The weekend is over, and I have to go back to work tomorrow. I actually went back to work today for a few hours to try to see if I could fix the issues plaguing our network. Turns out, I was able to fix one of the two problems. I fixed it pretty immediately because I spent some time yesterday just thinking through these issues, and I thought about tweaking something to see if it’ll work. It did. Everything is fixed except for our wireless issue. I tried a few more things, and it looks like I chipped away at the problem in a positive way, but we’re still having issues. I did some research, and I discovered that a Windows Update may have caused this problem in the first place. That was my initial suspicion but I couldn’t prove it. I tried some of the fixes I found on Microsoft’s own website, but they didn’t work. But I did get closer than I have, so I’m confident I can figure this out tomorrow. It could be a certificate issue, so I’m going to create a new one and see if that fixes anything.

I started doing my taxes yesterday. I had three different employers last year, and I’ve already received two of my W-2’s from them. Unfortunately, the one I have not received yet is from the employer I just don’t like, and that’s at my old job at McDonald’s. Turns out, I might have to go inside the damn restaurant and sign my name on a paper requesting to receive my W-2. They can’t just mail it out like a normal company. It’s so stupid. Anyways, from the two W-2’s I did get, it looks like I’ll be getting quite a healthy refund, and once I input my last W-2, that amount will most likely go up. What a relief. These car repairs really put a damper on my finances, and I can’t forget about the hundreds in gas I spent on my road trip to California, as well as my whole new home furnishings provided by IKEA. I’m eager to get this last W-2 so I can start paying down my debt. I’m also getting my new, bigger paycheck next week on the 1st of February, so I can start seeing how much more per check I’ll be earning, which in turn will help me see how much more I can contribute toward bringing my debt down.

Other than that, I really have nothing more to write about. It was a slow Sunday, which I loved. I watched a few more episodes of the Good Wife, I read some, went grocery shopping, and worked some on my computer. I sent out some emails to teachers who emailed me throughout the week but didn’t get back to because of the crisis I was embroiled in. I’m confident I can fix this issue tomorrow, and I wanted to get back on track. I can’t wait to get this issue behind me so I can just move on and do my job better.

This week has been hell. I hope next week will be better.

I was texting with one of my friends yesterday about my horrible week at work, and our conversation turned to self-control. I told her about my desire to drink and eat junk food and my desire to indulge in all of my worst impulses. She said she had no self-control, and I told her how easy it was to have self-control. I told her to think about how good she’ll feel by not doing the things that make her feel good. I never thought about it myself in that way, but once I wrote it down, I laughed because of how true it was. She said I get off on asceticism. I think I do, actually. During this entire journey of my blog, a big part of my life has been denying myself past pleasures. I even keep track of how many days it’s been since the last time I drank or ate junk food or a handful of other bad habits. But I have what I think is a good reason for this.

I’m impulsive. It’s not the first time I’ve admitted this to myself, and it probably won’t be the last. When it comes to my impulses, I have a hard time controlling them. And the best way I’ve found that works for me to keep them under control is to deny them outright. I deal with extremes here, and I haven’t found a way to balance my life yet. I don’t drink anymore because I don’t like who I am when I drink. I do and say stupid things, and I’ve lost people because of that. I try not to eat junk food because my health is important, and I know if I have one burger, it’s going to be easier for me to let myself slip in some more junk food into my diet. I know I can control myself, but I’m like a pendulum: I swing one way, then the other, and my momentum will always keep me swinging. What I need to do is stop swinging. I need to have balance, but that’s way easier said than done.

My friend is right, too, though. I do take great pleasure in denying myself pleasures. I do get off on asceticism. The more bad habits I can deny myself, no matter how good they feel, the better I think my life will become. It’s like a purification and a simplification of my life. For the past 139 days, I’ve learned to live without many of my past bad habits, and I’ve turned out okay. Better than okay, actually. I feel like I’m at my best right now, and if I ever fall, I know it’s going to take me a long time to reach the heights I’m currently in. I have to keep reminding myself of all the good I’ve done because my mind makes it so easy for me to remember the bad. It reminds me of it all the time. But the more I keep forcing myself to remember the good I’ve done, the great things I’ve accomplished, the less ammo my mind has to hurt me. And I think that’s a big reason for my success.

