Conference season has resumed after a five year hiatus. Last weekend the CTO was in town for one of them - blessedly I did not have booth duty - so I met up with him at an overpriced steak house downtown on Saturday evening. Really in violation of my core principles to do work functions on a Saturday evening but the current work situation is so genuinely insane and I am so far beyond my historic norms I just shrugged it off. Free expensed dinner, whatever.

He was still on CET and hungry, so we got there early, which meant the waitstaff was not out in force. We talked, mostly about personal stuff (again mega personal violation but again again, whatever), and over three or four hours housed a couple of bottles of wine in addition to a lot of steak. It must have been prom night because as we were leaving the place had filled up and there were a lot of ugly formal dresses. On my senior prom night I got drive through sandwiches and dropped acid with my best friend and later we popped a magnum of champagne in her Bronco while fireworks went off overhead for something unrelated to our dance. A million years ago. None of these girls looked like they’d be down for that sort of thing. I remember I wore an ugly dress too, red with a giant skirt, slightly too long. I wore giant platform sandals underneath so I didn’t drag the hem on the street. I did my hair like Bjork in one of her videos. I was entirely too cool for high school in Kansas in 1999.

The CTO is good at what he does, technically and in the leadership stuff. I left feeling positive about the future of my RSUs, accepting of all the excessive overtime I work, shrugging off the recent stresses. As a man, too, he reminded me of bits of former lovers, guys I almost married in the old pre-crisis days, making me a little melancholy in the hired car home. How different my life could be now if I’d married the guy who taught me how to taste and accept the wine from the som like I did for the CTO earlier in the evening, I thought. How different things could be now if I decided to stop being hung up on decisions made in the past, I thought. The sun was setting as I arrived into my tiny apartment on a high floor and I sat in the dimming light and watched the birds fly above the park below.

In the midst of the pandemic lockdowns starting in March of 2020, I was on the last business trip of the pre-crisis era, another conference for another employer - Atlanta, I think - and on the last day before I flew out I sat with my then boss in one of the bland conference center breakout rooms and talked idly about what was going on, about “current events”. He said something about meeting again in a few months after things had resolved and I just said, That world is gone forever. I could feel in my bones then that everything was changing around us and I wouldn’t be doing anything remotely similar for a very long time.

So it was nice, in a way, to feel like things were almost like they’d been in the old days, not just before the pandemic but earlier than that, when I was still more optimistic in general and less careful and less, I’ll just say it, paranoid about the ways things can rapidly fall apart.