You'll have to pardon the lateness - this is yesterday's entry.
I'm experimenting with having a more regimented, formal process for going to bed, where I put my phone away, and get to sleep properly.
I've been at it for all of two days, and it already seems to be helping. Yesterday I was super effective at work, and had a great day.
I'm grateful that Kacie pointed out that I needed it, and that Missy is helping me with it.
Patience, my friend. This one is going to take a lengthy explanation.
So, let's start at the beginning. My dad has had an enormous influence on my life, both in good ways and bad.
He was sort of a mythic figure in my life. He had this crazy job that made him travel all the time. It made him fairly wealthy, too, or at least it appeared to.
As a result of this, I had a very privileged childhood, traveled exotically, and was really very spoiled.
But it all fell apart around the time I graduated high school. My parents got divorced, our family had immense financial difficulties, and my dad came down with a form of leukemia. He also moved overseas.
Over the next decade, things got even worse as many truths about my father came to light. He was to put it bluntly, a very bad man. He cheated on my mother for most of their marriage with multiple partners, perpetrated fraud in his business and was a con artist, embezzled money from my grandparents and their family business and more or less destroyed it, and possibly worst of all lied to us all about having, leukemia, which he never did.
One of the more life altering side effects of all this, was that I learned that the way I thought my childhood had gone, and the actual events that were happening were really very different things.
The things my father did sort of swallowed my history as a child, as a person. I felt like I didn't really know who I was for a really long time.
Okay, thanks for hanging in there. Now let me tell you something that happened to me about 10 years ago.
By accident I once left my contact lenses in overnight not just for a day but for several days. I'm not sure how it happened, I just forgot I had them in. I got the great granddaddy of all eye infections. It was really, really bad. It was so bad that when I would go outside I was almost functionally blind for about two days.
My girlfriend at the time, wife now, Missy was super mad at me about it. She gave me an enormous and well deserved spanking. My other partners, Pene and Spacey also gave me no end of grief about it, as did many other members of my poly family and my close circle of friends.
Some months after this, I lamented aloud to anyone and everyone I could, "Will this never end? When will I stop being punished for this thing?"
I recall Pene's answer, "Never."
The funny thing is, it's not hyperbole. Since that day, this thing has continued to follow me around.
Total strangers who listen to the Big Little Podcast, have teased me about it.
I have this very close friend Amelia, who I've known for five or six years now. Note that this is long past when this happened, and I didn't even know her then.
This morning we have the following text exchange:
See at the end there? She told me she loves me because she knows that when people tease me about this it does kind of irritate me.
But to be honest, it's a feigned irritation at most. Actually one of the really great things I get from this, is that it's sort of uncorrupted personally owned history that can't be taken from me.
People who tease me about this, do it because they care about me. It's a history of being loved. Not by a parent who failed me, and in doing so, deprived me of a huge chunk of my life. But rather it's a history of being loved by people who care about me on my own terms, as my own person.
Every time it happens, it makes me feel kind of great. And to be honest, it really does keep me from ever sleeping with my contacts in again too.
i'm grateful I have this history and I can appreciate it so.
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.
