a conversation with HR.

[9:47 AM] Chris: whenever you get a chance, could you give me a pointer to FSA enrollment for the new plan year?

[9:56 AM] HR: hey chris. we have open enrollment for health benefits and FSA mid Feb. We have not made official decisions on new plans just yet
 
[9:57 AM] Chris: ah okay, so there'll be emails then. thanks!

[9:57 AM] HR: oh tons of them
        you will be sick of me nagging :)
 
[9:57 AM] Chris: ALL THE EMAILS
[9:57 AM] HR: hahaha
[9:57 AM] Chris: no it's totally good for people like me
[9:58 AM] HR: and thats why i do it ;)

[9:58 AM] Chris: my wife gets justifiably nervous when there's some piece of paperwork that's up to me.
 
[9:59 AM] HR: HA!
        love it
        we have an odd plan year, so ive heard this from a few people

        they think they have missed something

[10:00 AM] Chris: at one point she was like "I'm doing all this stuff, is it bothering you that I keep asking you questions? I feel like I'm nagging, or assuming you're not competent to handle it yourself."



"nono, my inability to do paperwork on time long predates you. anything that wasn't critical often didn't get done at all."
 
[10:01 AM] HR: this is awesome
[10:02 AM] Chris: all about the teamwork. :)

The Talk[tm]

J is 7 now, and developing a level of maturity where it's time he knows that he has Asperger's syndrome, and how that makes various things easier (math, reading) and harder (everything else) for him. He's known for a long time now that he's different, so hopefully it comes as a relief. Anna found this really great book that I recommend for pretty much everyone. It was amazing to read it and keep nodding and picturing J's version of that behavior or difficulty. Like, all his flapping and dancing and twirling? That's full-on bona fide stimming, which is immediately clear if you watch videos of other kids doing it.



It should be a good conversation, though I don't know if I'll be there for it: being Mama, she handles most of these things, and for whatever reason, J is usually more comfortable discussing challenging things with her, when I'm not around. (Otherwise we risk having him clap his hands over his ears and repeatedly say, "Please stop talking about that, it's making me sad," sometimes escalating to dramatic moaning and collapsing in a puddle on the floor.)

It's a tricky thing to talk about. One the one hand: "Here's this condition that describes your gifts and challenges really well, and explains why some things are hard for you."

On the other hand: "Lots of things are harder for you than for other kids, but you know, you have to do them anyway."

And J is unusual for Aspies, too, with his awareness of other people's emotions, so you have discuss what's specially different just about him. He doesn't have an obsessive special interest, either, nor does he monologue drastically more than other 7-year olds.

Speaking of things that are harder, he swam today! Actual self-buoyant, laying-flat-on-the-water, not-dog-paddling swimming! A classic thing for kids on the autism spectrum is lack of coordination between their left and right sides, so this is is a pretty huge thing and the result of a few years of work.

I promised to take him sailing when he could swim; guess I should find some weekends for the sailing certification, so I can rent us a boat.

Chris the stepfather

My two brothers and I are all married with kids now, which I think is a sort of milestone for our parents. Given the generational dynamics of parenting, I have to think it's fun for them to watch us do it, to see themselves mirrored in us, and to see where we've chosen to deviate from what we learned from them. We were just visiting them last week, and I think J and I put on a good show, partly because I put a heavy emphasis on amusing myself, and I'm hilarious.

At one point J and I were talking about wind.

Chris: Oh yeah? How do you know what the wind's doing when you don't feel it or hear it?
J: Then it's not there!
Chris: Oh, look who knows so much!
J: ...Is that Chris-language for "wrong"?

He knows me so well.

Another time we were riding in the car. If J has any sort of typical Aspie-like obsessive thing, it's computer time: once he gets some, he'll jones after it in a really annoying way. So he interrupted whatever boring grown-up conversation was happening.

J: I'm going to tell a story now. Once, there was a blonde-haired boy who wanted more computer time.

I couldn't resist.

Chris: Was the blonde-haired boy being really passive-aggressive about it?

Which sadly went over his head, but I thought it was awesome.

We can take a little getting used to. I tried to get him quelled for sleeping, which is a dodgy proposition sometimes anyway, and this particular time we did things out of order: more than a neurotypical kid, J relies on a consistent order of events and gets tripped up when the order changes. (It will, for example, be a while before he's adaptable enough that we can take him on a vacation to a foreign country.)

