Malvasian Fragments

so-what-next

2015-09-11T03:28:49+00:00

So: what next? After tossing it around, I think the main thing is that I should stand down a bit, and stop seeing certain interactions as power struggles. Or rather, stop treating them that way: I still think that part of what's going on is placing her in the role of provider and placing her children in the role of provided for; that is indeed a power dynamic, but it's up to me as to how I respond to that. She's older, she's set in her ways; if I can find positive ways to redirect her energy or attention, then great, but if not, I should think about what I want to get out of actively pushing back.

And yeah, I think her memory isn't what it once was. I'm not sure what to make of that, other than to be glad that I'm not seeing any signs of that with my dad. And to be prepared for it to get worse.

The bit about the different grandkids was odd, though. I'm hoping that it was a fluke.

the-rest-of-the-visit

2015-08-25T04:18:48+00:00

The rest of the visit was mostly as expected: we went to a zoo and a museum, my mom reminded us of the existence of gift shops every 30 minutes or so during those trips, but we enjoyed the trips anyways. On the last we went shopping (and looking at kittens) downtown, and actually that was pretty fun, Oberlin has some neat art galleries.

During one of the museum gift shop visits, apparently my mom and dad got in an argument over something that she wanted to buy (I think for the other grandkids?) that he thought they wouldn't like at all. I was outside of the shop, though, so I don't know exactly what was going on. And it must be difficult for them to negotiate that sort of situation: sometimes my mom needs my dad's help to do something, and sometimes he doesn't want to be part of that something. If she could see, she could just do it, he wouldn't be part, and it would be a normal disagreement; as is, though, it gets more complicated. In general, what I think happens is that he does that thing anyways, and in general I think that's the best outcome, but I don't think it's always the best outcome, and I got the impression that, in this situation, the discussion about the outcome didn't play out very well.

Also, on the last day, at some point my mom and I talked for a bit, and I said something like "we'd been having arguments about shopping all week"; if I'm remembering correctly, she said something like "really, I didn't realize that". That felt pretty odd.

this-is-where-it-gets-weird

2015-08-24T03:37:16+00:00

My mom doesn't just want to pay for meals and events during visits, she wants to give gifts to people. So we weren't too surprised when she announced a spending budget for Miranda during the trip; Miranda was good about that and found something nice to buy that used up the budget.

This happened during the first day; my mom responded by increasing the budget. And she did that in a way that did not impress me: she decided that the way to be fair to her sons was to give each family the same amount of spending money for the grandkids, instead of giving each grandkid the same amount. Everybody else was more or less horrified by this; if I'm remembering correctly, she responded by some combination of covering her ears with her hands and telling us that we can't tell her what to do.

I raised the issue the next day as we were walking to the car, saying that I really hoped that she wouldn't say things like that to the grandkids on the other side of the family; she responded by calling me stupid, spelling it out just in case I didn't get the point.

I don't think that she actually treats her grandkids that way normally: I've never gotten the feeling that Miranda gets more Christmas / birthday gifts than the other grandkids.

paying-during-visits

2015-08-16T04:53:05+00:00

For at least the last decade, when my parents have visited (or when we've visited them), we've had arguments about paying for stuff. Specifically, my mom really wants to pay for everything: in restaurants, she'll regularly tell the waiter to give the check to my father (my mom is blind, else she would take it herself), and she'll say things like "your credit card isn't good here".

This largely comes from a good place: she wants to provide, she wants to be a nice guest. But there's also a power dynamic going on (whether intentional or not I don't know); and when it transitions from her paying for restaurant meals to wanting to come along grocery shopping so she can pay for groceries, it becomes something that I can't explain in terms of gifts or in terms of a nice gesture.

This has actually gotten somewhat better recently; we've established that we'll alternate turns paying for restaurants and that we'll pay for our own god-damn groceries. On this visit, they let us take them out to a quite nice restaurant with no pushback at all; I appreciated that.

talking-about-visiting-my-parents

2015-08-12T04:17:15+00:00

We visited my parents last week. It was mostly good, but interactions with my mom were strange.

Which I want to write about so I can think about it, but I'm not sure I want to do it in as public a space as my regular blog. So: here, I guess.

sun-shining-on-seats

2015-07-15T13:55:33+00:00

I like the way the sun shines on empty seats in the upper level of Caltrain cars. It's like the universe is welcoming me, saying: sit here, please.

feeling-better

2014-10-01T04:01:17+00:00

I am feeling better now than I was this morning, or than I was yesterday. So that is good. We'll see how the rest of the week goes, but I am optimistic.

tired-of-being-tired

2014-09-30T04:08:07+00:00

At the start of this year, my allergies got a lot worse: I was taking a bunch of Claritin, and still I felt tired most days. But then I got a recommendation to start washing out my nose and I started feeling normal again.

Partway through the summer, though, it got worse again. I should probably talk about this with my doctor, but what with my back and leg and back problems, I feel like I've spent enough time in medical institutions recently.

Still: I'm tired of being tired. Which made it worse / weirder that I had a hard time getting to sleep last night; I'm not sure if it was a slight fever from my flu shot, or if my brain just has too much to process right now.

(Maybe it's a sign that my hypomania is coming back! That was certainly an interesting experience, though one that, on balance, I would rather not repeat...)

prickliness

2013-10-22T17:14:31+00:00

I feel like I'm a lot more prickly than I either used to be or want to be; I also feel like that prickliness doesn't come out uniformly, that it gets triggered by certain contexts.

