Resolute

I dislike resolutions for the new year. I think it's silly that a specific, arbitrary date is forcing us to make changes in our lives, when we should be making those changes every day. I also think this temporal quality of the resolutions contributes to the terrible success rates these resolutions tend to be met with.

And yet, my life has pivoted entirely in an astonishingly short amount of time, and it dramatically all unfolded in perfect timing for the new year. So I feel compelled to brush off this blog I haven't posted to in almost a full calendar year to think about the coming year.

I just accepted an offer for a new job, and will be signing the paperwork to begin as soon as humanly possible. I'm optimistic about the company, and a large part of that is the speed with which they sped me through the interview process. I IMed the CTO on 12/27 about the position. He replied and told me to forward them a résumé. He read through the résumé, chatted a bit with me, and set up a Google+ Hangout with the executive team for 12/30. I woke up on 12/31 to the job offer. I told them I liked to be in a culture that valued getting things done; they gave me an interview process of four days. That's fantastic.

I haven't officially mentioned it to anyone at the school yet, but I'm leaving college. I doubt I'll be coming back. College does not have a culture that values getting things done.

I'm not sure where I'll be for the foreseeable future. I'll be discussing it with my family during the next week, while in Syracuse. I may just stay in Syracuse, living with my family as I try to reverse the damage being in college did to my depression. I may continue to live in Buffalo, combatting depression the best way I know how: doing what I love. That decision won't be mine to make alone, and I'm afraid of it.

I don't have a resolution this year. I don't want to resolve a past issue in my life. I want to take this pivot and run with it, building the best future I possibly can. As I fall asleep tonight, this will be my mantra:

There are over 7 billion people on this planet. By the time you finish this thought, 250 new people will be born, 250 new lives will begin. That is 250 chances for you to change a life, to meet someone great, or to meet someone who will change the way you see the world. Every minute, 105 people die. That's 105 chances you most likely missed. That's 105 less opportunities in the world.

You are not unique, you are not special. Those are concepts that are limited to a time when the earth was large and empathy was small. There are people out there who are smarter than you, better than you. There are 7 billion people out there, and each will make you feel like an idiot about something. But that just means 7 billion people who are qualified to make your life better, and 7 billion people whose lives you have a responsibility to improve. Being unique or special is a sad, stale, and stagnating way to see the world. There is nothing worse than being the best thing you encounter on any given day.

Good night, moon. Good morning, 2012.

I met you on the dance floor
Where passion goes for birthing
You looked at least as lost as I was--
I think that's what drew me to you
Not your nondescript shirt
Full of pockets for you to hide in
Not your slightly imperfect features
Marred only by unnoticeable distortion
It was your eyes, the world I saw in them
As you danced by yourself
that made me extend my hand, in offering.

I spun you under my arm
the gateway to a world neither of us knew
and pulled you close, wrapped my arms around you
as much to keep me safe as you.
And as we ventured to worlds unknown
your hand clutching at my thigh
my fingers locked with yours
our fear and worry and hesitation palpable
I knew you were but a moment
That this was all you would give me
And I knew as you embraced me,
softly kissing my cheek before scurrying away
into a world I'll never know,
I knew you had given me more than anyone else
More than anyone could or would.

A moment.

In the nineties, we sang angsty and angry ballads about changing our world, about the decay of life around us. Ironically, we were never more alive. How do we document real life, when real life's getting more like fiction each day?

It's 2011. Nobody wants to document real life anymore. Real life is getting further and further from fiction. We won. We changed things. Dichotomies broke down, things lost some clarity, lost some of the "us" and "them". But at what cost?

It's wonderful that we're moving away from all the terrible things we do to each other. It's great that there's become less of a "them". But in doing so, we've lost the "us", as well-- it was defined by the "them".

What these Zoloft-fueled, 3-in-the-morning thoughts really come down to is, if someone were to document real life today, what would they say? They'd tell an empathetic story of mixed feelings and compromises.

Give me back my absolutes, my caricatures.

