Archive for March, 2009
Had a frustrating experience today that made me reflect on the possible disadvantages of having to walk around this world as a nonwhite (Asian) woman with a deaf accent who still looks like a teenager sometimes. Having mentors to vent to helps a lot; it wasn’t a big deal and I’m over it now (writing this here is the last of getting it out of my system). So much world to change, so little time, so many human limitations… I’m glad so many people are working on this.
Also had a really great phone conversation with Paul Commons today. Also had Melanie’s shepherd’s pie – chicken, carrots, onions, cinnamon, and thyme under a mashed sweet potato crust topped with chopped leeks and melted cheddar. Ahhhh.
My hands hurt today, so I didn’t practice piano or type much. Will see if I can go all-Dvorak tomorrow and limit myself to two battery-lives of this laptop – work only when unplugged, until the battery runs out – need to wait until the battery recharges fully to work again, and only do this twice.
Tomorrow: Email backlog. Cooking pika food. Music.
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
I love my IIF team. After running our session (which was a rousing hit), we have the job of providing our class with food tonight on a budget of $200 (for 30 people plus what’s probably going to be a nontrivial number of guests) and settled on pizza from The Upper Crust plus mochi. We debated how many pizzas to get (the rule: if you’re eating a “healthy” Upper Crust pizza, you can eat the entire pizza – if you load it with tons of sausage and bacon, maybe a quarter of a pizza – ergo, we should get LOTS OF PIZZA) and ended with a strategy of “here’s a list of pizzas; order top to bottom until we run out of money.”
Part of me is scared that these kinds of little conversations will stop being normal someday, that this world I’ve waited and wanted and worked for so long to belong to could still be taken away from me. I’m trying to think myself through this, because it’s not something I want to grant the power to affect me. I can keep myself from getting into a situation where I won’t be able to participate in the sort of communities I want to be a part of; that is not an issue. The issue is whether I’m using these communities and the means I use to stay in touch with them (the internet, for the most part – but also being around Boston) as a security blanket tha keeps me from being open to trying different things, different ways of being, thinking, spending time with people. It’s almost silly when I phrase it that way; I’m two years out of college and I’m still scared of being alone in the dark.
There’s a lot of snow today, which is going to make it interesting to get the pizza to class (my job is to do the delivery).
Monday, March 9th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Fedora’s suspend-resume is awesome. I can actually throw my laptop closed and into my bag at a moment’s notice, pick it up a few hours later without getting third-degree burns, and still have battery life. Hibernate, however, takes forever. And sometimes doesn’t work (I’m going to start keeping track). Ubuntu was the other way around. I wonder why. Time to gather data so I can figure out how to ask these questions.
Yesterday ended up being a day for music, with interruptions only for dinner at pika and watching the (hilarious) semifinals of the MIT 100k competition which my friend Amanda is running. Kevin had a gig at Wally’s last night and I went in, got a coke, sat down, and then they started playing Trinkle Trinkle (a fiendishly difficult Monk piece I can’t even listen to) and my jaw dropped and stayed open for the next two hours (I had to leave early to catch the train home).
Armed with a crash skim through my book on jazz theory, I went in going “okay, now I’m going to try to figure this out!” The entirety of insightful writing from my notebook follows.
head —> ZOMGWTFBBQ —> head
…yeah, that would be for some value of “insightful.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen a string bass strummed to produce chords before – that was pretty cool. I was also struck by how much people didn’t play – I think solo classical piano gave me the assumption that you have to be playing something interesting and complicated All The Time. You’d think that 7 years with long rests in the cello section would have taught me otherwise.
I’m going to need to figure out how to memorize more tunes (how the heck did they play for so long without sheet music or a fake book?) and how to hear myself while other people are playing while listening to them at the same time (there were some really cool back-and-forths between the piano and the drummer) and how to figure out how solos get passed around between musicians. I’m starting to pull out things I learned from doing improv theatre and see if I can translate them to music.
