Archive for December, 2009
Sebastian gave me a copy of Stones Into Schools for Christmas. It’s the sequel to Three Cups of Tea, and both are fantastic books about getting schools into places so remote that even other aid organizations ignore them, and the transformations that occur when education comes into those places. With an entire book full of those stories, I was surprised that these two sections were the ones that hit me hardest. This is from page 182-183: the 2005 earthquake has just devastated Pakistan, and Greg Mortenson’s nonprofit is desperately trying to help rebuild schools. While his team is on the ground in Pakistan, Greg himself is at home in America with his wife and young children.
As I huddled in my basement office listening to [my teammate] Sarfraz report [from Pakistan] on the confusion and the despair, the madrassas, and all the other things he was witnessing, the most powerful reaction I experienced was a deep sense of guilt over my absence from the front lines… It was finally [my wife] Tara, who understands me more than any other human being, who decided to act.
“Let’s go out to dinner tonight,” she said. “We need to talk.”
When we got to the restaurant, she got straight to the point.
“Sweetie, if you just stay here you are going to drive yourself and the rest of us crazy. So when we get home, I’m going to pull out your duffel bags, and I want you to start packing. It’s time for you to go and do what you do best. This is your calling. And when you get home, we will be here waiting for you.”
The timing was terrible – the holidays were just around the corner, and as Tara and I both knew, if I left now there was no way I could be back home for Christmas. This was a very difficult decision, and in the end, the person who made it on my behalf was my wife and best friend. She knew that although I was home, I was not really home – and in order to return home with full heart and mind, I needed to leave now.
On Thanksgiving morning, I was on my way.
Who’s going to do that for me? I thought. Do I ever want anyone to do that for me? Do I ever want to have to write an Acknowledgements section like this?
Thanks to my amazing kids, Amira and Khyber, whom I love so much; I’m sorry I missed out on nearly half of your childhoods. That reality is the most painful part of my work and I deeply regret not seeing you first learn how to walk, tie your shoes, or ride a bicycle…
Tara, my wife – dear friend, companion, confidante, mother of our children, and the love of my life… I owe you immeasurable gratitude. During my frequent absences over the fourteen years of our marriage, your support and love has made it possible for me to follow my heart. Thank you for the sacrifices you have made…
I don’t know. And it bothers me that I’m spending time thinking about this instead of doing Real Work (because… I have a bias that this sort of thinking is Less Valuable, whether I should hold that thought or not). Perhaps because these thoughts have only started popping into my mind in the past few years and I’m still not used to them and am actively trying to not get used to them.
Every time I pause for breath and look up at this again, I make sure my reasoning-paths for making the decisions I do make still stand. The decision has always been “not now.” It’s been that way because I know that saying that doesn’t hinder my ability to make this choice again in the future. Someday it might, though; I was surprised at the rapidity at which things approached the tipping point for the grad school question once I stumbled upon that sense of fit – still working out the exploration process and the application process to see if this is the future I should and will be walking down, and when – but going from lackadaisical “mm, maybe another year?” to “WRITE THE APPLICATION ESSAYS! WRITE THEM NOW!” in the span of a few days – and then have that persist for weeks and then months – is unusual for someone whose planning horizon is decades.
All right. I think I’ve got that more or less out of my system for now – time to move forward and Do Stuff! Stuff stuff stuff!
Thursday, December 31st, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Whoa, there are papers and studies on learning by teaching! I love it. I want to read this and understand it and bring it back to the projects I’m working on.
These are luxuries I take for granted now:
- Known quantities of uninterrupted time and a schedule you control, no surprise trumps.
- The ability to disengage and disconnect when I need to be an introvert without leaving any wreckage behind me.
- Not having to block being an empath.
On empathy: this is simply describing my tendency to pick up – strongly – on the emotions of those around me, particularly the emotions of people close to me. It’s not a superpower or anything; it doesn’t always work and it’s not always accurate (and some people are extremely hard to read), but I’ve done this since I was a very small child, and it’s had an impact on the person I grew up to become. For instance, another oversimplified viewpoint of the contagious happy enthusiasm is that it is also a self-defense mechanism, because those are the emotions I’d like to pick up, so I make them happen. And one of the reasons I need time and space alone (and will not-sleep in order to get it) is that, without that solitude, it becomes difficult for me to tell which emotions are Mel’s emotions and which ones are borrowed or picked up from other people, to sort out the conflicts between the feelings I get from different people, and to figure out which ones I want to identify with and keep, and which ones I shouldn’t. (Less healthy coping mechanisms: severe sleep deprivation and/or oversleeping, music/movies as a way to turn off my brain, logic/rationality/science/math/engineering/work/sheer-functionality as a way to turn off my emotions.)
