I recall thinking it was weird to see that on the pair of Old Navy jeans Susan bought me a couple years ago. Because really, 1994 wasn’t that long ago, right?
Holy crap, it was. Fifteen years ago, when I first started using Linux, before I had solid internet access. Not only was I young, it was before I had ever really lived.
Why by the way, starts when you drop out of high school.
Today was the FHR, and it was epic. That uhh, other bike club that was out there seemed really friendly, despite an internet full of old curmudgeons. I suppose that’s why we made the internet though. I have a few before and after photos. None during the ride, because I only stopped once and didn’t have the energy to grab the camera the two times I walked up a hill.
best moment, “pull up your pants or get off the boat” coming over the ferry intercom.
Mother and I spent some time yesterday tuning up her new bike and ended up building another bike from parts in the garage. I’ve got to fix a front derailleur issue, but otherwise I’m happy with it. I’ll probably ride it to work tomorrow.
I called my father for our regular sunday chat a bit after arriving at the afterparty on the pier in Bainbridge. He asked why I was out of breath, and after I told him about the race he said that he was a bit younger than me he used to get on his road bike and “ride and ride and ride”. I wish I had been able to know him before the smoking/drinking/health/depression/angst all settled in. It’s sad that these moments are getting to be so numerous where I feel that I’d like him a lot if I had the opportunity to.
I’ve been working on some couchdb / Java stuff at work, and I’m getting pretty frustrated with how classes and libraries (jars) work. Or don’t for that matter.
I came out of a cave again recently in regards to being distracted and not thinking about life. Not as deep as back in November thankfully, and thus much less anxiety ridden. Hindsight of course gives me the opportunity to look at the choices I made and the people I made them concerning and have clearer view of what was happening and why it was making me feel the way I did.
On one hand, I feel like spending more time alone than ever, but at the same time quite the opposite. It’s possible with spring here that I’m ancy to get out, and my lack of patience is making leaving those who aren’t as eager behind. Adventures are meant to be shared, but with the right people. I’m feeling the need for a trip to Vancouver. I wonder how addicted to love Barner is at the moment.
In short, I’m not ready to grow up. That hinges in how you define growing up. I don’t want a white (or green) picket fence. If anything, I want a warehouse or a pile of containers. It’s not that I’m irresponsible, or want to be. I definitely have no interest in prime time television (short of course of BSG and anything of Joss’s), it’s that this American Dream seems so placid. Perhaps our education system is tuned to producing laborers and our entertainment industry has found the best way to make consumers of those people. I escaped that system with only minimal emotional scarring in exchange for many good lessons learned.
I’m absolutely fucking tired of having to convince people to get out of their house. I just don’t care at the moment if they rot. Or even stay in their house, but read something non-fiction, or learn or get involved in anything. I hate the concept of being spoonfed. From my okcupid profile, written sometime in the last couple of years:
But, if you’re easy going, cute, simple, quiet, adventurous, you want to live in a treehouse or a warehouse. you like conversing online or in real life but such conversations amount to things other than politics and music. you should have a unique personality, trying to be like anything you’ve seen on TV doesn’t count.
[elsewhere]
I’m much more drawn to people that I don’t have to tell “the top is JUST around the next corner”, and I tend to marry people who take me canoe camping, or live in a van-ing, or whatever.
I’ve dated people that wanted to be the kind of person that did things, or at the very least wanted to be around the kind of people that did these things. Perhaps there were self-esteem issues at the core of it, but they simply didn’t do anything. What I did this week amounted to dishes, pets, and if they were lucky some reading.
After many years in Maine of dragging people together, trying to mediate stupid fucking social group issues, and doing all the heavy lifting in the name of building a community that did something, Seattle has been a god-send for me. Finally I can get up on a Sunday and go on an awesome bike race on an island with one hundred people, a good handful of I see semi-regularly, and not have to organize the whole thing myself. An old cohort from Maine recently asked me why I don’t hang out with another friend of ours that moved to Seattle. Forgetting how terrible a roommate and employee he was, especially as a friend, there are other people here who build ideas and software of value. Here there are interesting minds who have provocative opinions, perhaps who also drink heavily, rather than simply the latter.
