work issues

I was cranky about work this week. Not just cranky, but sunk in a bit of a fog, what's left of depression for me after

Anyway. Cranky. I spend a lot of time working on things I don't care about in between the things I do. As useful as I've been, I look back on six months and don't feel like I've been particularly effective. Certainly I haven't been engaging the sorts of system-design skills I'm good at; i was just starting to, when the company stopped new development for six weeks to work on various quality-focused initiatives. Now I'm working for at least a week or two on spewing out some kind of inventory database for all our servers, which is not the least bit interesting to me, though it desperately needs to be done. (And which I've been hacking on over the months, but only implementing the things I need.)

I watch other people of both greater and lesser seniority becoming technical leads. How do you become a technical lead? By having an impact and pushing others to do the same. What am I not doing? Having an impact.

Also, I'm getting married, one old friend is missing my wedding for reasons I'm not entirely clear on or at peace with, another old friend is very extremely ill, and being a stepdad is an ongoing process. Among other things. It's a busy time. I can't recall ever having this much stuff to deal with.

I've been through this cycle before, of course (that's what makes it a cycle). Over a period of a few weeks, I'll wind up tighter and tighter. I get irritable, which is a lightweight form of anger. I feel it in my aikido instincts, where I'm much more likely to want to use force and be combative, even if I don't act on it. During this part of the process, zazen keeps me in touch with what I'm feeling, but doesn't actually help me settle down.

This mental pain is dukkha, that troublesome Buddhist word usually translated as "suffering", but "angst", "stress", "distress", or "discomfort" are usually better. The root of the word means "a wheel out of balance". The Buddha, as was his way, gave everyone a fine definition:

Birth is dukkha; aging is dukkha; illness is dukkha; death is dukkha; grief, lamentation, bodily pain, mental pain and despair are dukkha; having to associate with what is displeasing is dukkha, separation from what is pleasing is dukkha; not getting what one wants, that too is dukkha.

Faced with this dukkha, I become hard, trying to defend myself against it. Trying to defend myself against the world outside myself, as if that's the problem. As if there's some kind of separation between "me" and "everything else". There isn't, though not in any particularly magical mystical "everything is connected" way. It's actually very concrete, though counter-intuitive: every phenomenon's existence depends on every other phenomenon's existence. Thich Nhat Hanh, while I'm allergic to his writing, named his monastic community the "Order of Interbeing", which describes it quite well. Everything in the universe is interdependent to the point where it inter-is. The chain of cause and effect is often so complex that we can't enumerate every link, but it's there. I get hard and angry in response to my conditions at work. My conditions at work arose because I took the job and then started executing on it in a certain way. I interviewed for this job because I'd worked with the recruiter at a previous job, which I'd taken because I was burned out at the job before that...the details are endless. But every decision and every interaction and every response and every happenstance all create what we call the "causes and conditions" of our current state of affairs.

All this is to say that there's no such thing as "Chris" being separate from "the world Chris lives in". I have created that world. That world has created me. We have arisen and developed together. We're not two different things: the world would be very different for a lot of people without me in it. I'm not special in this way. It's true for you, too. It's true for everybody.

At this point in the cycle, I'm getting hard and, in a way, angry about my suffering. This continues for a week or less, when one day I've had enough and I sit down for zazen again, and this time, at some point I change from being hard and angry to being soft, and sad. I let myself feel sad because after all, things are not what I want, and feeling sad about that is okay. I finally accept my dukkha, stop fighting it or protecting myself, and really fully acknowledge it as part of my experience right now. I open up to my immediate experience (which has a lot of unpleasantness). I become quieter and less confrontational, especially at work. In aikido, I lose the impulse for violent, linear motions (like punching people) and my fluidity returns. I give up trying to force my experience of the world to be a certain way. I let go of my desire to control, to stop feeling bad, to shut the world out, and once again I can create flexible, spontaneous responses to the needs of whatever's really happening.