Nobody Can Live In The Theatre

Ever since I was a kid, I've been fascinated by the theatre. I think it has something to do with the fact that everything is, by necessity, so much bigger when it's on stage. Everything is larger than life because, let's face it, nobody wants to see a husband and wife fight. But throw it on stage, blow it up so it's larger than life, and suddenly it's interesting and artistic. When we expand things to larger-than-lifesize like that, they start incorporating literary elements, they start showing us things about ourselves. We cling to the cliches and archetypes and caricatures because they're convenient and easily recognisable, and because they are organic representations of the things we see in each other and ourselves. They're relatable.

I've always wanted to live in a theatre. I've always wanted everything to be larger than life, always wanted things to mean nothing or everything. There would never be a dull moment, right?

The problem with living in a theatre is that the people don't scale. The people around you are people, not cliches or archetypes or caricatures. And endless monologues are lonely things to give.

It's been a while since I wrote here last. A month, almost.

I've been keeping myself busy. I launched a defective product, I spent a bunch of time providing bug fixes for it, I took on contracts for clients, I worked and worked and worked. And you know what?

I'm seeing little reward from it.

That is purposefully disingenuous. I am being paid quite well, have wonderful relationships with my clients, and have somehow risen to the enviable position of turning down work I never sought in the first place. Kevin Purdy, of Lifehacker and Complete Android renown, and other well-connected friends and acquaintances in Buffalo keep pushing contracts and jobs towards me. I am, in a certain sense, being rewarded handsomely for my "work". But in the sense that matters most to me, my sense of accomplishment and quality of life, my high water mark for my emotions... in these places, I seem to be falling short, stagnating.

Part of the problem is that, since August, I've been embroiled in the part of being a programmer I hate the most: maintenance and revision. Part of what I love about programming is the high, the sense of freedom, the grandiose visions that starting a new project grant you. I haven't felt that, in all honesty, since August, not counting a brief moment of insanity here and there. Part of this, ironically, is the fault of my own success; a project that was started without that high, sans those grandiose visions, actually took off and began fulfilling some of the ones I would have had. Kevin, again, is to thank for that. In essence, all the problems in my life right now boil down to "It's pretty much Kevin's fault." I kid. Sort of.

I want to be working on something new. I have lots of ideas. I have lots of exciting technologies to play with, lots of interesting people to talk with, lots of encouragement. The only thing I truly lack is time.

I return to school in a week. I have yet to write the papers or read the books I need to have read by then. I've yet to start. Hell, I still haven't registered for classes. How can I already have no time to do this stuff, and be losing vast amounts of my day shortly? That's just not fair.

In roughly 12 hours, I'll be meeting with my doctor for a variety of reasons, mainly to get refills on my dextroamp-amphetamine, the federally controlled pills that let me have an attention span longer than--- ooh, kitty. But I also plan to broach the whole "sleep disorder" thing then, because I feel like that's where a lot of my time goes. If I could rid myself of that nasty compulsion, the unnerving need to go into a coma every day for a third of the day, I think I'd be a much more productive person.

I feel kind of fucked by Google. And that's totally not ok of me.

See, I was blessed by Google. I was one of ten people outside of the company given super-early access to their awesome new Channel API way back in October-ish. At the time, they gave access to my development server for android2cloud, to load-test the service and figure out how it works under load. They said they'd be expanding the test server numbers to check and see how more and more user load affected the server as time went on. That's totally reasonable, and I was lucky to get what they gave me. Because I'm a greedy little bastard, I asked that the production server be considered for the larger tests, and was given an assurance that it was "exactly the kind of environment [they'd] want" when the time came.

So I faithfully ported android2cloud, tried to work out the kinks in the system, tried to help out the other developers who were gifted with this early access. And we heard very little about the roadmap and schedule of the testing. So, we moved along. I had to stop working with the Channel API after a while, and pick up nodejs, to try and get a patch for my server issues out the door as soon as possible. And that's where I was, when I saw the TechCrunch post today.

After that, I saw the App Engine blog post.

