Brian's World

Setting Sail: A Pirates Life (2/3)

This post is part two of the three part series I’m titling ‘A Pirates Life.’

After ye’ early ventures our small crew started to pick up some momentum.  We were aiming to set sail for open water, into uncharted territory in hopes of even greater treasure.  Avast, we couldn’t do it along with such a small crew, so I figured I could help the Captain and Chief Mate out by recruiting some of the drunkards that frequented the tavern.  Sure, they might not be the best sailors in the land, but they seemed to be a hearty bunch of fellows that had an idea what was going on.  I figured instead of outright telling them to join it would be less work for me if they wanted to join on their own, so I posed some quite open ended questions to some quite open minded folks and before you knew it the crew had doubled or tripled in size.  It was surprisingly easy getting people to join the crew by letting them take part in the planning for our venture into uncharted waters.  To be quite frank, we could use any cartographer we could find trying to help chart our course.

Sure, we had our scuffles.  One of note to this day was during one of the initial recruitment sessions (you know, where potential pirates come and right their name in the Crew Log) the Chief Mate argued strongly for a sailor he’d known who was convinced that the knots tied in our Chip Log weren’t measured correctly.  Having tied them myself (and being fairly accurate with my measurement skills) I called his bluff but we let him aboard anyways.  It seemed that having one mutiny-prone fellow would help keep morale from getting too high at times, wouldn’t want the crew to be overly optimistic of anything.  I had to sleep with one eye open from that day on, but paying extra attention to things seemed to work well (and I could live with being a bit tired).

We set sail and made our way from port to port, borrowing what we could and looting what we couldn’t.  Anything we couldn’t use we used to barter (aka sell) at the next port we landed at.  Lucky we had one crew member who could sell just about anything, another one that could fix just about anything, and a few well skilled at putting junk together and making it look like silver.  Turns out that’s all the people really want these days, as long as it looks good and works fine the details and composition of it don’t matter to much at all.

We picked up a few treasure maps along the way and secure some small chests, we were starting to do quite well for ourselves, collection a sizable chest and gathering much needed spices and oils to look to sail to new foreign ports.  Unfortunately, like every great pirate sailing from port to port, the Royal Navy, specially one Rear admiral, seemed to take personal offense to our plunders and plots of conquest.  He set out to shut down ports before we arrived, preventing both us and the “friendly” merchants from doing any business.  Luckily for us, the merchants found other ways to exchanged their goods for our services; turns out they don’t like paying the queen’s tax much either.

This all culminated in a meeting with the Admiral of the Fleet actually, who took us by surprised as we docked in the Port of Tyne to do business.  In retrospect, we should have expected company in the Navy’s backyard.  After putting up a noteworthy fight with the Rear admiral, his commander came in to negotiate peace with us.  I was glad that we were finally meeting face to face to discuss our issues, it’s much harder to sleep with the sound of cannon fire raining in than one might think.  We sharpened our swords and headed to the meet, expecting an ambush of sorts.  Turns out the Admiral of the Fleet is a bit too laissez faire for something like that.  Instead, he conceited that the taxes they were making at the port were never going to balance the destruction we could (and already had!) caused, and we agreed to split our differences and continue on with our voyage.  I suspect the Admiral of the Fleet was loosing faith in his Rear Admiral after he failed to eliminate us several times.  It certainly helped having the tax-dodging merchants on our side too!

Early on as my time as Second Mate, back when we were still recruiting the crew,  the Captain had pulled me aside and said that should he fall to Davy Jones’ Locker I should take the wheel and stand in his place.  Knowing I had large pirate boots that I might need to fill some day I tried to stay as well informed as possible, learning as much as I could from my fellow pirates and practicing the whole navigating a large ship thing when I got a chance.  I suspected I may never be fully ready to take over, but let’s face it I don’t think any captain really is.