Beyond the re-ordering, though, he was just fidgety and cranky that night, so I gave up and came upstairs to the living room to hand off the quelling to Anna.

I said, "Crabby little bastard. No idea what his problem is." My mother, a kind and gentle soul, sort of stared at me: I obviously love J very much, so those seem like harsh words. Rather than addressing the language issue, I waited for Anna to come back shortly, knowing what was coming. Sure enough, she returned, having experienced the same failure I did.

"Crabby little mofo. Oh well."

burnout culture

Robey makes a good point (as he often does), in response to geek and longtime blogger Jeff Atwood leaving the company he started a few years back:

sounds like steve jobs' death has made many people rethink their devotion to burning out: codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/f...

-- Robey Pointer (@robey) February 7, 2012

Atwood's article is excellent, and quotes a couple of other successful tech people with similar experiences. They watched Steve Jobs die, and then probably read his biography, and realized that while he was a driven and brilliant design genius, he was also a dick who had miserable relationships with a lot of the people closest to him. Sure, sure, you can psychoanalyze it all you like, we all grow from causes and conditions, but the keywords remain. "Dick." "Miserable."

This is all a little funny to me since I do spend a fair bit of time working, but I do it because it's fun and engaging, all the more so now that I'm a team lead, where I have the additional incentive of working directly to help my team be happier. This is the first time since 2006 that I've dedicated significant resources to a job: everything has to take a turn, I guess, and right now it's work. I'm never again going to work the way I was at 22 or 23, because jeez, why would I? I worked really hard, but I wasn't working effectively, and I hadn't yet learned that sacrificing your time and health will not actually bring any reward.

If I left work an hour earlier, I could see J for that time sometimes; but that's time when he's in the middle of the End-of-Day Routine, so he's either eating, reading, or involved with Anna somehow. I make a solid effort to be around in the mornings until they leave, in the evenings for the Quelling, and weekends (working around what sometimes seems like endless Zen things). And we only have him half-time, anyway. It seems to be all right, for the moment.

This isn't to say any of us should be doing one specific thing or another; "the right thing" changes over time, anyway. I do insist that we should be aware of the tradeoffs we're making.

unslept family day

J is 7 now, which means I've known him almost five years, and he is growing up. He runs pretty normally now, and he's making that fantastic, gratitude-inducing shift in perspective where he starts to see himself and to empathize more clearly with how others see the world. He's still got his package of Asperger-y stuff, but he's growing up into his unusual self. He looks us in the eyes constantly now, which is striking and awesome. It'd be nice if school could be challenging enough for him to learn anything besides perseverance in the face of tedium, but in general he's got the hang of it as long as his teacher knows how to handle him.

No work today or Monday, so after trying to sleep off my 1:30am-6:30am awakeness, I was around for playing, and J really wanted my company. He's a big fan of making extended Tinkertoy armatures for poking Anna--as with most things J-related, we have no idea why--so he recruited me to help build a Mama-poker that would be longer than her (extremely long) arms without falling apart. I ended up doing the engineering, but he enjoyed watching and doing the testing. We ended up with a quite successful design, about 4 feet long and very stable. Anna was a bit more equivocal.

J knows me so well now that he's largely able to keep up with when I'm being facetious (not coincidentally, a word I learned from my father at an early age).

J: *giggle* Chris, are you making a whatchamacallit too?
C: No. I decided to make a thingamahoozie instead.
J: A thingamahoozie?! What's a thingamahoozie??
C: Oh, you don't know? It's so much better than a whatchamacallit, you won't believe it.
[sounds of Anna busting out laughing in the other room]

Sometimes it's just fun to be contrary.

just married

Anna and I got married on Saturday. So that's a thing. We're honeymooning, which means lots of eating and staring off into space and reading novels, and not so much with the brilliant coherent essay-writing.

At some point my friends pointed out that our anniversary is Guy Fawkes Day, that most twisted of British holidays, which we would never have heard of if not for Alan Moore's V For Vendetta (which you must go read right now, if you haven't). So that's entertaining.