Now that I can listen to jazz for extended periods of time without going “aah! It’s awesome but it hurts!*” I’m trying to start understanding what I’m listening to. Right now, I’m cursing whenever the camera cuts away from Bill Evans’s hands because I can’t hear** half the notes I’m trying to transcribe and how else am I supposed to know what they are?
*The same kind of mental pain that happens when you turn on hearing aids you haven’t worn for months and go “AAH! Noises that I can’t differentiate!” It’s not loud, it’s not physical pain… it’s… mental dissonance? Floods of unprocessable input.
*Notes are generally grouped into 3 categories for me, from low to high: (1) can hear and identify, (2) can hear but can’t differentiate – I just know “there’s a really high note playing somewhere” and (3) have no idea that a sound was made. Which notes are in which category depends on the instrument, listening environment, how awake I am, and so on. The vast majority of what Bill Evans does in that video falls in category (2), but enough are in (1) that I can sort of pick out bits and try to extrapolate the “there was a high note here” stuff for when the ratio of (2) to (1) isn’t too high. I don’t know what I’m missing for (3).
Friday, March 6th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else, music | 1 Comment »
It is a bad idea to gash the pad of the middle finger of your dominant hand when you plan on playing piano for several hours. On a salt pour spout, of all things. Yesterday, a few hours after the cut, I was fine, sightreading swing music with happy abandon and no pain or blood (since it was a shallow, paper-cut like gash, I figured it was fine); this morning less so, and I’m going to give it a rest and wrap it up lest I start smearing blood all over the keys. I’m playing slowly today with a lot of attention to fingering… perhaps this isn’t such a bad thing. I’m conscious of way different things when I play this way, sans middle finger.
Marketing meeting: check.
Pika dinner: check. Liang cooks magical chicken, a sort of braised 3-cup chicken type recipe. I reprised the roasted carrots and potatoes that had been such a hit at my aunt’s, and stirfried like a maniac (hint: the secret is putting rice wine in the sauce).
Also, Mike Lee! Also also totally geeked out about posture with Nagle – it’s still a surprise and a great pleasure to find friends who are intellectually curious about the same things. Also also also some things and conversations that fall into the vague category of “my future career, inasmuch as I actually think about it” stuff.
I really have to get over the “I’m not useful! People are going to have to teach me everything! I’ll slow them down!” blocker that keeps me from learning something I’d like to learn. Recognizing that I can usually get on my feet pretty quickly helps. Knowing that my documentation and community facilitation skills can make me immediately useful also helps. (They still need a lot of development, but I can do things with them right away without hand-holding.)
Today I should be cleaning up my wiki profile pages (I missed that last night), cleaning up after today’s SL IRC meetings, and getting a lot of deliberate piano practice in; I did daily practice this week, but need to focus on a few spots that I haven’t hit yet. Namely, upper structures. There’s also a proposal that I have to write and send tonight. Right now I’m off to 1cc to pick up some XOs for Olin’s repair center.
Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Today started late (approximately 4:45pm) as I spent most of the day at my aunt’s house watching snow fall. And fall. And fall and fall. And impede transportation. And fall.
Despite the late start, I did Pretty Damn Well. In addition to co-running what I will (in a very biased manner) call a wildly successful Harvard Law class (participation at an all-time high! workshop rocket pitches hilarious! speakers who talked about LOLcats! people moving to the next building after class so they could continue the discussion!)* I also cleared my entire post backlog, my online reading backlog (the equivalent of several books) and my book reading backlog (several books).
I also reduced my all-time email backlog to 288 (about half its previous size – grr getting sick and accumulating several thousand…) – I’m really slacking on the Inbox Zero thing. Ah, this is perfectionism rearing its ugly head again, that’s what it is. I’ll be back at Zero by the end of this Friday. I’m just going to delete the stuff I don’t deal with before then.
*Have I mentioned I love designing and deploying learning experiences? Only about several million times? Oh, okay. Just… just making sure, then.
