Category: Life

General updates about what’s happening in my life, and personal writing.

This is fine. (Happy 2015)

This is fine.

For whatever reason, this comic (by the illustrious KC Green) comes to mind when I think about the past year. Not trying to be a downer — life is, on the whole, pretty good. I think why it feels so emblematic of 2014 is that so much of the year was spent trying to maintain an even keel, some level of equilibrium, as if I somehow had my shit together after a major personal, professional, and emotional shift. Did I actually have my shit together? No. Do I have it together now? Hell no. But it was still the right decision to make those shifts.

Life Update

I’ve been playing a fair bit of Final Fantasy XIV (Hyperion server, come say hi), which has been a nice escape distraction pastime. I’ve got two characters (yes, even on a game where you can play every class on one character, I still make alts), and have thus played through the main storyline twice now. It tickles the right mix of nostalgia, new fun and lore, and “the pretty”. We’ll see how long it holds my interest!

My brother Uriah came down to visit the other week. It was excellent to see him, and I’m glad he had a chance to explore San Francisco a bit. (We also got to see our cousins who live in the area, which is always fun.) We went for a really nice drive down Skyline, into the hills between the Bay and Santa Cruz, down through Big Basin State Park, and then back up the coast. One of the nicest things about it (other than some good brother time) was the lack of cars for most of the trip — it wasn’t until we were almost into Santa Cruz that we really hit any traffic to speak of, and there were long stretches where we were the only car on the road, winding through tall redwoods and the random opening out onto valley vistas. It was a nice reminder that some space and nature isn’t that far away.

Working through some depression and remnant guilt/overdeveloped sense of responsibility, but that’s pretty normal and not really new. I feel like I’m managing alright for the moment, which is a good spot to be.

At some point I’ll go back to posting pithy/interesting videos and links and writing essays and reviews and other such stuff that would be interesting to more than just friends. Right now, I’m mostly just glad to have an outlet for saying “I’m still here.”

Next: 2015

It may be a month late to do new year’s resolutions, but time is sort of wibbly-wobbly anyway, and they’re not really resolutions so much as planting tiny little fires under my ass to try and live up to my own expectations and desires.

  • Travel to at least one place I’ve never been (preferably in another country).
  • Create more. Even if it’s chaotic and a mess and not what I was trying to do. Because it feels good, and because it’s how you get to a point where you DO make what you were trying to.
  • Take my career next steps. There are a few things I’d like to explore.
  • Start dating again. It’s been over a year. It’s time.
  • Save some money. It’s a good idea in general, and there are also some known expenses that will inevitably be coming (e.g. my car won’t last forever, and it’d be nice to not have to scramble to replace it when it dies).
  • Make some new sites/redesign this one. Gets back to that “create more” thing. Too many of my ideas are “needs regular use/updates” projects, but can’t hurt to make them anyway, or come up with some one-off pages/sites.

These are my own goals/expectations/resolutions/desires/whatever-you-want-to-call-them — I’m mostly posting them for myself. That said, feel free to come up and ask me what I’ve created lately, or help brainstorm places to visit.

Wading into the Brambles

I’ve been debating doing NaNoWriMo this year. I’ve participated on and off for years, though I’ve never finished. At this point, it’s been a long time since I’ve written fiction (or told any sort of story, fictional or not), and I miss it. It’s a little weird to say that, since a) there’s technically nothing stopping me from doing it now, and b) I was never all that amazing at it. (I’m trying really hard not to just completely bag on my writing ability, since people seemed to generally respond favorably to what they read, and bear in mind Ira Glass’s quote on creative work, but it’s hard. Even with the stories I was moderately pleased with, there was SO MUCH room for improvement.)

I do miss it, though. It’s weird — I’ve felt blocked to the point of frustration for years now, and unable to bring myself to get past it, even though I know the answer is simply to keep it up until I get through the brambles. I’ve been thinking about it a lot for a while now — the dearth of creative outlets and making in my life, and it really struck home a little while ago. I was having a conversation with someone who is a maker and doer (and just generally awesome person), and we were talking about hanging out sometime, and they said they looked forward to hearing/seeing what I make. I was instantly filled with embarrassment, because I felt like I had nothing to offer to that conversation. I love creative people — it’s what I’m attracted to, both in friends and otherwise — and when given this opportunity to make a more solid connection with someone I already liked and wanted to get to know better, I felt like I had nothing to contribute.