Assuming that's true:

What can/should I do about this triggering?
What can/should I do to prevent the prickliness from leaking out to situations where I'm not triggered?

Localized infections are problematic but manageable; I don't want this to spread.

agile-learning-blockage

2013-10-13T04:24:58+00:00

And with Agile Open California coming up, another reason why I'm feeling blocked (not just about blogging, more in general): for the last decade or so, I've spent a lot of time thinking about agile and related concepts, and running experiments to try to learn more. And, right now, my standard ways of running experiments in that regard aren't available, which is unsettling.

Which doesn't necessarily mean that I really am blocked: maybe it's a sign that I should enlarge my context, for example. But it's definitely thrown me off my game.

Something to think about; and, no matter what, I'm looking forward to Agile Open California, even if I expect it to be a bit frustrating last year.

(I would seem to have written a not-completely-dissimilar fragment after Agile Open California last year. Hmm.)

puzzling

2013-10-08T01:42:54+00:00

Thinking more about why I'm feeling unproductive: that mostly concerns how I use my evening time. Like I said in that fragment, I'm not infrequently tired, and I'm also watching TV a bit more than usual. (I try to put the TV time on days when I happen to be more tired.)

But part of it is that I downloaded a few puzzle programs for my iPad; Slitherlink in particular is both incredibly addictive and inserts itself into little fragments in my time if I let it. And it's very easy to let those fragments add up, so they turn from brief breaks into a sizeable chunk of my evening.

Which, on the one hand, I should guard against. But, on the other hand: I like thinking about games, and Slitherlink certainly gives me material for that. (I'll write more about that on my main blog over the next week or two.) So I don't want to beat myself up over it, either.

feeling-unproductive

2013-10-05T04:40:47+00:00

I'm in one of my periodic slumps where I feel unproductive. Though, as slumps go, this isn't a particularly bad one: I actually have a bunch of posts to write, I'm just not writing them quite as quickly as I'd like.

There's a bit of a malaise beyond that: I'm not sure how much I want to focus on games blogging these days. (I'm not at all sure if I'll go to GDC this year.) But I also don't have ideas about something different to focus on instead.

Ah well; it will sort itself out. Like I said, this isn't a particularly bad one, mostly I just need to sit down and write. Probably all that's going on is that I'm a little more tired than I had been; some combination of getting up earlier to take the train plus allergies being worse than normal.

walking-funny

2013-09-23T04:44:47+00:00

A few weeks ago, my back started hurting; I think it was because I'd recently switched to shoes with extremely thin soles (leather, maybe 2mm?) as opposed to merely very thin soles (rubber, 5mm), and walking with those shoes on concrete was too jarring. So I ordered another set of the less thin version, and wore sneakers in the meantime; and my back started to get better. (And my coworkers commented on my wearing sneakers; I wasn't expecting that.)

Now I'm back to the sort of shoes that I'd been wearing for a year and a half; but something isn't feeling right. Both in my back and in my walking: I think I'm overconscious about how I'm walking, and sometimes I'm having my heel hit first, sometimes I'm having the ball of my foot hit first, sometimes I'm doing some sort of weird halfway thing, and some subset of those leads to unexpectedly abrupt contact.

Hopefully this will sort itself out soon...

ignoring-self-advice

2013-08-18T04:38:57+00:00

It is a not particularly comfortable situation to think: if somebody else were describing their mental state to me, and if it were like mine over the course of the last several months, then I know what advice I'd give them. So why am I not doing that myself?

But maybe it's not that simple: that would probably be my first reaction when talking to a friend, but after talking more, I'd probably find that the story is more complicated. I do generally like my coworkers, quite a lot in some cases; the work is frequently quite interesting technically; and I think there's a good chance that the company will do well financially.

Still: the engineering culture is anti-team, anti-process, and pro-heroics; and while responding to change is good, unreflective veering is not. Or at least not for me; one of the unexpected things about this job is that it's doing a surprisingly effective job of uncovering some of my core values.

sleep-problems

2013-07-31T04:18:42+00:00

It's been a surprisingly bad summer for my sleep. Partly, it feels like my bad allergy season is lasting longer (is permanent?): in the past, I'd taken two Claritins a day during the bad pollen season but only one during the rest of the year, but this year the bad season never really stopped, I just gave up. And it's probably partly the change in my sleep schedule because of the office move: I'm waking up at 6:45 instead of lazing in bed for half an hour after the alarm rings, but I'm not going to sleep half an hour earlier. (And at times I wake up still earlier than that, which is Not Helpful.)

But it's also because my brain has stuff to process. It's not like last year, when work was driving me crazy; but I have things to think about a little more often than I'd like.

Sigh. Ah well; it's not like I'm going to stop thinking about things...

source-of-drama

2013-06-14T04:45:45+00:00

I'm significantly less morose than I was when I wrote that last post: the talk in question led to significant changes, which I think are for the best for me. Ripples for other people yesterday and today; hopefully those will calm down, but it would seem that part of my niche at my current job is to be an unusual source of drama.

We'll see how the next couple of months play out; I'm looking forward to them.

damaged-goods

2013-06-11T04:06:32+00:00

It has been a while since I have posted on this, my morose blog. And part of the reason for that is that I have in fact been much less morose this year.

That has changed somewhat over the last month and a half; this last weekend in particular wasn't much fun. And it's a reminder that I am still damaged goods.