I'm feeling a lot better now. I was in a couple friends' aikido tests on Friday, and that's always fun. I'm still a bit on edge about work, but I've settled considerably, and after venting to my team lead a bit, I've discovered that the current view from the higher-ups is that I should make of my role whatever I want.

("After this current project, I'm going to spend 100% of my time on X. I'm also going to have the team run me through like a new employee, so I'm fixing bugs and knowing the code better."

"Oh, definitely! I'm actually surprised that wasn't happening already."

Has this ever come up before? No. I'm the only software engineer on the Ops team, so there's been no one else trying to do this job that we could use either as a model or for comparison.)

It's good to be on the up-cycle again. There's still a lot of stuff to work through, but I'm definitely settling down, even with some stuff left over from Chile. My one response to everything is "Let Go": people, places, things, ideas, beliefs. Just because you let go of something (or someone) doesn't mean it goes away. It might, but that's better than grabbing onto it and trying to control what happens. Letting go means allowing the world to take its natural shape, accepting The Way Things Are as your starting point and going from there.

If you're feeling hard and angry in any part of your life, consider letting go and becoming soft and sad. You'll be glad you did.

failing

A year or two ago, someone died when Caltrain hit them. This is unfortunately normal, between 1 and 4(!) times per month, and it's almost inevitably suicide, or occasionally stupidity. I mean, the train didn't go out of its way to hit you, right? You know exactly where it's going. It doesn't deviate from its track, and it takes about a mile to stop. To not get hit by a train is not rocket science.

This one was a little different, a driver who maybe misjudged and got stuck on the tracks when the lights turned and the gates closed. Why didn't he get out of the car? An old acquaintance, James, insisted the guy was a fool.

James studies Krav Maga, a deeply violent Israeli martial art that prides itself on real-world effectiveness. Maybe a year before, he got robbed at gunpoint in San Francisco. Like any sane martial artist, his instructors reassured him that peaceably handing over his wallet had been the right choice, but he beat himself up about it a bit anyway. James thought that he should have seen the lookout guy down the street, and been more aware of who was around him and what they were doing. He might be right. I wasn't there.

Maybe, on that street, James didn't fulfill his capacity. He didn't seem to understand that maybe, neither did the guy in the car? We're fragile beings: we get distracted, we panic. Sometimes, we fail.

The past couple weeks, I've felt like I'm failing a lot. Zen talks about life being "one continuous mistake", which is one way of saying that we can't tell how things are going to turn out, and we just stumble through, pay attention, and do the best we can.

(When things go the way we want, we tend to imagine a sort of determinism: we planned and worked hard, so of course stuff happened the way we expected. Mistakes are surprises. We dislike mistakes not only because they are often obstacles to getting what we want, but because their insistent spontaneity reminds us how precarious and contingent the events of our lives really are.)

Here are the things, all important to me, that I feel like I've been failing to do with any consistency:

• sit zazen
• study for the GREs
• work on sewing for monk ordination
  
• go to aikido
• go running
• cook
• lose weight
• be remotely as effective at work as I want to be

That's a long list. It's all in my head, of course. It's true that I'm not doing those things enough (or at all, in some cases), but my problem is really the feeling of failure, rather than the reality of it.

Here are things I'm not failing at:

• being a good husband
• being a good stepdad
• being kind and patient with people

See, that's not so bad.

I'm intrigued that the "failing" list is things to do, and the "not failing list" is things to be...

stepdad-in-progress

J and I have been getting closer, at a good, gentle pace. There's usually a shift any time I do anything to take care of him, like watch him for a couple hours while Anna does something, but it also helps that we have our regular 10-15 minutes in the morning between the end of the Morning Snuggle and Anna's having breakfast ready. The other day I hung out with him a bit and then fed him dinner, which he started eating with his hands (and probably nibbling like a squirrel, though I wasn't paying much attention).

