Tomorrow OSBridge is an unconference. We’ll see how that works out. I’m jumping back on a train for Seattle in the evening. It’s Pedalpalooza in Portland right now, and I’m not seeing any of it. All of my social effort has gone towards hanging out with open source types and some evenings with Jason. I feel, perhaps, disappointedly overwhelmed by this. While riding with Adam, Joe and Narayan to get chili-dogs and drinks after the configuration management panel, we briefly talked about hobbies. So very, very much to do, and not enough time.

That’s part of the anxiety, and why I don’t want to go camping this weekend. I love everyone, but part of me wants to see more product coming out of my life than is right now. Maybe I’ll hole up alone this weekend, and see how that goes.

I forgot how sleepy conferences are. OSBridge is a neat effort, there’s a lot of breadth of topics. Some folks were complaining it’s trying too hard to replace OSCon, which was very vendor oriented, while Portland is more grass roots and the conference should represent that better. Also, it’s been said that the exhibit hall isn’t free, while it was at OSCon. This doesn’t matter a whole lot, because it’s pretty dead anyways.

My stomach, and thus appetite are still broken, and the anxiety continues to mess with my ability to get a full nights sleep. Parts of my brain have found the sign that points to “enough is enough” land, but the balance of my heart keeps me a martyr. It’s one thing to simply be someone who won’t think about their life, I’m uncertain how to approach the lack of time to do so.

It’s nice to bike around Portland at night, as well as see Jason and Andrea again.

Not Me: You should come camping. Hike. Talk Rest.

Me: No, need to stop being distracted already and get back to who I am.

Not Me: Okay. Make plans to get out of sad. Hug.

Me: Some day it’ll come. Big loss in my opinion.

Oh, hi Portland. I’m Bryan, and I don’t like great things not working out. Off to social network all the same.

Whatever his occupation Dennis is endowed with an enourmous capacity for enjoying life. Like many rural men in Maine, he’s a tinkerer. Some part of every day he’s under the hood of his aging Suburu coaxing life into the engine. He typifies characteristics associated with the native Maine man: independent, resourceful, at home in the natural world, the hills, and the woods

This was harder to find than it should have been.

Ray: “Oh my God….It’s my father…My God! I’d only seen him years later when he was worn down by life. Look at him. He’s got his whole life in front of him and I’m not even a glint in his eye. What do I say to him?”

I don’t think about the future a whole lot. That sort of what lead me to spending a whole lot of time and stress six months ago figuring out where I wanted a relationship to go and what I wanted to get out of one. I’ve had a pretty good idea where I haven’t wanted life to go, which is to become cynical. I over-quote dad saying “I don’t like people, but there are people that I like.” I’d like to say, that I like people. Granted, in a city of over 600,000 people, it’s easy to carve out a huge niche of people that I like. But I’m not cynical about humanity as a whole. I don’t want to become old, tired, distrusting, alone. I fight hard to not be alone, to sit down friends and remind them that they’re valuable to me and appreciated. This is more important to me than most, and a photograph of my father happy in his twenties hangs in my house to remind me that he once was, before I knew him.

There really isn’t a right way to live. We sort of figure this out as we grow from what life has thrown at us. The tangible comes and goes, I value the impact I make on others lives more than anything I could acquire. Learning makes my mind happy, other lives make my heart happy.

It’s entirely possible that I open my mouth too much. Which is to say, that it’s become habit for me to often talk about what I’m thinking about, which presents itself as a conclusion rather than a process, by social norm.

I decided to ride to work today without music. I can not finger the last time this happened, it would surely have been the result of a dead ipod battery rather than a choice. My stop at All City found me with relatively intense anxiety in my stomach, which cleared up when I got back on the bike.

“We’ve already been through this.” Yes, and I’m still not satisfied with how it’s turned out.

Further reading last night and this morning in the previously mentioned Changing Lives. I’m about halfway through the book, and most of the stories cause such emotion in me to bring me to tears. There’s are repetitive threads, kids coming from ‘the county’ where theres nothing to do but pick potatoes and work in the woods (is there even that anymore in the post-NAFTA era?), which ultimately leads to drug and alcohol abuse. Broken families from alcoholism, physical and sexual abuse.

Persevere, hold on to what good you can, one step at a time forward.

I’m off to Portland tomorrow for a conference and won’t be back until Friday night. There’s a number of camping trips this weekend, and I don’t think I want to go on any of them. I need more time for myself. Being social doesn’t come naturally to me, and as much progress as I’ve made in it I easily forget how hard it is on me.