I’m not sure what the lesson is here, if there even is one. I just thought this was a nice revelation in a week I learned a lot about myself. Maybe it can help someone, because in the end, that’s a big reason why I wanted to start this blog.

I was able to fix a lot of the issues from the past few days today. Everyone has internet if they’re hard wired into our network. The wireless is still not working, which means I’m back to where I was Monday morning. That’s better than nothing, I guess. What fixed this problem was a bad ethernet port. At least, that’s what I think since all I did was move one ethernet cable to another port on our main host machine. Everything just started working on this machine, and I was able to get one of our two DNS servers working. Our secondary domain controller can finally talk to our primary one, but not the other way around. This was an issue I noticed on Tuesday, but the reverse: Our secondary domain controller couldn’t talk to our primary one, and it was this primary controller that was having connectivity issues. Now it’s our secondary one having issues. I haven’t been able to figure that out yet.

The network engineers who setup these servers back in 2013 are coming up on Monday to take a look at this mess. I tried talking to one of them over the phone and see if she could walk me through it, but she couldn’t. In fact, it didn’t even seem like she wanted to try. It was probably that and the fact that my problems were messy. Either way, relief should be coming Monday afternoon. I’m hesitant to let them come up because of how expensive they are, and because I know I can figure this out on my own. I’m planning to drop in for a few hours this weekend to try out a few more things, but I’m not very hopeful. Who knows, right? I wasn’t very hopeful when I switched ethernet ports, but it worked. Very strange indeed.

Besides all that, this week is finally over. I do have to say, it went by super fast, and because it went by so quickly, it seems like nothing happened this week in my life. I started a new book, I returned to Insanity and that totally helped with my stress and sanity, and I kept my self-control. There were a few days earlier this week where I totally could’ve convinced myself to buy some wine and buy some junk food and just indulge in all my worst impulses. I really wanted to do that, but I didn’t. I kept my cool. I kept chipping away at the problems at school, and I got some stuff working again today. I have some ideas that may get the wireless up and running again, but I don’t know until I try them. Things seem better now, and that’s awesome. I’ve learned a lot. Hell, I got a pretty quick education on how networking works. Everything from DNS to DHCP to RADIUS servers to so many other things. I know how everything is connected to everything else, and I know what tools to use to trouble shoot specific problems, and I feel more confident that I can do my job better than ever before. Of course shit still don’t work, but it will soon.

I hope.

Today was much better than yesterday, and that’s because I came out of hiding and made myself available to be seen by people. For the past three days, I’ve been locked inside my office trying to figure the issues we’ve been having with our network. All I did was stress myself out trying to figure out a problem that might be beyond the scope of my expertise. Today I accepted that. Today I allowed everyone who saw me to ridicule me, and I laughed along because I needed to. If I can’t make light of this situation, then I don’t deserve to be there. If the last tech guy can’t figure this out, then it’s okay that I can’t, either. That’s kind of horrible, but there’s truth there.

For some reason, and I’m not really going to go into much detail here, one of our servers — a very old server that the last tech guy wanted to decommission but couldn’t because of some DNS issues — worked as a DNS server. That means if I change the DNS server from any computer on our network to route traffic from this old DNS server, then that computer could get internet. I found this out yesterday, and today I changed some settings for a few of the more important people at school so they could have internet to do their jobs. That bought me some time.

I simply chipped away at the problem today. I took it slow. I read a lot. I performed a lot of tests. I tried to troubleshoot all the errors these tests gave me. It seems like I was fighting for hours just to move forward an inch. I’m understanding how everything was built and how everything works together, and it seems like the solution is just around the corner but I can’t see it. Nothing makes sense. Why these two servers are down makes no sense to me. They can see each other, they still replicate to each other, but they can’t talk to each other. If they can’t talk to each other, then no one else can talk to them, and we need them to so they could reach the internet. It’s strange.