That's not the only thing that's going on, though: some real differences in approach and philosophy are coming to the fore, coming to a head.

But: a good talk today, where we didn't dance around the issues. I'm considerably more optimistic now than I was last night.

warning-signs

2012-12-11T00:32:03+00:00

There have been a lot of warning signs that I should quit my job. Events at work; my reaction at night to events during the day; the fact that my last vacation was the least relaxing vacation I can ever remember. (And the vacation before that was interrupted by news that a coworker/friend was probably quitting.)

The strongest recent warning sign, though, was Agile Open California. I go to that conference every year, it's one of my favorites, it always fills me with energy and ideas. Not this year, though: I was mentally checked out for most of the conference, and the main thing that I got out of it was the name 'Mini Waterfall' to describe the way we'd done our iteration planning from the middle of 2011 to the middle of 2012. (After which we switched to an awful Kanban implementation—the awfulness was in large part my fault—and instead of trying to improve that, we switched this fall to a 'Mini Matrix' planning/team model. Whee.)

I'm only having fun if I'm learning stuff. And I'm also a much more productive employee if I'm learning stuff: if my brain is working actively, good things generally happen around me (albeit unpredictable good things, mixed in with a bit of bad), whereas if I'm just going on autopilot, then a company can find a fair number of people that are as productive as I am. So, if I'm seeing signs that my learning pathways are actively blocked up, that's really bad.

Fortunately, Agile Open California provided a solution to my problem to go along with that diagnosis: a key part of any open space gathering is the Law of Two Feet, which states that:

If at any time during our time together you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet, go someplace else.

subtext

2012-08-20T01:01:34+00:00

I feel like my blogging has had more subtext than normal recently. In my regular blog, certainly; but in my linkblog perhaps even more. Not all the time, not even most of the time, but it's there. Which is kind of interesting, as somebody who doesn't particularly believe in authorial intent: yes, the intent is there, but no, I don't think it should matter when looking at the blog from the outside.

In fact, maybe I should make intent matter less: maybe I should do a better job of filing off the specifics and presenting general thoughts? I dunno, I probably do lots of that anyways, my brain likes to generalize. Also, in my linkblog, there's this funny wrinkle that my brain wants to see external determinism: over and over again, the Twitter or RSS feeds that I follow serve up something that's directly relevant to what's going on in my life at that moment. But, ultimately, I'm repeating those links with minimal commentary; if their meaning to me serves to give the links more coherence to others, so much the better.

vacation-and-guests

2012-08-13T04:03:46+00:00

The last week of July, we went to theater festivals in Canada with Liesl's father and brother. Good times, but nine plays in five days was a lot; it ended up being the least relaxing vacation that I can remember in some time. (The plays weren't the only reason: working through Democracy of Objects and an external event I had on my mind both played a role.)

Two days after we got back, my parents showed up, staying for a week. And then we had a day off, and then Liesl's mother and her mother's husband showed up for half a week. Several days off after that, but we just got an invite to a party the following weekend. And then, the weekend after that, I leave for PSL, which I'll be at for a week.

I'm very glad that the first Monday in September is Labor Day. Right now, I'd be perfectly happy if we didn't plan anything social at all next month...

consensual-reality

2012-07-04T03:49:56+00:00

Lots of stuff going on at work over the last couple of months that I can't talk about here, let alone at my main blog. Probably much of it I'll never be able to write about—grab me in person if you want to hear things—but right now things seem to be actively turning out well, so that's good.

One thing that these events have brought home fairly strongly, though: different people have quite different views of the reality underlying a situation. And that is, in general, a perfectly fine thing: different data, and non-conclusive data at that, naturally lead to different hypotheses/beliefs. But sometimes it can lead to tension, especially in emotionally charged situations, and when that tension gets too strong, acknowledging that difference can be useful. Was, in fact, surprisingly useful to me recently.

driving-the-train

2012-05-23T04:14:53+00:00

An exercise for the reader: if somebody used the phrase "driving the train" to describe the job of being head of the engineering team at a startup, what would you think that person felt were the challenges that the company faced, and what would you think that person felt was the desired behavior for other members of that engineering team?

gdc-fallout

2012-05-01T03:50:16+00:00

It's funny to think that, going into GDC this year (and, indeed, after the first two days of GDC), I wasn't sure if I'd return next year: looking back, this year's conference has had an amazing effect on me. A long, deeply needed conversation with Michael Abbott and a completely unexpected talk by Brian Sharp have combined to significantly change my approach to one important aspect of my life a couple of months later.

I hope I'll be able to talk more about it soon. In the meantime: quite a ride.

problem-solving-mode

2012-04-02T07:56:30+00:00

My brain is in problem solving mode right now. Which can be a good thing, but I'm learning that it's a double-edged sword: I'm not at all convinced that the problem in question is one that it's useful for my brain to repeatedly remind me about. Sigh.

Still, interesting to watch. And a reminder of just how many suggestions my brain can come up with when it's in that mode. Given the right context, it's quite effective.

seeing-textures

2012-03-27T15:21:53+00:00

One optimistic spin to put on my thoughts from yesterday (spurred by a blog post I wrote yesterday): maybe I'm getting better at seeing textures, both in the existing behavioral space and in the possibility space. I'm not as good at seeing/navigating those spaces as I'd like, but still: improved vision is a plus.

