophomore and junior years in high school.

Lateralus.

Blew my mind.

It was damn near a religious experience.

Vibrant colors shifted in the darkness. I had all the lights out and my headphones on. A pair of studio headphones from the 1970s that the guy down the street was selling at a garage sale (I've actually owned quite a few pairs of Koss headphones over the years). They didn't have any padding at first, but I think my Mom came up with the idea to stuff 'em with old socks, old cut up t-shirts, or something like that. The headphones still worked well, and I remember finding out much later on that well-built speakers just continue to age like wine as long as you treat them properly and listen to them within their range... Yes, each speaker has it's own designated spec and maximum suggested listening volume. That shouldn't really surprise anyone.

I was definitely not listening to them at a reasonable volume. I'm sure they were probably rather loud at that time, and I would have been amazed as a pubescent ball of raging hormones fueled by delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol at just how engrossing the sound was.

It has been over twenty years since the album came out, and it's been a really long time since I've listened to the album in the same manner—with headphones turned up loud—but I do remember that there is one song where if you're listening to it loud enough with headphones, you can hear what sounds like someone in the background knocking on a door and yelling;

“Hey! Turn that down!”

Which, you can imagine might be jarring to a sixteen year old me who has just gotten super stoned at two in the morning when his parents have to get up and go to work in just a few hours... You can imagine what that does to someone who is inexperienced with smoking cannabis and is at the point of paranoia-stoned. I threw those fucking headphones off so fast! I thought for sure it was my Dad banging on the wall, and I freaked out about the volume level of the headphones; if my father could hear them in the next room then they really WERE too loud. Reality was far from my panicked state, with blood pressure spiked, a slight sweat from the brow, and a dry and unfinished swallow.

So, yeah, that's a nice approximation of what I remember my first time listening to Tool to be like.