I was talking online with a friend when he mentioned he had a date with a girl he’d met on Match.com. Being the curious type, I signed up for a free account and read his profile. It is funny, because you think you know someone, and then you read their online profile, and you think “Who is this again?!”

I promised him I’d do my own online profile, except I am not going to pay money to put it on Match.com, so you, dear blog readers, get to read it. And in case I feel the need to pay to find dates in the future, I’ll probably put it up there on Match.com. 😉

Let’s see. Ah, yes. The first section on Match.com is “About Me and Who I’d Like To Date.” Hmm…

I can say with confidence that I’m unlike any other person you will ever meet. I’m an ambitious entrepreneur who isn’t afraid to risk everything in a new business venture. My risk has been met with good rewards so far, as I am the owner of a successful web hosting company. However, being a successful business owner also has its drawbacks, as I spend too much time on my computer and I work strange hours. Expect to see me work 14-18 hour days sometimes and want to take several days off and just go driving other times.

I would like to meet someone who can draw me out of my shell. I know that I work too much and I need someone who will bring some fun social activities into my life. I’d like to learn how to dance, for instance. I love driving around winding roads and getting sunburned, I love overnight trips to the coast, and I love spending time on the beach. I’ve even been known to hit a few golf balls in my time! I enjoy being outdoors, but I don’t get an opportunity to go out there often, so if you can get me out of the house and doing something fun, you will work well with me.

I enjoy surprises immensely (especially of the “Pack your bags; we’re headed out for the weekend!” kind) and I really appreciate guys who give me small tokens of affection (as I will with you… my close friends get free food whenever they’re around me; it’s a gift of appreciation from me.)

Expect to constantly be bombarded with ideas when you’re around me — if you can take my crazy, spontaneous ideas and help me craft them into workable business ventures, or say why you think they’re not workable, this helps me immensely! I have a lot of energy and enthusiasm for whatever my idea du jour is. I need someone who can keep up with me and even help temper me (with a smile) as I bounce from idea to idea to idea. Above all, I am looking for someone who shares the same passion for life that I do, and truly enjoys living and all of its nuances. It would also help if you can cook… I am a terrible cook!

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That was actually more fun than I thought. There you have it… enjoy, and feel free to analyze! 😉

It’s the next morning and I’m still sick. If possible, I feel more sick than I did yesterday. The cold triggered a huge wave of depression when I woke up this morning, which took this time to remind me that there’s no one to take care of me when I’m sick like this, and that — while I am completely exhausted and even a flight of stairs seems insurmountable — I still have to drag my butt out of bed and do everything myself.

I am now considering that this is not necessarily a bad thing.

One thing has become clear to me in the past several months. I have a 10-year-old cloud of depression hanging over my head, and I’m not going to have a successful relationship until I can lift it myself without relying on someone else.

I remember when it all started. My best friend moved away when I was in 7th grade, leaving me with no one. I can remember wandering the playground idly (I still hate the fact that they gave 7th graders recess) with no friends at all. It was the worst 6 months of my life, bar none.

That 6 months of my life, somehow, still has a grip on me. I still get depressed and lonely, even when I have a boyfriend. I get even more depressed and lonely when I don’t have a boyfriend. The last 6 months of my life have been rough, and I’ve gone through a lot. I know this is a large transition in my life; it’s the same one most people go through when they get out of college and enter the “real world.” It is probably one of the largest transition periods I’ll go through. I would say I’m depressed about 60% of the time right now. No, when you see me online, or even when you meet me in person, you don’t see it. But it’s there, and it likes to come out at inopportune times (mostly when I’m going to bed or waking up.) It hits me when I’m most vulnerable and least expecting it, and it turns me from a confident CEO to an overly-emotional stress ball in seconds.

I’ve made the decision that I have to beat this or I’m not going to survive on my own. I know this from looking at my previous depression cycles. At some point, they all got so bad that I didn’t want to live any more, and I don’t want to be in that state any longer. Some of you would advise anti-depressants or even a therapist. Though I think a therapist would probably help me more than drugs, and I haven’t quite ruled out that possibility, I’m going to see if I can beat this one myself. It’s been part of my life for 10 years and I finally feel like I have the strength to tackle it head-on.

I know facing the depression will make me face some things I don’t want to face about myself. I’ve treated a lot of people I love poorly in the past. I have actually worked out most of those by this point thanks to Landmark forum. Now it’s time to turn inward and really focus on letting that go inside myself. It’s also time to build my self-confidence and really love who I am. I’ve gotten a lot better at that, but I’m still not 100%, and I turn on myself too quickly when I do something wrong. I also tend to blame myself for things that aren’t my fault, which just makes me miserable since I can’t fix whatever it is.

I realize that there is no perfection in this life, and I won’t ever be happy 100% of the time. But if I can focus on fighting through each individual depression and finally getting to the root of it and clearing that up with myself, I can at least have a positive, healthy outlook the vast majority of the time. I can’t run away from my problems any more and hide behind relationships. It’s time to get this out and taken care of once and for all.

So I’m at this party. I have to say this is definitely one of the weirdest parties I’ve ever been to! Normally when I think of “party”, I think of a bunch of people drinking and hanging out. This party has alcohol and hanging out as well, but it’s a geek-themed party, which means everyone has a laptop and we’re all hanging out coding. I opened up an IRC channel for everyone, and I am IRC chatting with a bunch of people in the same room as I am. (Nothing to show you’re a true geek like IRC’ing to people in the same room!)

The party is at David Weekly’s house, formerly known as SuperHappyFunHouse. David is the creator of IMSmarter, which is an Instant Messaging proxy that adds some interesting features to IM. It’s hosted at Simpli, which is how I know him.