If, of course, I'm not deluding myself, which is always a possibility! I'm certainly more tired than I'd like to be right now...

figuring-out-next-steps

2012-03-27T05:00:22+00:00

Been thinking a lot recently about how to best approach a situation at work. I have some ideas about where I'd like it to end up, and some idea about short-term steps that I hope will lead in the right direction, but it's not adding up properly, there's too much worry. I think that I should focus on the short-term steps and not get too wedded to specific outcomes; it's possible, though, that I'm just shying away from some of the issues involved and should behave more forcefully.

I was going to say that this mirrors issues that I'm thinking about in my life more broadly, but it really doesn't: there, I know I want to be doing something different (on a different scale), but possible outcomes are way too vague right now. The similarity is that I think I'm okay with the short-term steps; that's something, but I could use help brainstorming the bigger picture.

Probably a good time to be going on vacation. Though that may end up not giving me enough down time, either: maybe I really need to spend more time alone, just walking and thinking. And writing, always writing.

broadening-work-friendships

2012-03-19T05:07:30+00:00

In the fall, I seemed to be becoming surprisingly close friends with three of my coworkers; interesting and pleasant, but two of those friendships have cooled significantly since then. And this turns out to have its own benefits, making it easier for me to pay attention to more of my coworkers. Which is interesting from a purely observational point of view - they're a distinctive bunch, I learn something from watching them, I enjoy interacting with them. And it's nice to have room for a larger number of lower-key friendships to develop; I've seen some of that happening over the last couple of months, I should spend more time nurturing that.

Not that I didn't enjoy the way things went in the fall: the coworkers in question are all people I still enjoy talking to, and I'm quite glad that one of those friendships has remained strong. But, in retrospect, it was both a bit exhausting and a bit myopic.

Hmm, I just edited out a third use of the word 'interesting' from the first paragraph. Honestly, I really do enjoy people on a pure personal level. (As long as there aren't too many of them around!) But it is doubtless clear to everybody who reads this blog that my brain is incapable of not going analytical at the drop of a hat.

asking-for-what-you-want

2012-02-27T05:22:28+00:00

Something I've seen several times recently: person A wants person B to do something or otherwise behave differently, and gets progressively unhappier as person B doesn't do it. Person A then considers whether the appropriate response is to continue bottling up his or her unhappiness, to come out with some sort of passive-aggressive snark, or to make a scene about it. Meanwhile, person B has no idea that person A wants him or her to do that.

In fact, I've done this myself recently; and if any of you reading this haven't, I salute you, because it's a very easy trap to fall into. But still: if there's something you want somebody else to do, try asking for that person to do it before you fall too far into a funk? It won't always work; but sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't work as intended but leads somewhere surprising and (on the balance) good, and when it fails you're almost never any worse off. And it can lead to a remarkable reduction of internal tension.

I'm better at asking in those situations than I used to be; I think I probably have Gerald Weinberg to credit for a fair amount of that? (Perhaps Delany, too.) Though, thinking more when writing this, GTD has also made a big difference, because it asks you to be clear about what you want to have happen, and whether or not you're waiting on somebody else for that to happen.

struggling-against-silos

2012-02-09T04:43:17+00:00

I like work a lot, but recently I've been more annoyed than usual at the number of silos that we have on the development team. Actually, "silos" might not be the right term, because that implies different groups with different areas of focus: what's really going on is more individual ownership of projects and areas of the code. (So: very skinny silos!) This has been the case everywhere I've worked (not so surprising, among other reasons because engineers don't like to talk to people), but this is the first job I've had where my manager considers that to be a feature rather than a bug. (To be fair, I think his feelings are a little more complex than that, but that's how I interpret his actual behavior.)

I'm not sure what the most productive way is to approach this. But after being bothered last night about recent planning meetings that were organized in an (in my view) excessively exclusionary way, I realized that that actually was a pretty good place to start, since it involved behavior that individual contributors could control. So I sent out an e-mail noting that my behavior was different than other people's behavior in this regard, and asking if the obvious interpretation (that other people liked to exclude people from meetings, and that I should therefore get with the program) was correct. And, fortunately, I got exactly the response I hoped for: a good number of people said that no, they liked being invited to meetings in areas where they didn't work on the code every day.

It'll be interesting to see if people's actual behavior changes as a result of that. And it will also be interesting to see how my manager responds, if at all; he didn't chime in on the e-mail thread. (Which is good management behavior on his part, I think: his responding too early could squelch discussion.)

dating-faculty-brats

2012-02-06T05:58:48+00:00

Something I realized last week: everybody I've dated for longer than a month or two was a faculty brat. (As am I, of course.) That is, admittedly, a small sample size, but it's also a small population to choose from.

I may write about this eventually on the main blog; I'm still thinking it through. Certainly, despite the small sample size, this isn't a coincidence. With (at least?) two causes: clearly that's my type (or at least one of my types), but I'm also sure that the selection process works in the other way, that faculty brats are the most likely to appreciate my considerable peculiarities.

And: class runs deep.

sorority-life-hoodie

2012-02-05T07:06:09+00:00

I've worn my Sorority Life hoodie for the last couple of days, for three reasons:

It's been a little less cold, and my regular jacket is a bit on the warm side.
We're getting hoodies at work, available with either the pink or blue versions of our logo, and there were rather too many jokes made about the pink being for girls and the blue being for boys.
Whipping Girl pointed out just how reluctant men are to be associated with femininity—e.g. if a woman asks a man to hold her purse, he'll typically hold it away from his body instead of slinging it over his shoulder or even just tucking it under his arm—and I'd like to better understand my own responses in that regard.

