Pilots are lucky enough to have someone who’s job it is to help them sort out and work through any mid-air problems that occur.  Sure, while it’s not the controller’s fault that a bird flew into your engine they’ll do their best to clear whatever runway you want or make sure that help is on the way if you prefer the river route.  When all is said and done the captain is often heralded for landed after hitting a bird, but who thanks the operational folks behind the scenes that made sure the landing environment or post landing process was well under way?

Even when things don’t go wrong, when  I depart an aircraft I feel this urge to say thank you to the pilot if he’s standing in the cockpit area watching everyone leave because he didn’t kill us.  In retrospect, I should probably be thanking him for following the instructions and thank the person who passed along those instructions on the radio for making sure that we didn’t crash into anything along the way and made it to the gate without too much hassle.

I wonder if there’s competition in the field to work with more complicated parts of the process.  I imagine working at a small boring airport is just that, but I’m unsure if a particular controller position represents the height of a career or whatnot.  Presumably no one really cares about ground control because you have windows to avoid hitting things, but I suspect the more airborn stages get more exciting; they at least have more at risk.  I’m also left wondering how frequently the controller folks wish they were in the pilots shoes.  Sending a plane off to Hawaii is one thing, but actually flying it there sounds like it would be a much more exciting experience.  I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d settle for being a passenger on the plane either.

Me, I’d settle for being a passenger once in a while.

Good night moon.

After a fairly lengthy period of observation, I’ve concluded that don’t I derive the satisfaction or enjoyment I do from purely being alone, living on a planet devoid of other humans wouldn’t be pleasant in the least, but rather I enjoy taking substantial breaks from people that compromise humanity.  The reprieve is what I’m actually enjoying, a chance to relax not worrying about how others are going to perceive me or the opportunity to rest my ears and just listen to the silence.  The contrast is appealing, much like people enjoy entering an air conditioned house in the summer.  If it’s cold outside and cold inside it’s not nearly as refreshing.

To qualify my statement of a “fairly lengthy” observation slightly, I’ve been living by myself since my Junior year at RPI.  For the past 10 months or so I lived practically alone on the west coast of the US, and for the past week I’ve been completely alone in Australia.  There’s a bit of a progression here, but I’m optimistic I won’t find myself moving forward as the sole occupant of a space craft destine for a planet anytime soon (though that sounds intriguing).  During my time at RPI I lived alone and spent a significant amount of time in my dormitory or apartment, people thought my behavior was strange when I’d decline invitations or intentionally seclude myself (I’m a pro at leaving a group before a social gathering is about to begin).  As terrible as it may sound I enjoyed taking a break from others and would avoid lots of social situations likely due to the high amount of situational stress it might place on me.  That’s a very fancy way of saying I don’t like being around people all the time because I end up exerting a lot of energy trying to look like I fit in.

When I was at RPI I wasn’t always alone though, aside from classes (which I never really counted) I interacted with others through activities like RPI TV filming Student Senate meetings and being a member of the WTG and collaboratively working on cool web projects.  I didn’t go out to eat with people every night (in fact I rarely did), but I could spend a few hours each day interacting with folks in a fairly comfortable hybrid of a social and professional environment.

Transitioning to life after RPI I “work” a lot more, and I count work in the same category as attending classes as not-really-inter-personally interactive activities.  Sure, I briefly interact with folks at the lunch table, during a weekly meeting, or engaging in the transactional email, but I rarely discuss things of interest or engage in any collaborative efforts.  Working together involves late stage integration or, reviewing the work of others.  Most of my teams effort is through individual tasks where little to no interaction with other people is necessary, in fact the more people you have to interface with to do your job the less efficient you are at it (there’s a clock in play).  Paired with the lack of a social life outside of work (one of my known weaknesses) I’ved started to feel increasingly lonely.