Tomorrow: marketing meeting, pika cooking, and getting my OLPC and SL wiki userpages updated. (Don’t worry. By virtue of clarifying what I’m working on, I’ll inevitably yak-shave and do actual work on those projects as well.) Ah yes. And piano and exercising, but I’m getting used to those by now. Well… at least the piano part.
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 2 Comments »
Via Chris Carrick, a great 10-step program from Allan Chochinov’s presentation at Compostmodern on how to design impossible things (I’m very good at #6).
1. Acknowledge privilege: Being a designer does not give you the right to be a crapmaker.
2. Use the word “consequence”: Talk about the implications of your actions.
3. Question authority: Don’t wait for permission.
4. Surround yourself with the awesomest people you can: Go to parties, drink wine, make friends.
5. Don’t play fair: If making something gorgeous will get your clients on board, do it.
6. Be intentionally dumb: Start with the most obvious and ridiculous solutions.
7. Redistribute (then reduce reuse and recycle): Find materials that are already out there first.
8. Broaden your market: Think beyond your audience.
9. indulge discursive design: Do something that’s wildly inappropriate .
10 Talk to anyone who will listen: Get the word out.
I want to post an insightful analysis right around here, but I’m tired and have two more backlogs to sift through (this is the last of my post backlog for the time being) before I go to sleep tonight. So I’ll end with my favorite sentence from the article.
Designers think they’re in the artifact business, says Allan, but they’re not, they’re in the consequence business.
Monday, March 2nd, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Things I’m working on for the CFS pilot right now, deliberately kept rough and unedited. Deployment work is messy behind the scenes, and sometimes you don’t have time to make stuff all professional and shiny-looking for the public eye – this sort of to-do list publishing would probably mortify a number of other organizers, but this is the sort of list I really work from
- Get the tech teams in Boston to have interfaces that the loop team can work with and plan around, by way of nudging the loop team to have interfaces with external volunteer groups.
- Make and maintain a tech status page up on the wiki where the questions “what’s happened so far? what’s happening now? how can I help with what should happen in the future?” can be answered at any point in time.
- Support Yifan in her team’s efforts to get an XS up and running and the teachers trained on how to use it.
- Ditto Sandra for the curriculum support and integration team (“curriculum team” for short).
- Ditto Elsa and Colin for Sugar testing sprints.
- There must be other teams in the Boston area who want to help with things… where are they now?
- Schedule interview sessions with the teams working on the pilot, likely late this month after the XOs are deployed. I’m determined to have a behind-the-scenes “here’s how to reproduce what we did with this deployment setup” guide. My ethnographic and journalistic tendencies demand it. (Also my apparent love of pedagogic documentation.)
- Stay on top of things and keep reminding people
- Stay on top of things and keep reminding people
- Stay on top of things and keep reminding people
- Do all of the above extremely part time, largely remotely, with no actual authority, and with no income. (I consider myself to be paid in “learning stuff and doing interesting things.”)
In my craze to get things done and clarified and documented (while not being crazed and actually relaxing and cooking really good food and geeking out with music) I’ve largely dropped offline. My IRC hours have plummeted, and I’ve discovered that I’m functional without them – but that I miss them. They’re like hanging out with friends in the living room after a long day, which is nice since I increasingly come home to an empty apartment (and then jog in my coat until my room heats up, after which point I stay in my room as the “has habitable temperature” location of the domicile). So now I’m productive in a way, but out of touch with the rest of the community – so many things to balance.
As a side note, I constantly wonder why I’m learning about project management; a few years ago, when I was still in engineering school, I would have told you that the last thing I wanted to become was a manager – what you need is hackers who can get stuff done. Turns out that sometimes you need more than hacking to get stuff done… so now I’m adding another perspective to my toolset. It doesn’t excuse you from non-meta work, though; I’m still bushwhacking wiki pages, hammering at builds, proofreading volunteering invitations.
When you can’t tell people what to do, you make it really easy and appealing for them to do the stuff you want them to do. (And if it’s really easy and appealing, at that point you might as well also help them do it.)