The guest book didn't get put out, so we don't have an exact count, but it was about 170 people. It was a Zen Buddhist ceremony, which is funny because there are no Buddhist weddings outside the West: they're typically either civil matters, or handled by a more visceral local religion, like Shinto in Japan. This is part of the transmission of Buddhism to the West, though, so here, we have Zen weddings. Our teacher did the honors, I sang the Magnetic Fields' "Book of Love" as Anna came up the aisle, and we had a first dance (I hate dancing) just so ninjas could interrupt and attack us. Me, Anna, and J successfully fought them off. It was awesome. No video of the ninjas, I don't think, but there are some photos that I'll put up soon.

Our witnesses were both named Ann, so mine was the Best Ann and hers was the Ann of Honor.

Before the vows, Anna and I each had a chance to say something: Anna said many funny things about the unlikelihood of her ever getting married (e.g. during the toasts, the Ann of Honor said, "It's a cold day in hell, and somewhere, pigs are flying"). That warmed up the crowd for mine, where I started by saying that before I met her, my life was a friendless, meaningless void. With, what, 100 of my friends watching? Very silly.

The wedding gave me a lot to think about in how I and others perceive me. For one thing, I'm struck by how surprised people were. I guess I don't pay a whole lot of attention to how much and in what ways I'm a private person, or what I do or don't share with different people. Apparently, when Anna and I started dating, someone advised her to be cautious, because they hadn't seen anything that indicated I was interested in or particularly capable of returning deep emotional connection. That's pretty wacky, given the decades I've spent learning and experiencing those deep emotions. It's not like I'm hiding or anything; I guess I just haven't found a reason or useful way to bring my deep sentimentality into everyday conversation.

Later, a woman from our dojo said, "I didn't know you had it in you", meaning the comic timing of what I said during the ceremony. I responded gracefully, but I was taken aback, because honestly, I'm pretty funny and the timing of my delivery is usually excellent. I thought about my relationship with her over the years, and I realized that when I've made jokes, her response often indicates she doesn't quite know what to make of me, so I've toned everything down around her. Maybe I shouldn't? Hard to say.

I guess that kind of sharing is what I wanted for the wedding: to invite a bunch of people I know in all different kinds of ways, and bring everyone together for this one focal moment of standing up and showing ourselves. The two most common comments were "Amazing ceremony" and "Wow, you have incredible friends." That's pretty much what I wanted to hear.

Steve came all the way from Chile! And brought me a bottle of Mistral Nobel pisco, so I can share the, uh, "joy" of pisco with everyone here. (That's the good stuff, but when I was drinking it straight on ice so I could actually taste it, all the Chileans looked startled and repeatedly asked if I didn't want to mix it with some Coke or something. I like it, mostly, but it can be an acquired taste.)

J was part of the ceremony too, and I think it did something to cement for him the commitment of our little family: he's been looking forward to it for a long time, and I perceived a shift in our relationship afterward, where he seemed a bit more relaxed and I got a long, long hug goodbye when he went to school Monday morning.

The weirdest thing about getting married is that there was this huge crowd of 170 people, and now it's just us. It's so...quiet.

cold feet

I must take a moment to fret. Here's a true story.

"Hey, I see the container for French basil. Do we have a container for California basil?"
"I...might have thought it was redundant?"
"What? They're completely different. Here, smell."
"Um...okay."
"See? Completely different."
"Uh-huh."
"California basil is drier. The French has this citrus accent."
"Uh-huh."

I mean...what?

Is marriage really advisable under these circumstances? To someone who can't tell the difference between French and California basil? I am distressed.

Excuse me, I think I have the vapors.

transition

We moved, finally! Last month we punted on buying a house, and pretty much immediately compromised on our ideal place and took a 3-bedroom condo in the same neighborhood as that house. Because of our trip East, we only had about 2 weeks to pack, which I don't recommend.

It turns out we had about a 3-bedroom apartment's worth of stuff stored in our 1-bedroom with garage, and Anna is just very good at storing things. I feel justified in feeling as cramped as I did.

Speaking of bedrooms, we have one now! With a door that shuts! I was working in the bedroom today when J careened in to ask Anna a question (even though she was elsewhere). Anna made the best sign ever for our bedroom door:


It seems to work nicely.

