Driss-A-Blog

This stems from a sober realization that I had a few months back that I needed to plot out my life. My primary goals are: 1. find a community, 2. get married, 3. have a family. Those are pretty simple. And I was in tears at the time because I realized that those goals will be nearly impossible to achieve considering where I am right now and how my life is currently proceeding.

I consider myself to be liberal Modern Orthodox. If you go to YIOP, the local Modern Orthodox synagogue, and you look at the women's section, you'll notice that the women are either teenaged, or married. That's it. I don't know why there's a paucity of women my age. Apparently, when they turn 21 or so, they all move out. That's admittedly a bit of a silly way to think about it. But to think that there's a realistic number of them in the city, and make decisions based on that, would only be deluding myself. And I have to stop doing that.

What are my options? One is to travel to local cities, like Chicago, Toronto, and Cleveland, to meet girls. But I did that once. Even though we phoned every night, seeing someone in person once a month is not enough. I put myself through enough emotional pain over that to make that dating rule #4. As much as that would be convenient, that's not really an option.

That pretty much means moving. Frumster used to show statistics about its membership. If you worked out the numbers, it turned out that New York City had as many members as all the rest of the country put together. New York is a great place to visit, but I can't imagine liking living there.

Are there any other places in the Northeast that are close enough to NY? Am I willing to do a LDR from an hour away from NY? I don't know yet.

What about my job? My house? My friends and family and relationships here? As hard as it is to say, they're sunk costs that I cannot afford to let affect my decisions about my future.

There are two big problems to figure out. A job, and my house.

The job. I love my job, except for the commute. If I move I cannot keep it. Even if I could tele-commute, the pay would not be sufficient for an increased cost of living. So I'll need to find a new job. I've been looking around the New England/New York area but haven't found much in the way of Mac programming jobs. I know C/C++, and I've lived the past year in J2EE land, but the idea of working on servers isn't appealing to me. I'm much more of a end-user app person, building UIs. I have extensive InDesign plug-in experience, but that's just as specialized a skill as Mac programming and just as difficult to find a job in.

The house. I am the owner of a 1400 square foot ranch. What do I do with it? Am I planning on moving back to Detroit after getting married? Should I lease it? Sell it? What do I do with my 1400 square feet of furniture and furnishings? I could leave them and lease the house as furnished. I could sell most of them and bring the rest with me. And I don't even know how to start in finding a place to live more than 500 miles away.

But what choice do I have? Very little. And the longer I agonize over it, the worse it's going to be.