Sure, I talk to people back from RPI online at night and we’d chat about X or Y but that’s an extremely limited interaction.  I’m all for instant messages instead of phone calls or in-person contact (I often prefer these sort of methods that support slightly more pre-meditation), but sometimes it’s nice to have a significantly lower barrier of entry where you needn’t punctuate your thoughts by <enter> keys.  I’ve also been in a relationship for a fairly long period of time which usually confuses people via the logic <relationship != lonely>.  The cop-out reasoning is that I’ve been in a long-distance relationship limited by the same factors that limit anyone interacting with someone a distance away, but fundamentally these aren’t as mutually exclusive as they seem.

Being on a continent where I know 0 people (or perhaps 0 people know me)  pushes all this to an extreme.  I’m out of timezone making it challenging to have reasonable contact with anyone that I might usually.  I’m not technically impressive enough at work to warrant anyone taking a notice of me, and my limited social skills means that longest conversation I’ll have with anyone outside of the office will be ordering food.   If this happened during my tenure at RPI I’d be like hooray, a few days away from everyone to catch up on all this email and write all that code I’ve been thinking about but I’ve done that all months ago.  I haven’t sufficiently fulled up a quota of work to do to comfortably occupy myself devoid humanity.

I think little kids have it easy, they can shout “will you be my friend” at someone and have a decent chance of getting a response; especially if that person is of a similar age.  People would think you have a mental condition if you said that at my age, and I believe the slightly more socially acceptable thing to do is propose you “go out for drinks” or something like that.  I don’t drink which makes it kind of strange for me to ever propose such a thing, when I’d really be saying is “do you want to go out for drinks even though I’m just going to have a soda, I figure there’s a decent probability you consume alcohol”.  If you’re invited out for drinks I think you can miss expectations and avoid the actual drinking part, but if you’re the person doing the inviting that’s a bit stranger.  I also don’t have anyone who I’d propose this to so this  paragraph is moot (i.e. I’ve concluded anyone I’ve interacted with has a sufficiently full social life to have no existing quota for me).

Had I been more outgoing in college I would have likely gained experience in the going-out-with-friends category but instead I focused my efforts heavily on programming projects and alike.  I think at some level I like to think the two are, can, or will be connected but more on that later.

Good night moon.

If I were running a bank or financial establishment in which people physically interacted with their money or account I’d want to keep hours that mirrored the needs of the people’s money I was holding.  My local credit union back home was open 9-5 weekdays, except for Thursday when they were open until 6.  On the weekend they opened up shop for 3 hours on Saturday morning from 8-11am.  To me it seems like they’ve only created a total of 4 hours that actually cater to the needs of the people doing the banking, the 3 hours on Saturday plus the “late” night on Thursday for you to deposit your paycheck.  So kind of them.

When I was working a “regular” job that kept me in an office from 8-5ish it was impossible to visit the bank when I wanted to check up on my money.  Sure, I could rush home on Thursday and wait in line for a long time OR wake up promptly Saturday and get to the bank but that’s not really how I want to spend my Saturday morning.  I’m sure the counterargument to this bank scenario is that I, running my mythical bank, would have to find employees that could work the hours desired by customers.  I don’t have any qualifications in human resources to say this is remotely feasible, but if a grocery store in the outskirts of a pseudo city in “upstate” NY can be open 24/7 I think a community bank can afford to be open until at least when American Idol comes on.  I’ve never been quite sure what “props” are, but I’d like to award them to the grocery for letting me indulge my desire to go grocery shopping between 10pm – 1am.

Providing what most would call extended hours makes it much easier to distribute the load, and I suspect you end up distributing the portion of the load that you actually don’t want in an establishment during other times.  I get frustrated, not visibly so, waiting in lines behind slow old people… especially when they’re at the self checkout… and as a result I spend less time making you money (aka shopping) and spend more time trying to go as fast as possible to get in line before that man being wheeled there his stretcher.

Even in my own place of employment, which is fairly liberal about these sorts of things, I feel weird showing up after 9am, like I should be apologizing to someone.  Given, my specific line of work does put me on call most days from 8-4, I’m a big believer that being on call means available, should someone call not hunched over the phone waiting for it to ring.  There’s no one to apologize too I’m sure, but I just feel guilty walking in when everyone is already there.