It's been interesting: the third point is present, but already diminishing. So that's definitely good: I'm not drawn to femininity, but I'd like to be more in control of (or at least aware of!) my reactions there. And it's also reminded me of the fact that zippers are on the left side of women's clothing.

This experiment would, of course, be more powerful if the hoodie in question weren't mostly grey with a relatively small SL logo. Baby steps...

no-linkedin-recs

2012-02-01T05:34:09+00:00

A former coworker (who reported to me for part of the time we worked together) asked me for a LinkedIn recommendation the other day. Which is something that I've never given before; and even though I think he's a good guy and would happily serve as a reference for him in general, I somehow didn't want to give a LinkedIn recommendation.

I'm not sure why. It had nothing to do with him: like I said, he's comfortably above the threshold for me to serve as a reference. And while I am a bit worried about this serving as a precedent that would make me harder for me to turn down other former coworkers who are beneath that threshold, I don't think that's the issue: I'm generally comfortable saying no to people. So I think it must either be something about public recommendations in general or LinkedIn in specific that I'm uncomfortable with.

I don't think I have any conscious philosophical dislike for public recommendations, but my guess is that I do have an general distaste for it. And, as social networks go, I certainly don't like LinkedIn as much as LinkedIn would like me to: I put my resume up there, I accept contact requests from coworkers and friends, and occasionally I'll even go through the recommended list and click on names myself, but I don't spend actual time there and I certainly don't want to turn it into any sort of hub.

I dunno. I wish I knew what was going on there, but not enough to actually spend more time thinking about it.

tv-shopping

2012-01-21T04:41:03+00:00

It had been clear for the last half year or so that it was time to buy a new TV for a while, but I'd been putting it off. Which is a little strange: I'm in general not actively adverse to electronics shopping?

I finally got around to doing a bit of research online and talking to friends, and noticed that I was enjoying the process. As I spent more time poking around Amazon, I realized: I actually wasn't averse to shopping for a new TV (and receiver) at all, my brain had just assumed that part of that shopping would involve going to a physical electronics store, and I apparently really didn't want to do that! So I thought about that for a bit, decided that I wasn't being irresponsible by not looking at TVs in person, and a day later everything was happily ordered from Amazon. (Incidentally, it turns out that, even with Amazon Prime, TV delivery still takes a week, so don't expect to get it quickly if you follow the same route.)

At first I assumed this reflected my dislike of shopping in stores. But the truth is that I actually like shopping in some kinds of stores just fine: I really like bookstores, I enjoy doing the grocery shopping every week. And I would expect electronics to be something I'd be okay with shopping for, too. I think that what's going on is that my mental model of a store where I would buy a TV is Best Buy; and I don't like the sales staff there, don't trust them to give me advice that has more to do with my needs than their financial incentives, and don't trust them to have configured their display models in ways that reflect how they'll actually look in my environment. So, when my subconscious puts all of that together, it can think of lots of other things it would rather be doing; and I'm certainly not going to say my subconscious is wrong in that judgment.

embarrassing-edits

2012-01-20T05:20:18+00:00

After reading my last fragment, a friend of mine e-mailed me saying how he noticed the extent of his negative reaction to use of "male" and "female" as nouns. (They're fine as adjectives.) Which I agree with, though it looks like my reaction isn't as strong as his, so I was surprised to hear that I'd made that mistake; looking at the fragment, though, there's an inappropriate use of "female" in the second sentence. Oops.

If I'd caught that myself, I would have just edited it out, even after publication. But now that he's pointed it out, doing that would feel like I'm hiding my mistakes. So, instead, I'm taking the opposite tack: after all, what is this blog about if not publicly embarrassing myself?

(And, of course, it's nice to have an extent to anonymously talk about another friend of mine. Or at least I find the idea strangely amusing: how long will it be before somebody who doesn't know me at all can trace out all of my friendships and their interconnections here?)

reinforcing-gender-norms

2012-01-19T07:02:25+00:00

Reading Whipping Girl (which is excellent) got me thinking more about what made me uncomfortable about that coffee the last week. One of the specific topics that was discussed was another male participant's recent interactions with an apparently quite conventionally attractive female, and the fact that he didn't end up with the outcome that we're supposed to think is desirable (and that he probably did think was desirable!), namely having sex with her. (There was also some amount of friendly teasing of that participant for various other reasons, and some of that teasing was gender-linked.)

I am male. I do not, however, consider being male as an area of expertise. And so: I'm not particularly good at acting conventionally masculine (though I'm worse at acting conventionally feminine, and years ago discarded the two skirts that used to be in my closet). And I'm also not particularly good at expressing traditional masculine sexuality, so while I'm noticeably more attracted to women than to men, I'm not particularly attracted to women who are strongly marked as feminine. (In general, the latter is an active turn off for me; it is not a coincidence that Liesl hasn't shaved her legs in years and doesn't spend much time shopping for clothes, or for that matter that she gave me one of the aforementioned skirts.) And so, in retrospect, being in a context where somebody else was being teased for failings along those lines was probably at least as much a source of my discomfort as other aspects of the coffee were. (There certainly were other sources of discomfort: my introversion, and less-gender-linked ways in which the interactions marked me as unusual.)