I like being an empath; it hurts sometimes, but it’s the tradeoff I’d choose. I’d rather be able to understand and help things than not feel them, and if I could be more of an empath, I would turn that dial up. If have #2 – the ability to freely disengage – I’m okay; I can act like an emotional heatsink because I have a way to dissipate whatever I get. If I don’t, it builds up until I have to do a series of self-contained explosions, which leave me drained and slow to context-switch back into productivity. Somewhere down the line, I gained the ability to be selfish about it and forcibly disconnect. It’s a total jerk move, and means I’m not strong enough to take it – but the thing is, I shouldn’t have to be. I should be able to choose what I want to take and what I don’t.
Yes, I just had one of those I don’t WANT to be an empath now please go away moments, and am trying to work towards a justification of my actions by writing this out. Mrgh. I’ve got mixed thoughts on that. See, that’s the problem with coming to think that your worth is nonzero and positive; you gain the ability to be selfish because you think doing something for you is more valuable than doing… whatever else.
I think I’ve just got one more thing to get out of my head, and then I’ll be able to get back to work.
Thursday, December 31st, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
So… once upon a time, I actually wanted to do this sort of thing. (Lousy grammar in the last sentence of that posting notwithstanding.) If you’d asked me in my late teens what I’d like to do after school, somewhere in that list would be the item RARGH SUPER HARDCORE STARTUP CRUSH CRUSH GO GO GO YAAAH!
And then I learned what it felt like to burn out. And in the process, I started learning what I actually meant by saying that I wanted that.
- I want to work hard – really, really hard, fail rapidly, learn fast. Well, not only is it possible to work hard without being on the fast route to burnout, you can only work hard when you’re not burnt out. D’oh. Also, you can learn-by-failing-rapidly pretty much anywhere you want. ;-)
- I want to make a difference. Well, you’re usually more effective at that when you’re not completely addled with adrenaline. And startups of HARDCORENESS! are by far not the only places where you can make a difference. In fact, if you can only change the world via the medium of startups of HARDCORENESS!, that’s quite limiting.
- I want to work with people who will push and challenge me. Well, turns out that it’s a lot more fun to work with colleagues and teammates who aren’t (1) burnt-out, (2) hypercompetitive, or (3) obsessed with work and ONLY WITH WORK ZOMG.
I haven’t done this quite as badly as other folks I’ve heard from, and I’m not proud of still being proud of my “war stories” (such as they are), but for the number of years I’ve been on this planet, I’ve done a good number of Idiotically Macho Things… and I still do. The thrill of heroic firefighting is addictive, but it’s only possible when something’s caught on fire in the first place – where the ideal would be to make it so that fires don’t even get a chance to start at all.
Sometimes a dose of healthy competition can work wonders; sometimes a battlefield metaphor is appropriate – but these don’t work if they’re full blast all the time. If you want to be a good athlete, you don’t run 30 miles and lift weights and compete in a boxing tournament every day and blow out your knees and rack up concussions in the process. You’ll wreck yourself before you get a chance to master everything. What I hear you are supposed to do is train intensely – and an important part of that is rest. You take days off, you stretch, cross-train, eat healthy, all these things.
Now, I realize I’m not the epitome of balance right now. Far from it. I’m a terrible example to follow with regard to work habits because so much of me still wants to prove I’m MACHO ENOUGH!!! by going HARDCORE ALL THE TIME!!! and this often leads to Bad Decisions with Ensuing Consequences such as a nosedive on my college transcript, RSI, et cetera. But I have come to realize that the sort of environment described above are temptations that I should avoid, because it’s not the better part of me that wants it, and it will hurt what I’m trying to do in the long run.
I’m fortunate enough to have environments where the calibration-goal is sustainability and not burnout. I don’t calibrate well to that, but at least it’s almost always clear what it is I’m aiming for and what I’m not – I still often set myself to BURNOUT MODE! but it’s usually clear to me throughout that I’m choosing to do something I should not be doing, which tends to help me not do it as much, and not stay too long in it during my weaker moments when I choose to overclock in ways I shouldn’t.