Working summer jobs I didn’t mind the early mornings so much, nor did I really mind them in college.  I think now that they’ve become consistent with no end in sight it is a much different ballgame.  In college I could easily muster up the energy to get up at 6am for a few days if needed to work on a special assignment or something because there was that direct motivational link and because I knew that I would, inevitably, have a few days where class started >= 10AM so I could do whatever I wanted all morning.

Unlike my colleagues (or at least I’m assuming), I go home and “hang out with the wife and kids” or something like that; nor do I really take a break from work to watch TV or <insert social activity> unless there is a good episode of Jeopardy on.  I go home and usually spend anywhere from 2-4 hours doing programming of my choice now, using whitespace as freely as I want.  At some point the reverse of the morning starts to set in where I start to feel guilty that I’m still up, despite the fact that I could be wildly productive, because I know I’m suppose to be somewhere by an acceptable time in the morning.

At MassMutual I got around this by doing magic when I was at home; as in I wrote code to solve problems in ways they couldn’t fathom and as a result I could show up whenever I wanted.  While my stay there was short (it turns out if you automate a problem they’ve hired 4 interns to do you’re unlikely to stay employed for too long) it ended up being at least a beneficial time arrangement.  I haven’t rule out an arrangement like this at work, but coding up some magic is going to take a bit more work.

I can’t say I remember the first time I wore them, but I can assure you they were definitely Monday or Tuesday pants at first.  The fact that they were size 30×32 implied they were from the older collection of trousers I have, at least dating their debut back to Freshman year of college.  Since they weren’t white or another awkward color there’s a very high probability I wore them at least once, if not twice, a week during pants-wearing season, with the exception of the two summers I worked at jobs that required me to dress in non-cargo pants (but summer isn’t really pants wearing season anyways).

I haven’t enjoyed them as much over the past year or so, they were definitely getting short on me and their texture started to degrade.  Last year I remember transitioning them from Tuesdays into Wednesdays as I lost a few good shirts in the war, that was probably a good sign the end was near for them.   Unlike my primary pair of dark cargo pants, they didn’t seem to wear as much on the bottoms (in retrospect that may have been because of their limited length) and they also did a decent job holding their color for being washed with the frequency that comes with any pant that holds early-day-of-the-week slot in my wardrobe.  The pockets held up remarkable well too, I don’t recall doing any repair jobs to close holes and whatnot.

I won’t miss the lackluster texture or the limited length at all, I look forward to a crisper and long pair.  I certainly will miss the feeling of all the things I did in those pants, particularly the things that I’ve long since forgotten.  I filmed many a Senate Meeting in them during my early days at RPI, they’ve traveled with me back and forth from school to home over breaks, held my pencils and pens walking into tests / exams, and been there for holidays and visits with seldom seen friends.  I don’t have many specific memories of any of those things, but when I’d put those pants on I know they were there with me, one of the very small physical things that hasn’t changed in all these years.

My parents bought me some cargo pants for the holidays, so I didn’t go around pant-less today.  I actually had a very similar colored  pair waiting in the reserve clothing drawer ready to go today when the final button broke.  Yes, I could have sowed it on if I really wanted to, but the buttons had become sharp with age and I’d already relegated them Sundays due to their vertical challenges.  The new pair is too tight in the waist (or I’m fat at the moment) and seem much more like the recent khaki pants that someone glued big pockets on than actually purposefully designed cargo pants.

I need to start the hunt for a new pair of primaries; with this pair gone it feels like only a matter of time before the other one of my older pairs finally gives out on me.  The loss of that pair will be much more significant I suspect unless they go out in an act of glory somehow, but really I’d like them to just keep working as they currently do.  I find it comforting and kind of trusting to dawn a pair of pants in the morning that’s consistently been there when you’ve needed them or just been along for the ride.

Good night moon.

