pausing

When a company IPOs, those of us who own mere Cattle Class shares pre-IPO get to wait out a 180-day "lockup" period before we can transfer shares to a different owner, whether in exchange for money—what the finance geeks call "selling"—or just because we feel like it. In theory, the intention here is to prevent current and former employees from dumping all our stock the moment we can, so the price doesn't crash. You might think this is a giveaway to privileged investors, who get to cash in at the stock's opening price of $50/share, instead of 6 months later at $20/share, and you would be correct.

I've already mentioned my experience with the Hapless Stock Guys, who bought most of my stock in advance, but fat-fingered their valuation of the company by 100%, thus paying me double what they intended to. As it turns out, they would have lost money on the deal anyway, just...considerably less. And really, I would have done better if I'd just unloaded everything (or more like) at the time, but without knowing when the IPO would be, or anything, I just didn't. Except for needing money to pay taxes, it's all intuited guesswork.

So the lockup just ended. I transferred the stock to them—contractually forgiving 100% of the loan and its interest I borrowed from them last year, which is amusing—so now that deal is concluded, and they can move on past what has probably been among the crappiest of their years. The tightly-wound one of the pair actually apologized for his aggressive behavior back in November, and said he's really taken it as a moment to reflect and learn some life lessons. I didn't inquire further, but emotional responsibility isn't super common among Finance Guys, and I really appreciated it (and told him so).

I don't know what happened to the other guy, the mellow one who went to my private school, and who contacted me initially. He was pretty chill back in November, and I would not be surprised to learn he's backstopped by generational wealth, and/or he's been stoned this whole time.

It's a nice moment to stop, and feel at least one item drop off the long mental list. It's not a long moment, but it's there.

economics of the moment.

The world is a little hinky. There's a nationwide housing...thing, which I was somewhat skeptical about, until I saw that houses in my ancestral village, a New York Rust Belt hamlet which is convenient to absolutely nothing, has seen house prices double in the past couple years. Our house, where we've been for 9 years, is definitely much nicer than when we moved in; is it 170% nicer? Well, to live in, yes, but from a tax appraisal perspective, we haven't changed anything.

(The rat-infested garage is gone and replaced with a gorgeous new concrete pad; the house is surrounded by an alligator-filled moat lovely fencing. All but two windows replaced. Foundation brought up to date. The shed is ≤ 120 square feet and technically movable, and the shop is a trailer, so the official square footage/bedrooms/bathrooms are the same.)

I have struggled to understand the economics of being a landlord. Using a typical example, not even in the Bay Area, you'll see a place, say "Four units, never vacant, $3800/month turnkey," and it's selling for (say) $2,000,000. That's $86,400 of income per year! And...even with maintenance or rent increases, it takes numerous decades to pay off its purchase price. So if the revenue from the asset isn't the point, it must be the value of the asset, either to sell later on, or to borrow against for other financial plans (like buy more properties!). We did see people running a string of leveraged properties as Airbnbs, suddenly having a sort of cascading margin call when local governments decided the law applied to them the way it does with hotels; we saw it again with the pandemic crash, which indicates that, yes, one buys real estate in order to buy more real estate. It looks like a lot of work, although it is nowhere near as much work as having a real job, so there is that to consider.

I'm on a Slack instance with some folks from Rochester, NY, who linked a "10 Cities Where Home Prices Have Started Falling" listicle, and Rochester was #2, but #5 is my sadly post-industrial hometown. Or it was sad, anyway; but it looks like it's far above state and federal rates for violent crime, and only slightly above for property crimes.

(Not much change, I guess: we weren't in a bad neighborhood, but I did wake up one night to hear someone trying to jimmy open the back door under my bedroom. That door, probably solid wood aged from 1914, also had a pretty epic Yale deadbolt, keyed on both sides, so they only got the trim off. The door got deadbolt guards, and eventually we got an alarm system.)

Back when I spent three weeks at San Francisco Zen Center, there was a guy there who was fast approaching his priest/monk ordination—the ambiguity is a long story, but comes from Japanese Zen's histories in both Japan and the West—and he struck me because he was so young to be a professional cleric: somewhere around 22. He'd been at SFZC for a few years, and I don't know if he did college or not, and he didn't chat much with us transient students, but what struck me most was that he'd never lived on his own, only in groups of one kind or another.

I know quite a lot about solitude, and loneliness, and isolation, and so I know that the solitude of meditation (zazen specifically here) is one form of being with your self and your mind; and living by yourself, instead of in community, is quite another. And doing zazen when living by yourself is yet another other thing.

