I have to shrug about the upcoming election. You do the best you can do with the resources you have, but ultimately a lot of things are out of your hands. If things ultimately don’t work out maybe it’s my chance to move on and do something else.

I do wish I had more practical skills, though I do think I’m pretty damn good at working with and cleaning data at this point with the R Statistical language. I know it’s a domain specific language and not in high demand but it’s done a good job at processing several million dollars in  label jobs for mailing lists, allowed for processing absentee and early voting data for a quarter million voters and helped me run a pretty damn competent data operation. And I’m pretty good at setting up very complicated queries in the Democratic Party’s Vote Builder and SQL.

And it’s not like I’m stuck here. I’m leasing my rundown apartment month to month, I didn’t buy a house or land despite looking. I’ve been hoarding cash over the past year thinking I would need it to buy a house over the past year and I have quite a bit more in stocks and bonds I could tap. I have friends and colleagues I’ve known over years and an impressive sounding title I can put on my resume and decades now of experience. And I live simply, I’ve never needed a television or home internet and are content with using my mountain bike and the city bus to get around town. My living standards are pretty low, witness my grubby apartment and my desire to live eventually in off grid cabin in the wilderness.

I’m sure next Tuesday will go okay as I did my best, even though I have ideas for improving a lot of things next cycle if I get a chance. That said, I have a good reason to worry as it’s a tough political environment for democrats and expectations are high, though I’m at minimum hoping we can out preform the top of the ticket. That doesn’t say I’m not worried. And while I’m somewhat competent at more practical and in demand languages like Python and C, I’m no expert on them and have no formal certification. And unlike R I’m hardly as practiced on them though I can certainly read and code in the them.

I’m sure whatever ultimately happens on Tuesday, it will ultimately work out for the best. Life is full of ups and downs and one can tie oneself up in knots or anxiety but you just got to push forward and do the best you can based on the circumstances. Maybe I will or maybe I won’t get to implement my grandeous ideas for data targeting my state agency but I have a lot of hope and ideas on how things can be made better.