Archive for January, 2010
Went blues dancing on Thursday; it was the first time in ages I’d gone. It was wonderful (thanks to Liz for dragging me both there and onto the dance floor and Gui for refreshing my memory as to how to actually dance), and I spent some time later that night howling silently on the sofa repeatedly trying to get my right leg to uncramp. (It would uncramp, and then when I moved it would cramp again in a different place. Ouch.) It was totally worth it – and perhaps next time I should, uh, stretch.
One of the reasons I dance (various styles of swing/blues) is because it’s a safe space for me to play with touch and physical interaction with other people. I mean, this is blues dancing. (The video is of Jenn and Gui, two friends and former housemates of mine, and amazing dancers and teachers.) I can have a hard time with hugs and still dance blues because it’s a sandbox with known edges that I know I can navigate. I still usually have a hard time turning off the intellectual part of my brain when I dance – there’ll be a millisecond lag as my brain buzzes with “oh he’s pulling this way which means I should step here and then aah wait he’s doing something else augh” – but on Thursday, for some magical reason, that clicked off.
And it’s… it feels good. To be able to shift in response to a subtle tip of pressure on your shoulder. To spin around with an outstretched hand and trust that it’ll be caught for you to be pulled back in for another move. To go several hours without too many words or questions or analytical decision-trees spinning around in your head. To toss down glasses of cold water while you watch bodies and footwork intertwine across the wooden floor, to feel the differences in the styles of various leads and try to match them, to slip slowly into sync with someone, to have some sort of physical connection. And to walk out into the cold January night and feel the steamy sweat evaporating from your hair.
It’s been a while; the next morning (the cramps finally stopped with a hot water soak) I was gently reminded of the existence of a number of muscles in my torso, back, and legs that I don’t typically use. And then, of course, I followed it up by my first winter hike today… since I didn’t have proper gear, I improvised, stuffing slipper-socks into boots and layering up under jeans so the water wouldn’t soak through. Liz took me around one of the easier trails in the Blue Hills Reservation, and I discovered that walking uphill in the snow is exhausting, that the muscles in my feet aren’t used to doing that in heavy boots, and that flopping into the snow to make snow angels (haven’t done that in years!) is a delightful way to cool off.
Watching the sunlight filter through the trees is magic. And boy, are you hungry afterwards – hot soup is great. We went to REI later that evening and I now have a set of thick, warm socks for the next hike. That’s the only thing I could manage to get over sticker shock for. ($150 for a pair of pants? I’ll keep using my layers-and-then-jeans arrangement until I find a sale, thank you.)
When I got back from hiking, socks-acquisition, and a satisfyingly spicy burrito dinner in Waltham during which we caught part of the football game, I toted groceries home and spent the rest of the evening playing charades with my aunt and Audrey, tinkering with a bit of piano, and watching her (my aunt Lynne May) get excited about Inkscape and the possibility of remixing Mo’s curriculum (written for middle-schoolers) for her first grade class and hearing her plans for the spring. One of the themes the class is supposed to cover is “community,” she’s been asking questions about open source and Sugar for months now, and… well, let’s say we’re both pretty excited about this.
Tomorrow: blues dancing again! And a lot of cooking, and rediscovering the floor of my room. Some writing I need to get done, too. It’s good to be tired and sore and able to soak in that; I should physically exhaust myself more often, because it helps brings a different sort of peace to my mind. And given that my usual mode of operation can be illustrated by Thursday morning’s antics of trying and failing to exhaust myself enough with pushups, piano-playing, etc. to be able to physically sit down and work at the computer, finally settling down by blasting Beatles music while standing in front of my computer simultaneously editing the Events FAD page and bellowing the harmony and/or humming the bass line (sometimes, in order to concentrate, I have to cram things into my ability to multitask so the “extra churn capacity” in my head is occupied and the part that’s useful can sit down and do work) … peace is a good thing to find whenever I can get it.
Saturday, January 9th, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »
This time last year was a wonderful lesson that I’ll be forever thankful for. Hard to believe it’s only been a year since I began to realize I was a cygnet – and now I watch in awe as my flight feathers come in. I must look a mess, half-moulted. I must sound a mess, beginning to give answers I used to scoff at. “You’ll just know.” It is a happy time.
Thus ends the cryptic section of this post. (It’s not intentionally obscured – I know what it means – I just… can’t write it any better, not in words, so I’m just going to sit here and be wordlessly happy right now.)
