Archive for July, 2010
Left Chicago Tuesday evening, arrived in Boston close to midnight. Hauled my luggage 2 miles from the train station, slept in a bit the next morning, packed my car full of my stuff throughout the majority of Wednesday and napped for a few hours before hitting the road early Thursday morning just as the sun was coming up. Drove straight down through NYC and DC (pausing during rush hour for dinner at Waffle Houes), hitting Raleigh close to midnight and getting a quick tour of both the apartment and the Django-based POSSE webapp (under construction) from Ian before folding out the sofabed and napping for an hour and a half before heading off to the RDU airport carrying my backpack and a guitar.
Flew RDU to ORD, attempting to stay conscious during my layover; flew from Chicago to Shanghai and slept fitfully for a few hours on the plane (I usually have a terrible time sleeping on planes) because I was so exhausted. Didn’t sleep particularly well – it was a long, long flight, made longer by the fact that the least sappy movie on the entertainment rotation on United was called “Date Night” (actually an action-comedy with almost no sappiness at all and a bunch of guns and car chases and a helicopter, so I was not entirely displeased). Learned that specifying “Asian Vegetarian” for meals gets you way better food (curry!) and think I’ll keep experimenting with various dietary options on flights out of pure curiosity.
My Mandarin isn’t so much rusty as it is patchy. My main challenges with the language center around (1) lipreading, because there are clusters of syllables that appear identical and that plus the language’s tonality mean that any given visual clue could correspond to a large number of auditory signals – and unlike in English, I lack the exposure to word-frequency I need to wing my way through it Markov-style, and (2) the writing and phonetics of the language being incredibly decoupled – that is, reading a character and knowing its meaning doesn’t mean you know how to say it, and vice versa (unlike languages that, you know, use a phonetic alphabet[0]). So I could follow signs, but not pronounce them; knowing the English for the train station I was looking for did not help me find it on a map until I (laboriously) figured out the characters for it, translated them to pinyin (because my visual scanning for Chinese characters is weaker than my scanning for Roman letters), and then read the map, and so on.
And oh my god people here speak really fast. However! There is hope! I’ve started to be able to pick up on sentence structure again – not content, just structure, so sentences sound like fill-in-the-blank reminders that I have a limited vocabulary – “<place> <date> I <verb>-past-tense <direct object> or <verb> because <item> better-than <adjective> <other-item>” and so forth. I hope to someday have the luxury of being able to immerse myself in learning this, just throwing myself into a weird place and a new (well, not entirely new now) language until I actually become able to function at a higher level than the “I can get around town, buy food, have basic conversations, and painfully pick my way through news articles” abilities I had (and have now forgotten) last time I tried. I have therefore decided that I’m going to be Really Stupid while I’m here – unless work-functionality demands that I speak in English – and throw myself headfirst into reclaiming my Mandarin, which means making a fool out of myself in broken sentences and bad pronunciations but if that’s what it takes then I don’t care.[1]
Also, an 18-hour drive followed by 23 hours of transit to, between, and from airports (including a 15-hour flight) that lands you 12 timezones from where you started is supposed to make you tired – and it did! – for about 4 hours. Which is… how long I crashed for. And I’m awake again and not feeling tired in the slightest, though I know I’m probably exhausted but not feeling it because of the timeshift. (I usually don’t even try to rest when this happens – I just go “ooo, I can work!” and work – but I tried to be unconscious for another few hours this time, got in about another hour of sleep, and now I give up.) So I’m reading in an attempt to stay calm enough to go down for a third nap before I go off to catch my flight to Beijing.
Sumana’s post on Kannada made me smile – as many of her blog posts do (see: copious amounts of food) – because I feel similarly about Fookien (my family’s Chinese dialect). There are words I automatically translate into thought-images that are not their literal meaning – in some cases I didn’t learn their literal meaning until years later – because of the contexts I heard them in. For instance, “Gong-bin” means (roughly) “stupid/stupid-looking,” but I heard it only as a term of endearment (as in “Gong-bin chabowah,” which means “my dumb-looking daughter” – and I’m totally mangling the phonetic transcription here) so I thought it meant “beloved” or “cute” or something complimentary until… I think I was in high school when I found out otherwise. And phrases that mean things other than what they say (“have you eaten rice yet?” –> “how are you?”) And little softening-words, and doubling-for-emphasis. And the weirdness – and richness – of growing up surrounded by a language you don’t really speak, growing up actively not understanding a swath of the conversations around you, a linguistic wall that can’t be breached[2], knowing idioms but not basic vocabulary.