We did have some adjustment to the new sounds. It's only a 5-unit complex, but various noises, like a guy slamming a front door at 2 AM on a Saturday, sound like they're right in our hallway. Partly it's poor construction, partly the other people are noisy, and partly it's just such a big place that we can't easily localize sounds the way we could before. At any rate, our first night here, we woke up adrenalized in home-defense mode because we thought someone was making loud noises inside the apartment. A couple hours later, exhaustion calmed me down enough to take a nap. Eesh.

It's a lovely place, though. Hardwood floors in the non-bedroom areas, trees outside the windows, a much nicer kitchen. A few weeks ago we ordered what I can only call an Epic Couch, plus an ottoman, currently being built in Los Angeles and arriving in a week or two. Incredibly cheap, as couches go.

Did I mention we have a bedroom?

All the excitement carries a cost, in stress and a bit of money. We're doing well, though.

J, of course, adjusts pretty smoothly to most changes, if you don't tell him first. He used to have these cheap, scratch Bob the Builder sheets, and when Anna would suggest he switch to some nice soft microfiber sheets, he'd say no, he loves his Bob the Builder sheets. I suggested she just go ahead and put the soft sheets on his bed, and of course he laid down and started rambling about how soft the new sheets are and how awful and scratchy his old Bob the Builder sheets were.

That's the human thing, isn't it? We have our idea of how things will go, and it's all imaginary crap until something actually happens.

Anyway. It's good to be home.

Cape Cod

After Philadelphia, we took the Amtrak Acela Express to Providence, where my parents picked us up and brought us down to their house on Cape Cod.

The train goes all along the Connecticut and Rhode Island coasts, and I had forgotten what a difference it is to have a coast that's actually accessible: estuaries and tidal inlets filled with boats! Marsh grass, clam shacks, New England beaches, the whole nine yards.

It's been a pretty epic trip. J put on his new glasses for the first time (video coming soon), and has done really well with lots of long stretches of travel. He and my niece E have gotten along famously, which is amazing to watch. She's almost 9, and I think being with J gives her a chance to just be a kid and not worry about being caught in the gravitational pull of her 11-year old sister S growing up. The sister has also been given to mood swings over the years, and as near as I can tell, one common dynamic with them is that S does the protective-older-sister thing, but E has always done a lot of caretaking to try and ease S's moods. Supposedly she's really good with the special-needs kids at school, and you can see that in her patience and humor with J. So they've spent many hours together, and J gets some experience of a cousin (and grandparents and uncles) a bit more...mainstream? From a family with fewer traumas, maybe.

At dinner he said, "I know I've only been here a few days, but I feel like I've lived here my whole life." Which is awesome, and clearly we'll have to make this a recurring thing.

My parents bought this place when I was 12 or so, and before that we'd come down every year and rented a place for a few weeks. Like any nice place to live, Cape Cod was a good financial choice for buying real estate 20 years ago, but it's harder to sum up the family experiences. Lots of sailing and swimming and biking the Rail Trail and spending a couple summers working here. I got to show Anna the sunset and take J sailing for the first time (he loves sailing and he's really close to swimming now).

It's nice to share that.

happy half-birthday, J

J's birthday is around Christmas, when it's impossible to get any kids to come because they're all doing Christmas things. So he manages to have several birthday parties, and this is the big one when we invite whichever friends from school, plus his lifelong friend S who's the son of one of Anna's college friends.

There were ponies, and Anna made a pretty awesome scavenger hunt for the kids to work on: there were two ponies and six kids, so they went scavenging for cool stuff like "a blackberry leaf" and "a Y-shaped stick" when they weren't riding, and then using their combined results to solve a puzzle at the end.

J's dad did extremely well with having me around: he seemed pretty relaxed, and looked me in the eye and called me by name several times. I have every hope that someday we will have an actual conversation, although maybe not on a day where a kid looks at him and says "I didn't know J had two dads!".

Unusually for a social event J was glowing with joy when everyone was standing around singing "Happy Birthday". It's a lot of fun to watch him grow. A lot of my contribution comes indirectly, from giving Anna hugs and ideas when J isn't around.

For example: J had a special drama-queen week where on four or five different days I came home and Anna explained that J had declared today "the worst day of my life". Growing up in a family of mostly-loving mockery, I thought the obvious thing to do was to write on the calendar every day it was the worst day of his life, and eventually point out to him the clear evidence that he was being ridiculous.