Monday, March 2nd, 2009 | olpc, sugar | No Comments »
We’ve got a problem and would like a less hackish way to fix it. Help!
Problem:
We’re a coalition of teams in Boston dedicated to various aspects of local deployment tech support. Right now, nearly all the people involved are students at Olin College, there’s a lot of overlap between the memberships of teams, and we only have one active deployment at the Cambridge Friends School which, in this case, is coordinated by a Harvard-based loop team called One For All; the loop team serves as the contact point between the school and all these independent teams of volunteers.
But we digress. We’ve got a lot of things To Work On, and they’re floating around in a Nebulously Undefined Cloud that occasionally emits noises that sound a lot like “we have stuff to do, but we’re not really sure what stuff needs to be worked on now.” Most of our volunteers are busy students or working people who don’t have the bandwidth to constantly keep up on what’s going on. Every time they cleared a block of time (intermittently available, not-necessarily-at-regular-planned-intervals) to volunteer, they had to go through a huge overhead of asking around and finding out what needed to be worked on, where to get the resources to do it, who they had to give what to by when, how they would know when they were done…
If only there was a way they could, at any given moment, look at an open list of well-defined to-do items with deadlines, explanations of the milestones they’re working towards, and all of the resources and contact information someone would need to pick up the job and do it…
Our current hack:
A few of us got fed up with this one afternoon, sat down and made a wiki status page with some tasks, and started driving a schedule of more regular check-ins (schedule still stabilizing, but getting there).
There are obvious scaleability problems with this. Beyond this pilot, beyond these short-term deadlines, we have no way to track our to-do list without going insane. Even now, managing the page by editing it is a pain. Watchlisting the entire page for email updates (so we won’t forget) sends us a message any time any task is changed, not just the ones we care about.
Is there a better way?
This sounds like a job for a ticket tracker. We set up a temporary Trac instance on Colin’s shared server account and are moving towards that for our second temporary solution – I say “temporary” because it’s a pain in the neck to set up and maintain, and takes time away from what we want to focus on (serving the technical needs of local deployments).
What we’d really like is to have a ticketing instance hosted elsewhere, administered by Someone Else. We don’t really care who. We don’t even really care what platform it is (RT, bugzilla, Trac… whatever), as long as it’s for deployment tickets rather than code bug-tracking. We’ll have tickets like “install the Maze Activity on all of Mrs. Johnson’s class’s laptops” – not a bug but a to-do item- as opposed to “Maze feature such-and-such is broken, please fix” (which we’ll file upstream in the appropriate development bugtracker if we find it). Deployment tickets, not development tickets.
This would make a great community-group service for Sugar Labs, olpcfriends, or a similar group to offer for deployment groups – a set of conditions (who’s eligible, what maintenance you must provide, what terms of usage you have to agree to) for getting Trac hosting with certain features and services provided, and a handy subdomain (deployments.sugarlabs.org?) for access. This shouldn’t seem like such a strange idea; Sugar Labs already does it for code hosting.
O Metabrain, what can we do?
Monday, March 2nd, 2009 | olpc, sugar | 1 Comment »
Introduction, or: What the heck is going on?
I’m trying to think about why I’m feeling weirdly unresolved and intellectually uncomfortable about the piano lesson I had this week, and why I like it. The last part is easy: it’s the sort of productive discomfort I’ve come to associate with leaps of understanding, actual rearrangement of my mental models of the world, not just practice/internalizing/building-upon what I already understand.
The question is why the stuff we did this lesson in particular got me into this state; lessons with Kevin generally do this, and I love it, but let’s use this a case study to focus. And then there are two questions after that – the first is how I ride this particular wave and make sense of this mental rearrangement and come out the other side without wimping out and pulling out of it because it makes me intellectually uncomfortable. I should relax because I understand things differently, not because I’ve given up on it. If I ride this out well, then the second question is how I can make this learning discomfort cycle happen again and again and again – right now in piano, but also in other disciplines I love.
