On that front, I’m now looking at the amazing possibility of helping people in sexuality communities who have contacted me from Washington DC, Toronto, and San Francisco emulate the success of New York City’s event in their own hometowns. But not yet…. Not quite.

As the unconference ended, Sara and I were joined by a group of over 20 friends (and friendly acquaintances) for dinner at a nearby Asian restaurant. Despite my hunger (I only ate at the behest of my concerned friends during the day ’cause I was so busy), I didn’t want to finish my meal; I knew that would be the end of dinner, and the day. Nevertheless, day turned to night and as Sara and I walked around the corner for a modicum of privacy, excitement gave way to sadness and we said (temporary) goodbyes in tears.

I retreated from the city then, headed towards Providence, Rhode Island to stay with close friends who generously offered me the opportunity to create a small sanctuary in their spare room. This has been helpful, and I can begin to feel myself recovering, but I’m still having trouble grounding myself in the here and now or focusing on the new tasks at hand. For one thing, there are so many, and for another thing, they are so vastly different from what I’ve just done that mentally changing gears so radically, so quickly, under so much pressure, is actually painful.

When I moved my self and my life half way around the globe to Sydney last year, I felt optimistic about what I would find. Sadly, I didn’t find what I wanted. Now, having moved myself and my life all the way back across the planet and then some, I’m determined to make what I want—because it doesn’t exist yet, and no one knows what it’s going to look like…except me.

My hosts, Emms and Zac, are nothing short of a godsend. They are literally a healing warmth of a magnitude I could not possibly express adequately in words. Unfortunately, shortly after arriving in their home, I fell ill. Of course, this is not at all a surprise considering my physiological history for exactly such mind-body connection.

My attempts to focus on my writing (for my second and much more advanced web development book on CSS I’m authoring; my first book was much more 101-level) have been only partially successful, but I’m encouraged by this anyway. As Emms told me last night while cooking a pasta dinner for us all, “Comfort yourself with the standards of the world,” a piece of advice she wisely preceded with, “Now’s the time to focus on only the most important parts of your chapters.” This, all while taking my hand every time my eyes unexpectedly overflow with the salt water I feel like I’ve been storing up in them.

I’m a little…not annoyed…chagrined at the admission that yesterday was the first full day in more than 4 weeks that I didn’t cry at all. Not only this, but earlier today while my hosts were at their day jobs and I mainlined enormous quantities of tea as though it were a blood transfusion, I couldn’t stop myself from crawling backwards in time towards happier memories. I cried again, embarrassingly loudly since no one was home, and resigned to let my head rest for a while instead of forcing it further into failing attempts to create reusable patterns of CSS code for styling semantic markup.

To help with the memories, I’ve been playing MGMT’s Kids on repeat for what must be an hour or more now. I first heard it on Australia Day (apparently Australia’s almost-equivalent of America’s Columbus Day), which Sara and I spent with Janek and company at his house on a tropical, warm, rainy day in Sydney. The radio was playing all day but the only song I remember was this one because, somehow, it stood out like a spotlight. I remember laying on the couch in the living room with my head in Sara’s lap, eyes closed, as she pet my head and I purred along with the kittens in the far corner of the room. The memory is emblazoned in my mind’s eye as a vivid still frame.

When Zac came home and gave me a hug to comfort my tears, he remarked on the song. “It’s always weird to hear this song,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because Emms and I went to college with them—the band.”

And now I have two memories.

My flight from Sydney to New York City was less than good, better than terrible. I already knew I hated United Airlines, now I’m just more committed never to flying with them again. More than that, I’m frustrated that my flight was so dependent on choices Sara’s family made for her without consideration for me. If little else, I’m happy to be finally out of reach of their influence.

It’s been weeks, literally, since I haven’t cried at one point or another, usually multiple, in the day. I’ve been falling asleep in either tears or unmatched stress and restlessness—each has benefits over the other. Last night was no different.

Today I have errands to run for the KinkForAll New York City event I’m helping to run tomorrow. I’m extremely proud of the work Sara and I have managed to accomplish on it not only for the first time ever in our lives but also literally from the other side of the planet.