Don't get me wrong: the other people involved are all people I like, and in fact (as I hope is obvious to them, but it always bears repeating) like quite a bit. And whom I had a pleasant dinner with tonight; I'm writing this post in part to try to understand why I actively enjoyed tonight's dinner instead of actively disliking it. And I take an active role in friendly teasing somewhat often myself; also, there's nothing at all wrong with most of the interactions in question. (Being reminded of the existence of differences is something that I in general view as morally neutral, even if I don't always enjoy it.) It's just a reminder of how this world encourages us to actively reinforce gender norms.

birthday-parties

2012-01-12T05:41:46+00:00

Continuing on the theme of "common social situations that my brain doesn't deal with in anything approaching a normal fashion": I was talking with some friends about birthdays this afternoon. Here is a list of things that I enjoy on my birthday:

Being wished happy birthday.
Having somebody else make slightly better food than normal, especially if it involves good chocolate.
Any sort of social interaction that I would enjoy on any other day.

The third of those is by far the most important. And here is a list of things that I don't enjoy on my birthday:

Spending time with large groups of people.
The vast majority of non-edible presents.
Having social interactions that I might enjoy if they happened as a matter of course but where the birthday is an outlier.

There are a few things going on here. One is that I, in general, actively dislike parties. Two is that, in general, my life is a quite happy one (despite the at times morose tone of this particular blog!); and, while there are always ways to improve that, restricting improvements to birthdays seems bizarre. So: if I enjoy spending time with you in some context and we do that regularly, great! Whereas if I don't enjoy spending time with you in some context, then why would I want to do so on my birthday of all times? (And the context there is key: there are lots of people that I enjoy spending time with in small groups but whose presence isn't enough to quell my strong desire to flee from large groups.)

And if I would enjoy spending time with you in some context but we don't do that regularly, then I'm happy to have a birthday be an excuse for fixing that! But the downside there is that if the birthday really is a noticeable outlier, then that will be as likely to make me feel mildly depressed as anything else: it would leave me wondering what's going on the rest of the time. (Don't get me wrong, that last situation is quite rare.)

Side notes: yes, I am aware that birthday celebrations aren't all about the person whose birthday it is, and I don't incorporate that enough into my analysis. And one of the many reasons why I am very lucky to be married to Liesl is that she is happily accepting of my several extreme quirks when it comes to holidays.

alien-coffee

2012-01-12T03:14:31+00:00

An interaction I had earlier this week: I was going out for coffee with a slightly larger group of friends than normal. (All people I enjoy interacting with in other circumstances, e.g. I quite enjoy playing board games with all of them, or talking with any of them one on one or even in slightly larger groups than that.) This time, the conversation ended up going in a direction that left me feeling alienated in the same way the company holiday party did: yes, there are reasons why we are friends, but still, we have pretty different approaches to our lives. (Some of them more than others; incidentally, earlier, I mentioned being at different stages of our lives, but while true, I don't currently think that's very relevant.) And, rather than deciding that this was an interesting difference (or coming up with a way to steer conversation in directions I would have enjoyed more), my brain simply decided that it would rather be elsewhere. Which was hard to do gracefully in that specific situation.

No big deal, certainly: an hour of unexpected boredom is, in general, enough to cause me to shrug my shoulders. What to do about that information in the future is less clear, though: I suspect that this particular mix of people in this particular context doesn't work well for me, but I will be a bit lonely if I stay away from related interactions. (Slightly different mixes of people in the same context, the same mix of people in different contexts.) But if I'm in the same situation again, it's not obvious to me how to redirect it to an interaction I would enjoy instead of one that leaves me feeling alienated: I can't very well say "I'd really not rather do this with all of you" or "I like spending time with all of you but only if we're playing games instead of just talking" without acting like an asshole.

I can try to gracefully withdraw from such situations a little earlier, but sidestepping isn't my favorite reaction to such situations; hoping that it won't happen again is also not a great solution. I'll probably do a mix of those approaches anyways, but hopefully tempered with enough observation to find a better path forward? And there are times when it would be convenient if my brain were better at enjoying common social interactions...

catan-chocolate-and-code

2011-12-24T04:48:53+00:00

I may not have been thrilled about the company Christmas party last week, but yesterday was a good example of why my job is awesome. First, on a social level: one of my coworkers has been in a board game mood this week, so we played a game over lunch for the third time this week. (A five-player game of Settlers of Catan this time.) And my Scharffen-Berger order showed up earlier in the week, so we had a chocolate tasting party yesterday (two single-source chocolates plus their standard mocha and nibby), with rather interesting conversation.

Which is all well and good, but of course I'm actually getting paid to work, not to play and eat. And the programming yesterday was fascinating: I started chipping away at something that had been bothering me for a little while (in a way that will directly help an upcoming feature), and I got a really useful code review at the end of the day from one of my coworkers that had me rather regretting this morning that I wasn't going into work today to follow up on her suggestions. And we'd had a very productive planning meeting on Wednesday (which generated some useful ideas going in a quite different direction from what I'd expected entering the meeting) that I wrote up notes from yesterday, I'm also looking forward to helping implement that in the beginning of the new year.

Good times.

2011-holiday-party

2011-12-19T07:02:32+00:00

We had the company holiday party this Friday. Which was at a local winery, followed by dinner, followed by a pub. And which started off depressingly: I had a lovely conversation during the first five minutes of the bus ride, but I spent the remainder of the ride listening and realizing that those who surrounded me had a very different approach to (some aspects of) life from me, were at a quite different stage of their lives, or both.