Tomorrow I’m going to try a few more things and see if I shake anything loose. I called the company that set these servers up a few years ago, but I just got a voicemail. I left a message, but no one got back to me. I’m going to try a different number tomorrow and see if I can’t get somebody up here to figure this out. I’m thinking of working through the weekend to see if I can’t figure this out on my own. I’m confident I can, but I also don’t want to screw this up anymore than I already have. I’m taking it slow now. Doing more research, doing more tests, evaluating if what I’m looking at even needs to be done, and then carefully implementing the changes and observing how they work. If nothing happened, then I just reverted it back. Otherwise, I left it alone and hoped for the best.

Tomorrow is Friday. I thought today was Friday. I feel bad that this happened and that this disrupted everyone’s game plan for the week. I’d admit, I wanted to get this working today so I can be seen as the hero, but hell, I must’ve done something to cause this mess in the first place. What that was I don’t know. Been racking my brain all week. But hey, at least I didn’t feel like getting a drink today or stress eating. That’s progress.

Nothing was resolved today. I couldn’t get the network back up and running; in fact, I seem to have made it work. When people could once connect to the internet by an ethernet cable, now they can’t. The wireless is still down. It’s a weird issue, and the culprit has to be DNS, but the real culprit is probably Windows Update. I pushed out updates to every computer on the network last Friday, and I’ve been hearing reports about internet problems coming on Saturday. Something happened between Friday and Saturday, and I’m not sure what. Neither does Doc, the last tech guy, who came over to check it out. In fact, from around 7-10:30, we were trying to troubleshoot these issues together, and we couldn’t figure it out. What I’m going to have to do tomorrow is call the suppliers of our servers and see if they can send a network engineer over to check our setup.

It’s so weird. I don’t understand what’s going on, and everyone’s pissed at me at work because they can’t use the internet. I can’t ping our two domain controllers, but I can ping everything else. Our two main controllers are also our two main DNS servers, and everything connects to these DNS servers through DHCP. But since I can’t ping these two controllers, and everyone uses these servers for DNS, nothing can connect to the internet. These DNS servers exist; I can log on to them and use it like any other computer. The network just doesn’t see them. It’s like they don’t exist.

I don’t know what I could have done to fuck this up. I don’t know if it was even me. Maybe it was pushing out those Windows Updates. Or maybe it’s a hardware issue. Maybe I need to tick a checkbox somewhere and everything will be back to normal. All I know is that I think I’m doing fiddling and I’m ready to call in some experts. I wish I didn’t. I wish I just knew what was going on, but I don’t, and neither does Doc. We tried everything we knew to do and nothing.

I’m afraid I’ve lost all credibility at work. Hell, I’m afraid I’m going to get fired. I liked this job. This week was supposed to be simple. It was supposed to be a good week where I kickstarted a few projects I’ve had in mind. But life threw me this damn curveball, and I’ve struck out. I’m stressing out, and even though I feel better right now because I was able to talk it out with someone more knowledgable than me, the problem still remains, and I don’t know what to do.

I hope my brain can work through this problem overnight so I can have some sort of epiphany in the morning. I know the symptoms, but I just want to know the cause. If I know the cause, then I can attack it with all my might and fix it. But alas, I don’t. I don’t and it’s getting to me.

I still didn’t fix what’s plaguing our network at work, and my car was still not returned to me in working order. These two problems are really pissing me off, and I just want everything to work like they used to. Fortunately, things might change for the better tomorrow. I emailed the last tech guy today, and he replied with some great suggestions that I can’t wait to try out tomorrow. If he turns out to be right, then I was looking somewhere completely off than where I should’ve been looking. Two days down the drain, pretty much. But if I can fix it, then it was all worth it. As for my car, I’m going to have to replace the rack and pinion again because the mechanics don’t have a clue as to what else it could be. This sucks, but I may be able to cover the parts with the Autozone warranty from California. I’ll see about that when I get there.

I wish there was more to write about than that, but these last two days have been rough and have consisted nothing else but these issues. I wish I could say that I’ve tried to live my life more meaningfully, but I haven’t. That sense of quiet desperation? Yeah, that might’ve been be foreshadowing all the issues I’ve been having thus far this week. I did finish my first book of the year yesterday: Dennis Lehane’s the Drop. It was a fun read, and I’m kind of ashamed it took me two weeks to read it. I’m in the process of changing that today. I’m going to try to get more reading done this year, and that just means finding the time. I gotta cut something out and I think that’s going to be TV.