I’ve tried to do this case-study/generalization of my learning process with other disciplines over the years – yay spiral learning! I’d also like to point out that I’m channelling my vague understanding of Piaget right now. I think it was Piaget who originated the (delightfully cyclical/meta) mental model of learning as either adding to or replacing mental models, but this also has overtones of Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” and… oh, anyway, wherever that idea came from, I’m using it to try to make sense of what my brain is doing. (Argh. My education knowledge – vocabulary, history, how to phrase and frame things, everything – is sorely lacking. Chalk another one up for the “want grad school!” pile. But I digress.)
Now that I’ve turned a piano lesson into a (clumsily-stated) education problem, let’s begin. I’m first going to think/read/listen to my recordings and notes to build a picture of the material we covered and how we covered it – where I was, new stuff I learned, why I’im confused, and then what I’m going to do about it. Some things here may not make sense to non-musicians – please ask for clarifications if you’re curious, and I’ll elaborate.
Where I was
I proudly showed Kevin that, after a protracted battle, I’d gotten “Someday my prince will come” to the point where I could fluently solo with arpeggios and chords on my right hand through the piece while playing shell voicings with my left. I’m also usually over-reliant on sheet music, so the fact that I could do this from memory was also a big deal for me. Something previously impossibly difficult for me to do had become so easy that I was getting bored while doing it. The piece sounded right. It made sense. Win! We agreed this piece was doing well and that we’d come back and add new things to it later in the lesson.
Then I played “Well You Needn’t” with shell voicings (Charleston rhythm) on the left and the head (melody) on the right. Comping was easy and comfortable. I’d also memorized this; it wasn’t at the “have mastered to the point of boredom” level yet, but I could easily recover when I stumbled in a way that sounded good. This is a much harder piece for me because of the rapid chromatic progression of chords in the bridge – not technically difficult (when sightreading or competing in classical piano as a kid, I did especially well with quick, complex technical pieces; my fingers love fast), but understanding-difficult. I could blindly play notes at high speed, but that was it; the chord combinations sounded weird to my ears, and I didn’t know what else I could do with it other than straight sightreading of the melody.
This quickly became apparent when I tried to solo on “Well You Needn’t.” I could do a boring, rote, almost-memorized-and-predictable arpeggio solo that was essentially “I think I’ll play the notes of the root chord in ascending order, every time, because I can’t think of anything else to do!” I could also awkwardly and randomly hit notes on the F blues scale over my left hand’s comping. In contrast, when soloing on “Take The A Train” with the blues scale, I feel like I’m fluently playing coherent licks. Same licks. Same scale. Different song – it’s more apparent to me how the licks and solos can “fit” into that chord progression than on “Needn’t.”
Kevin also heard the random number generator in my attempts to solo (it was pretty painfully obvious) and suggested picking a consistent note to end on as a way to help me play phrases rather than one randomly selected note at a time. I realized that my approach to “Needn’t” was robotic – I was feeding in rules, could only feed in rules, because I wasn’t comfortable with the song itself. This sort of blind, scripted playing was (and is) my primary approach to music, and that’s what I was trying to learn and grow beyond, so this was a “yeah, you haven’t learned that yet” reminder. I’d try practicing the same thing for next time to see if it got any easier.
New stuff!
Okay. Back to “Someday.” Let’s see how quickly I can get thrown back into disequilibrium. It turns out that the answer is “very quickly.” If, instead of arpeggios (1-3-5-7 intervals from the root) I’m told to play the first inversions up (3-5-7-9, sometimes flat 9) I suddenly get very confused and things sound wrong. I’m soon counting and pointing to the keys on every chord trying to figure out what notes I should be playing, and wincing because 3-5-7-9 is unfamiliar and my brain is going “These notes should not be played together! You’ve never heard it done before!” (I used to have similar feelings about major 7 chords. Then I got used to them, and now they sound wonderful.)