I suppose with the Internet I can have all that from anywhere, but the human contact makes a difference. It was bizarre going from having read about SeattleWireless on the internet, to hanging out with them, joining them, drinking with them, and becoming friends with some of them. Nothing was what it seemed, but while what I expected wasn’t, I met some great people. Similarly I had a hard time getting a start in the industry in this city until people started to get to know me (well, the certifications got the start, but those don’t matter much anymore for what I really do and have the opportunity to do now.)
Where to? Like I started to say, I’m not ready to settle. I’ve recently learned that I’m not ready to think about settling either. I don’t know where I’ll be in five years, but any sort of expectation of where I’ll live or where a relationship should be is literally anxiety inducing in a deep dark from the cockels sort of way. I worried for some time if I had commitment issues, but if you drew a line between commitment and settling down, the uncomfortableness exists totally to the latter side of the scale. I’ve questioned the possibility of having some kind of serial monogamy social disease at times. I think the reality is that trying and learning from my mistakes is how I’ve always figured out life. The trouble has been it’s much easier to debug broken code than mend someone’s broken heart. I’m unskilled and learning another way.
It’s not that I simply want adventure, or want to picture myself as the type of person that would, or want to be around people that do. The same drive that upsets me when I take the same route home that I took outbound defines who I am. I won’t simply say I want to be challenged at this juncture, but I’m not going to be the same person tomorrow I am today. Better get on board.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could watch Battlestar and say, “Wow, they’re totally being prejudice against that individual because they’re different”, and fucking finally get it?
Being human is embarassing sometimes.
I really should install wordpress on BikeSeattle, but with sites like SeattleLikesBikes already around I’m not sure it’s needed other than a topical place for me to put bike related posts. It’s a great domain worth saving though. From Sweetbike, the NYPD officer that assulted the bicyclist during Critical Mass has been fired/quit/whatever you want to believe.
Back in December I wrote the SDOT about the Platt Buzzer on the SODO trail. The SDOT folk are super responsive, friendly and seem commited to resolving bicycle related issues. All of my interactions with them have been positive. I’ve been told a couple of them have gone out and experienced the buzzer at night and agree it’s very dangerous, but it’s attached to private property so you can’t really force them to turn them off. I suppose some kind of noise ordinance might apply, but threats of prosecution is just silly and counter-productive to community. Others have told me that they’ve talked to Platt managers about it, and I included them on my second email in Januray to SDOT but didn’t hear back. It’s unfortunate. I’ve been brainstorming different ways to deal with the graffiti problem in that section of the trail, perhaps I should go talk to them myself and see if I can do anything to help.
The FHR is this weekend (Sunday) out on Bainbridge. It’s going to be fun, and you should come even if you don’t consider yourself a serious bicyclist. Chilli, prizes, beer, etc.
I found some frames in the alley in Georgetown, including a 62cm steel frame that’ll make a nice city road bike. Someone from the hood brought by Raliegh internal 3-speed, which will fit my mother well. Once I put some new rubber on it and tune it, it’ll be going with her to Eatonville so she can commute to work on it this summer. By the way, the Pack Forest is incredibly undervalued as far as mountain biking in the woods goes. My MTB is living in Mom’s shed now, waiting.
It seems like the closest I ever come to making sure I’m okay is when I let myself do whatever I feel like doing. This is generally conceived to be a treacherous idea however. Perhaps for good reason. Looking back the most often I’ve looked to make choices based on how I feel is when I feel the anxiety pushing me to get out of a relationship. I can think of a few times when I’ve been sick and looked to others to take care of me. Is that the same? I don’t think so. I suppose I’ve always been so independent I tend not to have any particular desire to ask for anything. Yet I have such strong feelings. Meh. I will work instead of think about this.
Page 185 of The Public Domain talks about Clay Shirky trying to get AT&T to adopt perl.
As Shirky recounts the story, when AT&T representatives asked “where do you get your support?” Shirky responded, “‘we get our support from a community’ – which to them sounded a bit like ‘we get our Thursdays from a banana.'”