On a semi-related note, I’m trying to discern a pattern in my fearlessness, because so often I throw myself headlong into things that other folks are usually afraid of – I’ll do that for some parts of my life but not for others. Actually, it’s usually not actually fearlessness, it just looks that way… often I’m terrified but hurl myself in nevertheless. (Sometimes I do seem to have an absence of fear where there probably should be at least some caution – for instance, traveling alone and walking strange city streets at night – but that’s another discussion for another day.) New place? New job responsibilities? No problem – maybe an initial momentary hesitation, but then it’s all plunging through. New language? Gulp, but okay, I can deal; hurtle forward. Stop occasionally to recover/gasp for breath, and then off we go into the storm again.
The adverb “slowly” is largely in my vocabulary as an abstract concept that applies to other people; I tend to have two settings: (1) ZOMG and (2) the much more rarely-seen and shorter-in-duration “crashing in recovery from ZOMG.” That’s why I so often write down (in this blog for my future self) the small moments of actual peace I have – they’re so fleeting and rare that I want to catch them while I can because I don’t know when they’ll come again.
Probably not this week while I’m in China, and that suits me just fine. :D One last nap attempt now and then it’s off to the airport – working with Gerard (and possibly some other local Ambassadors) today to try and get a sense for what they need. Wheeeeeeee!
[0] English doesn’t really. We just like to pretend we do, but in reality, American English is a mutt of a language with way too many in-jokes.
[1] Hah. I have cut off my escape route to being shy about this. Which I really, really, really am. Unless a teacher or someone gives me explicit permission to mess up, I’m absolutely hesitant to speak a language I don’t know because I am afraid of making mistakes. So this is intended to be a public statement of accountability to make sure I don’t cave in to that fear. Yarr! LINGUISTIC MASOCHISM!!!
[2] Except it can be, but it would be very hard. Hypothetically, I could learn the peculiar Taglog-English-Fookien mashup my family uses, but only if people patiently sit down and teach me – it’s not like there’s a textbook for that sort of Creole, and I’ve been told all my life that it’s not useful/good to try and learn that because “nobody speaks it” (“but you do!” I point out) and that I ought to learn Mandarin instead. So I continue with my hobbled patchwork understanding of our odd little dialect, and try to shoot in as many “what does that word mean?” questions on the side as possible, and have slowly started to piece together bits of vocabulary and grammar over the years. Very little. But some.
Saturday, July 31st, 2010 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
(If someone can translate and post this to the zh-language Fedora Planet, that would be awesome!)
I’m about to board a plane to Shanghai – I’ll be in China for a week devoting my time towards building up Fedora activities and presence in the region. If you’re in FZUG, in the area, or interested in the region, please let me know! I will be in #fedora-zh all week (I usually lurk there anyway) and trying to improve my (very basic) Mandarin skills, but will probably need a lot of translation help.
This trip was originally supposed to be a POSSE (more on that later) but that was unexpectedly canceled at the last moment – it’s actually a good thing, though, because we’ll have more of a chance to get to know what’s happening in the area.
One area I’m personally interested in is education, mostly at the college level – for instance, it would be great to see a POSSE (workshop for professors interested in getting their students involved as contributors to open source communities) in China sometime in the next two years, and I would love to talk with people about how we can make this happen.
However, my first priority on this trip are the Ambassadors and folks working on the ground for Fedora in the region. How can we do a better job of getting you resources, how can we get more publicity on Planet and Ambassadors-list regarding what is happening in the region? Do we have a lot of packagers, or translators, of $SKILLSET in the region that we should organize a FAD around? Who should we talk to? Where should we go? Do people want to meet up for dinner some evening?
In other words, what are Linux users in China passionate about, and how can Fedora help them? Blank slate.