I’m fortunate to have friends who always recognize my independence and autonomy, but will also exercise theirs in reminding me that they care about me not careening off the cliff-edge. I often push back – but it’s good to have something to push back against. It’s good that I have friends who will, on occasion, stand beside my desk until I close my computer and join them for food, or go to sleep, or whatever it is I’m not giving myself at that moment. On a few rare occasions during college, I found work literally being taken out of my hands and several pairs of hands on my shoulders guiding me back to my room, with classmates waiting by my door until I slept for the first time in several days (Sleep Interventions).
Good friends will let you get mad at them so long as you do get the rest you need, and later when you realize it was the sleep-debt talking and not you, you thank them. Good friends start teaching you that calibration early on when you’re 17 and can afford it, so that you don’t do it so badly when you’re 23 (as bad as I am now, I know I’d be much worse without those earlier experiences). And I’ve been on the other side of the table as well, trying to get my friends to take better care of themselves; sometimes I listen, sometimes I don’t, sometimes they listen, sometimes they don’t. We keep on trying.
This seems to be where this mental thread is going: I enjoy being around people who are passionate about what they do, truly believe it’s going to change the world for the better, and throw themselves fully into that calling – and who believe that part of that calling is to care about and for each other – the teammates they’re doing that work with, and the world they’re doing that work for. Part of making sure the job gets done is making sure the folks who’re doing the job are all right – not because you need them as a means to achieve your ends, but because they are people – your brothers, your sisters, your colleagues, your friends.
How was it the quote went? “Do your work as well as you can, and be kind.” Kind to others, and kind to yourself.
I’ve recently been reminded how wonderful it is to listen to percussion. Percussion and bass lines, and the way music fits together. How long have I gone without appreciating this? Several months, at least. I love rediscovering things after some time away; it’s like getting together with a good friend after an absence and seeing how much you’ve both grown and how much you’re still the same person. It’s nice to be able to trust that you’ll always have some people even if you’re not in constant touch with them; you can reach out and talk to them at any time.
Just looked at the time, and in my mind now, I can hear the voices of several friends going “well, it’s getting late; you ought to go to bed.” (Or, more simply: “MEL. SLEEP.”) Tonight’s a night I listen.
Thursday, December 31st, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
TL;DR “talking to myself in order to keep my head on straight” post. I forsee many of these coming out during my preparations for quals and the end-game of my dissertation.
It’s been a while since I sat down and continuously listened to music; this break has been excellent for that. I’ve been on a fingerstyle guitar listening kick lately, but other things have popped into my musical field of view. First, Beatles covers; it’s wonderful to hear what so many people have done with the same song. Second, Variations on a Theme of Paganini by George Thalben-Ball is written for pedalboard and looks like a lot of fun to play – particularly the last variation which is all sliding feet glissandos. I wonder what it’s like to have to coordinate your feet and your hands at the same time. Being able to stably play music and build instruments is another argument for settling down. (Eventually. A long time from now. While still continuing to travel a lot.)
I need daily rituals that I can take with me wherever I go. Right now I’ve got my computer and writing, which is nice, but I’d like to be able to add something physical to that, and something musical. Either I haven’t found it yet or I haven’t been doing it long enough consistently enough to realize that I’ve already got the makings of those. I’m still a novice on bass and guitar, and can’t move across those instruments with fluency – for that matter, I want to get better at playing with (not just playing) the piano. Conversation. I want to be able to use music to have a conversation. I want to be able to have a conversation by kicking or hitting or throwing a ball or by sparring with my fists and feet. But conversations require partners, and the only way I have of keeping up a stable conversational partnership is via the internet – not particularly great for music or sports. Hm. Wait, that previous statement isn’t quite true. This is a problem I could solve. Hm.
There is a game called The Game of Nom. (Windows-only, alas.) The title alone fills me with great amusement.
Today, I…
Did some budget/equipment/logistics research and continued some conversations on the possibility of a small SoaS pilot/testbed this spring. The pieces might fit together; I’m going through and identifying, quantifying, and then minimizing possible areas of uncertainty and risk to see if we have a chance of staying under time-budget, figuring out the resources (mostly people-time) available, and weighing that against other possible time-investments to see if this is what would give us the most leverage… several hours into this I started laughing because I abruptly realized that this sounded a lot like what “entrepreneurship” is, except without the “money” part.
Had one of those wait what’s happening to me? moments wherein I panicked that learning to think “this way” would diminish my ability to “do engineering” before logic took hold and reminded me that the two aren’t mutually incompatible and why was I so freakin’ obsessed with the latter anyway? (I am; I have this thing about wanting to stay an engineer – as if I could stop being one! – which is a knee-jerk reaction I don’t fully understand, and therefore need to look at more.)