Flux is the constant in my life, and the stability I have is that I’m perpetually in transition. I’m learning that I need to schedule time at home base just as much as I need to schedule time for trips – instead of just putting down things like “Toronto, January A-B,” I also need to put down “Boston, January X-Y” to make sure I’ve got time in town if I want to spend time in town. Make sure I schedule time to hang out with friends and family if I want to spend time with friends and family. Leaving things open in a “oh, at some point of course it’ll happen” fashion leads to them not happening. Scheduling time as “open time” is… paradoxical, but extremely useful – they’re times during which I can’t pre-schedule anything. Right along the lines of my habit of planned improvisation.
It’s fascinating to hear other people describe me as naturally being things I know I’m definitely not – when you practice coping strategies enough that they can appear effortless to other people, maybe that’s natural; I don’t know. I’m not naturally patient or diplomatic; I have a hair-trigger temper and the ability to unleash a powerful rage when my passion takes me the wrong way – and because I recognized that short fuse when I was young, I also learned to be acutely aware of it and control it very, very well, so I could be patient and diplomatic despite myself. (Well… the “patience” part is somewhat less successful, as anyone who’s ever seen me being antsy – and most people who’ve met me have – can attest. But I say “patience” because even if I am antsy, I can still wait. I just fidget considerably in the meantime.)
Similarly, I’m not naturally social, and very much not extroverted; I’ve written about this before, and I’ve written about why I write so much in this context – in effect, it takes this much ongoing scripting for me to constantly get past my considerable shyness. I am also not naturally…
- persistent – mostly I use this adjective as an alternative to describing myself as “impatient” ;-)
- detail-oriented – when it matters, I set up elaborate error-checking routines (not always perfect, but at least I hit different bugs each time; that probably means I’m fixing at least some of them successfully) to make sure my WOOO IMPROV tendencies don’t miss things I should not ignore.
- generous – the reason I focus so much on making it easy for myself to give is that I know that I am lazy and that if it is hard I will not give; my willpower is not that strong. (And so I compensate by hacking around it! Yay hacking!)
- brave.
…but nevertheless, I can be these things sometimes, despite myself (or possibly because of it, or both at the same time). A lot of hard work is involved. Even more grace is involved. As fuzzy and reluctant to engage with the specifics of the God Thing as I am, I know I do believe in that.
On a completely unrelated note, cream of roasted carrot soup (vegan, just pureed ’till smooth) and cream of roasted sweet potato soup (vegan, same) look virtually identical and taste amazing when combined, a blend of complex flavor notes unified by this lovely roasty sweetness. I need more adjectives for describing flavors; I keep on falling back to “tasty.”
A whole bunch of good conversations today; here’s one (Fedora Marketing). I’ve spent the last 2 days immersed in Fedoraland; the next 4 days will have a lot of non-computer time, so I’m storing water in the camel’s hump, so to speak. Blues dancing for the first time in aeons tomorrow night (yay Liz!) and (hopefully) the start of music recording on Friday, and hiking this weekend if the weather permits (I have a CAR! I can go to NEW HAMPSHIRE! And see nature, and people!)
I have a Maltron on loan from Karl and am doing a cold-turkey switch for outside “normal working hours,” so this non-computer-time thing is part of the plan to mitigate the jarringness. And then I’ll be up to 3 keyboard layouts I can switch between, whoo! I surprised Yaakov at FUDCon by being able to touchtype dvorak on his laptop (slowly, I’ve only done it once since high school) when we were working on the survey.
Yep. I think I’m mostly over the “recover from being in Glenview” hump; normal Melness is returning. If there’s such a thing as normal Melness.
Thursday, January 7th, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »
Let me force myself to write this, because if the infinite optimism drive works on just about everything else, it should be able to hit this too. Let me see what I can do with this. Let me start with the sentence “Visiting Glenview is great.”
It makes me appreciate things; it’s like rolling back through a whole bunch of revision histories and going whoa, new features. Sometimes you don’t know what you have until you don’t have it for a little while. And I can roll back through the changelog and remember and appreciate and silently thank the people who’ve helped me commit those patches to the person I’ve become. And during my normal life – when I’m in Boston or traveling around – I’m more acutely aware of how lucky I am to be where I am and with the people I’m with.