Simultaneously, I’ve been chasing and feeling continually frustrated by failing to make significant-enough progress on writing my book on CSS. My co-author Joe has been fantastic, and one particular employee, Clay, from the publisher has also been equally supportive. However, the rest of this project feels extremely precarious and that is endlessly aggravating.

It’s aggravating because it was a project I sincerely wanted to see done well, and have been working toward for a long time. I quit my day job something like 6 months ago now in order to focus on getting it accomplished successfully, but I am now further behind than I was then. Despite my best efforts, life kept throwing me curveballs to the point where I already know it’s not going to be the book I wanted it to be. I’m extremely angry at…everything…for that.

As if that weren’t enough, as many already know by now, Sara and I are no longer together, for reasons I’d rather not discuss quite yet. As painful as this would be in general, this is even more painful when seen in light of the fact that it’s one of the reasons my book has suffered. The book isn’t some great money-maker for me, but rather an opportunity for professional exposure and recognition that I’ve been working towards for 8 years—that’s how long I’ve been making money in the web development industry. To have that opportunity suffer pours salt into wounds that moving to Sydney in the first place had already re-opened and which the loss of this relationship is a 3^rd degree burn.

All in all, I’m struggling to keep professional commitments afloat, organizing a first-of-its-kind unconference for the sexuality communities in New York City, ending a 4-year relationship (with the person I’m organizing the unconference with), and moving across the planet. All. At. Once.

I want to change the channel off of this ridiculous soap opera, but can’t. Instead, I keep playing everything in fast-forward in my head until I can again see a point somewhere in the hopefully not too distant future where everything I’ve worked on is successful and I’m peaceful once again. Please let that day be soon.

My name is Meitar Moscovitz, and I am hoping that this letter serves two purposes. First, I want to express to you an enormous degree of thanks that, no matter how I try to codify it in writing this letter, seems to defy explanation. In part, this is because I have yet to understand just what sort of impact learning about you and your work is going to have on me. My (as yet admittedly slim) exposure to your work came first about two years ago when I saw your presentation appear on the TEDTalks video blog.

It was informative at the time, but I failed to make the information personally applicable to me then. Today, however, I am finding myself in a situation that is, for want of a better explanation with the ability to include copious back-story, at the point before a major turning point in my life in three major ways. (I am moving to Australia from New York City, where I have lived all of my life, with a girlfriend with whom my relationship is “complicated.”) As I’m sure many other people have done when presented with such a life-changing event, I am asking myself why I’ve never been able to “be happy” before, and whether such drastic change is really going to help.

A part of my story, and the second reason why I’m writing you, is that at the age of twelve I was diagnosed as having bipolar disorder. That diagnosis became an explanation for others to explain my dissatisfaction with my life, yet it’s an explanation I have always felt lacked real substance, even if it did put at least one more piece of the puzzle together. As far back as I can remember, I have always been wanting, rarely able to work joyfully, rarely able to love without fear.

Today, when I watched your talk on the TEDTalks video blog again, a lot of things you said became instantly pertinent in ways it had not been two years prior the first time I saw it. Suddenly, thanks to many other “pieces of the puzzle” beginning to fall into place, especially those that began to explain hardships in concrete ways (my various relationship struggles not least of them), I was able to understand how and why I might differ in regards to my seeming inability to achieve lasting happiness, in contrast with certain friends and, indeed, my girlfriend, who seems remarkably capable in this department.

Due to all of these things, I am now finding myself very interested to learn specifically about how and in what ways the concepts of neurodiversity, and specifically as it relates to “mental illnesses” such as bipolar disorder, correlate with your findings on synthetic happiness. Are people diagnosed with mental illness, such as I am, routinely less able to manufacture synthetic happiness than people who are not? If so, why, and in what ways?

I’ve spent a significant chunk of today searching the Internet for anything that might relate to the intersection of these two psychological and psychiatric disciplines, but have not turned much up. I would be greatly appreciative of any further information you might have on the topic, or pointers to where I might find such material. Either way, I’ll just keep looking anyways. :)

Thanks again for a marvelously inspiring and informative presentation.

Sincerely,
-Meitar Moscovitz
–
Professional homepage: http://meitarmoscovitz.com/
Personal homepage: http://maymay.net/

In less than two hours of being awake, I was crying in fits and starts on my bed again. I wanted to tire myself out again so I would go back to sleep. I just want to go away and hide.

