Brian's World

The Best Thing

Usually I try not to take any stock in any single lyric or phrase captured from a song, you can really manipulate things to serve just about any purpose.  I’m going to make myself a special exception tonight, so pardon me if this ends up being a gross misjudgment.

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.

Raindrop

I won’t talk about the fact that it never seems to rain out here.  Two weeks ago it drizzled for maybe 10 minutes, by the time I realized what was happening and got outside it had already stopped.  Today it was very cloudy (which reminded me of RPI a bit), and I think I heard a rumble of thunder off in the distance… but no actual rain or real weather happened.  I guess the sunny weather is great if you like being outside and stuff, but it all seems just a bit too perfect and controlled for my liking; almost like the Truman Show… except they had rain.

No more talk of rain for now though.  I spent most of this weekend thinking to myself about motivation and the purpose of life or something like that.  I don’t really like thinking about the purpose of life at all, but it was “one of those weekends” where I didn’t have anything pressing to do and I found myself wandering in my own thoughts a bit too far.  Among other conclusions I’ve reached, I think that everyone would be best served by deciding their own purpose for their life, but you need to be careful not to try and define that as an explanation for your existence or something really even connected to being alive.  Again, I’m wandering down the wrong path here.  Let’s course correct.

I’m having very broad trouble with motivation these days, characterized by staying up watching “classic” movies until 1-2am, sleeping the day away, and spending too much time surfing the internet (aka reddit).  These are all good in moderation, but I really had no good reason to watch The Transporter 3.  It ends the same way as the first two.  It occurred to me that college, and studying at university in general, serves as a really good underlying motivation for doing things… grades help too.  No one goes to college for the sake of going to college, meaning you don’t go there as your end goal.  You want to experience academics or social life or something else… and then when you’re done with that experience after a few years you build on that and move on to life.  College, and the broader educational field beforehand, offer a very very clear feedback system.  If you do well you get an A, if you don’t do well you get an F.  You’re often evaluated on a weekly basis, which I think is a great control for motivation.  If you receive quantitatively poor feedback, aka a poor grade, you know that you need to work either harder or better (or both) for next time.  You can also count on that next time being around to try.

In le workplace I haven’t found that to be the case very much.  Once a week I sit down with my manager and she reminds me that I’m doing a good job and should keep doing what I’m doing.  As much as it’s nice to hear that I’m doing a good job and stuff, that’s not the most motivating way to supply me with a status update.  To me, keep doing what you’re doing, implies that I shouldn’t seek to improve or optimize whatever it is that I’m currently doing and that I should keep performing the tasks as I have been.  Every once in a while we chat (or I think) about improving / optimizing things and there are some small scale things I can do here or there… little patches and tweaks perhaps, but the broader improvements I’d be interested in making require me to stop doing what I’m doing and probably require an OK from someone N rungs up the ladder from me.

On my outside-of-work projects I find myself similarly positioned.  I know that it’s not a question of writing the code of rmaking something that technically functions quite well, I don’t have the skill or competencies to make it look decent or worthwhile to interact with.  If there were plenty of interface-neutral problems to solve I’d be all over them, but unfortunately lots of my exciting ideas are heavy in the fields that I’m less experienced in.  I guess I could turn this around and say that I should use this as an opportunity to learn / practice some of this…. maybe I will…. ok I’ll be honest I probably won’t.

I will try to be as vague and obtuse as possible for this next part.  If you’re usually off-put by my complex analogies I suggest you wait until you’re… well maybe you just shouldn’t.  Dedicating you full brainpower to it may not be a good investment of your time.

As much as I had hoped the day that I desired to never come would come it seems that it’s surprise arrival has caught me a bit off guard.  I’ve been constantly reassured that what I long ago convinced myself was most likely to occur was the least likely outcome and I made the mistake of buying into that illusionist mindset.  Perhaps this all falls back on some fundamental desire to have a fortune of my youth be something more than a terribly short term solution to mask a long term problem.  I was too easily conned given my lack of knowledge of exponential functions at the time.  I won’t blame myself for being so easily deceived though, I was what, younger than a (years) bakers dozen  at the time.  Perhaps I haven’t come that far after all.