Going to Mass with my parents is good for me; I don’t regularly take periods of stillness and contemplation (I take them, but nowhere near regularly – it’s very much an “as I need it” thing). There are people at church who knew me as a baby. It’s good to be reminded that I’ve got a past. The family albums and photos around the house remind me of that, too – and the statuettes of saints, and the paintings by my mother’s father hanging on the wall. I’m connected to a long, rich web of culture and tradition, and whenever I want to reach out for it, it’s there. Even if I step away from it, I can always step back in case I want it someday, and I’ll always be asked to. There’s a weird sort of comfort in that.
Being with my mom and dad is good for me, too. I do enjoy spending time with them. It’s nice to be able to see them from the perspective of a young adult; I remember them differently from different phases of my childhood. They’ve mellowed out (a little bit) with age and come to understand different types of American-ness a little more (though they don’t always agree with it – nor do I, for that matter, but on different things). I’ve learned how to talk with them differently as I’ve gotten older – better on some things, worse on others. They teach me how to be a person. And watching them with young people who aren’t their kids is always something of a revelation to me – they’re very good with them. I think it’s always different when it’s your own kids and your own parents.
Sometimes, you can only really get certain sorts of food at home. Where else can I find homemade soymilk, pork lugaw, adobo, and the 2nd best huana miki in the world? (The best is made by my mother’s mother. I hope to someday vy for third place.) There are ingredients at home; Mang Tomas and banana ketchup and various Mama Sita mixes, polveron in the candy drawer, the occasional bag of ensaymadas after a bakery trip. Fish and shrimp are cooked with their heads on; rice has the proper semi-sticky texture (boiling rice like pasta and then draining it is just… no).
I’m forced to prioritize – how much rest do I need, how much do I really love what I’m doing, what’s the most important thing for me to accomplish, how do I make sure I do that? I learn what I need stillness and quiet for, and what I can do in snatches when I don’t know how much time I have. This is a good ability to develop for later on, though I’m not very good at it yet (and honestly, I don’t really like having to be good at it. Yet.)
I like going out with my brother and my cousins (Mindy is going to Northwestern next year, so I’ll have 3 cousins in the area then) and old friends like Randy. Once in a while, I’ll get to see IMSA buddies, and that’s nice too. I haven’t done this in a while, but I could also visit my elementary and middle schools and thank my teachers (one of the highlights of my high school career was going back to have breakfast with my kindergarten teacher). There are some classic growing-up spots I can go back to – in terms of sheer hours-spent, that’d be the two nearest public libraries, but there’s also the pools I used to swim in and the parks I used to play in (largely renovated now). When I manage to borrow the car, I sometimes just go out to those places and sit and work quietly – and it’s nice to be there, in the field where you first figured out how to steer your stunt kite, or the baseball diamond your little league team won the championship in (the last year you could be in the age league where girls could play baseball with the boys), or the sledding hill you drove your red wagon down (learning valuable lessons about suspension and handling along the way). The ice-cream shop whose seasonal opening and closing marked the start and end of summer. The hot dog place your middle-school band/orchestra/choir stuffed itself silly at in between watergun wars during Band Outing Day.
And then there’s the parts of town you’re still discovering, because you didn’t get to see them when you were younger. That’s pretty cool. There are trails in the nearby forest preserves that I didn’t know existed; there are bike paths that I’ve never ridden on because I wasn’t allowed to cross the street to them before. There are the places and pathways and playgrounds I snuck off to when I broke the rules and went out-of-bounds anyway; there’s the drainage ditch full of dandelions beside our street where I’d slosh my bike around in big circles in the mud in an attempt to become tired when I needed to run but couldn’t go very far. There are the parts of town that were built after you left home at 14, and those are good to discover too.
I need time to recover from being in Glenview, and I need to be aware of that and honor it instead of expecting myself to be able to instantaneously switch gears without any side effects. Being there does many things that are ultimately good for me; it also exhausts and drains me in a way nothing else does. (Well, maybe the Philippines, but that’s got the jet lag factor too.) But I do learn from it. It’s a good reminder, and it makes me refocus on who I want to become.
I’m back in Boston now; it’s good to be home.
Monday, January 4th, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »
I use computers a lot. I’m hyperactive and need to move every so often. I have problems with RSI (under control now, but something I need to keep an eye on constantly) because I sit in front of a computer not-moving for long periods of time on a regular basis. This is clearly not an ideal setup.
Since I can’t do a treadmill desk until I settle down (which, as we’ve established, will be a long time from now), I’ve been tinkering with more portable solutions for being non-sedentary while on the computer. Some potential components (some of which I’ve tried before):
- A standing desk just for computer stuff (don’t have, but easy to make with stacks of books) with as many monitors as possible (I have monitors).