I just took a little Happiness Formula test and the result I got is unsurprising:

Slightly below average in life satisfaction

People who score in this range usually have small but significant problems in several areas of their lives, or have many areas that are doing fine but one area that represents a substantial problem for them. If you have moved temporarily into this level of life satisfaction from a higher level because of some recent event, things will usually improve over time and satisfaction will generally move back up. On the other hand, if you are continually slightly dissatisfied with many areas of life, some changes might be in order. Sometimes we are simply expecting too much, and sometimes life changes are needed. […] Some people can gain motivation from a small level of dissatisfaction, but often dissatisfaction across a number of life domains is a distraction, and unpleasant as well.

For obvious reasons there’s been a lot of work done about trying to understand happiness. Everyone seems to have their own way about it, too. Something in this citation from my test result gave me a flashback.

When I was about 14 years old, I was a regular attendee of the Mood Disorders Support Group of New York (MDSGNY, for short). It was filled with people nearly twice my age, battling similar issues in much the same way that I was, with mood disorders ranging from mild depression to severe bipolar disorder and even frighteningly notable dissociative disorders. A common thread of advice that was given to us was that “people like us simply can’t expect to achieve the same accomplishments that people without these difficulties can.”

I found it insulting, and I was consistently questioning why that assumption was held so tightly with such a prevalent view. No one would ask why, or even seemed at all distressed by the fact. It was simply a matter of fact to most of the other attendees, and they seemed content with their resignation to accept it.

For a long time I’ve been struggling with understanding how other people seem so simply “predisposed to happiness” whereas I feel as though I am cursed by being “predisposed to sadness.” A short time ago, I wrote this:

In the search for answers people can come up with so many different rationalizations. It’s endless. The other day, I went to another party that I didn’t have a great time at through no fault of the very awesome hosts. This is becoming a trend I don’t like.

So, naturally, I instinctually come up with (endless) rationalizations to explain why. Every single thing I come up with is pure crap, of course, because it doesn’t really matter why I had a bad time since (surprise) it doesn’t change the fact that I had a bad time. No reason even has the potential to make me feel any better at all except for reasons that hinge solely on my own failings, because those are the only ones in which the situation was anything that “I could have done differently.”

Naturally (I have to imagine), thinking of my own failings makes me feel even worse. The net result is a cycle of thoughts that makes me feel bad and not good and in no way able to be happy about anything. And then I start to get quiet and go inside and want everything to stop.

This is such a typical thing. Everyone does it but from my vantage point it looks as though people react differently to such internal thoughts. I can’t see how they do that.

Most recently, it’s my relationship and social satisfaction that has seemed doomed to failure. I saw an interesting article on the BBC news web site about just such a thing: that researchers believe accepting sadness and resigning oneself to deal with the difficult times instead of believing in a fantasy where such sadness is simply gone, may in fact be one element of successful relationships. Another interesting quote from the article was this:

“The field of mental health perpetuates this myth with the very concept of “mental health,” which implies a state without suffering,” they say.

In other words, the very idea that sadness and difficulty is a sign of “mental illness,” judged only with the one-dimensional simplicity of the binaries of “mentally healthy” versus “mentally not healthy,” is worse than simply incorrect, but rather actively harmful.

In relationships, I have an unflinching confidence in myself to be able to “stick with it” through the bad times, but a persistent fear that my partner will never do the same. No other partner has proven themselves capable of this; each of them has high-tailed it and ran, and none want anything to do with me anymore.

It feels so circular.

A friend of mine recommended the blog of Penelope Trunk to me the other day. It was a wonderful recommendation. In one of her articles that I read, she says of the job hunt:

When it comes to career schemes, we simply do not have accurate imaginations about what life will be like for us in different situations, said Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University, when I interviewed him. Our most accurate information about what will make us happy comes from snooping in on other peoples’ lives to see if they are happy. And the best way to watch other people is to be in a variety of offices. Gilbert calls the informal process of judging other peoples’ happiness “surrogation,” and he says, “surrogation is the best way to predict if we’ll be happy. Observe how happy people are in different situations.”