I had to send out an email to the entire staff this morning informing them that I was having issues trying to get the wireless working. It was a hard email to write but a necessary one because I was getting multiple emails in the first 15 minutes of my shift from teachers complaining about their wireless. If I wanted to figure this out, I needed to be free to do my job, not babysit everyone who needed help. It sucked, but I had to do it.

I feel bad that I wasn’t able to fix this issue on my own. I thought I had this job under control. I was thinking about the future, trying to plant some seeds now for bigger things down the line. Hell, I was even excited about it last week when I devoted an entire entry on one of those exciting projects. And then bam! Life threw me a curveball and I swung at it and missed. I can’t wait to go to work tomorrow and figuring this shit out with the new leads I have now. I want to put this behind me so I can get back with my life.

I guess I don’t want anyone to see me as the fraud I think I am. I’m not trained. I didn’t go to school. I’m self-taught. There’s things I just don’t know. I’m learning a helluva lot more now, but at what cost? I seriously thought of quitting, and if not that, I seriously feared that I was going to get fired. I’ve been feeling stressed today, but I’m happy with how I’m handling it. I’m not done yet. I still have some fight left.

I’m going to bitch about work this entry, and it might not make any sense or be that entertaining to read to anyone but myself. For that, all I have to say is fuck off. This is my space.

Today was supposed to be a good day. A normal day. A day to relax and get some projects off the ground. It was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which meant no students, which meant time to myself. That’s not what happened. The moment I stepped inside the high school building, I was told by a few teachers that the internet wasn’t working. I checked my phone to see if I was connected to the wireless, and I was, so I figured something happened to this teacher’s laptop. I go check it out and sure enough, I couldn’t connect to the internet. Little did I know that this was just the start of a whole day of pain.

My phone could connect to the internet. My laptop could connect to the internet. My iPad could connect to the internet. The teacher’s laptop could connect to the internet if it was hardwired to the network. But try to connect to one of the available wireless networks? Nope. All we got was an error message that said Windows could not connect to the network. It was so quick all the time that I thought maybe something was misconfigured on the laptop itself. I tried manually creating a connection to the network, and that didn’t work. I checked the logs, did the whole ipconfig gameplan, even restarted until my fingers bled, and nothing. So I went into my office and started checking my domain controllers.

My domain controllers were giving me errors concerning our DNS server. Error and error after error. Great, I thought. A start. But I didn’t know why they were giving me these errors. Nothing was changed — hell, nothing was touched since I left Friday that could’ve set off these errors. I went through each error and looked up solutions for them online. I fixed error after error after error until those errors didn’t come up anymore. Great, right? I fixed it. Nope. I tried my work laptop — which were giving me the same errors as the teacher laptop — and nothing. Same errors. I rebooted, flushed the DNS, tried making sure the changes I made to the server propagated across the network and into my laptop. Nothing. It didn’t work. I was stumped.

I tried checking the Group Policy, changing the DC’s NIC settings — which reminds me, out of our 2 DC’s, each with 8 virtual NIC’s that control our entire network, only one NIC was giving me issues. It was the switch controlling the IP address to my primary domain controller, or PDC for short, and it wasn’t connecting to the internet. It had no internet access. I checked and re-checked ad infinitum it’s DNS settings, its DHCP settings, everything I could, and nothing. It was giving me limited connectivity and I didn’t know why. I still don’t know why. I tried everything I knew to do, including exhausting my Google-fu, and nothing. I couldn’t figure it out. It pissed me off then and it pisses me off now as I write this.

Once my shift ended, I was pissed off. I wanted something good to happen. My car was supposed to be fixed today. On Friday, the mechanic told me they needed to order a new part that wouldn’t come until today, Monday. But once it came, he said, it’ll take 30 minutes to install. It was a sensor, he said. They’re easy to install. Great, I thought. Lets go get my car back. I get there, and I was told the mechanic couldn’t get to my car today. He’ll get to it first thing tomorrow morning. Great, I thought. Just great.

