So long before onlydoing was a thing, I used to have a livejournal.
I haven’t written in it for about seven years. But it’s still around. Periodically I go back to it, go “dumpster-diving” through old entries, old memories.
The other day I stumbled across the very beginning of one of my oldest, dearest friendships.
Vanessa, also known as Shokolada and I did indeed become the very best of friends.
Going on almost 17 years now.
What a wonderful thing.
So WeMinder’s been live for 42 days, not that I’m counting. (Of course I am.)
It’s gone pretty well so far. The number of subscribers is growing. I’ve had a few departures, found a few bugs I’m working on, and had some truly great things happen because of it.
There’s this thing I’ve become very, very aware of, related to having my own software company. I have a yet further, deeper understanding of the concept of agency.
Agency is one of those tricky meta-concepts. It means both “the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power” as well as “an establishment engaged in doing business for another“.
Put more plainly, in a very real way I am WeMinder. It does things because I coded it to do them. It has customers because of my efforts (or lack thereof). It improves because I improve it. Any issues or problems it has, it has because of me. Any solutions to said problem are squarely on my shoulders and no one else’s.
That is a huge deal. It’s good in many ways, but it is also a profoundly difficult thing in some ways I wasn’t expecting too.
I remember over two decades ago, building my own Windows PC with a friend. We bought all the components at a couple of different places, including the case, the hard drive, the logic board, the memory. Over a weekend, we put it together, installed the OS, all that jazz.
When it booted up for the first time, I was so damn proud of myself. I had a fairly powerful computer, and had it for a fairly reasonable cost.
A few months later the damn thing started to have issues. I lamented to my friend Nullmoniker, who helped me build it, that the huge downside of what I’d done was that when it was super flaky at 10pm on a Sunday, there was no one I could call to help me, that I was on my own.
There are aspects to owning, to being WeMinder that are like that.
But, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’ve said for a while now that part of the process behind WeMinder’s evolution was that I had to emotionally mature as a person. There are aspects to being in relationships I understand so much better in my late 40’s, than I ever did before.
Today as I’m sitting here fixing a WeMinder bug, I realize that maturity thing has to do with being a technologist and a businessperson too. I see that one of the ways I’ve matured is that I’ve embraced the concept of practice.
When you begin a practice, you commit yourself to well… practicing it. You embrace the concept that you’re doing a thing, but that there isn’t any done per se. There’s always going to be a bug to fix, a feature to add, a place to promote the app, someone to tell, something to improve. The joy isn’t in being done with the whole thing. There is no done.
There’s only doing.
Which makes me laugh, because I’ve been studying that particular truth for a very long time now. And there’s no end to that in sight, thank goodness.
Over the years that I’ve been an author, and we’ve been creating the podcast, my work has made me pretty well known in the ageplay and kink communities. I’m always leery to use the term “minor internet/kink celebrity” because of even the slightest whiff of Gilderoy Lockhart style self-aggrandizement. But it’s true, I do have fans.
I love hearing from people how the podcast has helped them, or how they enjoy my books. It’s super gratifying when a complete stranger, someone I’ve never met, and wouldn’t know otherwise, reaches out across the aether to let me know that my work has had meaning to them in their life.
Relatedly, I had the nicest thing happen to me about two weeks ago. I was hanging out on a discord server I like, “MDLB and Friends!” just chatting when I struck up a conversation with someone, Danny.
I told Danny about my secret project I’ve been working on, Project Longbottom. It’s a software tool, an app-as-a-service for age players. I’ve been working on it like crazy for several months now, and it actually just went into beta testing a few days ago.
We were chatting about it when Danny told me he was a fan of my work. He’s listened to the podcast for ages, and had recently bought and was actually in the middle of reading Concerning LIttleton when we were talking. He told me “I bought concerning littleton and started to read it, I just got to say how amazing it is.”
So we had this lovely conversation.
And just like that, he went from fan to friend.
We’ve become fast friends, me and Danny, and his lovely wife/mommy Steph too. They’re helping me to test Project Longbottom and their help has been of immense value to me.
I feel incredibly lucky to have good friends like these.
So this is an experiment.
I was getting ready to leave the house this morning, and had some house chores to do. Which gave me some ideas about service, and what it’s really like, now that I’m really doing it.
And gave me the idea to record myself, so I could do my chores and blog at the same time.
Stan and Ford, from Gravity Falls
So what do I have in common with these two guys?
Just like them, I’m a grunkle. That is, I’m a great-uncle.
Through my marriage to Missy, I’m the uncle of my nephews, A1 and A2. And A1, the older of the two nephews, has two awesome sons of his own, K. and S.
I’m very fond of all four boys. In one way or another, I’ve done the avuncular thing with three out of four. (And S. is pretty new on the planet, being a newborn, so I’ll get there soon enough.) I’ve given advice, brought them to college in my car, and gone swimming with them, to name three different activities with three different nephews.
This makes me happy in a way that really struck home to me today as I was driving into work, and talking to my girlfriend about it. I also raised my stepson, Turtle for many years, back when his mom and I were married, and we still are in one another’s lives.
When I think about those things, they help me connect to an important and complex truth about myself.
My relationship with my dad was problematic to say the least. He wasn’t around a lot when I was a young kid. I idolized him and saw him as a mythic figure because of the way he floated in and out of my life. He traveled a lot for his job, and as it turned out for some not so great reasons. When I was in high school, and college, it was revealed rather spectacularly to me that he was in fact a terrible man who had done, and continued to do terrible things, to my family, and many others. That really knocked me for a loop for a damn long time.
As an adult, I tend to shy away from many norms and conventions. When I hear “This is how everyone does x…” I tend to go the other way. That’s especially true about social norms around family obligations.
But, over the years, I’ve gone from my knee-jerk, “I’m not gonna do what everyone else does” position, to a more moderate one, where I opt-in to what works for me, and make things my own.
Which gets back to that truth thing I was talking about earlier. The truth is, I love my family, bio, marriage, kink, poly, all of it. And I interact with them in the ways that work for me. I’m really a very good uncle. (And such a modest one, at that!)
I’m happy to share what I know, donate my elbow grease and effort to help my nephews, I’m patient, loving, and kind with them. And they’re all great. I’ve watched A1 and A2 grow up to be spectacularly great men. A1 is a good husband, and a great dad. A2 is smart, motivated, and adventurous. He moved to a foreign country to be with the man he loves, and married him. I’m so happy about that, and about them. I love my great-nephews, and I’m glad to have them in my life.
If I could phone-call the me of 20 years ago, and tell him that two decades down the line, he’d become a step-parent, and a grunkle and be happy about both of those things, that me just wouldn’t have believed it. I was so angry and bitter at my dad for being terrible and the betrayal of his falling off the very unrealistic pedestal I had put him upon.
As an adult I see that I get to opt-in to my family relationships, in the manner which works for me. That’s beautiful, and I’m grateful for it.