The impression I get from both posts is that Channels are available in all App Engine apps now. Which leaves me a little hurt and upset, and I'm simultaneously hoping that it is true and not true. I want my server problems to go away, and this gives me a huge amount of breathing room. But I also wanted to get some load testing metrics, get some idea of how this would actually work with our system, have some forewarning so I could handle this gracefully and smoothly. Finding out through a third party, then hearing about it on the official blog, and not even getting a similar announcement in the mailing list is kind of a slap, after everything. And I posted links to both posts on the mailing list, and asked if this meant the Channel API was available to everyone now. Nobody has clarified yet.

And then I think about everything that's happened, and this saga as a whole. And I feel like an ungrateful little shit, because the company that did so much for me and made such exceptions for me didn't remember to give me forewarning before launching the feature I had been testing for them, as a favour to me. If they even launched the service, which I'm still unclear on.

I picked up a new book about a week ago when my ex-boyfriend was visiting me (that weird occurrence seems to be a common one, for us) called "say everything" by Scott Rosenberg. It's just a story of how blogging began, and it is actually a rather fascinating read. I recommend it.

But I'm sitting here tonight, in a rather glum mood (sleeping for 24 hours straight seems to bring those on), mulling over that ex-boyfriend I mentioned. And I have to ask myself: why do we feel the need to say everything? Why does the human psyche give such a damn about being heard?

I don't really have an answer, but I do have a guess: It's therapeutic. That's the long and the short of it. Saying everything is a therapeutic endeavour that we all should try at one point or another. It doesn't even matter if anyone's listening, as long as we believe they're listening. This is what blogging, then Facebook Status Updates, and now Twitter is all about. (On a side-note, I'm being blessed with people who are listening because I have a kick-ass group of Twitter followers.)

I think that, from the time when we were keeping diaries, we have had trouble knowing ourselves. We have no idea how we sound, we forget what used to be important to us, and we cannot seem to get an outside view of ourselves. Writing things down helped that; we could recall that, at one point, the pants we wore to a party was more important to us than who went to the party. We could view something we wrote a month ago, and realise we were kind of an asshole. We could (maybe) consider whether we were still an asshole. For once, we could step outside our bodies and really get to know ourselves.

I think, over time, we've been developing simpler and simpler ways to do this, and simpler and simpler ways to share it. The act of making it simpler to do makes sense to me, and seems in line with the therapeutic self-improvement the form is meant to accomplish. But the sharing? I'm having trouble deciding why it's so important to people to easily share their thoughts, ideas, feelings, and things that should leave them feeling vulnerable with the world. Why did I challenge myself, not to write every single day, but to make a blog post every day? I can't answer for anyone but me.

I have a history of starting things and never finishing them. A terrible practice I try to get out of at every opportunity. One of the tricks I've learned, over the past few years, is that getting other people involved shames me into doing things. I'm ashamed of myself when I miss a post here. I'm ashamed of myself when I haven't made enough progress on a project other people are working towards. So I think, by sharing our innermost selves with the world, we're pushing ourselves to share more, engage in this therapy more. Writing is work, and even if it's good for us, we still need to get motivation to do it.

Why do you share?

"People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

-- Maya Angelou

This quote has been written on my wall for a little over a year now, I imagine. I rather like it, probably because it validates my vague feeling-based judgement of people. People fit a certain mould for me, fall into certain categories, based on feelings and vibes I get from them. Maybe that's weird. Maybe that's not. I don't know.

I've been thinking a bit about this, though. Matt, who I'm sure you'll hear plenty of as this blog continues, only stays in my life because of the way he makes me feel. He does terrible things to me, and generally doesn't treat me well, but he makes me feel better when I'm around him. So I keep putting myself around him.

Sometimes, I wonder how I make people feel. I tend to obsess over it; whether people feel like I'm rude, or unwanted, or not living up to their expectations. It's a constant, nagging fear at the forefront of my mind that makes it really hard for me to be natural in social situations. But I can do it when there's someone there with me, whose feelings towards me I know. It's weird, but having that one other person there gives me the ground to stand on that I need. Without that ground, I just can't... be myself. I don't know why having someone else there that I understand means so much to me, but it does.