- A normal-height desk for spreading out papers and work and things, and doing stuff like sketching/drawing, with an exercise ball as seating for that, and a normal chair as an “if someone else comes into the room” option, or an instrument-playing option.
- My instruments (just-keyboard would be fine, bonus points if guitar, bass and cello fit too) beside my desk – I love swiveling around to play a quick lick on the piano as a 15 second break between tasks whenever I have this setup.
- A portable keyboard tray that can be moved to sit or stand freeform (read: a sturdy height-adjustable music stand, which I may get for guitar/bass/cello anyway) and a portable projector (I have the old ILXO office projector).
- A lounging chair for when I’m lazy and feel like giving in to terrible posture.
- Whiteboards.
- A chin-up bar for when I feel the need to climb on things. I can actually lower myself in a controlled fashion from the bar now (as opposed to my “jump off chair while holding bar with no noticeable decrease in speed” performance from 2 weeks ago) so at some point I may actually be able to pull up.
- An I-am-more-comfortable-than-falling-on-a-hardwood-floor mat for things like situps and practicing falls (if room permits).
- Assorted fiddly-things for when I get restless – bonus points if fiddly things are for physical exercise. For instance, a door gym, a punching bag, one of those gyroscopic wrist trainer thingies, barbells.
One of the best setups I ever had was in college where I had a 4 (at one point, 5) monitor spread from an exercise ball beside which I kept a set of dumbells. When I was antsy I would do crunches on the ball, curl the (adjustable-weight) barbells with one hand while reading/typing with the other, and so on – it cut down on the number of times I had to get out of my room and (literally) run up and down the hallways to blow off steam.
I’ll be setting up the standing desk this week (stacks of books) and looking for a good music stand – the idea is that I should be able to bring it down to keyboard height when I’m standing so that things look sort of like this:
The chin-up bar has been a lot of fun to play with – just to grab and jump around with and hang and swing from. It makes me wonder if I’d do more situps if I actually unrolled the mat next to my desk in the mornings and left it there for the day instead of having it rolled up in the corner going “I can always unroll it if I feel the need to exercise.” Basically, I want to make it so that the easiest option I have for blowing off steam is to do proper exercise – taking advantage of one’s own laziness is an art.
Monday, January 4th, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
For those wondering where the questions in the FUDCon Toronto survey came from, this IRC snippet from #fedora-mktg last month is a little peek from when Robyn (rbergeron) and I (mchua) were going through questions from Yaakov…
07:25:09 < rbergeron> did fudcon live make it possible for you to participate more or less than otherwise, and how would like to be able to participate and have fudcon live match that.
07:25:22 < rbergeron> yaakov said in an email you guys talked a bit about the questions?
07:25:44 < rbergeron> do you know offhand what the meaning is in the 2nd half of the sentence there
07:26:14 < mchua> rbergeron: yeah, lemme try to parse it better
07:26:39 < mchua> for both attendees and remotees and read-notes-afterwards people:
07:26:48 < mchua> compare your FUDCon experience with FUDCon Live available
07:27:01 < mchua> with your projected FUDCon experience had FUDCon Live not been available
07:27:14 < mchua> and let us know the diff, and whether that diff is positive or negative
07:27:40 < mchua> now make a third option, “your FUDCon experience with FUDCon Live v.2.0 available”
07:28:10 < rbergeron> ahh
07:28:11 < rbergeron> ok
07:28:18 < mchua> where the value of “FUDCon Live v.2.0″ is set such that the third option has the maximum optimal your-happiness-with-your-ability-to-participate value
07:28:23 * rbergeron just kind of got a little lost in the 2nd half of the sentence
07:28:37 < mchua> and tell us the value of “FUDCon Live v.2.0″
07:28:38 * rbergeron laughs
07:29:04 < mchua> rbergeron: I’m, um, an engineer sometimes
07:29:25 * rbergeron points to mchua’s bed … go sleeeeeep
If you haven’t taken the survey, please take 5 minutes and do so now! It closes in 4 days, on Friday, January 8, 2010 and will help us improve future FUDCons.
Monday, January 4th, 2010 | fedora | No Comments »
I just spent more time in a movie theatre in the past 24 hours than I have in the entirety of 2009. The length of Avatar is partially to blame for that. And yes, the 1:30am IMAX 3D showing was worth it; that movie is such a stunning technological achievement that the part of my brain that would usually be going “ooh, this is a stunning technological achievement” was sufficiently stunned by said technological achievements to shut up and bask in the sheer beauty of it, sans running analysis (…most of the time).
