Archive for August, 2008
As readers of this blog will notice, I tend to very publicly state my weak spots in the hopes that they’ll be exploited and thereby give me more opportunities to learn to patch them, and also in the hopes that others will point out weak spots and propose fixes. It’s kinda like “Mel, the open-source project.”
Along those lines, here are some major flaws I possess.
- Perfectionism which leads to a tendency to fall behind. As behindness increases, so does guilt, and I feel compelled to raise the bar of the quality of the thing I’m making to compensate for the tardiness. The quality-bar rises exponentially over time, the quality I can possibly put into something rises almost linearly and then asymptotes at some finite positive number, and so the feasibility of meeting my expectations (which is quality-possible divided by quality-expected) drops rapidly to zero.
- An inability to say no without apologizing for the refusal. Again, guilt kicks in for having disappointed someone, even if what they were asking for is unreasonable and I have previously stated that I can’t or won’t do it. I don’t do the thing I said I wouldn’t do, but I usually end up overcompensating so as to not make them feel bad; this is the equivalent of someone asking you for $2 and you saying “No, but… I’m sorry, I’ll… I’ll lend you $2000!”
- Overuse of disclaimers weakens my conciseness. It also weakens my position and makes me – not just seem, but think – in a more wishy-washy manner.
I’m trying to fight the first by shipping imperfection before the due date with a disclaimer that it’s a draft. I’m trying to fight the second by censoring the apology (I do continue to propose alternative routes of action to people i turn down… I’m just learning how to make those alternative routes Not Include Me So Much).
Also, hurrah for the IPA!
Also also, (with great difficulty) you can do what you would do if you were a better person than you actually are. Maybe it makes you a better person and maybe it doesn’t; I tend to lean towards the “doesn’t,” or at least a “doesn’t necessarily.” But in any case, the end result is that you’ve done what a better person would have, so something’s better, right?
I sure don’t envy that better person. The things they do are freaking exhausting, and I’m like to drop over on my feet half the time as is. They’d do it somehow, though, so sometimes I can also try to do it too.
In other news, setting up for screenprinting is a very labor-intensive effort made somewhat more enjoyable by high-pressure garden hoses.
Friday, August 8th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Moment of the day: Heading back from the print shop listening to the tail end of the Gladiator soundtrack. It’s the bit where quiet humming over a wash of serene strings have just broken through the thunderous battle music that’s been blaring through my speakers for most of the ride. I’m in a behemoth of a minivan rattling down a poorly patched road, so the CD slams and skips intermittently.
There are gorgeous lofted clouds with sunlight streaming down around their edges, and I’m giving in to an overwhelming need for solitude that I’ve been fighting all day, letting myself just float in a sea of feeling lonely. It’s not a bad feeling, though I’ll pull it down (somewhat unsuccessfully, to my chagrin – I haven’t had this much trouble rewiring my brain for a while, and it renders me suboptimally functional) when I reach the house; it’s acknowledgment that I’ve learned to embrace solitude because it’s something I often can’t avoid.
End moment. Back to the present.
Tomorrow is the Game Jam at IMSA. First Jam I’ve been to that I haven’t run, and I’m looking forward to it. For the swag department of the Jam, silkscreens and an UV lamp are standing in my garage, with signs warning my father’s car from parking over our t-shirt making supplies.
Matt Ritter sends me emails that make me grin and spur me on to Do Things Better. My cousins have decided to try reading Shakespeare, and I wonder how much of this was triggered by my enthusiastic descriptions yesterday of how much I loved his writing when I was 11 (a little younger than they are now). My brother is home, bored, and willing to bake. Andrew is getting version control and Nikki made the ‘haxor’ t-shirt design I’ve wanted for over a year, and Tank is coming tomorrow morning. Things are going well – really, really well.
I still feel more quiet than usual inside, and I’m trying to figure out why. One more email, and then I’m just going to go and sit and wait for the eye of the hurricane to pass until my brain is churning as usual again.
Thursday, August 7th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
“Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.” –Wikipedia
My friend David has a recent blog post asking what can be done to avoid needing flow. As I kept on reading, I realized that he was asking not “how do we stop having flow,” but “how do we continue to communicate and collaborate with people outside our flow while we’re in flow?” Or maybe “how do we make it easy for them to join in too?”
“I think this concept of ‘flow’ feels like a good way to promote antisocialism in development teams, deemphasizing communication between developers to promote a team of cowboys working on code that requires a lot of headspace to work on. It feels to me like it would be a lot better to keep communication frequent (keep the bus factor high, that kind of thing) and if it makes simple code a necessity in order to get stuff done, all the better.” –dwins
Flow implies a trusted space you can control yourself within enough to run freely. Any explanations you run through are part of the doing, not floating above it as an annotation. When a team reaches this state together, it’s wonderful; you breathe and move together as a single organism without the need to explain things to each other.
However, every inclusion contains an implicit exclusion. By saying (implicitly or explicitly) that these people are in that state with you, you’re saying that others are not. By focusing on the task and the reactions of others to it, you ignore the non-reactions of others. Who isn’t participating, who isn’t speaking up, and why? It’s a seed that, when aggressively sprouted, turns into things like “those who can’t, teach” and its converse, “those who can don’t take the time for teaching.” (It goes without saying that I heartily disagree with those statements.)
