family matters
why i'm choosing to live in madison vs. closer to the fam

i just got off the phone with my brother who's schooling out @ berkely. during the call, we had an interesting little almost spat about where i wanted to work and why i didn't want to work places i didn't.

previous to this conversation, i had thought that my entire family understood my distaste for the evil empire(tm) ((microsoft)), and that i certainly had no wishes to ever be employed by them.

clearly i was wrong. back to the conversation.

my brother, in his infinite brotherhood, caring, and want to look out for me offered up the idea that i could go work for said company. and i, thinking this statement was loaded with sarcasmn, retorted with and equally, if not more sarcastic.... "oh gee!? you think you could pull some strings and get me in?"

... silence ...

oops. i guess this brother and i never really had this conversation before. so we went into it. a little clumsily at first, but we sorted through it and both came out with a better understanding of it all.

the short of it is that, while the majority of my family now works for microsoft, i never will. and i don't think less of my family just because they work there. (but i do give my mom more than enough shiz when i see her because she used to claim that she wouldn't work for them)

to me, it just seems that my family looks @ the world (and makes decisions) fairly differently than i do. and for now, i'm of the opinon that while it'd be great to live/work near them so we could hang out more, it's more important for me to live/work near people who see the world more like i do...

and what better place to start than a place where you've already got one great friend (with similar world views) who can introduce you to other great, like minded people.

call it the path of least resistance... i mean, it's not that i wouldn't find like minded people in places near the family... maybe i'm just lazy like that.

maybe just call it me maintaining that great bubble of delusion for as long as i can... who's to say.