I love Penn & Teller. They're funny, smart, talented performers. I also adore how humble, witty, thoughtful and just REAL Penn is.
You can really get this from his podcast, Penn's Sunday School.
In this particular episode he has really worthwhile, smart, respectful things to say about Robin Williams.
I'm really grateful for what he had to say about him, and the way some of the media have bungled talking about his death and mental health.
Language is a slippery thing.
I've noticed that the works of eastern philosophers, or even my own attempts to adapt their strategies in my life have a way of ticking people the fuck off.
At times, even as I was struggling to understand and practice these concepts, they ticked me off!
Just a few minutes ago I had a glorious, ecstatic, annoying, nauseating epiphany as to why this might be.
I think that the subtle nuances of the English language often conflate the ideas of simplicity and difficulty. That is, that implying something has few steps, also implies that those steps are easy, quick, trivial, or not challenging.
That's just not always the case.
Here's my relevant example:
Late last week I faced some challenges at work and had a conversation with a coworker that left a bad taste in my mouth. I left the office feeling like I didn't have the skills I need, and that I wasn't bringing my A Game in how I was going about getting them.
The whole weekend every time I thought about it, it made my heart heavy, and my stomach sink. I spent a good deal of time obsessed with career choices I had made 5 and 10 years ago, and regretting them. Then to add to that lovely salad of regret and misery, I topped it off with a dressing of fears about losing my job, not being able to hold my own next to younger, cheaper folks, and doubt that I would or even could ever get over this technical backlog.
I ate that fucking salad all weekend. Right up until I got into work today.
Fun, right? Not really.
So here's the thing about that whole salad-making-and-eating experience.
It was COMPLEX. It involved past regrets, dozens of memories, all sorts of imagined fears, and time to mix them together and force feed them to myself.
Yet at the same time it was EASY. All I had to do was trip on myself, fall down a rabbit hole of unhealthy thinking, and let the process just march along unchecked. It wasn't difficult.
Today when I got into the office, I tried something different. I sat down and spent time analyzing some code I need to understand. Some of it clicked for me right away, but the rest involved me painstakingly looking stuff up, writing things down, and working out how the pieces click together.
I feel so much better now. The process of teaching myself this code was SIMPLE, yet also VERY HARD. It went like this, kind of:
- read the code
- write it down as simple pseudocode when I understood it
- when I come to something I don't understand, stop, look it up in the documentation, ask a coworker, or try to reason it out for myself.
- STAY CALM
- Keep going
When I look back at this process, it's not rocket science. It's simple. The thing is something being simple doesn't mean doing it doesn't come without opportunity cost, dedication, a paradigm shift, and most importantly EFFORT OVER TIME.
That's an atypical way of looking at challenging things, and your relationship to them. I can see why it really pisses people off.
I've been feeling overwhelmed by the skill set required by my day job lately.
There's a fairly significant laundry list of things I need to have or gain proficiency in.
It's exhausting, and makes me feel like a big phony.
I found a great blog post about it:
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ImAPhonyAreYou.aspx
I'm grateful I did. Check it out.
Spacey & I, we make each other laugh.
No matter the time, or distance that separates us, it's almost magical to me how we can make each other laugh, lend each other strength, give each other perspective.
I love him.
I'm grateful each day for him.
One of the best things about my marriage is that Missy and I share our passions. We're unabashed nerds. We find something we like, and get super into it, like crazy. Occasionally, this makes us go off on a wild hare after something.
We'll stay up late playing video games together, or binge watch all the X-Men movies. I love that when I like something, and share it with her, sometimes she gets into above and beyond me.
Ingress is like that. Today we went out "portalling" - chasing down portals all over town, as a team.
We bopped all over the place. We crashed through brush, climbed over rock walls to clamber down the side of a hill, walked several miles, and made about thirty-seven u-turns chasing down enemy portals, and capturing them for our faction.
We. saw. turtles.
At one point this morning, when we were getting ready to go about our day, I hugged her, and told her she's my best friend. I'm grateful to be married to someone so cool.