So. Why am I writing about this?
For me, the sheer complexity and depth of the various systems of OLPC and its impact on the world is a large part of what compels me to work on it. I feel like I’m tapped into the Way Things Work enough that I can (often with much frustration and effort, but I can) make things go. To some extent, I can flow within it and with it. Complexity dissolves into things that just happen. It feels good. I daresay the same thing happens in many of the communities I enjoy being a part of; I belong to them because I can move within them with fluency.
This same complexity makes it extraordinarily hard to get started. It took me… maybe a year of intermittently becoming hopefully fascinated, timidly trying to pitch in, getting confused and scared away, and backing off and working on other things, before I finally “stuck.” The people “in” on the project seemed to be in an inner circle of flow, and having had newcomers barge into my projects and jumble my thought processes before, I was loath to interrupt them, even to ask how I could join them.
People like Michael Stone, SJ Klein, Seth Woodworth, Greg DeKoenigsberg, Adam Holt, and many more have been doing remarkable things to change this by taking the time to go meta, describe to newbies what it’s like to be in the project (to learn how to be part of it, not just to learn ‘about’ it), and then explicitly inviting them to join in with a first step they’re capable of doing. Here’s the message: “You’re not interrupting us. This is our time set aside to focus on helping you join us. Please do us a favor by taking advantage of the opportunity.” I would like to see more of this; I will try to do more of it myself, and take advantage of it when it’s offered.
You have to offer, though, and invite – because sometimes people don’t ask. This group often include the thoughtful and courteous ones that you want in your project because they’ll become the most responsive and proactive team members in terms of creating things that serve actual needs. They listen, but we have to ask them to – in fact, they’re listening and waiting for us to ask them.
How can we make sure we set time aside to allow others to enter the flow of things with us?
Thursday, August 7th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
The little countdown timer marking summer’s end is beginning to sound faintly in the distance. It’s an impulse to work harder, wrap up, go faster, get going, slow down, relax, and appreciate what’s around you, all at the same time. It hits most often when I look at people and think about how much longer I have until I leave them behind in Chicago, or how much longer they have before they head back to school or a job or whatever they’re doing with their life after what we’re doing here ends.
There are some things about this summer I’ll be glad to let go of, and there are some things I wish could last – maybe not forever (I’m very hesitant to say I want anything to last forever), but that they could at least last longer. It’s the same way whenever something ends. And then you move on. I think I’ve learned how not to cling to things by now (I think I learned this pretty early on in life), but I still sometimes want to.
And anyhow, if you don’t let go at some point of your own accord, something’s going to wrench it out of your hands sooner or later; if nothing else, I’ll die someday as well. Some things you ought to cling desperately to until you die (like caring for people*, and taking care of your responsibilities, and doing and standing for what you think is right). Most things, though, you have to someday let go, or you’ll live in the past forever.
*not to be confused with “taking care of people” – what I mean is a closer synonym to “caring about people” than “protecting them.” If you want to protect something, you make sure it has the means to cope with your absence.
I know we explicitly set a sunset clause on everything when we started up ILXO and all the arrangements thereof this summer, and I’m very glad we did, because that’s part of what enabled us to make it work. And I told them at the beginning of the summer that I bet I would be sad to see the summer end. And I am. And it was worth it.
This is my equivalent of “better to have loved and lost,” except without the sappy overtones (which, actually, aren’t necessarily implied in that phrase; there are many kinds of love, and one of them is the kind of love I have for life and living and all that’s in it – sometimes I’d say that love and life are so close they blur together and become indistinguishable). And in any case, it’s always better to have lived.
Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Wordle for this blog. The most surprising thing to me is the prominence of “Beethoven.” Also, I use generic words a lot, and don’t mention people by name often.
Tonight was interesting, but I won’t say why. And then I had kombucha. Earlier today, we went to a diner for lunch and I feasted on some of the most wonderful fluffy scrambled eggs I’ve ever had. Tomorrow Andrew and Chris and I are going on a food adventure.
You can tell my mind is scattered because I’m writing about food to get it back on track, and it’s not working all that well. (I’m trying to focus enough to do work before I pass out.)
Friday, August 1st, 2008 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
I’ve progressed to the point in speech therapy where I’m allowed to practice sounds at home (meaning I’m able to make them correctly with enough consistency that i won’t mess myself up by practicing the wrong things). They gave me lists of words with sounds that I’m working on, but cat /usr/share/dict/american-english | grep er$ > practice.txt* (and similar commands with more complicated regexps) yield a far more extensive list.
Speech therapy may be my biggest motivation yet to learn regular expressions really well.
*”Look at the big dictionary of words on your computer and put all the words that end in -er into a practice.txt file.”
Oh. Did I mention how much I love my team? I love my team. Despite high levels of sheer exhaustion from running a workshop at the Museum of Science and Industry, Tank and Chris drove to Evanston (Nikki and I had gone there earlier for an ILXO community meeting) and the three of them waited in the library for over an hour while I had speech therapy so I wouldn’t have to spend 3 hours taking the train and walking back home afterwards.
This week has probably been our best yet. Door after door opening.
I feel like I could fly.
(Addendum: Okay, XS installation is not working, there are too many emails to reply to, and the wifi keeps going down. Whatever. Life is still most excellent stuff.)
Friday, August 1st, 2008 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
