Category: family

Clarity

This post is… I don’t know where it’s going to go, but I feel like I need to write my way through it. Let’s see what happens. But before that, I need to cover some history:

  • 1995 – 2008: I worked at AOL, was very involved in church and had small children. I had two major leg injuries: a ruptured ACL and a dislocated ankle that required major surgery.
  • 2008 – 2021: Moved to Savannah. I worked at a series of small startups and a lifestyle company, quit my church, had growing children, and got very involved in the community, serving on at least one governing board pretty much the whole time from The Creative Coast to Susie King Taylor Community School. Also co-founded a non-profit, TechSAV. Oh yeah, I gained close to 100 pounds between 2008 and 2019.
  • 2021 – now: Started working at Gusto, by that point, had already quit all the governing boards, and COVID stopped us from doing all TechSAV events.

It’s now 2023 and I’m still working at Gusto, and loving it. I love having work/life balance finally, and not having to wear all the hats of being a startup CTO.

I’ve been thinking about looking for a board to join, and what to do with all my newfound time, but… for reasons I couldn’t put my finger on, I was dragging my feet. I just don’t want to.

Why? What changed?

I realized that since we moved to Savannah, I’ve been under a huge amount of stress – both externally and internally applied. This is the first time since probably 2000 that I haven’t been a Single Point of Failure for something at work. Balance wasn’t something I could physically do, much less something I had in my life.

Now that I’m finally feeling some relief from the stress, I’ve lost 50 pounds in the last two years, and I’m not done.

I don’t want to join any boards. I don’t want to lead some great new thing.

I want to get healthy.

I finally have some time that’s mine. I’m not on call for the first time in twenty years. People rely on me, but I’m not a Single Point of Failure for anyone’s livelihood (except my own).

It feels selfish to want to spend time on me, but I need to. I don’t want to commit to something else until I feel like I can do it without sacrificing my health, which I still need to improve.

Clarity. It took me a while to get here, but now that I’m here, I’m at peace with it. I’m investing in the opportunity to be here, to be present, to make sure that I can be here and be active for a long time.

Repurposing Notes: Positive Psychology

We do this thing at work called a Sage Session where someone picks a tech talk, we watch it, and then discuss it. Today was my turn, and I didn’t really want to talk about tech, because it’s not the thing that slows people down. I wanted to talk about positive psychology, so… we did! I liked the notes I came up with enough that I’m going to repurpose them here!

Talks we watched

  • The Secret to Happy Work by Shawn Achor: One of my all-time favorite TED Talks and worth watching, because it’s very funny, and a great introduction to the value of positive psychology.
  • There’s More to Life Than Being Happy by Emily Esfahani Smith: This one was new to me, but I wanted to find a counterpoint to all that happy talk. This is a good one.

Talks I wanted to show, but didn’t

Things to try

3 Good Things: Watch this and then do this.

Book

  • Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl – One of the best books I’ve ever read on finding meaning in life and relationships
  • Gratitude by Oliver Sacks – Nice and short, written by Oliver Sacks near the end of his life. It’s really good.
  • The Abundant Community by John McKnight and Peter Block – great overview of how to do community building based on abundance.

Podcasts

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Categorized as love

My Intentions for 2023

I don’t do resolutions. I don’t remember who I first got the idea of doing intentions from, but I really like it. It just feels better than BIG RESOLUTIONS that I inevitably fail. Intentions are things I’d like to do in 2023 but don’t have the same weight or guilt associated with them. So… here they are, my intentions for 2023.

Write more. I signed up for Bring Back Blogs, which means I’m committing to write at least three things here in January (this is one of them, so two to go!). With me less in love with social media than ever, especially the “big” ones, and my fascination with the fediverse (more on that later), it’s time to write more, think more, and revive the blog!

Read more. I think I only finished two books in 2022. I started a bunch, but unless I was trapped in an airplane, I didn’t make time to read books. I think it’s partly because I literally read all day every day at work, but that’s just an excuse.

Contribute to an open source project. Work keeps me pretty busy code-wise, but there’s so much interesting stuff going on in the distributed social world, that it’s time to do something with it. I’m keeping my expectations pretty low for this one, but I expect I’ll at least help with bug fixes and documentation on some interesting fediverse project like mastodon (or maybe I’ll start a federated ficly).