It’s pretty rare for me to see a movie where I actually like all the female characters. In particular, Neytiri… kicks… ass. I was surprised by how fast the pacing moved in the beginning of the movie, and how they somehow managed to achieve that rapid pace without accelerating the beats and making it feel rushed, or feeling like you’d skipped over large chunks in the story. The lighting was gorgeous; both the military base scenes and the out-in-the-forest scenes had a green hue, but the former was a sickly green and the latter had a lovely dynamic range. I don’t know much about lighting so I can’t tell more than that. And (this is silly, but) I liked the lens they used for the video diary clips. 200 years from now, webcams apparently still have a bit of a fisheye effect.
Ok, so the plot is cliched. It’s basically Pocahontas with aliens. And although it didn’t feel rushed, pacing-wise, I found myself going “wait how did they decide to become lifelong mates in 3 months which was actually several cut-scenes during the movie that we don’t really show?” I have no idea what the non-subtitled dialogue was (hurrah for alien languages needing to be subtitled in English) but I’ve heard that I’m not missing very much. Sans dialogue, the villains (Quaritch and Selfridge) were rather one-dimensional, and I wish Trudy and Norm (and possibly a few more of the marines – they’re mostly bodies that shoot things and die during the film) had been given more time for character development; the glimpse of Augustine’s past (in the photos on the fridge) was great to see. Then again, the film is already 2.5 hours…
The other one was The Princess and the Frog, which I went to see with Randy after we went shopping for a mattress and sheets for his new apartment. Randy is the oldest friend I have – our parents were friends since before we were born (6 months apart – he’s older). We were constant playmates to the point where jokes about arranged marriages started coming up. (Why is this a popular joke topic in my family?) He moved to Kentucky when we were both 6, and we didn’t get much of a chance to see each other for the next 17 years – but he’s in Illinois now, working, and about to move into a condo with my cousin Mark about 15 minutes away from my parents’ house (hence the mattress shopping). It’s great to see the kind of young man my old playmate has become.
We went to see a Disney movie because (1) Randy is a huge Disney fan, and (2) we watched our first Disney movie in a theatre (Beauty and the Beast) together when we were small. Of Beast: he remembers the music and the story; I remember how the visuals filled me with awe, especially that one sweep of the camera to the ceiling during the ballroom dance scene. On the way back home to drop me off, we did a pretty fair impression of crufty reminiscing about the quality of hand-drawn animation, “the good old days” of Disney musicals, the lack of a clear “magic moment” in this one (the carpet ride in Aladdin, the ballroom scene in Beauty and the Beast, etc – Frog is a good movie, a solid one, but not an amazingly magical one).
So. That was nice. And with that, my vacation concludes – work starts again tomorrow. (YAYYYYY!)
Monday, January 4th, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Found some old pictures while shuttling new ones into folders. My first solo lasercutter run, trying out the new machine at Wellesley in early 2007 for the first run of teaching ECS there (Alex and I were the inaugural TAs). Naturally, the first thing I cut had to be…
MetaOlin rice break in Boris’s room – from left to right, it’s Boris, Dellin, and Chandra. The great thing about rice and soy sauce is that with a bag that costs a couple bucks, you can fuel a horde of college kids through midnight snacks for… well, maybe a month. I’m not sure how long the sack of rice lasted.
For the senior retreat right before graduation, all of us were given an index card and told to make a representative collage. I have pictures of the cards my suitemates made; they’re hilarious, at times mildly disturbing, full of inside jokes, clean, stuffed with pictures, nicely laid out, haphazardly thrown together… I started sketching possible layouts in pencil on my card, kept erasing and redrawing them, and then finally decided to make that my card, hanging my pencil up with it at the last moment.
A whole slew of other things in here, too – posters I made for my freshman year hallway, photo shoots for SuIEEEte’s yearbook page (my junior year suite did a Harry Potter III spoof), 30 second video competition entries (“finding Gillester”), Halloween costumes (my favorites over the years: Robin (from Batman), the locomotive of a 4-person freight train, a cello, asleep (bed strapped to back), the Prince from Katamari Damacy), pictures of me and my brother as little kids, a high-school Mel clambering atop the blue metal sculpture in IMSA’s front lawn (Yare Yard), the Respawn Point poster I made to cheer up Alex and Not during a hellish finals week, Matt Ritter grinning in front of a burrito shop.
I should take more and better pictures; I really do appreciate them years down the road.