Friday, July 30th, 2010 | fedora, fedora-zh | 7 Comments »
As restless as I tend to be, it’s still harder than I’d like to admit to leave a place behind. Technically, I should be past New York by now; I was supposed to meet up with an old teacher and a friend in New Hampshire this morning, then start the drive to Raleigh. They had to cancel, so I decided to spend the early morning resting and packing instead, more leisurely – and found that once I sat down and looked around… there was a lot I didn’t want to just rip away and leave behind. Packing, usually a hurried 30-minute affair of shoving things haphazardly into bags, turned into a more methodical slow pick through all the things I’m leaving behind.
I’ll have one last shot to bring some of it back on my second trip to Raleigh, but I find myself mentally triaging again – do I want to keep my high school math notes? Yes and no. How much do I need? Not much. How much do I have? More than I need. How much do I want? I… have no idea. Part of me wants to settle down and have a place stable enough to get a real piano, even a beat-up old upright like Hector (which I got for free my freshman year of college), stock the fridge with more food than I can eat in a week and not have to wonder if it’ll spoil while I’m away. Part of me wants a carry-on luggage, a laptop backpack, and a travel guitar, and… that’s it. I am young and stupid, and so the second part is bigger, stronger, faster, and wins out every time.
I have generally made it a policy not to regret any decisions (nor to make decisions I’ll regret), so it’s not a problem. I’ll be hopping around for work and school and stuff anyway – all these things I’ve waited my entire life to do – and I do love seeing the world. I still get dizzy with the prospect of all that unexpected freedom (it’s still unexpected, even after a year or three or seven or ten depending on when you start counting), and I don’t think that’s going to go away anytime soon.
And my bass and guitar and Ian’s electric mandolin and my last two suitcases (one for clothes, one for everything else) aren’t yet in the car. What am I doing? I should put things in the bags, put bags in the car, and hit the road. I love night driving; it’s quiet, peaceful, and requires a working rear license plate light (yeah, going to fix that shortly).
Quiet night, open road, long stretches of highway and thinking. My mind will settle down again once I’m behind the wheel.
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
It’s 11:30pm and I’m trying to sit here thinking clearly about the work I should be doing. I feel like I’ve got a lot of good stuff wadded up inside my brain from the past few months of deep-diving (well, as deep as one can dive in largely one-week chunks) into a variety of education-related contexts, but it hasn’t found a satisfying way to spool out yet. Talking with Karsten in Santa Cruz got enough of it out to make for a good OSCON talk, and that felt great; I need to get more of it out. C’mon, thoughts. Form into words. You’re in there, wordlessly floating in my brain… now all you need to do is reify into something externally shareable and usable.
It probably doesn’t help that I’m simultaneously trying to get my brain to think in another language again. Mandarin re-acquisition isn’t going very well; I still don’t like staring dully at books that don’t type back at me. I memorize words quickly, then forget them just as quickly. Videos make my eyes glaze over. The #fedora-zh channel is largely empty and silent. I’ll pick a dictionary and a book to take with me to Shanghai – once I’m there, I’ll probably reabsorb the language like a maniac, but I won’t have long enough, nor enough time, to settle into being better at the language before I fly back to the US again.
Wish I could live there for a while. I don’t know how else I’d become fluent in the language, and… I would like that. I feel like such an ABC (okay, I am an ABC) and I’d like to be able to talk with the people I look like, and look like the people I talk to, at some point in my life. And it’s such an amazingly untapped part of the world for large swaths of the FOSS community, and… I would like to be able to help make that bridge. And I want to learn how to live in other places. Having more or less figured out how to live on my own, and then how to hop my long-term base every 3-12 months, and being reasonably happy with the progress I’ve made in learning how to travel constantly (still a long way to go, but I think I’ve identified most of the major bugs I have in that process by now), I want to go farther.
One of my problems is that I have to reach a certain point of exhaustion (it’s typically called “collapse”) before I can really rest. It’s a known flaw. It used to basically ensure that I’d be sick at the start of every single major school vacation because my immune system would cave in as soon as the adrenaline died down. I know, I know, I know. Sigh. Trying to work on this – the problem is that the sort of work and effort I’m used to involves more effort, not less (and putting in less effort involves more effort, which circumvents the point). I still can’t sleep for more than a few hours at a time – I just wake up. The way I know to sleep for longer than 6 hours or so involves not sleeping for multiple nights in a row and then then crashing hard. Or being sick. That works too.