The winery started off bad, too: over-oaked wine, and while I'm no wine expert, I can say with confidence that the cheese and chocolate that they served it with were bad. So: if they don't take food seriously (or aren't aware that they're serving bad food), why should I take their wine seriously? But then things got better: I played a game of go against three of my coworkers who were collaborating on move choices, and then played Medici with one of them; we played a couple more games of Medici on the bus to the restaurant, it's a good game that works well on the iPad.

The food at the restaurant was nice: not exceptional, but certainly better than at the winery. And I enjoyed the conversation, including a discussion with a Korean colleague of mine about K-Pop groups and Korean dramas. I, along with about a third of my colleagues, skipped out on the pub and took an earlier bus back: while the early employees all enjoy alcohol-focused occasions, more recent employees feel less uniformly so. I mostly read on the ride back; there was one conversation going on nearby that sounded like I would have enjoyed it, but I was just far enough away that my inertia overcame my desire to participate.

All in all, pleasant enough: it started off making me feel more alienated from my coworkers, which presumably wasn't the desired effect, but had the reverse effect by the end. And probably I should change the balance of how much time I spend with which coworkers...

bad-ui-tweaks

2011-12-12T04:21:45+00:00

Like a lot of people, I'm not thrilled with version 4.0 of the iPhone Twitter client; but what bugs me the most is a small thing, namely it's way of handling Instapaper. For one thing, you have to click on the article before saving it; that isn't particularly inefficient (you don't have to wait for the article to actually load), but it feels conceptually wrong to me, since I'm explicitly deciding not to read the article right then. But what's wrong on a more pragmatic level is that it no longer saves the text of the referring tweet in Instapaper, making it almost impossible for me to credit the referrer if I decide to link to that saved article on my linkblog.

I gave Tweetbot a try; it saved the text of the referring tweet but not its author, which is almost as useless for citation purposes. And Tweetbot has a whole other host of issues around state and strange ways of tapping (double-tapping, tap-and-hold). So I think I'm going back to the official client; but I miss Tweetie. It's certainly surprising how much of a difference these apparently small design decisions make to me.

getting-music-into-fingers

2011-12-10T05:15:25+00:00

Right now I'm trying to learn the 6-Part Ricercar from the Musical Offering. Which is a quite thorny piece, and makes me realize that I really don't understand the process of how music gets into my fingers. I'm not memorizing it, and it seems like there are too many notes / fingering decisions for me to be able to parse it, even with annotations, but somehow I'm learning the piece anyways.

How much of that is muscle memory? I'm sure that auditory memory is quite important, but I don't understand the mechanism: does auditory memory help with muscle memory, does it improve my ability to parse, it that reduce my need to parse, does it help in other ways?

Amazing piece. As is the 3-Part Ricercar: there, my brain has gone through a phase transition after I've gotten it into my fingers where I can pick out the voices much much better than I'd been able to before, hugely improving my options when interpreting the piece. If I can get to that state with the 6-Part Ricercar, it will feel wonderful.

the-time-has-come

2011-11-30T06:39:37+00:00

Zippy has gotten noticeably worse over the last couple of weeks; and today he was squeaking overnight, squeaking in the morning, squeaking when I got home, and was basically unable to walk. So: the time has come, we'll make an appointment for Saturday.

Which explains what my brain chose as today's soundtrack: a K-pop song that I'm only tangentially familiar with called "Cry, Cry". It seemed like a bizarre choice this morning, but thinking about the title, and realizing that one of the few lyrics in English reads "Can't you see the look in my eyes?", the message my brain was sending me is clear. (Reading a translation of the lyrics, it's of course about something completely different.) I actually think Zippy isn't feeling too horrible right now, but we don't want to wait until he's in agony.

He will be missed. Very much.

afraid-to-talk-about-sex

2011-11-21T04:22:32+00:00

Given how much I've been tweeting about Zero Patience, my brain clearly thinks I should blog about it; and my brain has thought for some time that I should blog about The Mad Man. (Maybe Oglaf, too?)

I'm nervous, though. Partly because of the content of The Mad Man: I've already squicked out one friend with a brief discussion of some of the practices featured in the book. Admittedly, with that particular friend, a bit more reluctance to raise certain topics is not a bad idea; and it's led to quite interesting conversations with another friend. Still: a minefield.

And partly because it hits at one of my insecurities. I'm used to blogging about video games, and I have some idea how to think about them in ways that lead to interesting posts. I have much less experience doing that with books and movies, however, and those are both areas where the state of the art in criticism is a lot more advanced than the state of the art for video games, so the bar is higher. And I don't like feeling banal.

Still, my brain seems fairly clear on the matter. And at least I can be fairly confident that people aren't likely to read about those two particular works elsewhere...

two-subscribers

2011-11-18T11:25:34+00:00

I looked at the statistics for this feed in Google Reader; it showed three subscribers, but I'm included in that count. (I subscribe to all of my own feeds so I can make sure they don't get stuck.) So really, two subscribers.

Which, on reflection, I'm pretty happy with: it would be a a bit sad if nobody other than me subscribed, but I'm quite unsure of what I'm doing here, so right now I don't want a particularly large audience. (There may be readers who don't use Google Reader, to be sure.)

