1998

Jobs, Culture and Life

From:    LARRY M. MIXSON
Date:    2/18/98 11:53am
To:      Elizabeth
Subject: Re: Jobs and Culture
 
Elizabeth,
Sure, I remember Maslow and his hierarchy. I guess I have not worried too much about the bottom of the triangle in many years. Having a good income and has allowed me more time for self developmental, cultural, societal and spiritual pursuits.
I am not so sure about the "modern terms" having no threat of being downsized or outsourced. These are realities of the current and future job market, (Toffler I had read Allen Toffler’s books Future Shock and The Third Wave.
  ). I have never had a job last more than five years and of the past four jobs I have been laid off twice and have been through three mergers and downsizings. The days of working at a job for 30 years and retiring (like my father has done) are gone. I find the key is to keep current in one's field of choice be flexible, always keeping an up to date resume and continually looking for the next job. Yes, I know, approaching 50 makes one review the past, think about the future and perhaps give it all up to take different path. I sometimes have these urges to give up computers and take up something like woodworking. But alas, I am not quite ready to give up the certainty I have now for an uncertain future. Perhaps as you suggested, a retirement career.
I get great pleasure from my bicycling. The paths and trails in this area are great. I usually start riding in the spring, late April, and ride till it gets too cold in the fall, early October.
 
I was surprised to hear about what you did for work. I would have thought that you would have got your Phd and be a professor doing research at some university. And Montgomery Alabama of all places, how did you end up there? Of course it is often by some strange coincidences that we end up where we are. All though I love the DC area I would never have guessed I would have ended up here.
 
I will be accepting the new job today but will not be starting until mid March. You can continue to reply to my email for now or you can always send to "mixsonl@acm.org" which is my account with ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). It will not change.
 
Yes Escher is the artist who does the hands. He was into perspective, foreground, background, etc. The book Godel-Escher-Bach compared his art concepts with the mathematics of Godel and the music of Bach.
 
Major computer junkie, well some might think so. I do it at work and do considerable reading on the subject. I am fascinated with the net and web but seldom spend more then 7-8 hours a week on it, seldom from home. I have had a high speed connection at work and so usually browse from there. I often look up information for work and pleasure on the web but the web can be a vast wasteland of meaningless content. I do have a PC at home but I don't spend a lot of time on it. Lately I have been learning to play the piano. I have a piano keyboard connected to the PC and a music teaching program. I just started year 2 lessons.
Larry
 

And so our exchange began. Most every day in the following months, with few exceptions, Elizabeth and I exchanged emails on a variety of subjects from music, the past, present, books, movies, expectations, and more. She seemed to be a much more honest, straight forward, exposed Elizabeth than I knew back in the 70’s when she seemed cold, distant, and broke my heart.  It was so easy to tell her things, things I didn’t, or couldn’t talk to Julie about. What this meant for my relationship with Julie I didn’t know, I had no intention of leaving Julie for Elizabeth, I had giving up any and all romantic thoughts and feelings for her long ago, but yet her she was again in my life, engaging me in conversations that I didn’t have with Julie.

The conversation with Elizabeth was like out of some science fiction movie in which there is a disembodied, artificial intelligence that you can talk to. Unable to physical touch or see, inside the computer, living in the ether of the internet. Intelligent, non-judging, inquisitive, informative, easy to talk to, to tell it, errrr… her, about myself.  I sat there and typed messages on my computer and the computer would respond the next day or sometimes in a few hours. It was like Elizabeth was the personas in one of the science fiction movies I’ve seen like HAL in 2001 Space Odyssey, Tron, or the comical  Max Headroom.

But it went both ways, she opened up and revealed things to me that she had never revealed in our previous 24 years of knowing each other. It was a glimpse into her life as well as hers into mine. I got to see who she was, who she had become, how she felt.

Laid Off

A Conversation with Elizabeth