It worked! Once Anna showed him the calendar, he started switching to "the worst day of my life this week" or "the worst day of my life recently," with finer distinctions like "second/third worst day of my life this week." Anna has also been progressively demoted:

• Worst Mama In the World
• Worst Mama In the State of California
• Worst Mama In the State of California This Month
• Worst Mama J Has Known In the State of California This Month

Luckily her friend Lupin has been granted the superlative position by her son.

At any rate, it's pretty awesome to see J loosen up his thinking a bit and start to acknowledge the world's complexity.

bedtime conversation

"Time for a snuggle?"

"I guess. Do we have to?"

"No... You can always lie there by yourself and listen to me cry."

This is how you know you found the right girl.

*heart*

voyage to suburbia

We're spending the weekend in a very cozy, white, subdivided outskirt of Seattle, at Anna's brother's place, with a passel of my future in-laws. (It is strange to think of them that way.) Her mother lives a few blocks away, and her father came up from Oregon. It's a nice little community. I'm a little disoriented by the number of red-haired children, and the lack of non-whites. San Francisco and Oakland people refer to the Peninsula, sometimes scornfully, as "suburbia," but a trip to a place like this shows they've clearly lost perspective.

Naturally, we're at the coffee shop, by ourselves. (Though really, this slice of the family is fine, except for her mother, and there's no indication she and I will have to talk.)

(You know how I always make great effort to communicate with and relate to people? The fact that I'm avoiding my future mother-in-law should tell how you, uh, problematic, she can be.)

We had a fine trip to get here. J's solution to the air pressure change of the descent into Sea-Tac:



We've had some nice bonding time today. It's possible that when we're away from the house, he more clearly recognizes me as one of the known and safe touchstones in his life, so he's more connective. He was trying to sneak up on Anna and he was doing a really horrible job, so I taught him how: placing the feet slowly and carefully instead of stomping, and looking to see if she was looking our direction. For some reason, the process of sneaking into the kitchen starts with hiding under a blanket in the living room, but while we were making breakfast, he managed to get past all three of us and we didn't notice until he was in the far end of the kitchen and said, "I snuck in!". So that's pretty awesome.

J's cousin M is, charitably, a handful: he's got some genuine issues, and with medication, he's now merely ADD. I've never actually seen it before, but the joke we tell:

How many ADD kids does it take to change a light bulb?
I don't know, how--
LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!

is pretty true to life.

So, J is a stickler for names. He reacts very strongly and loudly to nicknames, even when I referred to him and Anna as "the barbarian horde" (this particular one is okay since barbarians are now cool). He's not super happy that I call my car "Car," instead of a proper name like Anna's Molly. But twice now, M has referred to Anna and me, in talking with J, as "Anna and your dad," and J has completely let it slide without correcting him. It's impossible to know how he's processing it: whether "dad" is code for "that adult male in my family who's always there," or if he's just calibrating his response to his cousin's mental state, or if something deeper is happening. Pretty interesting, either way.

that's right, it's Tuesday

Anna bought me a new ring! It's tungsten carbide, and I have an urge to try and scratch it up, but it's tungsten carbide, so intellectually I understand that's not going to accomplish anything except to maybe scrape some chunks off a masonry wall somewhere.



It has a sort of One Ring vibe to it. It's heavy for its size (see: tungsten), about the same shape, polished to an unbearable shininess, and impervious to scratching. (You can, however, break one with a pair of Vise-Grips.)

The three of us went to Six Flags Great America on Sunday, a nice old-school nuclear family outing. I can't remember the last time I went to an amusement park, let alone one that is now located in the forest of Silicon Valley corporate office buildings (you pass by McAfee and Adobe on the way there, for example). When Anna was a kid (back before television), Great America was in the middle of nowhere.

Despite the constant music and barker announcements on the speakers, it was more or less the same noise I remember from places like Riverside Park (now also absorbed by Six Flags). The new thing is apparently to have TVs everywhere, which is what drove Anna and J away from Marine World in Vallejo. Anna's grandmother bought the 3 of us season passes to Great America, so we can go a few more times this year.

