The Future's So Bright

Confession: I forgot to post yesterday. Not because anything went wrong. Because everything went… fine. I stretched. I slept great. I hit the weights, ate well, kept the foot behaving. That’s the whole report. Some days recovery is just maintenance, and maintenance isn’t remarkable enough to earn its own entry. And that’s okay.

But if I’m being honest about why I forgot, it’s this: I’ve been completely immersed in a new goal.

I’ve known about myself for a long time that I am wholly, almost embarrassingly, motivated by goals. Big ones. The kind that demand a stupid amount of work. Like running 100-mile races. And when I physically can’t do that, I go looking for some other big thing to throw myself at instead. Right now, that thing is getting as advanced as I possibly can on all things A.I.

< Cue eyerolls >

I know, I know. But here’s the unglamorous reality. My job, and honestly my entire career field, is a little bit in the tank right now between A.I. and the current administration. Spoiler alert: I’m a federal government UX contractor, which is a double kiss of death these days. Last year, after the DOGE-ing of all DOGEs, I had to let three-quarters of my 64-person team go. So I don’t have the luxury of pretending A.I. is a fad. It’s the next shiny thing, and if I had my way, I’d spend all my time on it.

I love it. I’ll say it plainly. I even use it to build these very posts (NOT the writing, mind you; that’s all me). I just love using it for basically everything now. It wasn’t always like that. I only really fell into A.I. right around the time I started planning this surgery. I figured, if I’m going to be chair-and-couch-bound for weeks, I might as well lean all the way in. And so I have.

I passed my first Claude exam two nights ago. When I’m not working or using A.I. for work, I’m learning everything I can about it, because if I’m going to spend this much time sitting still, something useful had better come out of it.

Which brings me to the actual point.

For anyone staring down days, weeks, or months of being laid up: find another thing. Find something you can pour that restless energy into, something that keeps the spark lit. That itch to get up and do something interesting to you, even if you’re bad at it. Especially if you’re bad at it. For me, this has always been how I stay sane through a long recovery. In 2022, laid up with the other foot, I decided that was the perfect time to go get a second master’s degree. This time around, I noticed my company was willing to throw actual cash at anyone wanting to expand their Claude horizons, and I was not about to leave that on the table.

Since the surgery, I’ve built several genuinely great products for work that we’re now selling. I’ve earned a few OpenAI badges. And I’m currently grinding toward my Claude developer certification. I’m told that if I finish it before the end of August, there’s a bonus in it for me.

So that’s the plan. Fuse the foot, pass the cert, collect the bonus, and immediately spend a responsible fraction of it on more limited-edition Oreos for the research budget. A future’s-so-bright kind of week, shades and all.