So I go home and kick ass during Insanity. I missed sweating. I missed pushing myself to my limits and feeling exhausted afterwards. Hell, exhausted during the workouts. I earned my sleep tonight. I earned my steak dinner. Except… I wanted to season my steak with pepper. The bottle I had was running empty, so I went to open a brand new one. It was wrapped in plastic, so I tried taking the plastic off. Somehow the lid was open, so when I pulled the plastic down below it, the lid popped off and I emptied the bottle of peppercorns all over my floor. Fucking great. Just… great.

What a fucking day. And my back hurts, and I’m still angry. Great.

Some people don’t like journalling because they don’t like trying to find a narrative to their lives. I never considered it that way until I read something yesterday from a guy who likes to keep a log of what he does throughout his days. He’d rather log that he had a taco at 12 PM on Friday than write an entry that may or may not include the fact that he had a taco. Journalling means different things to different people. I’ve tried keeping logs of what I do, but it bored me. The only log I really try to keep are the books I read, which includes the day I started them and the day I finished them. I’ve tried to keep logs on the television shows I watched, the food I ate, and the music I listened to. I like writing. I like thinking deeply about my day and trying to figure out that hook to start me off into some sort of narrative with no idea where it’ll take me.

Journalling is freeing. I learn more about myself during this act than at any other moment in my day. Because I know this, because I go through my day with the awareness that anything is fodder for the content of my journals, I can live my life freely. I don’t try to create a narrative because that just feels disingenuous. I live it as personally and as honestly as I could because then I can delve deeper into what I’m made of, and only by tearing myself apart and putting myself back together can I see what I’m made of. That’s why I really love journalling. The added audience aspect of it included in the openness of a blog makes me extra vigilant to be honest.

Today I ran some errands, cleaned up my house, and did my Weekly Review. I watched a lot of the Good Wife on Amazon Prime, and I took a few naps because my bed, pillows, and sheets are so comfy that it’s hard to stay awake while lying down on them. Pretty boring and standard day in the life of Mario. Going off of yesterday’s entry, I’m feeling desperate for something. It feels like I’m waiting for something. Someone to come into my life. Something to change it. Time to pass before my life actually starts. I don’t know.

I had a feeling earlier today. I’ve told some lies that I’m ashamed of telling. The lies themselves don’t matter. They’re small stuff, like telling someone I watched something — a TV show or something — when I haven’t. I used to tell lies all the time and didn’t care. Hell, I’m keeping some pretty big lies I told as a kid that I’m keeping from people even now, and I don’t feel that bad about them. It’s the lies from the past 5 years or so. One of the defining transformations I wanted to do was to stop lying, even small ones like those. And every time I fail, I feel it immediately, and I feel guilty. Sometimes I’m able to “save” it by backtracking or something and then telling the truth, but other times I don’t. I remember lying about watching a USC football game a few weeks ago at work, and that just ruined my whole day. I don’t know why I lied about except maybe just wanting to fit in. But all that came back today while watching highlights of the Seahawks/Packers game. I imagined talking to some co-workers about it tomorrow and talking to them like I watched the game when I just watched highlights. It’s stupid. I can just say I watched the highlights. But it’s bothering me for some reason. Worth writing about, at least.

I guess that’s what journalling is about, right?

I want to do things better. I want to do my blog better, I want to do my novel better, and I want to do every aspect of my life better. I don’t know how — I have some ideas for some things — but that’s how I feel after today. Sometimes I wish I didn’t feel this way. Life would be easier, I think, if I didn’t feel so dissatisfied with it so much. What’s the point?

I felt really good about myself today after I cleaned up around my house a bit. I cleaned up my desk, my bookshelf, and my books, and I like what I did with it. I stepped back and looked at my home, and I really loved it. I came up with more ideas as to how I can improve it, but I haven’t committed to anything yet. I don’t know why this stuff makes me happy, but it does.

I also, finally, scanned all the papers I’ve accumulated since before my vacation into my computer. Many of those were statements, and I felt bad again when I had to go into YNAB and reconcile my accounts. I spent so much money on car repairs, on gas, and at IKEA, that I hope it all becomes worth it. I think it does, but some old feelings are returning, and I don’t know what to do about them yet.