We went on a rollercoaster! It looked pretty mellow, but it wasn't particularly, and then afterward we noticed it's called "Psycho Mouse" and it's rated a 4/5 on the intensity scale they provide. And I took J on the go-cart track, which was pretty awesome not only for him enjoying going fast, but also for me to remember how to properly apex corners. Sadly, the guy in front of me started driving like a loon to make it fun for his kid, and there wasn't room or horsepower to pass him, so I had to slow down.

And I am working! So much working. But it's fun. And I'm motorcycle shopping. And Anna is graciously assembling our wedding and somehow taking care of all of us while still getting some work done. And nothing is available for rent, and house prices are going down, so maybe we should just buy a house.

So, yeah. It's a little busy.

interval without sleep: family rambling

J and Anna stopped by the office this week to pick up a marble-track building toy someone is discarding. J was amazing! He met my co-worker Jess and looked directly at her the whole time, with no prompting! I had to remind him to shake Irene's offered hand, but then he did it with Joe by himself. He was being extra-adorable, from the moment I said "Hi J!" and he brightened and said "HI CHRIS!" in that way he has of not really bothering to control his volume, because hey, why would you?

Also interesting to watch people see me differently as I interacted with him. I think I still don't talk a lot about my private world, so for these people who have known me for 5 weeks, I imagine it's educational for them to see me in Stepdad Mode.

It occurs to me that J first met me when he was 3, and he's now 6, so he's known me more or less as long as he can remember.

I wonder when or if he'll decide it's safe to be as much of a jerk to me as he sometimes is to Anna. Right now there's no good name for our relationship, and we haven't explored the word "stepfather" yet; maybe once the wedding's done, I'll get to be Worst Stepdad In The World as Anna is certified as the Worst Mama. (Occasionally this is merely Worst Mama In California, but sometimes ratchets up to Worst Mama In All Of Time.) I imagine it has more to do with that fact that she's the one who takes care of him, and thus makes him do all the necessary things that he hates (which of course vary from moment to moment).

I have a pretty cool outsider effect on J. In many ways, he finds Anna suspect, always encouraging him to try new foods, interrupting his drama-queen moments, training him to use direct communicative language instead of passive-aggressive muttering. What an awful, sneaky Mama! Definitely the Worst Mama Ever.

He has no trouble giving Anna a hard time. But I'm a bit of a conundrum. I'm just this guy, you know? I'm Mama's friend who's now Mama's extra-special friend, and I love J and J loves me, but I haven't raised him, I've just been around and we've gotten to know each other like any two other human beings. Much like we don't believe our mothers telling us we're cute or smart or whatever, we think that people a little farther away from us can see us more clearly; which is true, in many ways. He sometimes finds himself determined that something in the world is wrong, but then finds me doing it, and doesn't quite know what to think.

Take the issue of naming one's car. Anna's car has a name, which J has grown up with, and they talk about her as though she's a person. I don't really name my stuff. I address my car directly as "Car," and any pets I'm interacting with will often be Dog and Cat. J doesn't really like that my car is called "Car": he's very particular about names, and about being called "J" instead of nicknames.

("Buddy," "Kiddo," and curiously, "Monkeyferret" all seem to be okay. But man, the second time I referred to him and Anna as "the barbarian horde," he raised his voice a bit and said, "CHRIS DON'T MISTAKE US FOR THE BARBARIAN HORDE EVER AGAIN." So noted.)

Rightly or not, I perceive in him a desire to be judgemental about Car not having a proper name. But it's me, and I'm special, so he gets this delicious inner conflict. Then he lets go, because he can't really decide that I'm bad or wrong, and then he learns that people can do things differently than how he thinks.

phew. hi.

Hi! I have a blog! I also have a billion other things, like work and Zen retreats, and holy crap I asked Anna to marry me and now I guess we should get married to avoid it being all awkward. My little brother the farmer was very nice and found a week they could come that didn't mean us getting married in the dead of winter, so now we just need 3 other entities to have the same day free seven months from now and we'll be good to go.

Our Zen teacher will do the honors. I asked her a couple years ago what she does for weddings, and she said it's up to the couple, as long as they say the Ten Precepts (to each other or the audience or both, I don't know). We have no idea what we're doing. In our different ways, neither of us has any idea what we might wear, and we need to talk to people who actually know things, about, um, yannow. Clothes, and stuff.