Ten years ago I returned to a brief stint at PC Tech, under new management, doing computer repair again. A family business then, one of the sons, I think Ben, told me he regretted spending as much time in high school partying rather than learning. In hind sight those remarks are always easier said, and perhaps can be used as leverage to achieve more at the time for some people. At the time, I don’t think I knew any other way to be. Today, perhaps I’ve pushed so hard to grow in so many directions at once that I’ve forgotten who I was a little.

I’ve been thinking a little about how the people in my life identify themselves, and what communities they’ve chosen to represent who they are.

I feel better after this weekend. At a party last night, Jarrod asked me how I felt, I told him that I felt better in my heart, but not physically, and we’d have to wait and see about that. I’m probably pushing myself too hard to deal with too many internal struggles at once. We’ll see.

Probably the difference between honesty and sincerity is that the latter contains more soul. Not just feeling though, you can be honest about how you feel at any given time, but more than that. All that is you.

“Wheel never stops turning Badger.”

Being broken. There’s this idea that something being broken requires fixing. Being broken is the human condition. Can change be a singular event? Something so transcendatal that you wake up one day and what wasn’t okay, is? Time, is often described to be the cure. Sometimes coping is a mechanism to make time pass. I think change happens with time. When you wake up one day and realized you’ve changed, it wasn’t that day that it happened. It happened along the way, bit by bit, and you didn’t see it coming.

An ex once told me she liked me for who I could be. Ignoring the obvious terribleness of this, it’s who you are that’s important. The good, the bad and the ugly, as they say. Broken and all, we are who we are, with time, we’ll be different, maybe better, maybe less broken in the ways that we consider ourselves broken now. But this journey has no end, just the paths we choose to walk along the way, and who we share those with.

Mom gave me a book recently written about The Community School, an alternative high school that she graduated from, called Changing Lives. The book came out fifteen years ago, and from the chapter on my mother I was around ten when it was written.

Reading the chapter about my mother is interesting, but I was mostly struck by the Forward. I’d like to quote the whole thing, but I’ll hold short with the first paragraph.

I realized recently that we weep with joy at our children’s weddings — even after we have outgrown fairy tales — because we long to believe there will be someone there for them when we no longer are. Someone to kiss away the bruises, to stand up for them to nurse them when they are ill and defenseless. Yet we know better; what they really need is the competences and the will to overcome.

I was raised to figure life out for myself, and so I have. There was much doubt in my youth that this was an appropriate way to raise a child. Despite all of the tragedy, the ups and downs life throws at you, I persevered and I’m a more competent person for it. There’s no sense in arguing the course, I turned out pretty all-right.

What shines through is that they have developed the habit of being unsentimentally reflective. Their inward look includes a startling willingness to take responsibility for their own lives. There is no hint of grievance-collecting, not a whiney tone in the lot, not even a legitimate sense of self-pity! They have a past to tell about and a way of thinking it over that does not lack for psychological insight. Their way of putting the pieces together gives them strength, endurance, and a confidence that they’ll resurface if they hold on to two unshakable beliefs: the power of intelligent thought and the importance of being responsible.

“There was an environment…that nurtured self-thought,” says Pat. “I had much more freedom…but with…responsibility. What you do not only affects yourself but other people — thats the big thing I learned.” She acknowledges the toughness but also the need to “take what you are given and mold it into something that makes you happy.”

And so it goes, and so I’m trying to take what I’m given and find that happiness in it. Carefully, but, without the hindrance of too much fear.

Defendant’s first set of interrogatories and requests for production of documents to plaintiff

*sigh* I’ve never been a plaintiff before. New experiences aren’t always life enriching.

Every once in a while when I’m thinking about how dating is difficult I have to remind myself that most people actually don’t. Another one of those activities that I think I’m a fool at until I look around and realize my peers aren’t really trying.

Lots of meetings of the lonely hearts clubs it seems lately. It’s good to talk to these people. Mostly I have been getting some raised eyebrows and reminders to be careful. There’s a little bit of talk of violence on my behalf, perhaps only somewhat sarcastically, as well. I’ll sum that all up in a quote you may recognize,

She still has the advantage over us.
Everyone always does. That’s what makes us special

Something about watching Tori and Jarrod play ninja/bear/hunter at 2am while eating sandwiches and drinking cider at squid makes life okay.

even if somewhere, everything was weird, Meg is awesome.

I have to consciously question my motivations and what exactly I mean to gain when I feel like people in my life misunderstand me because they fail to try to communicate and understand. As I further separate my choices as coming from my heart or my mind, isolate fears, accept them, identify where others are willing to go and not, their own motivations, oh, and well, everything else. It, feels, unfortunate, that I have had to write off so many people because of this. I suppose it makes me sad.

In the end, I love the rest of you. Thanks for being humble and vulnerable.