Finally went and set up my research server; right now it’s fairly boring, but I (and anyone, really) can…
git clone http://97.107.133.152/git/readingnotes
The notes themselves haven’t actually been checked in yet; they’re on another hard drive I’ll get to back in Boston. It’s at http:// rather than git:// because I haven’t figured out git-daemon yet, nor have I configured DNS (I haven’t actually set up A records before, but subdomains don’t look that hard to figure out) nor have I played with mod_rewrite (or indeed done much with my apache configs at all), nor have I even started to think about anything else. I’m messing around; this box is all staging right now, and it’ll take a good amount of configuration and experimenting and breaking-things and testing for me to be able to say “yeah, these services are production-ready for me.” I do imagine that after some years I will decide I no longer want to be my own sysadmin and switch back to having someone else do it, but if that happens, I will know I know how to do it, which is always nice. I’ve wanted to do this sort of thing for years and it’s good to kick my own ass into finally taking the next step.
Heard family stories about the courtship processes of a series of older relatives, which was most fascinating. The stories mostly sound like this: “Our families have known each other for many years, we’re in the age range at which one is supposed to get hitched, and we kinda like each other. Let’s investigate this idea of you and me getting married, ok?” (I’m sure there was more to it than that.)
Colloquial German, chapter 3. Wherein Mel learns adjectives and how to conjugate comparisons. I feel like slowing down and getting more vocabulary into my head before diving into chapter 4, but need something different as a breather, so I’m going to do some auditory training with the FSI course tomorrow now that I have my portable audio player. Mmm, portable music. I finally figured out how to convert things to ogg vorbis, and then spent some time reading about the file format.
The list is looking pretty good so far – tomorrow I’ll be wrapping up #1, doing #8, and hopefully making major headway in either #2 or #11, plus a SLOBs meeting to prep for and attend (I owe SLOBs a blog post on the recent trademark decisions and a proposal on how to revise the formal statements regarding them). That leaves #3 (start Thursday, finish Friday), #9 (Thursday), and… the longer-term stuff, which I’ve been at least working on a little bit each day, although today’s contribution to grad school apps was “throw out old statement of purpose drafts because they’re absolutely terrible.”
1. All recommendation letters I’m writing for people will all be mailed (yeah, need to do the “get stamps” part)
2. Grad school applications will go from “asymptotically being finished” to “finished” (this is the big one, and it’ll have to be broken into subtasks.) Working… on it.
3. Belated Christmas presents will be shipped (it’s so much cheaper to get Christmas presents after Christmas) and all necessary returns made.
4. I will begin my research pile by getting a VM slice and setting up a git repo for reading notes on it.
5. Get through Chapter 6 (”Present Tense of Haben”) in Colloquial German. So far, so good.
6. Convert the FSI mp3s for German Headstart into ogg format; use Christmas money to get an ogg-compatible portable media player (current top contender: Sansa Clip + firmware upgrade) and begin playing former-mp3s-now-oggs on it to start learning how to listen to the language.
7. Exercise differently every weekday this week in order to try out the different schemes you were considering; pick one on Saturday. So far, so good.
8. Scholarly societies: make sure your memberships are up-to-date (ACM/IEEE/ASEE), that you know what publications you want to watch this year, and that they automagically get delivered to your inbox. Tomorrow!
9. Year-end finances: roundup, 2010 budgeting. Thursday.
10. Finish transcribing, tabbing, and learning “Lullaby to an Anxious Child” on guitar (so far I have awkward fingering on everything except the bridge and none of it’s transcribed; I’d like it to be nice throughout). So far, so good. Also, I discovered tuxguitar today.
11. Ye Olde Annual Inbox Purge (this will need to be done a little bit each day)
12. Spend at least an hour each day doing Nice Things for/with Family. Hopefully longer. This may be the hard part – or then again, once I explicitly make it my responsibility to take this initiative, it might magically get easier. So far, so good.
Vacations are hard!
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Invent Your Own Computer Games With Python looks like a great base for remixing into a “how to make your own Activities” guide for students – it’s written so 9-10 year olds can understand it. And it is indeed remixable; the license is BY-NC-SA.
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 | sugar | 3 Comments »
Today was win!