Speaking of Zen things, we just got back from our sangha's semi-annual retreat down in the Santa Cruz Mountains, near Boulder Creek. This was my first retreat since October 2009, and while I've been sitting, all that time, sitting all day (in 35-minute periods with various breaks) is a different thing. Mostly it requires acceptance, in the broad sense that we struggle to explain. Yes, your knees are going to hurt, your back might hurt, anything else might hurt. Sesshin isn't something we do because it's fun; we do it because it's helpful to our practice, whose ultimate purpose is to end our and everyone else's suffering. We spend a lot of our time refusing to accept the realities of life, fighting our minds, often in very subtle ways. Usually I adjust pretty quickly, but it took about a day of sitting before I finally gave up and accepted that my body hurt. Then, of course, it hurt a whole lot less.

It was good, and important, to slow down for a bit, after this month of going full-tilt at work. I wasn't enjoying it, but I could have used another 5 days (the traditional full length for sesshin): I feel like two days barely makes a dent in the tension I built up over my time in Chile.

Then again, someone once asked the teacher Blanche Hartman what happens when we do zazen meditation. She said, "You can't possibly know."

I did get a bit closer to seeing all that tension and defensiveness. We can't let anything go if we can't find it. So I'm finally unwinding, maybe. We'll see. I probably won't narrate the process, because really, who cares?

One other notable thing, which I'll have to mull over and probably write about, was to see again the dissonance between how I see myself (withdrawn, lazy, disconnected) and how others see me, at least in the sangha (kind, helpful, listening). At some point I have to give some weight to everyone else's view of me. Because that's not terrifying or anything.

Tomorrow: back to work.

the kid's side of the story

J and I haven't had any conversation about the wedding yet. We still don't talk a whole lot even when I'm around: I make a point of hanging out with him some in the mornings while Anna makes breakfast, but he's 6 and not much for sitting around chatting. I was around for an awesome conversation about him being a bit jealous of me: he has a lot of insight into his feelings, and he's good at articulating them.

Anna told him we're getting married, though. J said:

1. Make sure it's on a Daddy day so he didn't have to come, and
2. Make sure we don't tell anyone so it can just be a secret.

Anna suspected that maybe his mental image of weddings wasn't quite accurate, and there turned out to be two concerns:

• He saw how many pictures were taken at a friend's wedding last year, and for the past while he's had this insane oh-my-god-they're-stealing-my-soul horror of having his picture taken. I tried taking his picture once, and he screamed and ran away and it took a few minutes to calm him down.
• He's afraid the food might be yucky (this has come up again).

I anticipate plain grilled cheese on the reception menu. In exchange for a promise that there only has to be one photo, of the three of us, he's willing to come to the wedding now. So that's nice.

Meanwhile, this afternoon he apparently decided to play Private Wedding--there's that "private" thing again, though the thing that got him on board was explaining that the wedding is a public ceremony to stand up and tell everyone we're a family--with a stuffed bear standing in for me, Mister Potus the platypus officiating, and the full population of other stuffed animals as the Audience. Everyone had a lovely time, although it seems likely we'll have to do it again with me present: Anna says with the stuffed bear instead of me, it just wasn't the same.

the gigantor apartment

We went and looked at this absolutely enormous apartment yesterday. Actually it's a condo. It's for sale, you're in luck! There's some photos there to give you a sense of scale, but nothing quite does it like this view from the front door:

It must be over 120 feet to the back wall of the master bedroom. Room-sized closets at every turn, a wet bar, enormous kitchen, at least 5 balconies. (Anna says 8. Which is totally at least 5. Plus there were 5, not 8. She's maddening.)

It was bewitching, really, to have all that space available. We were ready to take it. We could have people over! Everyone at once, if we wanted.

But the lease term would only be 12-24 months, because they want to try and sell it again. And it's $1000/month more than a small house down the street. Is it really worth $12,000 over the year to have all that space, just for a year, before we move back into a small space? Nope, not really. Properly managed, $12,000 could pay for the wedding and a very, very nice honeymoon. (You people eat hummus and Ritz crackers at the reception, we go to Venice for a week. Sounds like a plan.) We don't have enough furniture to make 1800 square feet feel reasonable. We don't want that much furniture.

Even more hilarious is to imagine buying that place, with the monthly cost pushing $4000/month. Ah, no.

So, nope. Gunning for the small house with the hideous kitchen and bathroom.

mawwiage.