Fast forward a few years to college, where I spent most of my non-academic time (and perhaps a bit of my academic time) working in very professional capacities designing web applications and writing software.  I figured that most people in college did stuff like this, and I think a lot of people do, but for me it was never just something on the list of things I do it was really all I did.  There were few weekends where I “went out” with friends, or relaxing just watching TV or a movie with others.  I didn’t wind down on a Friday night by playing video games or spectating a sporting event, I grab the easiest dinner possible and ssh somewhere to write more code.

I was lucky enough to surround myself with people in college who generally shared a strong work ethic, which meant that writing code on a Friday night might not  involve sitting alone in my dorm but instead manning my post in an office with 2-4 others.  It was nice knowing that I wasn’t completely unique in this regard, but I found that people have a path whereby they engage in some “fun” activities be it food, communal movies, recreational activities, etc.  In some aspects I wasn’t just involved in these work-ish activities, I was these work-ish things.  Where some people might frequent work on projects or spend hours on end studying before a big test they almost always unwind at the end or something along those lines; I’m approximately always working on things, there’s no unwind for me.  Sometimes this translated into “Brian hates fun” which is really just a misconstrued version of “Brian doesn’t understand fun.”

Moving beyond college was a hard context switch for me even if you disregard the whole across-the-country thing.  Most people I work with, even at the fairly progressive company I work for, work a well-defined set of hours where you can expect them to be very dedicated to work related activities.  While emails from people late into their localized night are common they’re much more maintenance style email than a substantial unit of work.  Very few people do stuff on the weekends, and I think the quantity of email I get between Friday @ 5pm and Sunday @ 4pm is less than I get some nights in the 6-8 hours I’m asleep.  But I’m not trying to criticize anyone’s work/life balance her, quite the contrary, that something I’m glad they’ve figured out and are good at.

I’m not good at that, and I don’t think it’s something that I can just figure out.  At work they are like here, go on a ski trip.  I politely decline, so logically I received an invite to another ski trip assuming I was too busy for the first one.  Nope, that’s not the reason why.  I enjoy skiing but see little purpose in engaging in it.  Last month there was a few nights of work related parties and stuff, while I made an appearance to get an award or two I wasn’t enjoying the free drinks or really hanging out with people.  This is how I act at most social scenes approximately ever; though I will fix upholstery from time to time too.  On a smaller scale I’ve observed my coworkers like to chat about their lives to each other, talking about who’s doing what on the weekends and such.  They’ve learned that it’s not really valuable to engage me in such discussions unless you want to hear about the latest programming adventures of Brian, which they sometimes do but I think most people try and enjoy lunch as the break-from-work time.

Unfortunately the few people in my life sometimes suffer as a result of the lack of fun that surrounds me.  When I get together with people we often work on projects (sometimes to their displeasure I feel) and the whole “lets do something fun” conversation never goes well when I’m involved in the planning stages.  I’m quite capable of being a participant if I make myself, but I’m not one to seek out, develop, and just-engage in commonly enjoyable experiences.  This doesn’t really upset me, I’m fairly content working approximately forever, but it’s particularly challenging to find people out there who share a similar, or even a fragment of a similar approach to things.

Good night moon.

Last I wrote I mentioned the fact that perhaps I moved so far out here to get away from everyone that cared about me or that I cared about.  I was never really good at the Oregon Trail game growing up (not that I actually played it for very long either), but if my memory is write the game presented the West as a wild frontier full of opportunity or something like that.  Staying East of the Mississippi, wherever the game would start wasn’t an option at all.  I wonder why.

Would the Pre-Worn Path not be an equally interesting game to try and stay alive in?  While purchasing supplies at outposts might not be the highlight like it is on the Oregonian counterpart, I’m confident that life in New England, the South, or even the Mid West would have presented its own unique set of challenges.  Maybe the to-be settlers aren’t actually looking for adventure, gold, freedom, or anything else that the Oregon Trail offers, but instead are just really bad at living where they currently are.  For all we know they could be fed up with politics, economics, or city life because it just hasn’t worked out well for them.  Heading out on the Oregon Trail is really the most feasible escape plan from all that, which makes me wonder even more what the game would have been like if there was an option to not actually go on the trail.