"Use the fork, please."
"Whyyyyy do you always have to sound like Mama?!"

"Hmm. Do you really want to know?"

"Yes."

"Well, I've had to think about this, because I'm new to this whole parenting thing. My initial thought was that we ask you to use a fork because we want you to grow up to be happy. But then I was wondering, what does that mean? What I came up with is that we want you to grow up in harmony with the world around you. As we get older, people really expect us to do things the way our culture says we should, and eating with a fork is one of those things. It's kind of strange, we can wear whatever clothes we want, but we have to eat with a fork. If you don't eat with a fork, there's a lot of conflict with other people, and it makes our lives really difficult. So that's part of what it means to be in harmony with the world. Does that make sense?"

"Yes."

"You sure? I was talking for a long time."
"Yes."

Then he ate the rest of his dinner with a fork, kind of: J's fork-fu usually means he places the fork on the place, impales a piece of food using his non-fork hand, then lifts the fork to his mouth. It's a process. We'll get there.

Apropos of nothing, really. We are J-less for about 6 days, and after 3 or so, I miss him.

crunch. grind.

I've been feeling a bit down this past week. This isn't the crisis it used to be: now I just feel crabby and down for no real reason, and I just make room for it. I see myself when I try to pin it on something (small apartment, future spouse with different taste in music), and just let myself feel down. It comes and goes, moment by moment: let go, laugh, feel sad, let go, laugh, feel sad. Lather, rinse, repeat. It's refreshing, in a way, seeing the endless dance of impermanence and contingency and cause-and-effect playing out just in my thoughts. The fact that everything is contingent and transient is what makes us free to change anything we want, from one moment to the next. I can be a new person! I can be someone laughing, and then I can be someone sad, and then I'll be someone laughing again.

At times like this, my job is not much help. From most jobs I get a sense of productivity and accomplishment, and with this one, not so much. That's really about me, though. If I start thinking, "Wow, I'm a really bad sysadmin, this is horrible," I can calibrate with reality:

• I told them repeatedly, in every interview, that I was a bad sysadmin, don't like being a sysadmin, didn't want to be a sysadmin. They said "Come do this job that's 50% sysadmin," and I said "Sure, why not?". Nobody was hiding anything.
• In 7 weeks no one has come to me to say I should be doing more stuff, or doing it differently.
• People seem generally happy to have me around.
• My boss and team lead both friended me on LinkedIn.

So, whatever. Clearly my perception of myself at my job is crap, and I have to trust things outside myself. Because that's not terrifying at all.

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.

art envy

One of our favorite blogs is by Tiffany Ard, who runs the excellent Nerdy Baby online store (if you want to get the house 6-year old a present, I recommend a framed copy of this poster, and let me know so I don't buy another one). She writes wonderfully about running her business and homeschooling her two kids. Her kid dialogue is especially awesome.

I was especially struck by this post showing the materials she made up for some of her lessons. I have this sting of envy because she's an Artist, and part of me always wanted to be, and I'm not, really.

Artists have this flow of ideas that I always covet. They just...create things, with ideas that come from somewhere inside them. I had a flow like that as a kid--show me a normal 7-year old who could possibly not spew out a world of ideas as they happen--but then it sort of dried up as I got older. I'm not sure why: one could blame school for crushing my creativity, but the truth is I don't think that's what happened. Plenty of kids around me became Artists. I think it's more that as I reached 6th-8th grade, I started to shut down emotionally as my friends and I grew in different directions and I lost them. And I'm just not really an Artist: my big gift is to understand the world, to learn stuff and find connections and patterns and things in common. Mostly I'm reading books or learning how to do something: ride a motorcycle, make books, make jewelry, shoot a bow and arrow. When I actually make something beyond the process of learning it, it's not the inexorable need from within that most Artists seem to have. I don't even make stuff because it's fun (even though it is). I make stuff in response to a need I have. I'm an Engineer. I solve problems.