As of Saturday night, Anna and I are engaged. We're aiming for October.

I decided sometime last year. I bought the ring in December, and it seemed like it was finally about time for us both, so I brought it with us to San Francisco last night, and asked her in the middle of the freezing cold dark windy rainstorm under the dome of the Palace of Fine Arts. Specifically, behind one of the columns, on account of the freezing cold wind.

It's an almond-wood ring because she doesn't really like metal rings, and it says "Say Yes" on the inside, which she did, and I hope she says yes every day, for a long time.

that was funZZZZzzzzzz

It's been a long weekend here in Chris's world. Yesterday we got up around 4:30 to go do Zen stuff, which lasted until 1 or so; then Anna went to help a friend pack up his late mother's apartment, and I picked her up and we went to the Bay Area Harmony Sweepstakes at the Palace of Fine Arts, which brought me a nice flood of memories. Many of the same people are still working hard that were involved 15 years ago. There were a lot of kids there, I assume because one group was a trio of 15-year old girls and another was an ensemble of middle school boys.

I am highly critical of a cappella groups, which kept me busy last night because most of them weren't very good. Some were worse than others, but I at least appreciate the courage it takes to get up on stage.

We ate a lovely dinner at Baker Street Bistro, which appears to be staffed by real French people, plus an absolutely adorable waiter. And a nice encounter under the giant dome in a vast, windy rainstorm.

Today was all decompression and reading and going for a run and eating chocolate-covered raisins and leftover duck confit. Life is, as always, pretty rough.

phase 3: profit!

(Underpants Gnomes reference.)

In a rather complete and abrupt lifestyle shift, I now go to a "job," in an "office." The first couple days have gone well: I'm still useless, but getting better. I made some minor changes to irrelevant things, often with supervision. Tomorrow the real fun starts, when we sit down with the head of the team I'll be working with for a couple months, and start to learn how the systems all work and tie together. My co-workers, not knowing my background, seem to think I will be cowed or dismayed by how bad the code is; eventually they'll get a better sense of what I've been doing with myself these past 6 years.

They're also training me to be a sysadmin, which is a bit outside my comfort zone--I'm not a sysadmin, I'm a software engineer. Isn't that interesting, though? "I'm a software engineer." I have this whole piece of identity involving the work that I do, and I have this internal rebellion against the fact that "Software Engineer" is not really my job here. It affects my interactions with other people in the company, especially the people who are SEs; and even on my team, my background is so different that I feel like a stranger in a foreign land. As Anna says, it's good that I've spent some time that way recently.

Anna has been visiting a friend up north for a couple of days, leaving me the apartment to myself. I'm enjoying the solitude: this apartment is a good size for just me. I've been listening to NPR again--I've gotten out of the habit, because while Anna can suck it up and deal, J hates it. In the quiet, I'm relaxing a bit, and noticing the sense of cramped-ness that I normally have to manage. I'm also dreaming of having my stuff unpacked and accessible, and a comfy place to sit and read, and generally starting to think I'd like us to find a bigger place before the summer.

I'm also not at all sure I'm up for the project of owning a house right now. My commute on the train is still 60 minutes, though I think I'm going to get a magnesium-frame kick-scooter that should shave off 15-20 minutes. My time is feeling crunched at the moment. Being alone in the house, I can get up, sit zazen, go for a run, and eat breakfast, all on my own schedule, and have plenty of time. With Anna and especially with J, I run on their schedule. I could do my own schedule, but then I would miss some snuggling and playing time with J, and that time is important to us, both individually and together. Then again, I'm cranky if I don't exercise, leaving me with less energy to put toward enjoying and being present for my time with Anna and J.

And I need to carve out time for aikido and Zen practice, but if I do those things for the purpose of deepening my relationship to the rest of the world, and they come at the expense of my relationships...well, you see the problem. Spiritual-yet-stupid parents can sometimes neglect their parenting in the pursuit of their spiritual path, a failure sometimes called the "Zen orphan" phenomenon. It's easy to do it wrong and think you're doing it right. (This is why it's important to have a teacher, who can tell you when your head's on sideways.)

The solitude is nice, but after 36 hours or so, I remember that living alone was only about 90-95% awesome, and we all live together to get that extra awesomeness. Soon the Barbarian Hordes return, and we'll all be home again.