What do I want to do tonight? The only deliverable I have to push out are my OSCON talk slides – as far as I can go with both sets of slides, and then publish them out so my co-presenters can complete their portion of the text information and we can release. Tomorrow I need to write an OSDC/edu article. And I’d like to clean my inbox before I start driving to Raleigh.
All right. I’m going to finish a little reading, upload all the notes I have for both sets of talk slides and blog about them and let my co-presenters know, and sleep for a few hours. I’m trying to go light on my to-do list and rest as much as I can force myself to rest; I’m bad at sitting still, but even if I can’t sleep, I can still lie down.
Monday, July 26th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I spent the weekend in Chicago, and will be working from my parents’ house today and tomorrow before flying back to Boston (to drive to Raleigh to fly to China)[0]. Originally I was just here to see my parents, as they (as usual) requested my presence, and tend to bribe me with my favorite comfort foods upon arrival (I had my first decent bowl of lugaw (rice porridge) in 2 months last night, and it was great), but when I landed in Chicago I promptly found out that my Ama (paternal grandmother), Ako (father’s eldest sister), and my Ako’s daughter Rizza (my cousin – she’s my age) had also arrived that day.
In the past year, my mother has taken up both yoga and stonecarving, and is noticeably calmer (I think) now that she is taking time to do things for herself, and I am glad. (And have been telling her to do this for the better part of… hrm. I dunno. 12 or 13 years, at least.) My dad is as akaw (“overly affectionate”) as he ever was. Ako and Rizza have taken over the bathroom: I am not sure what the multiple bags and tubes and jars and bottles are, but they take up a lot more room than… my toothbrush and my travel tube of toothpaste. (See, I figure when I stay somewhere, there will be soap and shampoo present, and if not, I can walk to a drugstore and get a tiny travel-size bottle, and what more than soap and shampoo do you need anyway?)
This afternoon, my cousin Mark (also my age) and I took Rizza, Ako, and Ama downtown because my parents were busy using Mark and Randy’s Christmas present to them (a cooking class). We rented a quad bike, which looks like a golf cart with pedals, and rode up and down the shore of Lake Michigan. More accurately, Mark and I pedaled us up and down the shoreline while Ama sat in the back and Ako and Rizza tried to keep up with our pedaling. When we went up hills I would leap out and push from the side while Mark continued to pedal and steer (so they wouldn’t have to pedal my weight, but I could push harder).
It was a good time; warm day, blue skies, and I was more or less myself and more or less relaxed and their reaction was an amused ay nako, there goes that Mallory being weird again head-shaking and laughing. Really, if it’s a sunny day and you’ve stopped by a park and are waiting for people to come back from taking pictures, I think it’s perfectly normal to lie down in the grass and enjoy the sunshine, but for some reason this is amusing, as is running (in general) and spontaneously being excited about… well… life. They really have been getting more and more used to me over the past several years, which is… good, because my role in the family appears to be “let’s push the edge of everybody’s comfort zone now, shall we?” at times.
Dinner featured the Asian equivalent of the Pru Frappe: a giant coconut bubble tea freeze from Joy Yee’s that was approximately equivalent in volume to a Pru. Om nom nom. As much as I complain about my family sometimes, they can be pretty awesome, and I do love them (and vice versa). We don’t agree on some things, and I can’t speak the mix of languages they speak, and I am unashamedly the Weird American Child, but… I dunno if this makes sense, but hearing conversations in dialects I barely understand is part of coming home. An oddly comforting part of coming home. This setup, strange and stressful as it is sometimes, is home. And these people are my family. And… I do not appreciate this enough.
I’m not coherent enough to write this well tonight, but wanted to pin as much of my brain down as possible before I spiral into unconsciousness for the night. Trying to fight perfectionism in my output, since I need to spew a lot of it and have been failing “release early release often” due to overly high standards, so you’ll likely see me spew a lot of utter nonsense in the next 2 weeks. I’ll brainspew, then at some point (hopefully) cull the good stuff and send that to various Planets / my team / etc / etc / etc.
Whee!
[0] and after I get back from China I am hoping that my next destination will be unconsciousness. Good grief but it’s been quite a summer. AN AWESOME SUMMER!!!! but yes. Rest. I’ve heard it’s sometimes a good thing.