This seems incredibly applicable to other arenas, such as personal fulfillment as well as social satisfaction. I’m heartened to see that my hard work and continuous efforts mimic this approach, even if I’m clearly not happy most of the time yet.

So, I don’t know. What makes you happy?

Am I asking too much? Why can’t I just go to parties and have a good time?

• Creative but non-technical pursuits (e.g., writing, philosophy, social theory)
• Knowledge-seeking activities, typically very techical ones (e.g., computer skills of various kinds, histories or scientific studies)

What is amazing to me is the sheer enormity of the number of people who have (or have had) authoritarian figures in my life in some capacity or another (e.g., parents, school teachers, employers, administrative personnel) who have completely missed this whole point and, associatively, everything it explicitly means and implies.

This makes those observant enough to notice it that much more valuable, and, sadly, makes me that much more upset when I fail to take advantage of such valuable resources in my life.

That is how well my father understood how to communicate with me, for I am all but incapable of communicating actively when I am in such a state as that.

Interestingly, it is only around another person that that state causes such a complete shutdown of my communicative faculties. Alone, I am still quite expressive, as this short piece illustrates, for it was written shortly after I was left alone in just such a state. Furthermore, an internal dialogue is constantly running through my head in these states. Indeed, I am very expressive in every meaning of the word, except in outward appearance. Small gestures such as the slight twitch of a finger are in fact huge, sweeping, screaming motions, so loud as to silence my own thoughts for a few moments and yet so invisible to an outside observer that I somehow feel that much more unheard when someone—through little fault of their own—fails to recognize it.

This is unendingly frustrating. I am at once both completely irrational and unreasonable, unforgiving of people’s blindness towards me and at the same time intolerably chastising myself for being so incommunicative. The internal war feels as though it is enough to tear me limb from limb, which in addition to making it hard to speak makes it hard to move. Muscles become at once weakened and strengthened, incapable of lifting the weight of my own extremities and yet ready to unfurl in so spectacular a display of speed and strength at a moment’s notice that one might believe them to be constructed as though they were made of some giant wound metal spring.

I do not understand why it is so insanely impossible for me to break from these states. Of course, in moments of obvious sanity I tell myself that it is precisely insanity that makes me so distraught. However, this very thought also makes me wonder how I can be so sanely aware of my insanity and yet be so unable to do anything about it.

The thing about being strong is that being strong means not getting what you want or what you need and yet being okay anyway. When I was young and, of course, even these days, I don’t always get what I want or need. I can do it, but I don’t like it. When I was young, my father would regularly tell me to be generous. The thing about being generous is that it makes it easier to be strong. That’s what my father was trying to teach me, I think. That’s really a very smart thing to teach a child.

My crappy ISP (named after a cartoon character) has been spotty all week, frustrating my attempts to be productive except in the case of playing with nmap. So I find myself playing with the WordPress to LiveJournal crossposter instead. This amuses me because now my posts from this blog will be posted to LiveJournal which will be fetched back to my LiveJournal mini-blog, and which will also appear on FaceBook. That’s what you get for unleashing content syndication on a restless boy.

Mostly, though, I want to shake this icky feeling and playing with technology can kill a lot of time.

Oh my god! This can not be happening to me. I simply can not deal with this.

There has been an ongoing issue at my work about training. After the absolute disaster at the last engagement I was on, I was promised three weeks of training–something I’d been asking for since after I finished my “official” training that I felt didn’t really help me at all because of the unorganized, utterly abysmal experience that was. Then it was two weeks. Then it a little more than one. Then it was just cancelled, and I was next put on an assignment that allowed me to work from home.

This working from home thing was awesome, because it meant two things. First, that I would get the chance to actually use the product I’m supposed to be an expert in supporting as opposed to looking over someone’s shoulder while they use it because they don’t want me touching their computer network due to the company’s security restrictions, which is what was happening at the disaster client. Second, it gave me the chance to work from home (duh), which is honestly not something I really care that much about for any reason other than the fact that it meant I don’t have to dress in ways I don’t feel comfortable and maintain this mask of someone who I’m not for the sake of the business. Admittedly, that is a big deal, but it’s not a dealbreaker, y’know? (I don’t actually have any problems being professional, but there’s a huge difference between being myself professionally and being a certain kind of professional that has to fit into the molds of the B2B corporate American mold. I can be professional, but I will never fit into that mold, not by a long shot.)