Sunday, January 3rd, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
I took some idle moments today to ascii up my impression of the Fedora Insight workflow that was discussed at FUDCon Toronto 2009: behold. (original source)
For context, Fedora Insight’s intended audience is people who are not (yet!) contributors to the Fedora community, but want to get a sense of its pulse at any given moment – what’s going on, what’s interesting, what are people excited about? Every piece of content on Fedora Insight should stand alone and be readable by someone who’s never heard of Fedora before (without them having to ask “what does that acronym mean?”) which is the reason for the “annotation” portion of the moderation queue. Think about how sites like engagdget, lifehacker, etc. put a few sentences of context to explain the site they’re about to link to. Same sort of idea here.
Thoughts, comments, feedback, criticism, tomatoes, and patches welcome – I’m putting this out as a strawman.
Edit: Oy, the fixed-width theming on my blog does not handle this ascii diagram nicely. I’ve replaced it with an image for inline reading, but you should really go look at the version on the wiki page.
Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 | fedora | No Comments »
…of how the remainder of 2010 will go, it’s going to be a very good year.
I woke up in a warm bed fully refreshed, had a lovely giant mug of tea, then breakfast, then another giant mug of tea. Blueberry crepes appeared halfway through the morning. I knocked out some solid progress on my to-do list, kept up with emails (even made a dent in my backlog), did not get interrupted, had a pleasant dinner with my family, read, had some good writing-braindumps, had some wonderful conversations with friends that made me (1) think and (2) appreciate the privilege of being able to hang out with folks this awesometastic…
In general, I’ve been in a happily relaxed flow state all day. Not uncontrollably hyperfocused (I was able to effortlessly direct my focus today – this is rare, and lovely when it happens!) or totally scattered (though I was able to effectively multitask and take in many things at once), not isolationist (though I did get solo work done) nor all socializing/talk (though I loved the conversations that I had), not sedentary (though I did relax) and not totally overclocking my physical capacities (though I did run about and move and it felt quite good).
In other words, today I had something that often eludes me: balance.
Here’s to many more days of finding the same. I’m off to stretch, then to read, then to bed. Ahh, this is good.
Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Today appears to be a Let’s Finish Up All Braindump Loose Ends day! I’m going through the list of sentence/writing fragments on my to-flesh-out-at-some-point list and running with them until my brain runs out of steam. HOOYAH.
Of all the things I’m grateful to Rick Miller for, a big one is that he taught me (after I whined to him for something like an hour at one point) how to gracefully hold power and responsibility despite not wanting it (and actually, in my case, being terrified of it). Well… I haven’t quite learned it yet. But he taught me that it’s something possible to learn, something worth learning, something I should learn, and how to begin learning it. He taught me that a reluctant leader could also be a very, very good one, and how to honor that if I were ever in the same position.
Since then, on many of the occasions I’ve been asked to lead something, the asking (on somebody else’s part) has often been followed by a long silence on my part before I answer. That silence is me screaming in terror inside my brain – aaaaaaaaah I can’t do this why are you asking me I’m going to mess it up ask someone else nonononono - and then pausing and going well wait. Is this reluctance getting you anywhere? Are you just trying to take the easy way out? Can you come up with a better option?
Sometimes I’ll be able to and I’ll say “well, that person should be running this instead and here’s why,” and sometimes I won’t be able to find a better way out and I’ll say yes, which means “yes, and I will do the best job I can do until I find or teach someone better than me and hand the reins to them as soon as is humanly possible” (and sometimes I’ll say that whole thing, too). SLOBs was a pretty big step forward; that’s the first time I’ve actually put myself forth for something. (Yes, it was after a pretty decent amount of encouraging and prodding behind the scenes, but still. I stepped into that spot instead of inadvertently being dragged into it.) (And speaking of that spot, I need to figure out how to be a better board member – I haven’t been entirely satisfied with my performance this far; it’s tough to make an impact on a 3-hours-a-week budget, but I’m sticking to that because I want to hold myself to however much time I would expect most Sugar Labs volunteers to be able to put in, to see what someone can do if they don’t have the luxury of spending all day every day keeping up with things. Aaanyway.)
Responsibility! It burns, and I don’t want it, and I don’t want to want it, but paradoxically I also know this sometimes makes me better at carrying it. I do not think I’ll ever feel mature or grown – but I can feel that I’m maturing and that I’m growing, and that it (generally) gets better every day – I can tell because I make different mistakes each time.
Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »