What frustrates me about the movies is the disconnect they present between the stores they tell and reality (be it past, present, or future).  I’m not so much irked by the fact that they present a disconnect, but more based on the fact that I fear at no point in my life will I have the opportunity to remotely come close to experiencing what they present.  Alright, I could probably model my life such that I’d have the equivalent of a background role in a film like Superbad, but focusing on any serious movie that potential drops to near zero.  Take Oblivion, a film I saw this weekend.  Two of the primary characters in the film live in a clear house in some picturesque location above the clouds.  I would like to live in a glass house, I’m willing to give up the large (also clear) pool and lofty location but these two compromises don’t make it any more likely to happen.  I’d even settle for the simple things, like a clear door that slides open when I touch it or windows that don’t have fake panes or unsightly rails / sashes around them.

Yes, I know this movie is set in the future and things are always super in the future, but who’s doing anything to make future a reality?  I suspect most people, myself included, are just sitting down and consuming these movies than carrying on with our fairly uninspiring lives.  Lately I’ve been “reflecting” back on the folks I graduated high school with (reflecting may be a nicer way of saying researching vigorously) seeing what people are up to.  In time I’ll probably execute the same queries against my college class, though I know far fewer of them.

Most of the top 15% of my high school class seems to have done a good job settling into a fairly stable life path with little hope of having an objectively substantial impact on any large environment.  I don’t doubt these people have the potential, if they aren’t already, to become top performers in their fields or personal lives, but the vast majority of these fields have existed for decades and will, in all likelihood, continue to do so rather unchanged into the future as well.  Teachers seem like a good example of this.  I’m not sure if they just complain a lot more or have more time to use social media, but I feel I hear from a sizable majority of up-and-coming teachers.  I think it’s great that you’re feeling called to work with the youth of the world to make them smarter or something like that, but do you really feel the model of doing so in a classroom of 20-40 students that’s used 9/12 moths of the year is really the way to do that at scale? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there’s anything ghastly wrong with the current model, there’s just substantial room for the kind of improvement best classified as a paradigm shift and not something sponsored by the PTA as an after school activity.

I get frustrated when I review my life thus far and conclude that I’ve not done enough to make tomorrow happen.  It’s really easy to sit back with a kids pack of popcorn and enjoy the movie, letting yourself be entertained for a few hours instead of doing something hard to make that entertainment more like a reality.

One of the tenants of RPI TV’s existence, as well as a handful of other organizations on campus, is the RPI Hockey season… the only sport that RPI is (at least as I understand it) competitive at some decently high levels.  If memory serves, RPI TV first started filming hockey because one or two of the clubs early members were particular fans of the sport and figured it would be something fun to film.  I think that’s a good attitude to take towards productions, I had a similar philosophy when it came to Student Senate meetings though there was  a touch of service-to-a-higher-calling in there as well.

As a very interested member in RPI TV I was mildly interested in participating in any activity, I didn’t see hockey as any more exciting than football or some strange dance or award show.  Freshman year I found myself busy the first few weekends when hockey season came up, and approximately everyone else was interested in helping out so there weren’t any slots for me to fill (at the time there were slots planned well in advanced).  I should have seen this as a forecast for the rest of my time there.

Come sophomore year, I had leg up on the rest of the RPI TV crew, I had a station wagon.  That made me particularly valuable considering the second best candidate for moving equipment was a small civic or something along those lines.  It could, and had, been made to work, but when lots of things needed to get moved I became the preferential transportation method because my seats folded down and you could actually see out the windows while driving a car full of stuff (that probably wasn’t as  important in retrospect, but I like to thing safety first or second).  When hockey season came around I chauffeured equipment to and from the field house, equipment that I rarely got to setup or use in any capacity.  When the crew was short a cameraman and I was feeling bored I’d stick around to help out, often getting the least important lowest-room-for-screwing-up camera that existed.  I didn’t have a desire to take away someone else’s role that they enjoyed doing or were perceived at being good at, but I also would have minded a chance to try my hand at something less mind-numbing or mildly important.

What quickly became apparent to me, in my role as senior equipment chauffeur, was that there were a lot of well established traditions that I was pretty clueless too as someone who hadn’t filmed hockey my freshman year.  I hadn’t gone out afterwards for pizza (this was before Denny’s was popular, though I didn’t do that either) and it was very convenient for me to volunteer to stay back and straighten up the equipment while others went out or headed back to a party in someone’s apartment.  I hadn’t done anything important or worth celebrating operating lame-duck cam, so I might as well take a few minutes to restore some self-pride by straightening up some cables.

In the back of my mind I kept hoping for a non-hockey opportunity to do something exciting and it kept not coming.  Partially because hockey had already trumped everything in the priority queue and partially because I’m not good at finding exciting things to do.  At the time my experience was producing daily news in a studio setting, neither of which RPI had (news, or a studio).

When my car became less relevant Junior year so did I.  There was no longer reason for me to be senior chauffeur, my sole purpose if I wanted to have one, at a hockey event would be to operate the lame duck cam and pretend anyone cared.  As you can guess, I ceased and desisted just about any hockey involvement that didn’t involve pleading for extra help first (aka there was once a holiday weekend before break or something).  I don’t know if I would have been any good at anything else, but the fact is that no one else was interested in finding that out.  Everyone had, my freshman year, established pretty solid roles that didn’t have any good place for me.  These things happen, I’m not as upset over it as you probably think.

More troubling, was the shift I felt I felt in the club from a group who filmed hockey for a few weeks a year among a plethora of other productions to a hockey-filming club that warmed up a few times before and after the hockey season to break in new people, equipment, etc.  As this spilled over into things like budgeting and long term planning, decisions weren’t made what would be the best solution to a generic need the club had or what tool is blocking members from trying a different production style to what do we need to make our hockey productions better.  Anything else was secondary at best (and humorously football was secondary, which looks a lot like hockey if you view it from the a color and depth-blind birds-eye view).  It didn’t matter that I wanted access to a studio, or that a camera was too large to be practical for a single camera shoot, hockey didn’t need a studio and you had N people to help move and setup gear for hockey.  If you weren’t replicating the hockey setup at non-hockey events people thought you were weird or bound to make a mistake just because that was the way everything had been done previously; all because a few guys happened to enjoy watching hockey.

All in all, I had fun in RPI TV.  I’m not sure what I would have done differently in my involvement.  I ended up directing / using the switcher for a total of 4(?) productions, 2 of which never ended up being recorded; some cultural show that no one wanted anything to do with and the GM Debates which were mildly interesting events but nightmares for other reasons (t’was busy season).  I went out with club members a grand total of once to Denny’s after a production during my 5 years at RPI.  I didn’t run for President of the club partially because I didn’t like hockey enough, and I don’t know I would have had any luck securing a VP position if I’d tried for similar reasons.  I suspect I won’t go down in the history books, but until someone wipes my database entries I’ll be that guy who filmed a whole lot of senate meetings that no body cared about; I’ll have to be ok with that.  My other contributions will likely have been overwritten by more exciting and hockey-centric ones.

As the Chief Mate once described things, a more adequate name may for the group may have been “RPI Sports Sports”.

I think the most worrying part isn’t actually the fact that I don’t feel like I’m moving anywhere, but instead that the actions I need to perform to return to making progress and moving are completely out of band.  I have to stop riding, get off the bike, and physically move it off the stationary trainer.  I know, that’s all rather simple to do, but then you have to get back on and get back in the groove of riding again.  It might be preferable to peddle through wet cement, I’d at least be moving (albeit slowly) and also have something fairly exciting to say at the end of it or a great reason if I had to give up.

Riding on a stationary trainer does give me something to say, technically speaking it tracks tons of stuff like my total mileage, the average speed I travel, the total time I’ve been riding and all this other potentially useful stuff, but I don’t think that information is nearly as useful as talking about where peddling has taken me and what it’s let me see along the way.  I can report day after day that I’ve been starring at the same wall, but no one really wants to hear that.  The statistics I’ve gathered are purely useful if I was trying to beat some record or achieve a super quantitative goal, and no one likes to measure their life by that.

Good night moon.

This trip to the home front seems to be plagued by a different feeling than most.  In past I’ve been primarily relieved to be home and relaxed to be back in familiar territory.  Those feelings are still present, but occupying a secondary (or tertiary) seat these days.  Of many thoughts and feelings, one of my primary concerns seems to be doubt if I’ve enlisted in the right service.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t doubt that we’re fighting the good fight and serving a good cause.  I also have full confidence in my commanding officer and those up the ranks.  I suspect what has me feeling a uneasy is the lack of camaraderie resulting from the fact that I’m the only one in my unit in my position.  I don’t mind my responsibility at all, it’s fairly rewarding on personal and professional levels, but I’m left feeling less like an appreciated specialist and more like the guy in charge of operating the radio because no one else was ambitious enough to figure out how.

I can’t help but look to my buddies from training school who got assigned to tank crews where they work together closely (perhaps too closely for their liking) with the rest of their four man team.  I certainly don’t have a desire to be packed in a turret basket with three other guys, but I suspect they enjoy the fact that if they’re having a bad day there is someone their who readily notices and can help out if necessary.  More importantly, they can call you out when you’re doing something wrong.  The specialization of my current assignment doesn’t bother me, but the feeling of often being the lone man out does.

Thinking back, I miss the days in training school where all of us in the platoon would have to (and could easily) work together to get things done.  Everyone developed a pretty good understanding of the specific tasks best suited for each other, and the hand-off from one person to another was seamless and natural.  These days any hand off attempt feels less like an assembly line and more like a mess hall cafeteria.  With a position near the end of the line, I’m serving something particularly tasty, the trays will already be filled by the time I get here and folks aren’t interested.

The logical thing to do might be to talk to my CO about this.  I’ve considered it from time to time, but we tend to get caught up debriefing firefights when we talk.  Some improvement needed here.

Being home during the summer season also means that everyone is out doing summer activities.  In past I’ve coped with the fact that everyone is out and about by submerging myself in work (a technique I use to cope with just about anything).  There is still a plentiful amount of work I could submerge myself in, it’s just logistically more challenging to do so now that I’m working a more proper job.  During my summers developing open source code I felt quite comfortable working on a variety of different open source projects during the day depending on who needed help, what was broken, and what I planned to get done.  Currently my job provides me with some flexibility to do that, but I start to feel guilty if I don’t get back to my fairly specialized role because I can’t currently rely on others to keep up while I’m off tackling an unrelated problem.

I’m hardly keeping any sort of quantitative measurements, but it feels like the less logistical it is for me to participate in something the more likely I am to get invited to it.  Actually, that’s probably not true, though it does feel that way sometimes.  The more logical explanation is that I happen to be deployed further away now and the timing just coincides with people having more active social lives now that we’re not longer in training school.

Good night moon.

I wish part three of this story was going to be more dignified.  When it came time for me to finally take the wheel, the ship was full of experienced senior sailors that’d been with the crew for years.  Being Captain didn’t involve any organizing, direction, order giving, or really anything that a typical captain does.  In fact, it took most of the crew some time to get used to the idea that I’d be using the Captain’s Quarters as my own.  On more than one occasion I’d come in to find someone else “borrowing” the captain’s desk to write personal correspondence and such, usually I’d just pretend I came looking for my sextant and save my entries into the ship’s log for later.

While captain, the ship kept sailing itself most of the time without any major efforts from the crew.  We’d filled most of the large holds with treasure and our days at see were less about finding the next treasure and more about making sure the ship didn’t sink or get looted by other pirates making their way around the sea, most days onboard were fairly relaxing for the crew and I.  I suspect under my watch we could have gathered more treasure and figured out somewhere to store it, and I probably shouldn’t have let the crew pillage as many towns as they did, but I was never completely sure any of them identified with me as the captain. I was merely the guy with a funny hat who occasionally shared reports with the Pirate Lord.  In fact, for much my first year on the ship the Pirate Lord was friendlier with some of the experienced sailors on board, I was merely the figurehead of the ship at the Pirate Council.

As my first full year at the helm winded down, we made a stop at the home port of many of the senior sailors that had been with the ship for nearly as long as I.  Their contracts were up and it seemed like a good time for them to take their share of the loot ashore.  I stayed away from the tavern those nights back in town when the crew was celebrating the end and drinking to their tales of the sea, I was still the Captain of the ship with work to do and, to be frank, was never quite sure they’d welcome me either.

We set sail again, following the course we previously had been on.  The ship was lighter (both in experienced sailors and treasure) which meant the wind could blow us around a bit more.  I did my best to keep the ship on course, but it was tough with a younger crew and the much lighter vessel.  After steering us through a storm or two mostly unscathed much of the time was spent, as it had been past, with a more relaxed atmosphere on board.  I made sure that our chests still had plenty to go around in them, and that satisfaction didn’t breed the most ambitious attitude.  Nobody died on my watch, we didn’t get hit with any cannon balls, but we also didn’t collect too much new treasure either.

I wish I left the helm of the ship in the glory of battle, at the sword of another or riding the ship down to Davy Jones’ Locker.  Unfortunately neither was the case.  As we made our way back into port I knew my days as Captain were numbered.  A new Pirate Lord recently been installed and some new captains in the council hoped to breath some fresh air into things.  The Pirate Lord and I agreed we’d meet one night  to discuss a successor.  I was informed  the next day on a routine trip to order some supplies for the ship that in my absence a successor been named and would be installed at the next meeting of the Pirate Council.  I felt betrayed at the thought that my ship, the ship I’d been the captain of for the past few years, could and would be handed over to someone I’d had no say in the selection of.  They didn’t know how she fairs during storms and how to stop her from rolling, but orders were orders.  I showed up the Pirate Council and nodded in approval of the process, but only out of  allegiance to the newly office now held by the newly installed Pirate Lord.I feared speaking out then might have jeopardized the grander scheme of things, whatever that may be.

I handed over the keys, signed a hasty final entry in the ships log, and packed my things to head ashore.  There’s some irony in the fact that the new captain drowned 3 months later, but that’s not my story to tell.  By the time I arrived ashore all the senior crew members that left the year prior had scattered and left.  I found myself alone much like I had when I first arrived in town, though this time I had my share of the treasure instead of the guy I shared a ride with.  I didn’t bother setting foot back inside that tavern, there’d be no one there who knew of me or my days at the helm of the ship. I suspect I’ll be lucky to be lucky to be a footnote in the history of the Pirate Fleet, the captain known only for not sinking the ship and ruining everything.

I did what it seemed like any seaman would do with a chest full of goal and hardly any reason to stay.  I use a handful of gold coins to buy my way out of there on horseback.

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.