The thing about two subscribers is: who are the two of you? I have a hypothesis, but it's quite tentative. And, of course, without comments, there's no clear location where you can respond to me. Though I would be a little suprised if the two of you don't know me well enough to have multiple ways of getting in touch with me.

how-to-learn

2011-11-18T05:40:10+00:00

A big part of the reason why I'm currently not very good at helping Miranda learn stuff is that my brain considers learning to be a solved problem, and a solved problem with a fairly banal solution. Namely: 1) Decide that you really want to learn something. 2) Ask yourself how you would act if you really wanted to learn that thing. There are, of course, further steps beyond those two, and I actually know a lot of techniques that can help with those further steps, but I keep on getting hung up on the first two steps.

It is, of course, possible to learn without doing that first step; back when I was teaching, I saw quite a bit of such learning! But a big part of the reason why I was happy to leave academia was that I'm ultimately not particularly interested in teaching in the absence of that first step. It seems to me to be quite reasonable for students to not be actively interested in learning calculus; why would I want to be in a situation where students are pressured not to make that choice, not to even think about it?

If you were to say that I kind of act like an asshole when my brain goes too far down this route, I would not disagree with you.

projects-and-choices

2011-11-18T05:40:03+00:00

I wish Miranda had some sort of big project that she was working on, some way in which she was pushing herself to learn and to grow. When she was younger, she did: she spent quite a lot of time drawing, and from my (admittedly both biased and ill-informed) point of view, it seemed to me that she got rather good at it. But (as far as I can tell) she stopped seriously working on drawing at some point over the last year or two, and the main interest that has filled that void is Minecraft. Which is a wonderful wonderful game, and one that leaves quite a lot of room for creativity; but it's still not the same thing, you can only do so much with blocks.

I'm not sure how to best help her with this. Part of my uncertainty is that my interests, the things I focused on both when growing up and now, aren't her interests: there's some overlap, but not enough to find real points of contact. But most of my uncertainty is that the very act of pushing reduces the potential rewards: it will be so much more powerful if an idea grabs her than if we nudge (shove!) her towards something. (Extrinsic motivation drives out intrinsic motivation.) I don't think staying away from the problem and simply hoping that she wanders into an obsession is the right response, though.

Sigh. Parenting is hard. She's a fabulous kid, it will all work out well eventually, but the journey isn't always so clear. I wonder what I was doing when I was in middle school, how much of my current interests came from my own desires back then, and how much came from activities my parents had me do?

iphone-ipad-style

2011-11-17T05:50:22+00:00

I've updated the CSS for the fragments to display better on iPhone and iPad. (And, I hope, other mobile devices.) Since I'm serving these up in as naive a fashion as possible, I didn't want to serve up different CSS files via User-Agent sniffing, so I used jQuery to figure out the screen dimensions and then adjust the CSS accordingly based on that.

Specifically, if the window is less than 500 pixels wide, the JavaScript adds a "small" class to the body, and if the width is between 500 and 1050 pixels, it adds a "medium" class, with CSS adjusting the dimensions (and, in the small case, the font) accordingly. Works fine, and I think the separation of concerns is okay, though part of me still wishes there were multiple CSS files.

It doesn't transition smoothly when you switch the device from portrait to landscape mode; I'm not particularly motivated to fix that.

failing-body

2011-11-15T05:27:59+00:00

This was a three-day weekend, with Liesl and Miranda out of town, so I spent a lot of time with Zippy. And he's definitely falling apart: far too often, he has a very hard time controlling his rear legs, and judging from the frequency of his squeaking, he's at least somewhat achy a fair amount of the time.

I still think that, on the balance, Zippy is enjoying life, but figuring out when that's not the case is going to be a lot harder with Zippy than with Yosha. With Yosha, things were very clear: as his body started failing, he stopped eating and mostly stopped moving. We made an appointment to have him put down, but he died the night before that appointment arrived. With Zippy, however, I don't think we're going to get such a clear signal: things have been slowly getting worse, and I don't think there's going to be the same sort of clear line that he's going to cross. I'm really not looking forward to making that decision, but I don't want to avoid that responsibility, either.

He, of course, remains a very very sweet guy.

books-blogging-and-boundaries

2011-11-13T05:58:32+00:00

One of my insecurities: in school, I got reasonably good at technical writing, but never felt comfortable with (actively avoided) talking about art. Blogging about games has helped me get over that, and in particular the discipline of writing about every game of any length that I play has made a big difference.

I used to read a lot more than I now play games, and I still read a decent amount. So: should I adopt the same discipline with books? Somehow, though, reading books still doesn't put my brain in the same analytical frame of mind, and I'm not comfortable writing in a more impressionistic mode.

And the books that I read can have their own problems, raise issues that I'm less comfortable discussing in public. The Mad Man was the most recent dramatic example of that: it's a glorious, glorious book, life-affirming in its own way, but it's also a book that discusses experiences/activities that I'm not comfortable talking about the idea of in public, even in the abstract. It's rather sad that games so rarely raise such concerns. (Catherine being the most notable exception that I can think of.)

git-repos

2011-11-13T05:53:08+00:00

I'm planning to eventually (fairly soon!) publish the source code for this blog, if for no other reason than that I should have some code to point to on github. The one mistake I've made in that regard, however, is that the git repository contains both the scripts to publish the fragments and the text of the fragments themselves. So I have to split those apart, and ideally prune the latter from the git history for the former. (It's not the end of the world if I don't do that pruning, however.)

Admittedly, it seems unlikely that anybody else will ever want to use that source code. And it's not all that representative of the way I program: in particular, there are a lot fewer unit tests than I normally write. I think the breakdown into classes and methods isn't so unrepresentative, at least.