Sunday, July 25th, 2010 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
My daily work-script from last summer when Matt Ritter and I lived together and periodically did productivity-related lifehacking because we’re both super-easily distractable. It… still isn’t a bad one.
- Look at today’s big rocks, todo list; shuffle undones if needed.
- Look at today’s calendar, done list. Update today’s done list, noting readjustment to time estimates for the future.
- Dump tasks into todo list.
- Look at calendar and block out time to be in each context
- Print calendar, big rocks, and to-do-tomorrow list.
However, it works better if you can resist the temptation to try to have too many big rocks (our word for “the really important stuff”) – if you mark everything as important, nothing’s important at all. So I think it may be time for me to prioritize my projects for the fall semester (yep, still trying to stay in sync with a school schedule – I am going back to academia someday) and make some tough decisions to take lots and lots and lots of cookies (the term Matt coined for “responsibly turning down and/or getting rid of a project,” so named because he began bribing himself to do so by getting a cookie every time he did).
I could work on…
- Finances/startup with Matt
- SoaS (various aspects thereof, but mostly attempting to streamline and document processes so the entire release team becomes redundant and can move on to other roles as people take over what we’re currently doing)
- Sugar Activity development and maintenance (IRC)
- Fedora Marketing: upstream marketing
- Fedora Insight: getting the dang thing up
- Trac plugin development and maintenance (TracBacks)
- Playing guitar (and other instruments, yeah, but focusing on one instrument at a time) with a good measurable goal being “start to record pieces, even if you sound awful”
- Getting back in shape so I can do martial arts again – some sort of consistent and reflective way of getting exercise (consistent in occurrence, not necessarily activity).
- Fedora on ARM (which likely implies BEAGLEBOARD HURRAH!!)
- Computer configuration/tweaking/sysadmin-fu, with the express goals of (a) getting my RHCE and (b) setting up and maintaining a number of servers and services for small projects I care about.
- Etherpad
- Relearning C (working through K&R)
- Relearning physics (working through Penrose)
- Relearning Python (building Django webapps and integrating then with Trac and supybot is the specific thing I’d like to get good at; I know it’s weirdly specific, but it makes sense to me.)
- National Novel Writing Month
- Improving my dancing (blues, specifically)
- Studying a foreign language (I also learned my lesson several years ago about only trying to learn one at a time, and a good goal here that I like is reading books and poems and being able to have text chat conversations in whatever language I pick.)
- Grad school – my application, reading journals and books and starting to write notes to researchers and whatnot.
- Learning to cook. Well. Specifically, what to do with farmers’ market produce. Possibly a focus on either Italian or Indian foods. Possibly trying to learn what the heck to do with an oven.
- Studying business – I actually want to start by trying to grok accounting and finance, and being able to understand Red Hat’s quarterly reports (which read to me now like “This is Red Hat! We… made money and stuff! Look, numbers and a lot of words you do not know!”) I’m pretty sure I’ll pick up a lot of marketing and brand things along the way because that’s where my interest lies, though. And legal, because there are some things one just has to know.
- Getting and understanding my medical history records, and specifically my (a) audiology stuff and (b) what, specifically, happened during my long bout with pneumonia when I was 2.
- Bike maintenance and extended biking explorations of the city I live in (Raleigh) – whether I’ll be around enough to do it is another question.
- Car maintenance. I’d like to learn it. Alex listed out the tools I’d need, there aren’t too many… that plus a shop manual should get me started if I tackle this. Also, driving – rally racing and whatnot, or… “the car stuff that Alex Maier does.”
- Matt Jadud’s awesome parallel-programming arduino project and the testing thereof
- Olin’s GCSP program, specifically (yet more) poking about transparency and infrastructure of participation from the alumni side (gosh darn it people let us help you).
- Fixing my terribly terribly terribly out of date website.
- Getting my files digitized, versioned, backed up, and accessible. (Searchable, streamable, secure, everything.)
…okay, I’m… I’m going to… stop now. Clearly, clearly cookies must be taken. I cannot keep trying to do this all (for most – some of them are still in the “considering (re)starting” category and I should just not do them.) Or rather, I need to decide what’s important to me now – doesn’t mean I can’t work on the other stuff but they should be extras rather than goals. It’s like cognitive housekeeping – and my brain moves so hyperactively that it kicks up a giant cloud of dust and chaos and leaves books and clothes strewn around my mental room, so I should… sweep more often.