Maybe it’s too much to fit two games on the same floppy disk or something like that.  I wonder if the lives of the people that made it all the way to where ever they were going (was it even Oregon?) was all that they hoped it would be.  Did they ever think about the friends, family, and others they left back before setting out?  My guess is probably not, or at least not seriously.  Given the lackluster communication channels (aka writing letters to be carried buy a guy on a horse) it seemed unlikely that someone moving out weest would ever hear from anyone again.  I guess they never have to worry about declining a party invitation.

Good night moon.

My holiday spirit was severely lacking this year, probably due in part to the high environmental contrast.  As an example, at RPI I’d be surrounded by holiday decorations (even if I had to put them up myself last year) in the Student Government Suite,  there would be ample holiday music to play, and since I was on the northeast it would be both cold and snowy (or at least appearing like it might snow).  This year the extent of my holiday decorations included a 3? foot pre-lit tree in the corner of my apartment that I was too lazy to plug in most nights.  At work I displayed my circuitry tree as well which impressed everyone, but that was about it.  There was no holiday music except when my iTunes accidentally started playing the free Holiday Sampler they gave out a few years ago and the weather out here was no where close to feeling like winter.  It actually was just starting to feel like fall, with brisk mornings and leaves coming down.  But yes, I mustered up the energy required to fly home and spend some time with my family for the holidays.

My parents briefed me in advanced that I wouldn’t be getting much at all for Christmas, and I was OK with that because I really don’t need much stuff.  It’s also a pain to travel with things, and I like to keep my apartment pretty void of stuff.  Let me think, notable gifts family this year include sunglasses (expensive ones that I don’t need), a GPS (returned to store), a camera for my Google TV (which logitech / Google have failed to release drivers for ), and some pants.  My brother got me a DNA testing kit thingy, which I look forward to reporting back on in a few years.

One of the things I dislike about the holidays is that things have broken down into lists.  At least for me, people usually don’t like to risk being wrong so they avoid trying to guess what I might like / enjoy.  While I can appreciate a logical and conservative gift-giving stance, it’s not as exciting to be the recipient because you’ve essentially written your own prescription for the pharmacist to fill and give right back to you.  Personally, I’m also of the mindset that if I want / need something I’m just going to go out acquire it, so populating a list of things “I’d like to have but can’t” produces items that are nearly impossible to find (and often programming related, like modules of code).

On one of my flights back out to California, perhaps the one after my holidays at home, it occurred to me that perhaps one of the reasons I ended up out here taking the job that I did was to get away from everyone who cares about me and those I care about.  That ended up being a pretty depressing plane ride while I pondered that, but I’m curious if on some subconscious level I was itching to get in an environment where I could more completely focus on work.

As an example, normal people my age  would be doing something on a Friday night like watching TV, hanging out with other people, etc.  Even if Friday isn’t your thing, there is some probability that over a weekend you’ll physically interact with someone classified as a “friend” in some way shape or form.  I, on the other hand, will likely spend my weekend working on a variety of programming projects and that will generally be the end of it.  I’ve never been really good at having fun, and being far away from most people who enjoy fun makes it easier for me to avoid those awkward situations.

The plus side of this is, like I said, that I could spend all weekend submerged in Concerto or working on work-related stuff without feeling like I’m really disappointing anyone.  If I forget about dinner there’s no one to complain about being hungry, I’ll survive and make it up as I go.  The downside of all this comes when I’m not feeling motivated to work at all so I stare at the empty screen or pretend to watch something on TV.  Going places and doing things would require me to motivate myself, in turn evaluating the value of said experience, which is always really low if I’m the only participant.  Any depressed / neglected mood I find myself in is only likely to be amplified by the emptiness of mutually occupiable furniture.

Good night moon.

