As has now become a yearly tradition, words from my past self to my present day self arrived this 21st of December. Here is what I had to say.

Dear FutureMe,

Here we are once again. We'll skip the pleasantries and get right to the heart.

To be quite honest, I'm a bit apprehensive about how next year is going to go down, at least as far as work goes. Being understaffed and rewriting the entire stack in the time the PMs are allotting is worrisome to be sure. I'm hoping that there will be no long nights (certainly impossible odds), but the realist in my is not optimistic.

I am, however, slightly more optimistic about that trip to Japan with your coworkers. The tickets are soon to be bought as I write this which will essentially seal three people into that deal. How things will play out while there, though, remains a bit shaded to me.

Speaking of Japan, don't really expect anything to come of the 3 month work stint over there, but it would certainly be nice. Oh, and this is of course assuming that you're still at LI, though I can't see any reason why you wouldn't be. That gig, though the honeymoon is over, is still pretty sweet.

On the girlfriend front... sigh... I can't really make any predictions. I've become disillusioned with the effectiveness of online dating as it doesn't pair you up with a person in any natural sort of way. Maybe with that senior promotion (presumably that'll happen sooner rather than later), you'll get some extra confidence and balls and can converse with ladies on a "cold call" type basis.

It seems these letters are getting longer each year I write them, so the wrapping shall begin here.

Oh, you need to bike over 2000 miles next year and get your fat body into shape. Please do that for me.

This is probably the most accurate thing I've written to date. Project Voyager, which I played a marginally large-ish role in for a while (lead web developer for the new "Me" page), was an absolute nightmare to work on, and continues to be in some cases. Any project that has people tossing out the term "PTSD" for those who have abandoned ship is not one that should be praised too heavily. In the initial stages, I did a lot of actual yelling in anger and frustration in trying to keep the expectations sane. During the course of the year, I entered what was probably actually some level of depression. I nearly stopped doing things after work at all, trying to keep what time I wasn't at work to myself just to recover so I could go and face it again the next day or week. In the end, I bailed from the project entirely (in the most hush-hush way I could, except for the long essay I wrote to managers about my thoughts on the mess). I attempted to flee to Facebook, making it all the way through the interview process only to be turned down, so instead just went to a different team which still has me working tangentially on Voyager. It's much calmer and saner overall and I'm slowly beginning to return to "normal", whatever that is.

Japan is a thing that happened, though, with a couple of work friends and myself making a pilgrimage to my home away from America. I'd like to say that this trip was way more successful than the one my brothers and I took. We went to more places, saw more stuff, and ate a larger variety of food. We hung out with the fine folk at the Tokyo LinkedIn office, who are exceptionally good at partying (from karaoke to playing wingman in Ropongi bars). To that last point, I had every opportunity to nail a drunk Japanese chick, but even my level of inebriation did not allow me miss the last train back to our hotel (our flight was the next day). Of course, I came back with all manner of used figures and such to adorn my various shelves.

Yeah, the girlfriend thing continues to elude me. I went on a couple-ish dates this year, but neither I didn't consider to be enough of a personality fit to continue pursuing (or other various circumstances). 2016 is the year I want to turn my lack of love life around (which is the equivalent of saying it'll be the year of the Linux desktop) because I'm getting bummed out watching everybody around me get married and have kids.

Finally, I think I biked six or seven hundred miles this year. Nothing to write home about after the 1800 I biked last year. I'm fatter than ever, but I think I've fleshed out a nice little plan for once the holidays and their gluttonous wiles have played out. Getting into shape will play heavily into the dating thing, methinks.

And with that, I will now go and pen the letter I will be reading and writing about next year.