My friend Jan also agreed to come to the party, and she’s having fun showing off her magic tricks and conversing with the 20+ geeky guys here. Since I have come down with an inopportune cold thanks to David’s roommate (I was over here a few days ago for Movie Night), I am hanging out by myself and blogging. The Sudafed I had earlier is mixing with some wine I had more recently and causing some funky effects… in that I should probably stay sitting down instead of trying to stand up.

I was hoping for some interesting geek projects to show up, but so far I’ve met a lot of people programming something in Python and a lot of people surfing the web. I even saw two guys playing virtual pool on an LCD… and someone else was watching!

Normally my blogs have a “moral of the story” or share some insight, but I think I’ll leave this one just the way it is. I’m at a geek party. If nothing else, it’s better than blogging at home. 😉

Every once in a while, I have a dream that makes me realize I’m going to be happy in the future (at least sometimes.) I really do think I get sent these dreams as God’s way of saying “Stick with it; you’re going to be just fine.”

I am hypoglycemic, and lately, if I don’t get enough sugar in the afternoon, I just zonk out for a couple hours. I didn’t watch my food intake carefully enough today, and sure enough, zonk I did, right on the bed, for 1 hour and 45 minutes until my body recovered from lunch. (Yes, this stinks. But I know how to prevent it, and I just didn’t eat the right foods today.)

During my nap, I had an interesting dream. I was over at my friend’s house watching TV. Normally, he does movie night, where a bunch of people get together and watch weird old movies. (In fact, I was there last night.) In my dream, though, they had a DVD full of short little cartoon skits. The skits seemed to fall along the likes of Family Guy or Robot Chicken, and they were all 1-10 minutes long. Sometimes they’d space out a couple skits, so there would be one skit with the same characters, then a different one, and then it’d switch gears and go back to the first set of characters (think commercial break.) They were pretty edgy and definitely geared toward 18-35 males; some reminded me of South Park, but I didn’t recognize any of the characters. Having seen Robot Chicken, this definitely strikes me as a trend in the cartoon world; instead of story arcs, just make goofy skits and go with it for 10 minutes. Throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. There is a lot of good stuff in Robot Chicken and I think we’ll see more of this as time progresses. (MTV used to do some of this stuff with Liquid Television back in the day, too.)

I think the whole dream was a reminder to me to quit worrying so much about the big story arcs in my own life. I will find someone who loves 100% of me, and my business will get the capital it needs and continue to grow and thrive. In the meantime, I need to remember those moments I have in my own life that I really enjoy — watching reality TV, reading books, watching movies, and most of all, hanging out with friends. Someone said that all life is is a series of moments, and if you spend the moments you have right now worrying about tomorrow, you’ll never get to enjoy today. So here’s to today, the day when I had a good nap and a great dream, got a new customer, and got some good work done. And here’s to tomorrow, however it turns out. 🙂

And this time it’s business that has broken my heart.

I have a friend (or one of those “business acquaintance” types, since he doesn’t really know me outside of my role at Simpli) who is starting up a wireless ISP. He wants to be the Wal-Mart of wireless and target suburban areas that don’t already have DSL or cable modems. I think it’s a good business idea, but his business is much like mine in that there is a lot of competition. What happens when those areas he targets with his wireless company get DSL or cable modems? What happens when customers need more than 6Mbit bi-directional? (This will come more quickly than anyone wants to imagine.) There are a lot of “what-ifs” with his business.

Knowing him, he will probably be successful. It’s incredibly frustrating, though, when I have a company that makes well into 5 figures every month, and I am really struggling to find investors to invest even $10,000 into my business. Contrast this with him–he has this “napkin idea” of a wireless ISP, which has 0 customers and 0 revenue, and he’s already received $235,000 in investments for his company. I want investors to help Simpli become the front-runner in distributed computing to achieve true 100% website and email uptime, and, while I do have some investors who are interested, I don’t know when the checks will actually come in.

In the meantime, AboveNet is having some of the worst issues I’ve ever seen. They’ve had three outages in 5 days. I’m ready to move out and get a new location with multiple network providers so we don’t have to be chained to them. I feel stuck, however, because we don’t have all the money I need to invest in the new location to make it totally 100% redundant. That’s where the investments come in, but it seems the potential investors I talk to all say “That’s a great idea, but I don’t have the money right now. Sorry.” And another door closes on my dreams.

No one out there takes it harder than me when we have an outage. I wear it as a personal badge of pride that Simpli has fantastic uptime. When we’re down, and especially when it’s completely out of my control, there’s nothing I can do but answer unhappy phone calls from customers. Half of them berate me and threaten to leave and half of them seem to want to hang out on the phone forever and ask me questions until it’s back online. Some of them say things like “This is unacceptable.” Do you think I don’t know that? Do you not realize that every cell in my body wants to go down to the damn datacenter myself and reboot whatever switch or router it is that has fallen over this time? Believe me, whatever pain your business is feeling, I’m feeling it 200 times worse, because I have hundreds of customers upset with me (even though no outage this week has been our fault.)

We are ready to move. I have everything in line. I’m waiting for one or two investments to make it happen. I have a meeting with a couple potential investors tomorrow, so I will hopefully close something. This has just been a very rough day for me. One potential investor finally backed out, saying (how many times have I heard this?) “Yes, I’m interested, but I don’t have the money.” When I expressed disappointment, he actually had the nerve to say “Don’t stop prospecting just because you’ve had someone [him, in this case] say ‘yes’.” Perhaps I just have too much faith and trust in others, and I have to learn the hard way that hardly anyone ever follows through with what they say they’re going to do. Cases in point: Not only him, but AboveNet, who guarantees 100% network uptime. Cheers to that. 🙁