Focus. It is hard. Opportunity overload: I still deal poorly with it. Even after years of having more opportunities than I can take, I still have this sense of panic that oh my god maybe I will never get this chance again – part of my brain does not quite trust that all this abundance of Cool Stuff I’m Actually Able To Do won’t be taken away from me at some point, or that I’ll need to fight harder or for more of it (I fight for some of it already) and combine that with my ability to easily be distracted and excited by shiny things and you end up with chronically overloaded Mel.
Happy Mel, though. I don’t think I would be happy if I were not busy.
Sunday, July 25th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Secretly (okay, not so secretly), I’d like to be a ninja. Hari sent me a link to ROOTS school and I must admit that this is the sort of thing (one of the sorts of things, rather) I dream of doing someday. I know I’m in no shape to do it now; I’m physically out of shape, lack basic camping skills (though Andrew did teach me how to build a fire, and I can pitch a tent), have no awareness or context or ability to navigate places that aren’t cities, generally don’t know how to deal with nature, and have a schedule and lifestyle that don’t deal well with me being off the grid for more than 12 hours at a time (in other words, my work is online and I am a workaholic).
Another thing I’d love to do – with similar “my life is really hard to interrupt right now” constraints that mean I’m not actively pursuing it right now – is cooking. Italian cooking and Indian cooking specifically. Learning it properly, thoroughly, and pretty dang hardcore for an extended period of time – a month, at least. A year, better. And I would like to build a house with my own hands, and go on an extended bike trip. Motorcycle. All these things. Kitesurf, wingsuit, martial arts… I’ve said this before. If I want to do these things, I know I need to start working on them at
some point. They are on my “would be nice to do, but I won’t work towards
it now” category. Plenty of other dreams to go for first. And I can only
save (financially) for so much at a time, and school is my #1 priority
right now.
That having been said, I am working on a bunch of things. Sometimes too many. Grad school is a big one right now. Grad school and being clear to study technical things and things about education – I am too often distracted from furthering my own (increasingly rusty) “how to make stuff” skills by… random things that come up. I actually want to be forced to sit down and learn about database schemas or VLSI or electronics manufacturing, and to make things, and to write elegant papers. It will be hard and I will complain and I will have to force myself to stick with it many times, but I want that. I want to learn how to do that. I want my brain to be shaped in that way.
I’m rambling right now – somewhat disconnectedly and incoherently, because I’m tired – but to some extent, it’s okay if I never get to do any of this stuff. Not because I’m giving up on them before I even really start, but because I’ll be happy with my life if I look back and have no regrets – if at any given moment I’m doing the best thing I could be doing, and the thing I want most to do, at that moment. I can’t cram everything in there. I try not to worry too much about that (though I still do). I don’t know how long I’ll be around and able to appreciate these things, so I’ll do what I can while I can, and what I get to I get to, and what I don’t get to, I don’t. I try for some crazy stuff, but I’m also ok with it not working out, so it’s really, really hard to disappoint me. Makes for a pretty good life.
Wow, my brain is really fried. I’d better do some work and get a little sleep before my talk tomorrow with Karsten. Early wake-up for practice. Maybe bacon waffles will be consumed for motivation. I still get nervous (that may be an understatement) before presenting, so I’m going to be greatly relieved after my first talk tomorrow… after which I get to practice and freak out about the second one. Whee!
I’m looking forward to the brutal “Boston to Raleigh in 24 hours” roadtrip I’ll be doing a week from now. It will be relaxing solitude. Immediately before my flight to China. Mmmmmmmm wanderlust and work. The two combined… are rather lovely.
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Today… was a decompression day. I spent Saturday feeling more and more introverted and getting more passive-aggressively grumpy as a result – I’d simply reached my Too Much Peopleness quota. This happens after extended periods of time in contact with large groups of strangers, and I need solitude to recharge.