We continued on our conquest, but it was becoming clear that the Captain’s time at the helm was nearing it’s end.  He’d been cheating death for a few years now, and a permanent return to shore seemed eminent.  It seemed my time to take the wheel was fast approaching, but luckily the battles were winding down as the Rear admiral obeyed his orders to stand down.

Boxes

I’ve been collecting a post of memories, things that make me think of being back on the East coast.  Perhaps I’ll post it at some point.  I won’t lie, I’m not missing the brutally hot weather folks are having over there, but I do miss the sound of the air conditioner clicking on at home.  I’ve also come to terms with the idea that I probably won’t make it to the Vermont house this summer.  As luck would have it, the year we finally get Internet at the house is the year I’m on the other side of the country.  I do hope that I get a chance to go back there at some point… I wish I could pluralize points and make my visits a consistent thing but I don’t want to get overly optimistic.

Growing up, and even up until around two years ago, Vermont was never really my favorite place to go.  It mean no internet which meant limited to no programming, the television was mediocre, there were always a large number of chores to do, and there wasn’t always lots of “fun” things to do in the area.  In college the VT house became this once-a-year get away for a few of my South Hadley friends, or something close to that.  We would go for a long weekend, cook stuff, swim in the lake, etc… kind of like a camping trip but with a house.  My visits were mainly limited to those once a summer trips with friends.  Not having internet access was always an easy way for the work-driven me to write off visits to the house.  I don’t believe in taking weekends off, and it’s not easy to work on web applications with an offline copy of the web.  I was also socially pressured to avoid going up with just my parents, apparently that became uncool at some point after high school.  It probably would have been uncool in high school too but I didn’t really have people to hang out with on the weekends so no one noticed I was missing.  I want to close this paragraph with “better luck next time self” but the probability of a next time seems low at the moment.  Perhaps this whole statement has been a complicated metaphor for missing spending time with my dad in recent years.

Onto a slightly less uncomfortable, but still not super pleasant topic.

My living room has a large collection of broken down cardboard boxes from all the Ikea furniture I put together.  My walls remain, save one clock and a small piece of “art” (I bought it at target, so I’m not sure if it counts as art), empty.  I hung the art up to give myself something to stare at when I need to focus on something besides the computer screen.  Completely logical.  Otherwise my apartment looks fairly generic, devoid from personel affects.  Even if you searched the cupboards and cabinets you would fine fairly generic stuff.  I’ve never been great at decorating, primarily due to a lack of interest, but I give myself credit for how un-personal I’ve managed to make this place.  It could probably pass as a safe house or something if I wasn’t using most of the drawers for clothes.  Interesting marketing idea there.

Back to the boxes though.  I have no reason to hold onto them.  It’s not like I am going to disassemble anything and make it look like new again such that I can return it.  Some of the boxes are large, which I’ve been using as an excuse… but I carried most of the stuff in here solo so that’s not really a valid justification.  I suspect on some deeper level I’m hesitating to throw them out… erm recycle (that’s what people call it around here)… because then my presence seems more permanent.  Having those boxes serve as a reminder how recently I’ve setup camp here and I feel hold me in a more transient state.  People don’t have boxes around for fun, they have boxes around to move things.  Ideally I’m going to muster up the courage / motivation to move them this week.

As strange as this is going to sound, I’ve noticed that I’ve been cleaning the bathroom a lot less around here than I would have in my Troy apartment.  It’s not like the Troy bathroom was always dirtier or this bathroom stays magically clean (my hair falling out tends to make mess of things these days).  I postulate that I clean this bathroom less because of the lowered chance that anyone besides me will be using it.  Sure, I didn’t have many visitors in Troy, but the potential to have visitors was an order of magnitude or two higher.

I had the pleasure of reading someone else’s blog this past weekend.  Someone who’s story seemed contextually slightly similar to me, graduating from RPI, getting a job on the West Coast, and having to pack up his life to move out here a year or two ago. In his “wisdom” (his words, not mine), he was glad to have friends that had moved all across the country because it made moving much easier, he already had friends in the Bay Area.  I believe he had actually moved out west with a friend who might have been doing the exact same thing.  I am unsure if he was being “wise” or just being socially more strategic or lucky in his selection of friends.