Good night moon.

Outpost

Just a few minutes ago I gave up washing some TV show about fishing and decided I should brush my teeth and head to bed.  As I stood up I heard what sounded like a gust of wind outside.  Oddly enough, that triggered my “you’re in a tent” feeling, the kind of feeling I would have when I would go out camping with the Boy Scouts in a tent or just sleeping under the stars (readas: the weather was nice and I was too tired to setup a tent).  Perhaps my current living situation isn’t much different from camping out in the wilderness.

Sure, I’m in a significantly larger living space compared to a tent.  I’m not living out of a backpack, nor do I have to sweep out the dirt / pine needles that might get tracked in on a regular basis, but I think if you take away some the details things are actually quite the same.  Camping was always an experience where I’d leave my friends behind for a weekend and for all extensive purposes be off the grid.  I’d go away for a weekend, my friends would presumably continue on doing whatever it was that they planned to do, and I would show up back at school on Monday morning and pretend to be up to speed on things.  See, most of my friends had dropped out of Boy Scouts in Middle School and I never really considered myself close friends with many people in the scout troop.  I didn’t mind being around any of them, but aside from saying “hi” in the hallway I didn’t really hang out or interact with them outside of scouting much.  While I don’t think any of my friends have dropped out of the “go to California plan” (because no such plan has ever existed) it does feel very similar, I’m out here mostly alone (I say mostly because, like in scouts, I did managed to have one or two folks I was friendly with that accompanied me) and most of the folks I’ve been friendly with are back east carrying on life as usual.

An outpost may be a better way to describe my slightly longer term arrangement out here.  I was probably “camping” during the first two weeks while I was living out of my suitcase but now that I’ve got some simple pieces of furniture I’m slightly more invested, not in the financial sense (I mean technically yes, but I don’t really care), but in the physical sense that I have a few items out here now.  I could probably load my existence into a truck in an hour or so if I needed to abandon the outpost and quickly relocate.  My possessions are really limited to things I need to survive without too much discomfort on a day to day basis.  I’ve got a chair to sit in when I want to watch TV, a few small pieces of artwork on the wall so my eyes can focus on something that isn’t a computer screen all day, and just enough lights so it doesn’t have to be dark all the time in here.  For some reason my fairly minimal setup at college really didn’t present this way to me, maybe that’s because I knew the defined start and end dates associated with things and could predefine my engagement as such.

Back in the day cowboys, missionaries, frontiersfolk (gotta be gender neutral), and others that setup outpost would write home to fill in their relatives and loved ones on the latest and greatest news and discoveries.  This feels a bit like my weekly phone call with my parents on Sunday, where my dad lets me know that I’m looking good / healthy and my mom asks what the past week has been like. I don’t usually have anything particularly exciting to say, but I’ve always avoided any status reports that could come off as depressing / negative.  It’s been a while since I’ve read letters home from folks that moved out west early on, but I suspect many of the painted similar pictures either to reinforce optimism, try and encourage others to join them, or even just to not appear to have made what can appear, at times, to be a mistake in the whole process.

Professionally I think I’m also on some sort of frontier as well, at least from the groups I hail from.  Many of my peers find themselves working / living well withing a day’s drive of RPI and probably the same could be true about where they’ve grown up.  I’m out here in “Silicon Valley” which is suppose to embody the bleeding edge of technology and innovation given the companies that call the area home.  I think the wide spread adoption of the internet has greatly reduced this feeling associated with geographic locations; you can just as easily visit a website built out here as I can, but I get to see the billboards recruiting for the latest tech startup or using catchy technology slogans to try and promote products.  Personally I enjoy Microsoft’s “Virtualization alone does not a cloud solution make” billboard.

I don’t know if I look forward to the Sunday drive home from being camping all weekend, when it was thoroughly relaxing to just take a shower and eat some food that I didn’t have to cook, or if I should be looking to a future where I start to scale up this outpost into something a bit more sustainable.  Either way, I’ve already put the fire out for tonight (because if you sleep with a fire still going your tent could catch on fire and you never ever want that to happen) so I should get going to bed.

Good night moon.