It inadvertently started last night after sushi, when I lay down to rest my (swollen) knee and simply… didn’t wake up again until 3:30am, having slept through 2 alarms, Robyn coming in and out, lights turning on and off… I was dead to the world. Woke up at 3:30, 5:30, and 8:30, each time vacillating somewhat miserably between the need to rest (not so much to sleep – which I needed too – but to be by myself for a while) and guilt over being unable to do work when I attempted to do so. At 8:30, when Robyn got up, I decided screw it, I’m going to sleep. My naps became immediately more restful thereafter, but I’ve still only gotten sleep in bits and snatches.
Dancing helped. There’s blues in Portland every Sunday night, so I took the bus up and spun around in my socks for about 2 hours. I even got asked for repeat dances, which… was flattering, but nice. I was definitely hindered slightly by my knee, which would occasionally send stabbing jolts up my leg, but it was a good night, a night of solid connections. A lot of leads with gentle, subtle styles, which was perfect for my energy level (low) and my knee (ouch) and what I wanted to do (listen quietly, not get flung around the room). One lead complimented me on my “good instincts.” I nearly laughed; they’re not so much instincts as they are years of getting over paranoia, and I’m still not all that great. But I did do a few dips tonight, which surprised me, and it was a good way to turn my brain off for a little while. Live band, too.
Reading and writing is a good way to get my functionality back. My ability to process audio is one of the things that drops out when I’m tired – actually, realizing that it has is a good indication to me that I’m tired. My ability to process text is one of the last things to go (if I ever lose it, I’m really in trouble, and I can only remember it happening once in recent memory). It’s challenging to rest, because sleep… is hard. But I can go upstairs and play guitar. The team is in the lobby (so am I) and they’re playing poker (I’ve been writing).
Highest priority tomorrow is slides, slides slides slides. Slides and being present at OSCON; I’m trying to be more gentle with myself about recharging so I can actually take the event on full-steam. There’s a lot I want to learn, a lot of people I want to meet, a lot of stuff I want to do, but I’ve got to be in a shape to do it. HOOYAH. Will make it through! I’ll be good and tired when I reach Chicago this weekend (visiting my parents for a few days, by request).
It’s a long summer, but a good one. I will… collapse in August. I’ll have the time and space I need to breathe then. It’ll be good.
Monday, July 19th, 2010 | kinesthetic | 2 Comments »
I promised Asheesh I’d write this post, though it’s coming a day late because I crashed through the 2nd day of CLS 2010.
What’s the balance between inclusiveness/accessibility and being able to use the best tools/formats available (in other words, not having to worry about whether everyone else is keeping up)? For instance, during the first day of CLS, I found myself zoning out a lot; as someone who can’t hear, it is extraordinarily hard for me to lipread multiple people in a conversation with background noise – should I have interrupted them and said “excuse me, I’m deaf… would you mind signaling when you’re about to start speaking so I know to lipread you?”
The issue is not that I should scratch my own itch, nor that it would not be an entirely unwelcome or unwarranted interruption and imposition on my part. I’ve been speaking up and making (and asking for) my own accommodations since I was a child. I fully admit that I’m frustrated and to some extent just venting/whining here, but my frustration is that there is that extra expectation that I must – and will – expend energy on rectifying this every time I’m at an event, and the incremental cost of doing so slowly chips away at my willingness to participate at all (because it “costs” me more than hearing participants to have the same level of participation). There is nothing I can do that will fix it permanently (if there were, I’d be more than willing to work my ass off for an extended period of time to make that happen) – things will always be this way, no matter what I do. And I am tired.
It’s like being told you need to pay a dollar every time you want to participate in a conversation. It makes you pause slightly about participating in that conversation at all, and even if the conversation isn’t that great, you’re more likely to reluctantly stick with it, because… well, you paid a dollar. Others will look at you and go “why don’t you just pay the dollar?” or “it’s only a dollar,” or “well, if you can’t even pay a dollar (you lazy bum) you shouldn’t be here” – and not recognize that it adds up. Say you have a dozen conversations each day, which is on the low side – you probably walk by many more in the space of an hour without realizing it (the questions on the bus? the chatter by the water cooler? the informal banter about the soccer game at lunch?) – that’s $4380 a year.