On the exercise front: I knew I couldn’t do a regular chin-up, but I thought I could at least slowly lower myself down from the bar – until I proceeded to essentially jump off a chair 8 times in a row (that’s about how effective my biceps were at attempting to slow my descent). I’m trying not to put myself into a world of pain tomorrow, so I’m going relatively easy at the moment, even to the extent of doing my “15-20 pushup set” with hands on chairs so I’m at a 45 degree angle to the floor instead of trying to go on the ground from my knees and having my arms collapse halfway through the second set. Not overdoing things is hard; I don’t have good calibration abilities on my physical self yet, but I at least know how bad my calibration abilities are, and recognize I can’t just rollback a bad ankle to its pre-17-year-old state, and… slow. Sloooow.
Furniture shopping for Mark’s new apartment with everyone except my dad (who hadn’t yet come home from work) provided an opportunity to practice my German (“Der Tisch ist auch sehr billig!”[0]) and learn some Fookien (“Lang bo lai je in huey bo ottoman.”[1]).
Turns out Yifan is also studying German – she spent the summer doing research there and wants to go back. If I can figure out transport to Naperville sometime this week, we’ll have a day of embedded tinkering (YAY! It’s been so long since I touched hardware!) and German movies. By the way, the great thing about friends is that you can – even if you’re not working on anything together – spend an entire day doing nothing but walking around a city for 7 hours (ok, food was periodically involved) and have a wonderful time.
And I am the proud owner of a portable vorbis-compatible music player. Merry Christmas to me! We’ll see how well this works tomorrow when I load it up for its first full day of operation, but it seems to be doing rather nicely right now.
Not even writing in complete sentences here, or listing everything I got to do – feels good to be busy again. Now I’m good and tired and can take some time to think and rest. Aaah, it feels nice, being able to rest. (Why do I have to work harder at resting than I do at working? That shouldn’t make any sense.)
[0] “The table is also very expensive!”
[1] “People don’t come and sit because there’s no ottoman.”
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
The thing I have to watch out for is not burn-out: it’s burn-in. It’s not running out of energy or running too hard that’s my greatest nemesis; I learned to deal with burn-out the hard way during 7 years of high school and college, and as awful as it was to flame and wreck that way, it was wonderful to have that problem. My biggest danger is not having places to put the energy I’ve got. I can’t down-spin the massive do stuff! do stuff! flywheel of enthusiasm quickly or well – or really, at all – and so I pace like a caged tiger when I’m home.
Common symptoms:
- Sleeping a lot. 6-7 hours a night. Or more. Every night. It’s not refreshing; it’s stupor-inducing – oversleeping is a drug of sorts for me, so that’s bad.
- Being full. Like, all the time. Which either means (1) I’m not hungry (and therefore something’s not quite right) or (2) I’m eating way too much (also bad).
- Generally being really antsy (all right, that’s not unusual) and feeling like there are lots of little snarls of knottiness threading up inside my neck and throat and shoulders because of it (ok, this might also be the RSI). I can close the blast doors and keep all the explosions inside myself, but I can’t stop them from happening. The energy turns into little dense pellets that gnaw; it really does feel like slowly burning inside sometimes, because there’s no vent for a clean fire to blast out and propel me somewhere.
The lack of running-around time due to the first probably also has something to do with the second. Comparing my usual caloric intake to what I eat when I’m in Glenview, I’m not actually eating more than usual, though we do eat a lot more meat and far richer and more “nice” food than I’m used to. Geez, I remember when going out to eat was such a rare occasion that getting fast food burgers was a special treat; today we went out for brunch and dinner, and I couldn’t finish dinner.
So. What can I do to deal with this? I WANT TO CRUSH THINGS! I want to totally pwn things! I want to do things!
Answer: well then, do things! That stuff, you know, that you wanted to do, but never had the time for? Do it now, and push yourself through it. Work through the nights if you need uninterrupted quiet-time; that’s the usual tactic for being at home. All right. So, this week…
- All recommendation letters I’m writing for people will all be mailed
- Grad school applications will go from “asymptotically being finished” to “finished” (this is the big one, and it’ll have to be broken into subtasks.)
- Belated Christmas presents will be shipped (it’s so much cheaper to get Christmas presents after Christmas) and all necessary returns made.
- I will begin my research pile by getting a VM slice and setting up a git repo for reading notes on it.
- Get through Chapter 6 (“Present Tense of Haben”) in Colloquial German.
- Convert the FSI mp3s for German Headstart into ogg format; use Christmas money to get an ogg-compatible portable media player (current top contender: Sansa Clip + firmware upgrade) and begin playing former-mp3s-now-oggs on it to start learning how to listen to the language.
- Exercise differently every weekday this week in order to try out the different schemes you were considering; pick one on Saturday.
- Scholarly societies: make sure your memberships are up-to-date (ACM/IEEE/ASEE), that you know what publications you want to watch this year, and that they automagically get delivered to your inbox.
- Year-end finances: roundup, 2010 budgeting.
- Finish transcribing, tabbing, and learning “Lullaby to an Anxious Child” on guitar (so far I have awkward fingering on everything except the bridge and none of it’s transcribed; I’d like it to be nice throughout).
- Ye Olde Annual Inbox Purge (this will need to be done a little bit each day)
- Spend at least an hour each day doing Nice Things for/with Family. Hopefully longer. This may be the hard part – or then again, once I explicitly make it my responsibility to take this initiative, it might magically get easier.
That should be pretty good for now ’till Friday, yeah?
Tomorrow’s agenda, things I should do every day this week:
- The exercise thing (morning stretching, plus moving a lot throughout the day)
- Do nice things with/for my family
- Ye Olde Inbox Purge, round 1
- Colloquial German, chapter 2
And then the other stuff…
- Exploring downtown Chicago with Yifan! (This will be most of my day.)
- All recommendation letters in the mail
- Finish CV (and swap reviews with brother)
If I have time, I’ll update the scholarly societies, but let’s keep the list more manageable for now. It is vacation, after all. Oh, this feels so much better.
And when I’m good and tired from Doing Stuff, then I’ll be able to rest.
Monday, December 28th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
I’d heard this part of the Kahlil Gibran quote on children before:
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
But I’d never seen the rest of it until tonight.
Your children are not your children…
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
Yeah, I’m thinking about the settling-down and getting-married and having-children thing again (and yeah, it’s getting old; it’s been old for me for years now). This is somewhat inevitable during any trip involving family, because it’s one of those things that’s constantly asked about and after a while it starts to get to you. I’ve always needed to have good answers for why I show no signs of going down that path anytime soon. Marginally acceptable answers (none untrue):
- I’m just starting out, and I’m so busy with work and travel right now, you know…
- I want to finish grad school first. (I never really cared about the “but who will want a woman with more education than himself?” argument – and there’s precedent on my mom’s side of the family, so I’ll deal. My grandmother may despair that I’m making it difficult to find a mate; I’m trying to reframe this as “high standards are a good thing, right?” The problem is that some of our standards may be directly incompatible; for instance, I don’t actually give anyone bonus points for being Chinese.)
- Hey look, it’s $name_of_unmarried_cousin over there – why not start with them? *vanish!* (BEST TACTIC EVAR.)
Actual answers:
- No, I do not feel a deep and lonely void that can only be filled in this manner. I’m happily single, thank you.
- The guys my family would set me up with are probably not the kind I’d go for.
- And vice versa. And I don’t want that fight right now.
- “While I recognize that it would make you extremely happy to see my children, your happiness is nowhere near sufficient reason for me to take on the responsibility of acquiring a suitable life-mate, then bearing and raising progeny, likely sacrificing much of my potential to do great things in a career I dearly love in the process.” (see Mel Sounds Like A Jerk Alert, below.)
- And if I did ever have kids… well, there’s a reason Cat’s in the Cradle is a song that haunts me whenever I hear it.
I know I sound like a total jerk when I even write this, but… argh. Sometimes I’m just frustrated and I’d like to say it. And I know it doesn’t have to be this way, but it still feels like a giant trap, because there are all these cultural expectations that come with being a wife, and then being a mom, and I have a hard enough time keeping my own stance under just the expectations of being a girl. (To some extent, I will be a girl until/unless I marry.) The ruts of history are so strongly grooved and deeply sloped that once I click into any portion of that track, I’m afraid I won’t be strong and steady enough on my feet to keep from being swept down into the rest of it. And I don’t think that track goes where I want to go. My mom got married when she was almost exactly a year older than I am today; I’m still young enough that “the rest of my life” is a very long time indeed, at least to me. I admire and envy my friends who are my age and married or engaged or in happy long-term relationships; they have something wonderful that I still don’t understand.
The scary thing is that my family (especially my mom’s side) is actually pretty liberal and westernized as far as these things go – I know there are a lot of girls who have it way, way worse. (I mean, I went to school. I can read. I’m writing this. That’s pretty good already.) Maybe I’m hiding from an invisible shadow that isn’t really there – it’s hard to tell sometimes. Invisible or not, I think I need to deal with this before I really start the dating thing; I don’t want to drag anyone else into carrying that baggage with me. Where I’m from, relationships are between families, not individuals. (What if I end up liking someone who doesn’t come from that sort of cultural mentality? That… will be interesting, to say the least.) I have to work on my relationship with my family before I can even think about adding another individual to that mix. And like I said, I don’t want that fight right now. I have a lot of other things to do.
Sometimes I think these are all mostly excuses to maintain the paralysis against the pressure until I find someone I like. (Hi, my name is Very Westernized. How are you?) I’ll figure out how to deal with all the rest then. I should apologize in advance to any hypothetical future relationships of mine because whoever loves me will continuously have to put up with a lot of shit. (I will, of course, return the favor. That’s what it means to love someone.)
In other news, I got a haircut today – there’s a good cheap place in the next town that cousin Mark was going to, and my impulsiveness and cheapness won out over the more rationally prudent conflict-avoidance part of my brain. So the shagginess is gone and my hair is now fantastically short, the way I like it (easier to care for). And I did pay for it; I came home and went straight to hug my mom in a pre-emptive mollification move because I knew she wouldn’t be pleased. I got away with two relatively short lectures and having to wear earrings and a necklace and a nice blouse (hers, as usual) for dinner. But I’m the one waking up with this haircut for the next couple of months, and I like it. So that’s okay.
Monday, December 28th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Spent the evening with IMSA (high school) friends: Shreyas, who’s a physics PhD student at Cornell (and home for winter break) and Sharon (my high school roommate) and her boyfriend Michael. After the requisite gentle ribbing over me still not having a boyfriend (it’s been a running joke since we were teenagers – technically, the betting pool is still on), we stuffed ourselves silly with Olive Garden breadsticks (and yes, food too) and went back to Sharon and Michael’s place to play Rock Band – Beatles edition, of course. Sharon and Shreyas were the two who got me into Beatles music back in high school; I am nowhere near as big a fan as they are, but due to the sheer repetition of John/Paul/George/Ringo songs being played and sung in my vicinity during the entirety of my high school career, they’re the only band whose songs I know all the lyrics to. And the music is good. And the company was wonderful. Before dinner:
“Positive integer?”
“4.”
“Negative pi.”
“See, we can’t even say ‘pick a number.’”
“Well, I’m picking a menu item modulo 3, and I’m not going to do floor.”
Mid-dinner:
“It depends on whether I pass my quals. If I pass them, 3-4 years. If I don’t, then…”
“What’s the expected value of your graduation?”
“The expected… oh, 3 years.”
“So you’ll probably pass, then.”
“Yeah.”
I got advice from the guys on grad school, which can be summarized as follows: (1) What social life? (2) TAing will give you war stories, and (3) Make sure you have something that isn’t school in order to stay sane. After dinner, we duct-taped the last Rock Band mic from the ceiling so that Sharon and Shreyas could simultaneously play guitar and sing. It’s been a long time since I heard them harmonize like that – I used to love to hear them sing as we walked back to the dorms after class, or when Sharon and I would stand outside Shreyas’s window and listen to him and his roommate Adam play guitar. My contribution for the evening was to squeak up from “medium” to a reasonably decent showing on the highest level in bass and the second-highest level in drums (my Rock Band gaming philosophy: if I’m not madly scrambling to figure out what notes to hit, it isn’t hard enough).
And when I sprawled back on the couch after Rock Band, Shreyas elbowed me. “Hey Mel, you’re tired? Sharon, look – she’s tired!” “No, really?” “The little girl who could never sleep!” “Ah, I still don’t.” “How is this possible?” “Chocolate martini. I’m a lightweight.”
“You know what’s funny?” Sharon said. “We’ve known each other for almost 10 years.” And so we have. 3 years of high school, 4 years of college (at 3 different schools), and now 2.5 years after college. The length of our friendship is almost exactly the same as the length of my social life, and this is not entirely a coincidence.
Huh. I feel old tonight.
Sunday, December 27th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Oi. One of the side effects of winter is that you have way too much time to go through archives and end up rediscovering wiki song parodies and other random things that aren’t worth the effort to actually keep track of, but are good for a grin when you stumble across them again (if only to laugh at how silly they seem now).
And sometimes you go “hey, I learned stuff!”