(Usually causing more problems in the process. But hey, you wanted cable in the apartment, you said it was really important, and you did not say I couldn't drill through the outside wall to do it.)

I've gotten a lot of mileage out of understanding this and accepting it. We are simultaneously infinitely malleable--I have little patience with people saying they're too old to learn something or too old to change--and we are also who we are. I doubt I'm going to be an Artist, or a world-class musician, or any number of other things. I do want to learn to draw, so a drawing class is on 2011's to-do list (as it has been for every year except 2010). I've mostly accepted I'm not an Artist, but there's a part of me that at least wants to know a technique for making art.

It's amazing to think of everything about me that's changed over time: my experience of the world is completely different from 5 years ago. And yet, we were visiting my parents last month and looking at my baby book, and so much of what was true at age 2 is still very true now (in particular, I talk with a big vocabulary and I have a tremendous lack of moderation around grapes).

Everything changes, and yet...some things persist, in some form or another.

[Cleared out of the Drafts folder, mostly written in early January.]

Early Writings

Second grade! As always, click to go to the Flickr pages.

I usually trace my writing style to reading Douglas Adams, but this is a few years before that. Apparently I was already finding my voice.

fun with the iPhone

It has a front-facing camera.

(At Phone's housewarming barbecue on Super Bowl Sunday.)

stepboyfriend action video

From this morning. At one point I was making weird faces and J said he was trying to imitate me, so I decided to play with the forward-facing camera on the iPhone so he could see how silly he looked.

Heh.

family

We're having some sideways rain here at the moment. It's less traumatic here than in Southern California, mostly because Northern California is actually meant for human habitation. (We get more rain naturally, and we don't build cities on steep hillsides made out of dust that turns into structurally-unsound mud when wet.) I'll happily take the above-average rainfall, though; our water situation isn't going to get less precarious with time.

I'm adjusting more. I finally powered on my MacBook Pro, which was good because my trusty netbook's Linux installation stopped working when I tried to upgrade it, and it's probably not salvageable. After using Windows and Linux for 9 months, I'd forgotten how aesthetically pleasing computers can actually be if a company makes that a priority. The quality of the graphics on the Mac is pretty stunning: I just want to stare and drool at all the smooth details in the Alt-Tab icons. This is a pretty old and worn-down machine, too, so my eventual new one will be extra shiny.

School is on winter vacation, so we're seeing a lot more of J than usual this couple of weeks. It's nice to have some family time, and for him and me to get a little more used to each other. He's an incredibly sweet and affectionate human being. Sample dialogues:

"Hmm, if you would like to play, why don't you ask me?"

"Mama said you'd be tired."
"Well, that's sort of true, since I just got home from being away. But Mama and I are also different people, and I play differently than Mama, so you and I need to figure out ways to play together that work for both of us."

In his drawn-out syllables: "Weeeell, that's good, I've been wanting to find some new ways to play."

Or, out of the blue at dinner:

"Chris, it's great that you're back."

Or, 10 minutes after I told him I was glad to be home and it was nice to see him:

"It's good you're not on the other side of the world any more."

Or the time Anna and I were meditating and he came out for the morning snuggle, and failing that, went and plopped down a blanket and pillow and started sitting with us, which was just cute beyond words. You get the picture. He's pretty awesome.

He's also 6, he eats about five different foods, and he's a total drama queen about things like his difficulty with writing. Also, we live in a one-bedroom apartment: it's too small for Anna, who spent years and years living in tiny campers full-time, so that's really validating for me. (I'm highly motivated to get a job and move us to a bigger place.)