I became enamored with minimalism all those years ago because I had a lot of stuff, and I wondered what the point of it all was. Some of those feelings came back while organizing and cleaning my stuff. There were faint, but I recognized them from another life. I’ve caught up with my life from three years ago, and now I’m ready to get back into it. I have dozens and dozens of books stacked on my side table that I haven’t read yet. Books I bought years and years and years ago. It’s funny how different I am from the person who bought these books. Old ideas and old yearnings came back, and part of me has grown that I don’t feel those same old things anymore. I know I’m going to enjoy these books — hell, some of them are making me excited to start on them quickly — but it feels like I need to read them because I have them. Because I spent money on them, and they’re sort of a promise to my old self. A part of me thought I’d be a better person if I read this book or that one. Maybe I was right? Only one way to find out.

I like who I am, and I like who I’ve become, but I’m also dissatisfied with myself, and this inherent contradiction confuses me. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. Thoreau wrote that in Walden, one of my favorite books of all time. That quote just popped up in my head, and that’s exactly how I feel right now. Desperate for something, but I’m not sure what. I’m tapping my foot on the floor, always looking at the time, waiting for something, yearning for something soul-quenching, but it hasn’t arrived yet, if it ever will. Will I ever find fulfillment? I don’t know.

My life is dictated by choices, those I’ve made and those made by others. Because I believe in free will, I have the power to choose which choices I make, including those made by others. The way I react is, in a sense, a choice. I can react positively, negatively, or somewhere in between. The life I want to live is my choice, and who I choose to be right now is a choice. The fact that I’m writing this entry right now was a choice I made. Habits help make these choices easier, and if these habits are trained to be good and beneficial, then that was a choice. I wanted a certain outcome, so I decided to do what I needed to do to get that outcome. The more automatic I can make a lot of my choices, the better off I’ll be, especially if many of those choices are the best and most beneficial for me.

But sometimes I still make bad choices. Somewhere along the way, I made a choice that damaged my car. I’m not sure where — maybe it was the moment I decided to drive to California, or even to the moment I decided to buy the car in the first place — but I made it. I made the choice to have the dealer help me out, and today he finally did. We were supposed to meet in the morning, but he was running late, and I had to go to work, so I left without having the meeting. About 20 minutes into my shift, he dropped by my office with the loaner car I was to borrow while he worked on my car. That. Was. Incredible. When I saw him at my office, my jaw must’ve dropped all the way to the floor because he was someone I never expected to see in my office. After work, I drove back to the dealership and discovered the mechanic was stumped as to what could be the problem. They ordered a new part that won’t come until Monday, so I’m out of a car until then. I was questioning my choice of dealer before today, but after, I felt better about it. Who would drive to my job just to try to fix my car?

Another bad choice I’ve made concerns her. I fucked up, and I lost a friend. I made the choice of emailing her this week after four months of no contact, and she hasn’t replied. I then made the choice of texting one of her co-workers, and one of my friends, to tell her that I emailed her. I won’t hear back — if I even hear back — for another few days, so there’s another thing I’m waiting on. I also gave in and bought my comforter. I mostly bought it for aesthetic reasons, but I know it’s going to keep me super warm and super comfy. I was just tired of making my bed with three blankets that don’t amount to much individually. I also received my very nice and very beautiful cotton sheets this week, and they’re so soft and comfortable that they needed a nice comforter to go with it. I thought it was okay for me to buy it since my paycheck this week was much, much higher than I thought it was going to be because I had more paid vacation hours than I thought I had. I’m loving this job more and more.

I chose not to workout this week because of my health. I think that was a good idea, but I didn’t realize how much I’d miss working out. I enjoy the extra time not working out has given me, but I missed feeling good and tired and energized and everything else working out made me feel. I am feeling better health-wise, so I’m confident I’ll be back to my normal routine on Monday. I hope I choose to workout even harder than before and feel even better.

I’m in charge of my life. The choices I make defines who I am, and I’m the only one who can make those choices. I hope to learn more about myself to inform my decision-making abilities a lot more than ever before so I can have the best year I possibly can. That’s one goal I’m making toward building the house I want.