I’ve also just deleted the majority of an earlier draft of this post, which would be summarized by one character: Scrooge.  I’m don’t want to be opposed to the holidays and the spirit of the season, but maybe I’m caught up in this over-commercialization of the whole thing.  I don’t need a particularly reason to get someone a present, and this season is putting unnecessary pressure on me to figure something out.  As an example, lets say I know I will be getting a gift from person A.  Coupling that knowledge with my desire to not look like an idiot, I need to have a gift on hand ready to reciprocate when the time comes.  If the gift that I’d really like to get person A isn’t available for whatever reason for a few months I’m in a bind, I don’t want to appear to be shirking my responsibility when in fact I have a completely genuine idea at the ready, it just cannot be acquired at the current time.  It would be much easier if I could be like hey, here is a happy 3rd of February gift and surprise someone.  Everyone sets expectations for the season, as with any expectations the higher you set them the easier they are to miss.

Today I was in the store buying some holiday greeting cards.  It was a fairly depressing experience.  I have a handful, literally… a number you can count on one hand… of people I have a strong reason to send holiday greetings cards.  Unfortunately, the store doesn’t sell any good cards in handful sizes.  All the cards that come in 5 packs or smaller are stupid pictures of cartoon snowmen made of fat ovals (opposed to pretty snowmen made of circles) or some modern art angel atrocity with what appears to be a multi-colored dance floor background.  These are not the type of casual greetings I would like to send people.  All the good cards are grouped in the 12+ range where you get a pack of 12 or something cards for a few dollars which means I’m left with like (12 – handful) of holiday cards with no purpose.  I have considered addressing them to coworkers, but 50% of them are Jewish I believe and nothing says Merry Christmas like a card to someone who doesn’t celebrate the holidays.  I’ve considered sending them to people who’s addresses I have but then they’d likely ask a) why does Brian have my address and b) what does he want that he’s sending a Christmas card to me for.  I think I might just mail them to myself over the course of the next few days, or maybe to strangers.  Don’t get me started on the abundance of holiday wrapping paper I have, and by abundance I mean 1 40 foot roll that I needed to use like 4 feet from.

Perhaps I’ll send a card to my dishwasher, I always enjoy falling asleep to the sound of it doing it’s thing.  I’m actually not sure if I enjoy the specific sound of the dishwasher, or if I enjoy the sound of something as a deviation from the constant silence around this place.  I’m sure it’s not something specific to the West Coast, but I feel that out here there is a lot more silence.  I talk much less than I did back when I was at RPI and hanging out with people, and some days I spend a small amount of time talking out loud to myself just to make sure my voice still works (those are usually the days that work consists only of saying “Good Morning” in the morning and then “Have a nice night” as I leave).  I’ve considered falling asleep with the television on, but it’s in another room and has no purpose for being on.  The dishwasher has a reason for being on so I don’t feel it’s a waste to use it like I would the television at night (not that there is a limit to the amount of television, but there is this thing called the electric bill).

Weekends are usually the most extreme, when my interactions with other people in person are solely limited to ordering at fast food restaurants.  I made friends with the folks at KFC one night, unfortunately the next week they changed shifts and I never saw them again.  KFC also took lettuce off their menu so I stopped patronizing them.  Now I look forward to Wendy’s.

Good night moon.

During college I could very easily dedicate blocks of time to task X or project Y, like just about everyone one.  You allocate yourself an hour to work on this homework, or an afternoon to focus on this project, or even just a few minutes to go through your email and catch up on stuff.  When I was at RPI I was “on-call” for a variety of servers that could send me text messages reporting outages/ downtime, but I never had to completely drop everything and run to the Union more than a few times a year.  It was good exercise at the time.  Every now and then I’d get an urgent looking email from a student or someone else out there needing something from me and I could decide to respond or ignore it for a bit, usually something I’d determine based on how involved my response would be.

When I’m working I don’t feel like I have the luxury to ignore things to give myself time to “wrap things up” with whatever I’m working on.  This leads to a process scheduling implementation that looks a bit like a preemptive priority scheduling system.  This is great for those high priority things that come in I need to address, but stinks for the low priority projects which are often the most interesting and personally rewarding.