Get out of the house. I almost don’t care what shape this comes in. The pandemic turned me into a full-on hermit to the point that leaving the house now is fairly rare. That needs to change. It could just mean riding my new ebike regularly, or going out to dinner with Jen more often, doing community things, or… something else altogether. We’ll see.

Travel more. We’re empty nesters now! We’ve already got a couple of trips planned for this year, and I want to do more! I want to go back to Europe and explore some places I haven’t been yet. Stay tuned.

I had three or four other things I was going to add here, but this feels like enough.

It got me…

COVID is wild. I tested positive on Monday. I’ve been hiding in my room since then. I was with Brian and Jen at UGA orientation in close quarters for 4 days and in the car for 8 hours. Jen and I slept in the same bed.

I’m the only person in the house who’s tested positive, and everyone retested today.

I’ve never run a temperature. I feel pretty crappy, but I’ve definitely been sicker.

I’ll be more careful in the future, especially indoors in crowds, which I’m pretty sure where I got it.

It’s not been fun. I don’t recommend it. But, I’m glad I waited two years to get it, where we have rapid tests, paxlovid and the variants are more contagious, but much less deadly, especially for fat asthmatics like me.

The Next Step in Representation

My youngest is in the process of graduating from high school, and I’ve got all kinds of feelings about it, so I’ve been escaping to comfort TV and rewatching The Great Pottery Throwdown from start to finish. In season four, they “promoted” kiln man Rich to host (he’s delightful) and replaced him as the kiln tech with Rose Schmitz. They never once mention her gender identity, and she cheerfully helps the potters, encourages them and gets about her job on the show with quiet happy confidence.

In season five, we meet AJ, who goes by “they/them”. No one screws up their pronouns. No one even makes a deal about it at all. Everyone on the show just gets on with doing their pottery things, and AJ is an amazing potter.

Earlier this year, I fell in love with the show Somebody Somewhere. I think I fell in love with almost every character in some way, but the reason I’m diverting from pottery is to talk about Murray Hill. There are a few nods to his transness on the show, like the waiter at the diner flubbing things, but, again, like Throw down, it’s not a huge deal. Where Murray stands out is that Murray is a not just a comic and MC of “choir practice” but we get to see Murray the college professor leading a bunch of students helping out Sam’s dad on his farm. We get to see Murray the professional.

And this is what I love about these three examples: Rose, AJ and Murray and shown first as talented amazing people, who are good at what they do, and are celebrated for it. Their identities are present, respected and acknowledged, without it being the only reason we see them.

This feels like real progress. We’ve seen representation of queer struggle in media for years – of torment, the pain caused by small-minded abusers and close-minded bigots. That’s important.

But, it’s not everything. While we need to acknowledge the pain and struggle of finding yourself and acceptance, we need to show off queer joy and accomplishment. Give me more competent queer people just doing their jobs! Being good at things! Being happy! I want to know that there’s that possible future for my kids, and I’m sure queer kids still coming to terms with their identities need to see it to.

Coming Out

Two years ago, I wrote about our kids coming out. Well, it’s National Coming Out Day again and I have stuff to talk about.

That last post was about preparing for your kid coming out to you, but I think it’s worth preparing ourselves for anyone we care about coming out to us – because there are two sides to it. The person coming out, and the person (potentially you) receiving it.

Coming out takes courage. Think about it. The person coming out is sharing their truth with you with the potential that you might not just reject their truth, but may violently reject them as a person. In the worst case, you could react violently and kill them. There’s literally no way for the person coming out to to know how you’ll react. That uncertainty, especially when coming out to a person they have a relationship with (friend, parent, spouse, partner, sibling, etc) has to be overwhelming.

Especially today, I think it’s worth thinking about how we would and should react when someone comes out to us.

How can we honor their truth and the courage it took to share it with us?

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Categorized as family, love

Random Pandemic Thoughts

This isn’t really a retrospective, because it ain’t over, but we’re doing a relfection on how we’ve been affected by COVID at work today, so I decided to write some things down before the meeting so my thoughts are in some kind of order. I’m sharing it here because, well, I wrote it down.