I think it's a standard family life, despite the somewhat non-standard kid: cuteness, affection, moments of frustration and anger (he has a lot of stress from an inconsistent schedule and his social difficulties, and he's got a lot of rudeness going on right now). I still have no idea how I fit into J's world. He's created a category called "Chris," which also contains his grandfather and seems to involve "gentle men in my family." Anna redirects him when I need time to myself, and there's also random playtime, including my favorite game, Let's Sit Next To Each Other On The Bed And Quietly Read Our Own Books. I try to do the behavioral stuff, too: I got annoyed with his rudeness last week, and boy howdy, did he notice. That's when we also had the "But Mama gives the time-outs!" conversation, which Mama helpfully clarified soon afterward.

(I made him sit on the bed and breathe with me to try and let go of our frustration, which either made him more frustrated, or helped him see his frustration more clearly, but either way he decided to clomp off to spend a few minutes in his room with the door closed, which is a fine outcome.)

I have frustration and sadness floating around: I need a job, the apartment is too small for 2.5 people, and I have flashes of resentment at losing my nice quiet sanctuary that I worked so hard on, to these barbarian invaders, with their noise and their endless piles of Legos.

But as you might guess, the truth is that I like the boy, and I'm quite fond of my intelligent, cute girl, and it's an excellent life we're all building together.

in sight of land

My plane leaves in 36 hours, which is sort of mind-bogglingly close. On Tuesday I get to see Anna, but then also on Wednesday and Thursday, the week after that, and then, so far as we know, the weeks and months after that. After so much time apart, it doesn't seem real; but it's true. My being away has been educational for both of us, but we haven't liked it. Our lives are better together.

Now, too, since we have an unbounded time to talk things out, we can start some longer-running conversations without worrying that we won't get it settled before we're on different continents again.

(Confidential to AF: I'm happy to talk about the bunny suit, but I think that thing with the goldfish crosses a few of my boundaries. Sorry.)

Then there's also the kid, who will be very happy to see me. I'll be happy to see him, too, though I find him, and our relationship, perplexing. He's known me for quite a while now, and he's decided I'm a very important person in his family--at some point I developed into my own category, so when we were Skyping earlier this year while Anna's father was visiting, he told me, "Me and Chris went to the park," when he was talking about his grandfather (who is not named Chris). I haven't done much caretaking with him, and he's usually playing with Anna when he's with us (and we only lived together a month), but I guess it's enough that I treat him like a person and he sees me and Anna in action.

Did I mention I get to be with Anna again?

best description of me this year

From Anna. (J is an extremely smart boy and swiftly approaching 6 years old.)

J and I have been talking about two-dimensional versus three-dimensional shapes, and today he wondered what one-dimensional things were, or if they were. I thought maybe a point, but I wasn't sure, so I said, "Oooh, we should google that. Or ask Chris--he might know." J started laughing with joy and said, "Yeah, Chris is like a google, but one we can skype!! And he knows a lot of stuff, but not all of it!"

Awesome.

teaching videos

As promised, here are the videos Anna took of me teaching. The batteries died midway through class, so you don't get to see the spectacular body-check during the vocabulary game. Also, they were exceptionally well-behaved because Anna was there (and note how they're always getting up and moving around anyway), and I'm particularly bouncy because it's Friday and Anna's visiting.





Or play them directly at YouTube.

an apt description

Steve has commented on how much he enjoys the seemingly endless discoveries of things I'm interested in or have tried out. It's a long list, because I'm just that way; I tell people that my primary hobby is dilettantism. The cycle: I try something out with a bit of intensity, achieve some basic level of competence--perhaps just to assure myself that I'm generally competent and that I can if I really want to--and then I drift off and try something else.

To me, it feels like a small list, but considering I did most of them for at least six months, some for quite a bit longer (usually because they were family activities, like skiing and sailing), I guess I've been accumulating them steadily through my entire life, but especially as an adult, being out of school and having some money and leisure time to indulge myself. Some, like motorcycling and ceramics, are not uncommon; others, like bookbinding and blacksmithing, are a bit more esoteric.

Steve, as he can, summed this up:

You have the interests and attention span of a kid with a checking account.

Not bad.