During the second run-through of the song, while Kevin is notating the chords I’m playing on staff paper so I don’t have to laboriously work them out each time, I freeze the sounds of the intervals in my head and stop counting; I’m just playing by ear now. This goes somewhat more easily; it’s faster for me to find “the next note should sound like this” than it is when I’m thinking of it as the dominant 7th for Bb. I realize that once I have the notes of what something “should sound like” in my head, I drop all the math, the intervals, the theory. Which is great! But it makes it more difficult for me to learn new things, because everything is something new to memorize; I don’t have a more flexible system of being able to back-figure and analyze music.
While Kevin is writing the last few notes in, I finish playing and notice a Bach piece off to the side. It looks pretty, and I begin to easily sightread it. As I’m doing this, Kevin finishes writing and points out his notes on the Bach piece to me. Do I know what he’s doing with this piece? I don’t. It turns out that he’s taking licks from Bach to use for when he plays jazz. “Cool,” I say, imagining a Bach invention played with a jazz rhythm, or maybe a passage from Bach transposed and played over a jazz piece’s chord transitions. Then Kevin plays the ending of “Someday” to show me, and now I’m awed and even more confused; it’s none of the things I had imagined. There’s something there that sounds like the Bach passage I’d just sightread, but I could not tell you how.
That was pretty much it. I got some new licks,
Why intellectual discomfort ensued
After some thinking on various buses and trains, and practicing more, I think I’ve figured out a first approximation of why I’m in disequilibrium now.
- Jazz (in particular, the chords and combinations I just learned) still sounds unfamiliar, and therefore in some way “wrong,” to me. Classical music sounds “right.” I’m used to it.
- I’m only playing scripted licks; I’m treating songs as if there was “invisible sheet music” behind the fake book, figuring that out, then playing that. Again, I’m treating jazz the same way I treat classical. Perhaps the equivalent would be dancing by doing move 1, then move 2, then move 3, rather than flowing them together and responding to the music and your partner.
- Because I come with these (and other) assumptions about “how piano is played” from my years of rote classical, I don’t know how to listen to music and take it apart – what’s there to take apart? These are the notes you are “supposed” to play. I don’t have a good grasp of the language I need to disassemble a piece (so I can later put it back together in my own way). This is the equivalent of doing surgery without names for your tools, procedures, or bits of anatomy. “Put the thing in the other thing. No, the big red thing! Now sort of move that thing like this!” I can’t think about this, ask questions about it, because I don’t have a way to express it.
- In other words, “music theory and I are not well-acquainted.”
This is great. I have full-blown “transistor syndrome” (my term from a paper written about the first circuits class ever taught at Olin*). I feel pain, I’ve made a first identification (here) of what that pain is – what I want that it’s keeping me from getting – I have a workable first problem statement / bug report, and nowI’m extremely motivated to find a way to fix it.
I’ve looked at theory books before. They’ve always bored me to death. But now I have one (a Mark Levine book – he has some beautiful textbook-writing techniques I should learn from) and am devouring it with an intense interest because I want to talk about what’s happening in a song I want to play so that I can understand it and play it better. Win!
*They told freshmen in the class of 2006, most with no electronics experience, to build pulse oximeters with the full knowledge that they hadn’t given them the necessary background (for instance, about transistors) to do so; the students struggled through and completed the project with great difficulty, their self-taught transistor knowledge visibly shaky. The professors marked the experiment as a success, because the outcome they wanted was for the students to want to know what a transistor was. The goal was motivation so that a more powerful learning experience could happen immediately afterwards. (I am not sure how they followed up and taught transistors a second time, though. I should find out.)
What I am going to do about it
I have a theory book now, and every time I get confused while playing through a piece, I’m looking through that book for ways to express the things that are going on so I can ask Kevin about them. That’s pretty general, so some exercises I made up for myself that I’m trying to work through before Thursday:
- Classical music sounds “normal” to me, right? So I can start from that. Take a simple, short classical piece with a clear chord progression that I know ad nauseam and write it up in fake sheet style. I’m thinking the Moonlight Sonata might be a good first starter, since everyone knows it.