  • Now that I’m vaccinated, I’m scared of what’s next. What do I want to do? Who am I now after being in a house-shaped cocoon for thirteen months? I don’t want to do what I did before. Going back feels impossible, not just because it is, but because of how little I want to.
  • Every time I try to think about the magnitude of suffering from the past year, I get completely overwhelmed and shut down. It’s unquantifiable, and makes me furious to the point of blackout that no one will be held accountable for all the avoidable failures at the national, state and local levels.
  • I feel guilty for being grateful for all of the time I got to spend with my family this year.
  • I feel guilty for not having done more to help others, but also feel like keeping my family safe, sane, fed and housed has to be enough… which I understand is a whole bunch of privilege and others had it way worse than I did.
  • I feel like I adapted to being at home all the time a little too well, and I’m going to have terrible social anxiety for a while.
  • I’m still disappointed every time I see people wearing masks incorrectly. I just don’t get it. At all. It’s not hard. Over your mouth AND nose.
  • I really miss a lot of things, and people, and the weird only-in-Savannah moments that used to happen all the time. So many of them that I can’t begin to write them down.

The Cultural Event That is Blaseball

I started playing (watching? participating in?) blaseball about six weeks ago. Imagine fantasy baseball where everything is fantasy. The teams are fake. The players are all generated by computers. The games are simulated. But, there’s play by play you can follow along with during the games, betting to do, favorite teams to pick, new rules to vote on and now idols to choose.

It’s ridiculous and a lot of fun. It’s become a totally partipitory thing on Twitter too, where fans of the game come up with backstories and cards for the favorite players and teams, and come up with ways to play with the “world” of the game and cause trouble (and they have… delightful silly trouble).

With work, I can’t keep up with everything going on with the fans on Twitter… so I recruited my kids! May and Brian are both now signed up and playing along. We have an epic text thread where we share betting strategies and they keep me up to date on the latest news. Brian comes in at least once a day with some crazy thing going on, or to discuss a new betting strategy. May will give me the latest gossip while we’re hanging out in the kitchen making lunch.

It’s been great to have some new thing to do with them that doesn’t involve trying to get each other to watch some movie or anime.

So, if you’ve got slightly nerdy, competitive, lore-obsessed kids, check it out! It’s free. It’s weird. It’s great.

On to the Good Stuff

Brian got shorn!

I was talking to a friend in the TechSAV Slack this morning about people running around without masks and being aggressively ignorant about it online and in person and as I was about to spiral into anger and sadness, I just decided… I don’t want to.

Instead, I decided to hop over here and write something about all the good stuff that’s happened while I’ve been stuck at home with my family – the happy accidents, the intentional accidents, and the successes (both intentional and accidental).

  • The Wire: The Ringer has a new podcast recapping every episode of my favorite show of all time. I used this as an opportunity to get Brian to watch the show with me, and he has! We’re now several episodes ahead of the podcast, but he’s really into the show, so I’m fine plowing ahead.
  • Home Haircuts: Brian has been growing out his hair since 8th grade (he’s just finishing 10th). The other day, he said, “I’m thinking of shaving my head.” I asked him 3-4 times if he was sure he wanted to. He said yes, so we grabbed the clippers and a chair, and went to the backyard. It was surprisingly fun to take all that hair off his head.
  • Exercise: I was doing pretty well on the bike last fall and then just stopped… and I can’t remember why. But, I’m back! I closed the Move ring on my watch every day last week, and am on to closing it this week too!
  • Gardening and the Barter Economy: I decided it was time to try gardening again, so I planted a bunch of seeds and did the whole “throw scallion ends in a jar” thing. The scallion trick works great, by the way. The seeds? Not so much. But, I have a friend who loves bread and is an amazing gardener, so I’m trading her a loaf of sourdough for a bunch of seedlings that will get planted this weekend. I even set up a table for gardening in the backyard that will hopefully keep the terrible weeds from my dilapidated raised beds away from the new plants.
  • Cooking With Constraints: We’ve been trying to only go to the store every 2-3 weeks, which means towards the end of that time, we have to get creative with our meals. We’ve been trying all kinds of recipes, and it’s been a lot of fun tweaking them to use the ingredients we have instead of running to the store. My favorites so far have been Bang Bang Chicken and Scallion Pancakes.

There are probably more things, but that’ll do for now. I hope you’re staying safe and as happy as you can be.

Standing

Standing alone in my driveway
On a empty street
On a small island
Next to a big ocean
I looked around at the houses
I looked up at the big sky, pink with dusk

Alone is a trick of perception
Based on the size of your container
Alone in your room
Maybe in your house too
But under that big evening sky now going purple
We’re all together