It occurs to me that were I given a budget of things like Dollars and People-Work-Hours, I wouldn’t know what to do with it at first – the only thing I’ve ever really had to budget was my time. –February 3, 2009
Well, I’m still kind of “what would I do with this?” on that, but I’ve learned both how nice it is to only have to keep track of your own resources (it’s a downright freakin’ luxury, is what it is) and that this “budget” thing is probably something worth learning because the tradeoff in effectiveness-magnitude can sometimes be worth the pain of attention to detail, and I’d like that option. (And then I’d like to… not choose it. Yep. Teach other people how to do it so I don’t have to. Hey, if it works for team-running and wiki-gardening…) Also, I think I’ve been able to learn so quickly at work in the past 7 months because I’d gotten ready to learn it – and I was hungry for it.
And then there are some things I still haven’t learned yet:
I don’t know how to be tired, and I don’t know how to be still, or lonely, or sad. I know how to be excited; I know how to be quiet and suck in reams of information, I know how to make my own happiness and curiosity wherever I may happen to be thrown down. I know how to keep my pen moving across a page. –December 27, 2008
In the past 9 years or so, I’ve learned how to lean a lot more on other people, but I’m still ready to bear my own weight at any time, and keep my center of gravity above my own two feet. I have the ability to intellectually analyze something, conclude it’s fine to take a leap that will bring dependencies with it, and then instruct my muscles to fling me out over that chasm of risk, but that’s still relatively rare, because it’s hard and by no means is it anywhere near spontaneous.
I’m starting to hit some of my pre-programmed “if ever I am in this hypothetical future scenario, what reaction would I want to have?” points nowadays, and the amount of mental simulation-running and prethinking that’s been stored up during idle moments are being put to good use. It doesn’t make the pathways any easier to walk, but it does give me a series of markers strung out through the grass. I need to make sure that I always have the space to do that kind of thinking, lest I get overenthused now and tap the well dry now that I have things to pump my energy into. (And yeah, that’s what I do with my free time – axe-sharpening, axe-sharpening, axe-sharpening.)
And glory, so much abundance now.
My socks have holes in them; my sneakers are close to having holes in them, my primary diet in the house consists of cheap noodles, frozen vegetables, and soy sauce, tupperware and reused plastic forks/spoons are not uncommon dining implements for me, and George Sass has dubbed the neighborhood of my domicile “sketch-tastic.” I sleep on couches, under pillows because there’s no extra blanket, on a sleeping bag in the middle of a wonky futon… and on an actual bed once during the past month. I realize that someday I will look back on this time of my life with overromanticized fondness because I will have, at that point, forgotten what it’s like to actually live on Very Little Money. Right now, though, it’s life, and a happy life at that. –June 3, 2008
My cousin Mark gave me a collapsing laundry hamper for Christmas; I feel so spoiled right now. Also, I do not know how I am getting it back to Boston on a plane, but I’ll figure it out. My family is giving very practical gifts this Christmas; my little brother got his choice of shaving razors – which can become pretty expensive, actually, if you want to go for the fancy electric kind.
Hari reminded me of a concept I’ve run across periodically but never consciously and systematically tried to deploy – linking learning to emotion. I usually think of it the other way around (not necessarily just “learning makes me happy,” but also the Once and Future King quote that “the best thing for being sad is to learn something”), but… baligtad naman, the inverse works as well.
I rediscovered my list of goals from right before I was about to graduate college and… well, I’m not going to go into a diff between January and the present right now, I’m just going to sit back and grin. (I still haven’t gone backpacking, though. I don’t know how to go camping. Andrew! Liz! Help me fix this one!)
And then a snippet from college I felt compelled, for some reason, to write down.
I remember sitting at dinner – in a borrowed blouse, because I didn’t have any nice clothes – with the Board and the Council and some administrators and a couple other students and some faculty, and watching them present a resolution… I think it was that one of the Board members was retiring, and this was his last meeting, and they’d decided to officially name him a Friend of Olin College as a thank-you as he left.
It was one of those super-formally worded things, with a lot of “whereas-es,” – the kind that, when you read ‘em, you roll your eyes and groan and wonder why these people can’t just write in normal English – and they called him up, and read it, and after every “whereas,” there was a wave of laughter and a nonzero amount of less-than-dry eyes. And I remember thinking wow, is this the sort of thing these statements mean? That behind each of these formal statements, there are… people? And that night, there was a little subtle shift in how I saw the world.
Merry Christmas; it’s been a while since my brain went into random-ramble-spew mode like this.
Tomorrow morning, I will figure out the things I need to do, and think about doing them, and maybe start doing them again. Tonight I’m just… chilling out. Mm.
Saturday, December 26th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