- By happenstance, I found that one of Melanie’s piano books has sheet music for “Someday my prince will come,” but that it uses a slightly different chord progressions and some interesting harmonies – all explicitly written out. It’s also in a different key. I started transposing it and picking it apart. I want to complete a first analysis – which is going to be incomplete and terrible – so I can get feedback on it. More importantly, to balance out my theory-head tendencies, I’m trying to put the stuff I’m figuring out into my own playing of the piece.
- I could think of more, but that’s a lot for Thursday especially on top of learning all my new stuff for the week.
Later on, I’m considering getting ear training books and working through them. This will make me faster at transcribing. I should also try transcribing and then comparing that to transcription books at first to see how close I’ve gotten. Before I try that, though, I want jazz to sound “less weird” to me, so I should try to listen to it even more, so it may be worthwhile looking into an online music subscription so I can easily pull up lots of recordings of a piece I’m interested in, depending on how easy it is for me to find things at the library (so far, not very).
Now what?
Stay tuned for how that experiment works out and whether I come up with ways to generalize whatever I learn from it. Dun dun dunnnnnn!
This is a wonderfully painful process. I never want to learn something without thinking about how I am learning it again.
Monday, March 2nd, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else, music | 1 Comment »
Recent realization that I’m going to try to articulate.
I don’t have to choose between work I’m passionate about and having good relationships with individuals and communities of human beings based on things that aren’t (just) my work. If I continue with the things I love, then I will (continue to) find people who love me – Mel, a person with great passion for the things she does.
They won’t love me because of my work, and our relationships won’t be based on it, but inasmuch as my work is something I love, inasmuch as your calling is a part of you, they will – through loving me – love that, and love that I do it, love that I choose to do it, love me no matter what I choose.
I don’t need to work on things to prove my worth, and my projects do not create my worth. The things I do and make affect the person that I am; whether I (or others) call the things I do “building a career” or what-have-you is, on some level, arbitrary. And I can choose how that affects me.
Realizing this won’t make me less shy or introverted (which I don’t mind, and often find extremely valuable). It won’t make me suddenly and magically start dating (I know my mom would like it, but really, it’s a non-priority…) and it won’t – well, it won’t do anything by itself. It’s just a thought. But now it’s there for me to ponder in case it’s useful for any future actions.
And it does take away a tiny chip of my irrational fear and frustration about – I can’t articulate it, but it’s some aspect that’s come from watching my beloved (and mainly older) female relatives go through life, respecting them, respecting that they made the choices that they made, seeing the conditions that surrounded those choices, and constantly thinking I don’t want that for myself in terms of what it means for me to be(come) a woman. And feeling sort of obligated to feel guilty for that. And feeling guilty. But not really.
It’s only in the last few years that I’ve started to see some vague and fuzzy outlines of pictures of what I could want. Maybe. When I was little, I always thought I would die young because I couldn’t imagine me as an adult – just cardboard cutouts of what grownups said and showed me grownups could be like. Even in my late teens, past 25 or so was just a blank. I couldn’t grow up; there was nothing I could see that I wanted to choose to grow up into, a aberration for a child who never had trouble imagining up any other gerdunken. (Well, maybe 4-D space, but even that was more visceral to me at 12 than the existence of my future adult self.)
My world is bigger now, and I’ve seen more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy. (People do community stuff as their jobs! There are co-ops where non-blood-relations create a household! Smart young couples with promising careers support each others dreams in an interdependent way! This is really, really weird!) I still can’t imagine myself at 24, or even 23. But I can vaguely imagine that a Mel who’s 22 years, 9 months, and some-odd days old might exist tomorrow, even if I can’t imagine who that Mel might be.
I know that she’ll at least still have a backlog to deal with. ;-) It’s time for bed. I’m still a little wobbly-sick and sniffly, but hey, I’m functional.
Monday, March 2nd, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