I should probably head to bed, in theory I have work or something like that in the morning.  I’ll take comfort in knowing it’s the same moon over here, perhaps that will help me rest tonight.

Good night moon.

Right Back Where We Started From

I know, I know, this isn’t part two of the three part series.  I haven’t given up on that at, but I set the bar a bit high and I don’t want to underwhelm you with part 2.  It also accidentally got published before I was finished, I’ll blame a wordpress vulnerability.  Those things tend to happen if you don’t update the code every now and then.

I’m writing this blog from my new apartment in Mountain View, CA.  If you hadn’t heard, I got a job working for a large search engine company (who’s opinions are never reflected here) which was well timed with my graduation from my Master’s program.  I packed my bag and moved out here three weeks ago and started work two weeks ago.  It’s been a crazy busy season, and this blog has been much more neglected than I’d like it to have been.  Things happen.

Despite all the help I had, relocating across the country wasn’t nearly as easy as I’d have liked it to be.  I consider myself fairly minimalist, I never thought I really had that much stuff and most of it was pretty easy for me to move.  For years I had moved myself in and out of college solo so everything was pretty manageable.  This past year, living in my apartment in Troy, I ended up with a lot more stuff than I would have usually had.  Some of it I needed (like plates), some of it I wanted (like a Keurig), and some of it I was given (like tons of steak knives).  The quantity of stuff was a bit daunting to think about, but luckily I’m not emotionally attached to much of it so throwing it out doesn’t phase me too much.

After I decided what was important to take or not I had to attempt to box / pack it up.  It’s fairly depressing trying to fit your life into a suitcase / boxes and thinking that those small containers hold everything physically of value to you.  Like I said, I don’t have lots of stuff, but I have a few small tokens that have come to help refresh my constantly failing memory; the blanket I’ve had on my bed since freshman year, the posters my dad always makes fun of, etc.  Not having too much stuff probably made the physical packing process easier, but thinking that stuff was all I have after 20-something years of life usually triggers the “what have I been doing with my time” stack trace which rarely ends well.

But enough about packing, in theory those boxes will be mailed out here soon now that I’ve tested my address (ordered a cable modem from Amazon to verify packages got delivered easily).  It will be nice to have a few things around here that aren’t completely new; I think all I have right now is a fairly ridiculously family picture my mom gave me with some strange family poem around it.  A reminder what my parents look like, I hope I never get bad enough to forget that.

I think what strikes me as most depressing (sorry for the lack of optimism at the moment) are the times like now. It’s like 11-something PM and I look at Google Latitude, informing that the closest contact to me is around 2500 miles away.  Coupling that with the thought that it’s after 2AM on the east coast I’m left with this reminder how lonely life can be.  I’ll say it, even thought it’s not particularly unique to me and somewhat cliche – Don’t take those around you for granted.  Enemies or not they’re there, which is often better than no one at all.

I spent close to a decade just observing from the outside, I didn’t fit in so peering through the window seemed like the next best thing.  In the end someone opened that window and pulled me in, a simple act I’ll be eternally grateful for.  Moving out here’s felt like I’ve ripped myself from whatever environment I had been in, not just my 5 years at RPI but my life thus far of being within driving distance of my hometown.  Sure, I’ve fallen out of contact with just about everyone in high school but the thought was still there; I could drive a few minutes and see then if I wanted to. Knowing these people were around, even it completely uninvolved or unrelated to me, helped me sleep at night knowing that the chance was there if I’d wanted to seize it.  I’d learn to live with that chance, and often out here I don’t think I even have that.  Out here I haven’t found any windows for me to look though even, never mind anything more,  it just solid walls.

Good night moon.