And you have to publicly put in your dollar. I have to stand up and tell people I can’t hear, and would they – graciously, please – accommodate me? Most folks are goodhearted and will gladly do so, but sometimes I don’t want to stand out. I don’t want to be labeled as deaf, because there are some associations that come with it that I find even more tiring. And offering to pay the dollar for me doesn’t really help, because you have to stand up and publicly say “hey everyone, I’m putting in a dollar for Mel!” which doesn’t help with the standing-out problem. So I just choose to opt out, and quietly slip out the back door and go away. Sometimes I come back. Sometimes I don’t.
I want to make this clear: I have no problem with paying the extra bill. I do so often. I stand up and ask often. I take a lot of extra, invisible effort to set up things (sitting in front so I can lipread, etc) so I don’t have to inconvenience others by asking whenever possible. But sometimes, when I’m tired, I wish there wasn’t that expectation. I wish I didn’t have to ask. I wish I could just be tired and not have to ask and have the world still work and have me be able to participate in it. I’ve expressed this kind of thing before. Multiple times.
Asheesh did a great thing yesterday: after we talked about this, we went to the next talk together and he started transcribing it in etherpad, in backchannel, in notes that everyone could see – including me. IRC transcriptions at the last FUDCon were a huge boon. One reason I’m so fluent in text-based communication channels is that it’s a part of the world where I never have to ask – I’m on equal footing by default. And I wish this could extend more to other parts of the world, even (especially) in tiny increments – my suitemates leaving captions and subtitles on in our lounge by default (I never asked for it, they never mentioned it) I am incredibly grateful for to this day. Small things like that – people understanding without you asking them to, and being able to participate in the tiny moments of life folks that people usually think “oh, this doesn’t matter” because they take it for granted.
I feel like I’m whining here, because I can’t propose a good solution – I’m just venting a frustration, and the frustration I’m venting is that I can’t think of a solution. But I promised Asheesh I’d give this voice, so here it is.
Thoughts?
I’m tired.
Monday, July 19th, 2010 | fedora, teaching open source | 5 Comments »
The best part of today was dinner with Ian, Max, Karsten, Robyn, and Asheesh at a sushi restaurant where the sushi came around the table on a train. As in… a model train. A little train pulling little plates of sushi. And you picked the sushi plates you wanted off the train.
I was entirely too excited about this.
In other news, our talks are taking shape – I’m excited about them, and a little nervous (I mean, first-timer at OSCON and… I’m doing 2 talks and a BoF, and OSCON isn’t a small conference). Okay, I’m more than a little nervous. But it’ll be all right. I need to practice with Karsten and Asheesh so I don’t talk too fast, and so we get a good banter going between us, and so we can wrangle audience participation smoothly (there’ll be a lot of it, of course – it’s a talk I’m involved in, so the audience will bloody well do work)[0] but it’ll be all right.
Just gotta keep telling myself that now.
In other other news, my left knee has swollen to the point where it’s a bit tricky to walk. It’s from playing kickball at Stanford last weekend; I was covering first base when my brother was at bat, and of course when he got a solid kick in and started charging towards base, I stepped on, yelled for the ball, and neither of us was going to budge. Jason, the ball, and I all reached first base around the same time, and he slammed into me and everything went flying; I limped around for the next few minutes, then shook it off and figured it was fine.
The next day my knee had turned an ugly blotchy red-blue and was reasonably tender, but still fine. This continued through the week, and the purple portion of my knee shrank. And then yesterday – maybe it was sitting still in the car all day and letting the fluid build up in the joint – my knee went stiff. When I went to wander the city last night, I started limping; most of the time it’s fine to bear my weight on my left leg, but occasionally I’ll step on it a certain way that does… something… unpleasant to the general area of my knee. So I walked as much as possible today, and rubbed my knee whenever I was sitting down, on the idea that perhaps activity and flexing out that joint and trying to get it to drain (it’s swollen) will help, so either I’m very very right or very very wrong, and tomorrow morning I will find out which is true.
I’m pretty tired today; I noticed myself dropping into being less and less verbal (the more tired I am, the more energy it takes to process auditory data, so visual input and text output are the last things to go). Taking a nap (I hope) before heading downstairs to finish my talk with Karsten. Or at least trying to take a nap.
So… much work… to do. But I love doing it all. And we had ice cream today.
Update: The nap turned into sleeping ’till 5:30am. Whoops.
Sunday, July 18th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