Note, it wasn’t anxiety, it was embarrassment. I was embarrassed — I felt like I was a poser who’d been called out on their facade. I realize that isn’t really fair to myself or entirely accurate — there’s room for people who celebrate art and creativity, who are supportive and the first to cheer others on, and that doesn’t somehow make them a sham. But feelings aren’t rational, and it doesn’t feel like enough to validate the role creativity has on my personal identity.

So, it’s time to wade into the brambles again. It’s been so long that I don’t even remember what telling a story feels like on my tongue, the heft and shape of a narrative in my fingers. It’s time to correct that. I’m debating doing NaNoWriMo this year, and it almost doesn’t matter if I finish, as long as I actually begin.

The Happy List

If you haven’t gone through the archive of A Show with Ze Frank, I highly recommend it. The topics range all over the place, and the tone can vacillate from serious to silly from one episode to the next. There are a lot of times where I feel like he’s struck a chord, and says or shares something that deeply connects with me and my own experiences.

I could keep rambling about that (and maybe I will, sometime), but I actually wanted to share a particular video that I think poses a good question, about what makes us happy. Go ahead and take a minute to watch it, I’ll wait.

I love this concept, and is one I’ve thought about a lot in the past, the notion of the little moments or vignettes of experience that allow you a moment of happy contentment. It’s part of what I try to get at when I talk about the notion of “Festina Lente”. Being present in the moment, not rushed. Attentive. (It’s also one of the things I enjoy about Amélie — savoring the little moments, cultivating alternative pleasures.)

There are a lot of moments I appreciate, but here are a few:

  • Walking through dry leaves in the fall.
  • The smell of the woods and the fields after a good summer storm.
  • Biting into the first apple of the season.
  • Watching snow and ice melt into the brook on the first warm day of spring.
  • Watching traffic lights sway in the evening winds in the summer.
  • Watching a full moon rise over fresh snow.
  • Cooking and sharing a large meal with people I love. (There are reasons I try to celebrate both Canadian Thanksgiving and American Thanksgiving!)
  • Feeling the cool air on my face from the comfort of a warm bed.
  • Cupping a warm beverage in my hand after being out in the cold, feeling the heat seep into my fingers.

How about you? What are the moments that make you happy when you catch yourself being present for?

Environment to Thrive

I mentioned briefly in Reunions and Goals that I’ve been spending some time thinking about what environments I thrive in. It can be a useful exercise — it helps you identify what is working and what isn’t, and hopefully find ways to improve your environment.

“Environment” can mean a number of things, so to be clear, I’m talking mostly about two factors: living environment (the weather and culture in which you live), and working environment (the culture where you work and what you do there).

Let’s dive into the living environment first: I’m an introvert who grew up in the woods of Vermont. I like having green space around me, and the ability to choose my own pace. I’ve lived in cities before, and the ones I’ve done best in were ones that were welcoming, radically inclusive, and not in quite so much of a rush all the time. I pick up on the tension and urgency of the people around me pretty easily, and it leaves me stressed out more than I’d like. I like my seasons to have punctuation: to be seasons and not just a slight variation in the same weather year-round. I’m pretty ambivalent about winter and summer, but spring and autumn are important to me — in particular Autumn. There’s something about the shift in the air, the leaves changing, the sense of culmination. It’s a period of creativity and productivity for me (spring is a period of reflection and renewal), and something I value a lot.

Culturally, I like the weird. Artists, musicians, counter-culture folks, Cacophanists, Burners. I like diners and dives, street art, and people who don’t take themselves too seriously. I like places where there’s camaraderie and community, where what you do or how much you make doesn’t define who you are. I like to be where there is activity and a sense of getting things done, but where watches aren’t wound too tight.

Then there’s the working environment: what makes me feel productive, how do I like to work? I’ve found that I feel most productive and most valuable when I’m in an autonomous role where I can contribute to a larger whole, and help the people, the project, and the organization shine. I like to fill niches and gaps in processes and workflows so others can achieve what they need with a minimum of drama or frustration. I like to help others feel supported and respected, and like to feel supported and respected in return. I don’t want the limelight — if I was suddenly given the option of becoming a CEO, or becoming a COO (or other C-level position that isn’t the public face of the company), I’d choose the latter. I’d rather have the recognition and respect of my peers than to be called out publicly. I like having enough personal space to get my work done and to breathe, but also enough social opportunities to feel connected with my co-workers.

What this breaks down into for a work environment is a place where there is a level of trust within the organization that everyone is doing their part and contributing as best they can, where the goal is to do good work and to do the right thing, and is less about the politics of ego. There should be room to take initiative, and not too much pigeon-holing into a specific role and job description. Intelligence and talent should be highly valued, but not at the cost of kindness. Every job will have days where you’re there because it’s your job and not because you are invested in the work, but the best environments are where that’s the exception, not the rule. The goal is a work place where you neither feel like an imposter, nor the smartest person in the room, where everyone is striving to do their best work and to be better than themselves.

Obviously, the working and living environments are intertwined: without one, the other will feel off or lackluster. Finding a good work-life balance is hard, and goes well beyond whether or not you’re there 30 hours a week or 70 hours a week. It matters more (to me, at least) whether there is enough separation that work does not overwhelm life (and vice versa), but still enough connection where each is complementary to the other.

I’m not there yet: I really enjoy where I’m working, and feel like the work environment is damn close to where I want it to be. I’m less thrilled with my living situation: the Bay is too crowded, too tense and full of people stressed and rushing about, too expensive, too driven by class and money. That’s not to say there aren’t some amazing people and communities in the area, and a lot of the things I look for — I am saying I’ve not been won over yet or found those connections. I really should invest some more energy into giving it a fair shot. The lack of seasons still bothers me, though, and I can’t imagine settling here for the long term. Maybe that’ll change. In the meantime, it’s at least a worthwhile experience, and an opportunity to identify what’s important to me.

Sympathies for my MS Friends.

Until about 7-8 months ago, I worked as a vendor for Microsoft (v-). It wasn’t a bad gig — the pay wasn’t amazing, but provided a nice opportunity to work on some interesting projects, and since I was a v-, had a certain amount of job stability (a- contractors are required to take off 100 days every year, which causes a lot of disruption in projects, but at this point has been established long enough that we’d work through it. Vendors did not have this restriction).

Apparently, Microsoft is planning to implement a required 6 month hiatus for vendors as well. I honestly don’t know if the upper management who made this decision is quite aware of just how much of the work is done by vendors. Optimistically, there is some grand plan as part of the upcoming restructuring (laying off 18,000 full time employees, plus apparently who knows how much external staff), which will allow the company to shift their culture and make this work. I’ve been known to occasionally be an idealist, but I’m not sure I can be optimistic enough to believe that.

My sincere sympathies for everyone getting laid off, and for my v- friends who will now need to navigate this new landscape.

Reunions and Goals

It’s always fun to have a little time to reset. I’ve spent the past week at Squam Lake, enjoying the swimming, the people, and the house. It’s been a family reunion of families directly related to the property, and so it’s been wonderful to see all of my cousins, many of whom I haven’t seen in years. It did mean I missed Hack Week back at work, but sometimes that’s just the way things happen. It sounds like they’ve been having an awesome time as well.

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what’s important to me, and what sort of environment I tend to thrive in. I’ve got a pretty good handle on it overall, but it’s still nice to pause and reflect every so often to see if things have shifted. When I turned 30, I took some time to figure out a two year, five year, and ten year plan. I managed to hit my two year goal largely on time, and I’m feeling pretty good about hitting my five year goal as well. The ten year is still too far out to tell, but I do feel like it’s still obtainable, so that’s good.

My ten year goal is a hammock. More specifically, sipping iced tea or lemonade in a hammock, while reading a book, nestled in a rambling garden outside a house. A significant other is doing what they want to be doing (maybe reading, or playing a game, or gardening, or painting, or whatever they enjoy doing), while the children play.

It may seem weird to think of a specific vision as a goal, but consider it for a moment: to achieve that, I need to be financially stable enough to afford a house and have the time to enjoy it. I need to be in a romantically stable relationship with someone who is interested in similar goals and lifestyle. I need to be emotionally stable enough to enjoy all of these things.

So if that’s where I want to be when I’m 40, how do I get there? Well, my five year goal is my litmus: if I’m starting to have a good handle on the financial, emotional, and romantic areas at the halfway point, I’m likely in good shape to achieve what I’m hoping for (and if not, it’s also a good point to do any course corrections). So, the five year goal is to have had solid progression in my career (in responsibility, pay, and flexibility), to have my personal life together, and to be in a solid relationship that, if not married and having kids, is at least on that path.

My two year goal was to have progressed in my career, where I’d be working for a company I respect and value, with a steady improvement of pay and advancement, and where I could see myself working for another several years. I managed to hit that right around on target (give or take ~6 months).

So… yeah, goals. It’s weird. When I was younger, my goals were things like “become a published author”, “have a gallery show”, “write a graphic novel”, or “design and produce a game.” Those are all still things I want to accomplish, but they didn’t really click as a goal, because while the goals were concrete, the paths were tenuous. My goal now is just an idea, a vision, but the path is clear, and I may end up achieving some of my other aspirations along the way.

Surfacing

I’m still here.

Fair warning: I’m going to ramble here for a little bit. I used to write my blog as a personal journal, and that slowly shifted into its current state as a semi-neglected platform for interesting quotes, random essays and commentary, and the occasional video. That’s likely what it’s going to continue to be, but sometimes you just need to get back to your roots and have a proper life-update braindump. Continue reading “Surfacing”

Lac à l'Eau Claire

A few years ago, I had a dream, involving a lake that I had never been to and did not even know existed at the time. When I awoke, I went to Google Maps and zoomed in on where the lake had appeared to me in my dream. Sure enough, it totally exists, and is just as hardcore as my dream would suggest.

To borrow from the Wikipedia page:

The Lac à l’Eau Claire (the official name, in French), also called the Clearwater Lakes in English, Wiyasakami in Cree and Allait Qasigialingat by the Inuit, are a pair of circular lakes on the Canadian Shield in Quebec, Canada, near Hudson Bay.

The lakes were created by a double meteor impact roughly 290 million years ago:

The lakes fill circular depressions that are interpreted as paired impact craters (astroblemes). The eastern and western craters are 26 km (16 mi) and 36 km (22 mi) in diameter, respectively. Both craters have the same age, 290 ± 20 million years (Permian), and it is believed that they formed simultaneously. The impactors may have been gravitationally bound as a binary asteroid, a suggestion first made by Thomas Wm. Hamilton in a 1978 letter to Sky & Telescope magazine in support of the then-controversial theory that asteroids may possess moons.

There’s more information about the lakes here, though it’s worth noting, there isn’t really anything up there. Like, no one. The entire “unorganized territory” that spans that area had only 16 people, total, according to the 2006 census, in ~129,712 square kilometers. One of these days, I’d really like to charter an expedition up there, and spend some time exploring the lakes and islands. I’ve had this compulsion to head up there for five years, now. Maybe one of these days, I’ll finally manage to do it.

Vermonters are Cynical Idealists

A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. Ralph Waldo Emerson “Self-Reliance,” 1841

I am definitively biased when it comes to this quote, seeing as I am from Vermont myself: that I agree with Emerson’s summation should go without saying. I do think he was on to something, though: while not necessarily geographically linked, there is absolutely a subset of people who have a predisposition to self-reliance. You know the ones: the folks that are always trying their hand at something new, always have pet projects and things they want to learn or do, because they feel it is worthwhile to know how to do something. The people who, even when they’re hit by setbacks and are on the ropes, they’ve got a smile on their face.

I wouldn’t consider them optimists, nor would I consider them pessimists — frankly the folks I’ve met like this run the gamut on whether the glass is half full or half empty. Instead, I prefer to think of this delightful subset of people as Cynical Idealists. Anyone who has spent any serious amount of time in Vermont will know that the official state pastime is complaining. We’ll complain about the weather, we’ll complain about flatlanders, we’ll complain about that pesky varmint that keeps eating the tomatoes. We’ll complain about the snow, and the mud, and the black flies and the mosquitos. We’ll complain about taxes, complain about the cost of gas or the cost of milk, we’ll definitely complain about the cost of heating the house through the winter. If you have an idea or a plan or a project you want to work on, we’ll go to great lengths to pick it apart until you’re wondering why you ever brought it up in the first place. We’ll complain about damn near anything, given the time and opportunity to do so.

And then, after we’re done complaining, we buckle down and deal with it. We complain about the sudden two foot snowstorm, at the same time we’re digging ourselves out. The ideas and plans that we nitpick, once we’re done poking holes in it, we patch it up and do it. You’ll hear a Vermonter complain all year, point out all the things that are wrong, and then if you ask them “Well, why don’t you just move somewhere else?” the answer will be “Now, why on earth would I want to do that?” This is cynical idealism, plain and simple: we’ll point out all the problems and flaws, and then work towards that ideal anyway. It’s a particular attitude that evolves out of pragmatism (in that there is still a sense of “this needed to be done, so I did it”), but is its own thing (“this SHOULD be done, so I did it”).

It’s not just Vermonters and New Hampshirites that are like this, not by any stretch. I’d say perhaps we just seem to have a higher concentration of them. I wish there were more cynical idealists in the world: there’s something very special, and very useful about the productive naysayer.

Emotional Communication

There is no language I know of that exists today that is able to truly convey our emotions, our inner needs. The scope just isn’t there — the best we can do is approximate it. We have words that are supposed to convey meaning, but even then, exactly what meaning is so fluid and amorphous, the true intent and meaning is lost in translation. Think about some of the biggest emotions in our lives. Think about love for a moment. “I love you.” “I love this television show.” “I love this song.” “I love my family.” There are so many valid contexts for the verb “to love.” As far as language is concerned, they are all valid, and we treat them as such socially. But the emotions underneath vary wildly. As human beings, we try to pick up on this additional nuance and emotional intent through body language, through situational awareness, the timbre of the voice, the tension of the moment. All of which rests on the hope that those around us are observant enough to notice, and aware enough to interpret these signals correctly. This is frightening, that so much of our emotional communication and well-being is reliant on others’ ability to perceive our comments in the way we intend. Given that, it is unsurprising that so many people feel isolated and alone.

Which brings us to another tool we have to try and communicate: if language does not have the tools to describe an emotion directly (not in a meaningful way, anyway), then it can at least describe them indirectly. Think about music, or books, or film, or photographs, or paintings, or any number of forms of art. The classic question of “What is art?” is easily defined to me: work intended to convey an emotional or personal response to someone. It’s an imperfect tool — there will inevitably be a lot of people who don’t “get” it. It’s not a fault of the artist, or of the viewer — they simply lack the shared context to invoke a response. A photograph of a weathered fence post in a field may not speak to some, but for others it can invoke a personal memory of visiting their grandparents on the farm, or strike a chord more metaphorically, describing for a moment the feeling of isolation that the viewer may be feeling or have felt. Put simply: art describes emotions.

Personally, I tend to draw from media sources to describe a range of emotions and personal thoughts pretty often. I’ve been doing so all week with video clips and songs and quotes, and this is hardly the first time, and I’m not remotely the only one — for every random silly link blog of goofy stuff out on the web, there is also a curated blog of someone trying to point at something in the hopes of getting their message across, and communicate something they feel is important to those around them. I post videos and quotes and songs and images to create a pastiche of who I am and how I’m feeling. (I’d be interested to see what interpretations people draw from the entries posted this past week.) Of course, I’m always afraid that I’m a bit of a Hector the Collector character when I do so, but if even one person gets and appreciates what’s shared, it’s worth it.