As an example, I’ve been writing a piece of Python code that would have probably taken me at most an afternoon if it was just me, Ruby, and my computer.  Perhaps a can of coke in their as well.  So far it’s been 2 weeks and it’s maybe 80% done because I can’t seem to work on it for longer than 5-10 minutes before something comes up.  Ok, that was a bit of an understatement.  I usually have less preemptions  from 8am – 10:30am, but I’m not the most creative at my programming during this hour (readas: I have motivational difficulties most mornings).  I’m also usually done being preempted at 5pm, but at that point I’m fairly upset that I’ve produced 10 lines of good code over the last N 5 minute breaks.

I’ve yet to figure out any good tricks to context switching more effectively.  If I leave all my Chrome tabs open in another window I can usually pick right back up where I left off on the internet, but my shell tabs don’t have the same mental resilience.  Perhaps I need to work on a better mental process scheduling algorithm, but a lot of them rely on the ability to estimate the time required to  complete a task and when I’m programming that’s directly correlated to how motivated / inspired I’m feeling which isn’t easily quantized.  More thought required, that’s for sure.

Good night moon.

I think it’s fairly depressing if the best thing about any night is the fact that one is not fighting, a lyric I’ve borrowed from Secondhand Serenade’s Fall For You.  Unfortunately some nights that seems like the only thing that you can consistently take stock in.  It doesn’t get better to realize that the fact that a dispute is not occurring is actually a result of no (or minimal) interaction at all.

Sledding seems like a very good way of picturing it.  While you’re sledding you’re always going downhill.  You can stop yourself or slow down, but anytime you are in the act of sledding you are moving in a downward motion.  Perhaps I could have been a bit broader and expanded that analogy to any activity influenced mainly my gravity, but the point is that if almost always feels like there is just one direction of travel.  At the end of your sledding experience you get off, grab the sled, and walk (in my case run) back up again to repeat the process.

I remember when I was younger and of a more commonly accepted sledding age, I would often pause for a while when I had completed my decent not really looking forward to the trip back up.  It would have been so cool if there was a conveyor belt to reset me to the top without having to get up and walk all the way up again, but that may be what makes the experience enjoyable; you have to work for it.  The ease of travel is also worth noting, it’s significantly easier to travel down the snowy hill than it is to walk up it, and the further you walk the further down and more enjoyable the trip there will be.

There’s a bit of a trick involved in figuring out how high up to walk if you hill that seems “impossible” to climb to the top to every time.  In my neighborhood this was the street that went up a hill, it was fairly long and boring to walk all the way to the top, and the higher you went the higher the probability was that you’d have trouble making all the way down (the road curved a bit).  Optimally, most people identified and used the longest possible path that minimized additional work (walking up, steering, slowing down, etc) while descending; you have to balance that additional work required with the thrill provided by the additional segment.

The one downside to this system is that sledding is fun usually, and that’s not really what I’m trying to convey at all.  It would be better if the walk up was fun, and the sledding part was unpleasant but you had lots of trouble stopping when you started.  I don’t think there’s anything actually wrong with fighting from time to time, I think it can be a useful conflict resolution tool to approach issues parties are often guarded on, or to quickly air out some dirty laundry that might take weeks to dry on the line outside.

Personally, I have a high tolerance for repetitive unpleasant interactions but I don’t think most people react that way.  I don’t usually think “this is unpleasant, I don’t want to do this” but I try to focus on it as a learning experience to figure out how something can be avoided or improved in the future, however distant or unlikely that future it.  People also say the darn-est things when they’re fighting, at which point I  LOL (actually out loud) , often when something that’s intended to be highly offensive at me.  This reaction probably started as a reuse of some nervous laughter, but I’ve adapted it into a way of adding a spool full of sugar to help the medicine go down.  This might be worth trying sometime if you haven’t, think of most experiences in life as medicine as medicine and don’t forget to add a spoonful of sugar if you can’t otherwise swallow it.

Goodnight moon.