I fought this fight when trying to get a company to switch from SUSE to Ubuntu. We asked the executives when had we ever used support and what exactly did they expect to gain from it. Not much, was the anwser eventually, and being a small company with an excellent VP of engineering, we were swapped over in a couple of months.
Nice day, got out and about.
Going to take as many people as I can get together to Eatonville tomorrow for a little hiking in Mom’s forest, (officially called Pat’s Forest now instead of Pack Forest) and spend the night down there. One week until FHR people.
I wanted to restore the old loft post somewhere, but it’s late and I’m tired. I got the old database imported from mysql, but I’ll have to convert it to another format before importing it. I need to figure out what the simplest format that supports comments wordpress supports I think. I want the nostalgia.
What an incredibly long and heart wrenching day. I know time will pass and I’ll feel better. It’s frustrating that sometimes when you’re the loneliest is when you need to be. I wonder how many people out there really have not being able to feel being their biggest problem. I’ve never had a problem with lacking emotion. Of course sometimes it is easier to appreciate how someone feels than others. I try to convince myself that my thoughts and feelings are not mutually exclusive. They can find compromise. It’s hard to do and I worry more and more that the missing link in relationships is going to be something much shallower than I was hoping for.
A long weekend is pretty well needed. I may sleep, or go for some lone bike rides. Maybe take mom snowshoeing or something. I need some distractions and rest to let my heart find it’s rhythm..
We have a second photocopier at widemile waiting for us to transition out the other. It doesn’t look like much of an upgrade, must be a lease thing. Anyways, it reminded me of Strategy (on the mind?) where we would print some of our own class handouts in mass quantities on tryout lease machines, complain when they’d break sometimes, and give them back. The director at the time was a master of getting a steady stream of copy machines, and it’d take me a bit to figure out how to get our complex jobs on them. When they fired her, I quit, and the reckoning began.
The Road Less Traveled, the infamous self-help book of my youth, begins with “Life is difficult.”, a twist on the buddhist truth that “Life is suffering.” Some days I wonder about my emotional and physical pain thresholds. I figure the latter is much higher, too much emotional carnage usually produces a sea of anxiety. I’ve learned to walk away from that more and more over the years. Leaving Strategy two and a half years ago was the the tipping point where I started to recognize my problems with drawing a line in the sand and saying something was too much to ask of me. I recently got an email from a stranger asking for my opinion of Strategy, I’m still thinking about how to write the response.
I rode with pointy3 yesterday. It’s been a while. Between vacation, shmooocon, being sick and being busy working on chef, I just haven’t had many free evenings in a while. I decided I needed to though, get out on the bike and enjoy the outdoors again. It was a pretty decent ride, although as usual I thought drinking doubles was a good idea at the time. I’m still trying to figure out what I want from a relationship and this came to sort of a head recently.
A while back I was writing about how I hadn’t stopped to think about what a relationship should be now, expecting a sort of american dream post-high school path would appear eventually. I learned that lesson already, so it was a neat little line to draw. I can make a list of personality traits that someone I would like would have, but that’s as much who I want as a friend as who I’d want to date. I suppose I had this over-simplified conception that an ideal relationship would be the combination of someone I liked to spend time with, was attracted too, and shared some similar interests with.
Older, wiser folks have told me that as you grow up relationships are more about working with someone to share your life together. With an emphasis on the work part. I guess I haven’t accepted that. I still compare perfecting relationships to the way I learn other things, and that as I understand more and more pieces, the puzzle comes together. This may or may not be a good idea. While my heart is squarely drowning in romanticism, my head usually takes the wheel and I have no expectations of movie plot love scenes. However, my problem is that I’m still expecting something that hasn’t happened yet. I don’t know what to do about that other than give it time.
Sometimes I’m not sure that I’m not crazy, or just depressed. I firmly believe smarter folks, apathetic folks suffer from this angst and it brings us down. So be it, for now I’m going to push through, enjoy some distractions, and choose a path on the other side.