Hopefully I was not condescending at him, but in my head, certainly, thinking about my long road to living alone but mentally healthy, I thought he would at some point find he would need to figure that experience out.

Post-ordination, he left to be the resident priest in a place that needed them—one problem the Bay Area has with Zen clerics is that nobody really wants to leave—and blogged a bit, until he stopped. A few years later, I looked him up, and he's definitely practicing the Buddhist Right Livelihood...as a public defender in my hometown.

it's funny because it's true.

 I do not know this mad genius, but this is so, so spot-on.

This came up when I was sharing "If Bostonians Loved Other Local Institutions The Way They Love Their Local Sports Franchises" with folks, which states that Connecticut

wants so hard to be part of New England but is actually just part of New York, and it knows it, and so it’s got all this twisted anti-Boston resentment.

I went to a prep school in Connecticut, and I can't speak to the anti-Boston resentment—most people have trouble understanding that I grew up in Western Massachusetts, not Boston, and that the Boston accent stops abruptly at Worcester—but that is absolutely Connecticut's level of New England-ness relative to its New York City-ness. I went to college north of Albany, NY, so the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic/Rust Belt population was more diverse, and that's...still what Connecticut is like.

I am still on unemployment, which I'm happy to have, but it's also a grim window into the finances of living in the area; I'm sometimes amazed anyone is still here who's not making a Relative Fuckton of Money. Much like NYC, there are always the people here making $300k/year and moaning about the impossibility of making ends meet. Dig in a little bit and it's rarely hard to find big-ticket items they think of as "necessary" and the rest of the world thinks of as "costs a year's salary (or more)." At some point we'll get a plug-in hybrid. Is it going to be a BMW? Audi? A shiny Porsche Cayenne?

Dear Reader, it will not. Those are choices we make.

Do you have any idea how many musical instruments a Porsche could buy?!

nono, this toy is *much* nicer.

My cittern arrived from Sweden last week, 10 strings of awesome shipped in a very, very robust case.

I haven't gotten around to recording it yet, let alone recording it next to its colleagues which will be moving on to their next homes; not that it matters, since I'm not exactly competent at any of them.

It's amazing.

It's beautiful, to start with. I ordered it from Mats Nordwall (a Swedish luthier who's well-known in the right circles) about a year ago, but didn't get to play one until a few weeks ago, when Timbre Folk & Baroque in Berkeley happened to have one of his more economical mahogany citterns in stock. The sound was what I've heard in my years of watching and listening to Esbjörn Hazelius recordings. He's playing the same instrument, only he's good at it.

You wouldn't know it from the house, but I actually only buy the instruments I need in order to have the sounds I want. I bought a cheapie electric guitar when I wanted to get into that, and then I replaced it with a Line 6 Variax that will mimic almost any electric guitar to my satisfaction, and donated the cheapie to a local school. I have a tenor guitar, a mandolin, a little solid-bodied mandolin, because of the sounds they make.

(Well, mostly. I bought the mandolins because earlier in my violin career, I wanted something tuned the same as a violin, but easier to play. I'm keeping the acoustic, and the electric is decorative, and not worth the hassle of selling.)

I expect to own more guitars because the Variax's acoustic mimicry is far short of its electric, so a 12-string guitar and some sort of smaller-bodied guitar would be nice.

It turns out there's a few things that make it such a distinctive sound:

• It's common for instruments with paired strings to have the lower pairs be one pitched high, and the other an octave below it; for some reason, Swedes use a classical guitar string (nylon wrapped with silver) for the lower-pitched string. So of course it sounds different.
• This reduces the total string tension, so they can build the soundboard with fewer stiffening braces, which means it has more freedom to vibrate.
• The lighter build means you can use a capo really, really far up the neck: usually, instruments will lose their resonance if you capo them above maybe the 5th fret, because physics.
• (Not that you shouldn't do it, because it can be just what you want, but you'll lose complexity and sustain.)
• My cittern's sound doesn't change much until maybe the 10th fret.
• If you capo your instrument up really high, it's reasonable to expect it will go a little out of tune and you'll just have to tune it for the higher position. My cittern...does not have this problem.

It's literally everything I hoped it would be. I am very pleased.

keep on shippin' on.

My cittern has gotten as far as Stockholm, which is enough to get into the USPS tracking system!

I have spent the last week assuming "UTRIKES" is a place, but it actually just means "to/about a foreign country," which means that my cittern is probably on a ship on the ocean. Luckily, Evergreen shipping—of last year's Suez Canal blockage—has grounded a different ship—named, I shit you not, EVER FORWARD—outside of the Port of Baltimore, but courteously off to the side, on a shoal just over half the ship's draft, rather than blocking the channel.

I stopped by Gryphon Strings the other day, and exercising great discipline, I did not acquire a single new instrument. Martin Guitars, of which I own an admirably illegal Japanese copy from the 70s, does try a lot of new things, for a 190-year old company, and they created this weird thing that I wanted to try. It is delightful, and maybe that will make its way here. We're doing some rearranging and refurnishing the living room, which will involve changes in instrument storage/display. We're not out of wall space, as such, but it's definitely not a blank canvas.

INCOMING

Just over a year ago, I ordered an instrument from a maker in Sweden, who said he would start it in November, which he did. And now, a year later, as promised by his website, it's actually in the mail!

If you can believe it, this is just his standard model, even the mother-of-pearl inlay. When it comes to aesthetics in musical instruments, the answer is that, while you can most certainly overdo it, the most important thing is that it makes you want to pick it up and play it.

The only custom bit I ordered is the soundport there. I've really liked them when on guitars I've played in shops: it expands where the instrument is projecting, but more importantly it projects it to me, the player, so I can hear more like what an audience would hear. And I'm not performing, which means I'm always playing mostly or entirely for myself, so I should get to enjoy it fully.

It's called a "cittern," which I've written about before, and the fastest way to describe it is that it's

1. a big mandolin, 
2. the size of a regular guitar, 
3. with an extra pair of strings.

The particularly Swedish aspect is that in place of the heaviest metal strings, it uses classical guitar strings. This gives it a distinctive voice, and lowers the string tension, so the maker can build it more lightly. And, finally, this all lets the instrument resonate with a capo on, all the way up the neck. Fretted instruments like mandolins and guitars tend to feel sort of...pinched, or tight, if you try to capo past, say, the 7th fret. By all reports and observations, Swedish citterns just go ahead and keeping ringing out, more or less wherever you want to put the capo.

Anyway, that's exciting, since I've wanted one of these for half a decade now. Maybe Honor and I will sit down with my cittern and their gorgeous banjo and bring our full "this is not my primary instrument" energy. 😀

workin' it.

I'm interviewing a lot with early-stage companies, in search of a leadership role above that of line manager, even if temporary. The title bump always matters, much more even than an IC (Individual Contributor) role. Four years as an Engineering Manager (EM) at a well-known and successful company meant it was easy to get another EM job; they hired me directly as my first EM title, but that's far more rare, and in fact I'd spent the 3 years prior struggling to land one. I suspect that companies' reasons for not hiring EMs directly are not usually the right ones, but the end result is the same either way. They get more skittish as you go up the ladder, but now I have a neat confluence of (a) understanding why I enjoyed joining a 55-person company, and (b) having the freedom to join something even smaller.

My friend Alexa, although I'm older and helped her navigate her way into leadership, has been moving in executive circles for quite a while now, and gave me some immaculate advice about interviewing for things like Head/VP of Engineering jobs, and why that might be a better fit for me. When you're talking to a younger company, and especially at the executive level, they want to see who you are, and not just if you're comparable to another employee with the same title. Basically, I show them a Chris-shaped human, and the two sides together talk about whether they have a Chris-shaped space.

My whole life, I have been utterly unable to not be Chris-shaped, except for very short periods. I'm terrible at it. It has caused me a lot of trouble, but on the other hand I have needed to spend less time figuring out who I am. A Chris-shaped job at an earlier-stage company can save me a lot of stress, by not having to convince entrenched people they need a Chris-shaped person. Or, at least, I convince the founders and executives, and then back it up with competence.

(Or get removed, I suppose. Some of these can also turn out to be inherently time-limited, since I can most certainly pull off scaling an Engineering department to somewhere in the 30-60 range, it's rational enough for you and/or your investors to want someone more experienced in the 200+ size.)

I'm finding I learned a lot from this past job, which was not an earlier-stage startup, and it comes out in how I talk about the job, what's important to me, what I think should be important to them. I feel more rooted, and that I'm inhabiting my professional space more fully. No small part of this is that I took care of myself after Tim died, and took a placeholder job that wouldn't push me very hard.

And now I can choose what I want to do.