The really annoying thing about getting the chance to work from home, however, is that all this opportunity to spend at home is happening while Sara is in freakin’ Australia on the other side of the fucking world! Sara has been gone since january 24^th (and I missed her a ton immediately), the same day I fell awfully ill with the flu for half a week. It’s been an unbelievably long amount of time and the whole experience, for many reasons that I won’t go into here, has been harrowing in ways I wouldn’t have imagined to the point that I’m insanely anxious about simply getting to see her again because the thought fills me with a crazy sort of unimaginable fear. (I feel so stupid for being this scared about it.)

Now she is finally returning, though because of flight delays I don’t know exactly when, and I expected a call from her some time this morning but haven’t yet gotten one and it’s already 2:30 PM, so this whole airline delay thing may very well cut into our weekend plans. I have already booked flights for myself to Maine and for us to come back on Sunday night. I had to juggle my plans around because this next week at work was planned to be a formal Oracle database training intensive, which I have been looking forward to ever since my first day on the job when I learned about these training intensives because one of my bosses told me I had just missed (by a couple of weeks) the week of intensive Python training taught by Mark Lutz, the author of Learning Python, Second Edition. In brief, I cancelled my Monday day off that I would have spent as an additional “welcome back” period with Sara in Maine that I had asked for (and earned because of the fact that I worked the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday) in order to attend this Oracle training–because I wanted to.

Now, I just got an email from another engagement manager (a boss, basically), that they want me to fly out to Washington State so that I can be there on Monday through (probably) Friday. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!?!?! If I am made to go all the way across this fucking country on the first week of Sara’s return (this upcoming week) for a client who has offered me no real idea of what the fuck I’m supposed to do instead of the training everyone else is getting and that I was expecting from everything I was told at my interviews (I literally asked people “Why did you join this company,” and everyone told me because the learning opportunities were immense–which is true, the opportunties are immense and wonderful, but I want some of them too, damnit!), then I am seriously considering simply saying no and quitting my job on the spot. I simply don’t think I’ll be able to handle that, and with all of this turmoil and absolute torture this job is putting me through, I don’t think I’d feel as if it were such a loss (except financially).

I feel like every single fucking thing is going wrong right now. I don’t feel as though I have a damn shred of support (I know I do really, but it’s so far away), an ounce of understanding (again not really true, I have friends who can understand, but I don’t think Sara really can on anything but a cognitive level–not to say she doesn’t have struggles or that her battles are less important or easier than mine, but she does not have these struggles that I have and by that very fact simply may not be able to relate experiencially to what I’m going through), and the worst luck (and please don’t tell me to count my fucking blessings, that is not what I need right now; I know damn well what my blessings are, thank you). What makes it so unbelievably painful is that the whole of my experiences is so much less priviledged than Sara’s, who’s just been on a wonderful vacation for six weeks and is returning to the wonderful feeling of coming home for a weekend ski trip and to her boyfriend who is supposed to be ecstatic to see her. And I am ecstatic to see her again, but I am so stressed out and emotionally high strung right now that I feel as though I wish she isn’t going to have to put up with this from me.

I spoke for hours with my friend who’s staying with me (after her own horrendously painful breakup the week Sara left for Australia) and she told me that I have to start thinking about myself, not worrying about what kind of a burden I’m going to be on Sara. This is smart, and is probably what I should do, but it’s so hard for me to do that when I have this incredibly powerful urge to just focus all my energy on making everything good for Sara. (Why is that such a powerful urge? Oh my god, for many reasons, all of which are valid and many of which are perfectly healthy, but none of which I’m going to go into right now.)

My friend said that I should want to get pampered from Sara for a little while, have her take care of me, be treated to thoughtfulness and compassion and empathy, and that I should let go of all these stresses I keep taking upon myself like worrying about whether or not I’m going to be happy enough for her so she has a good time. Again, this is smart and makes sense; I can’t possibly have a good time or expect Sara to have a good time with me (which is what I want more than anything in the world right now) if I’m going to be obsessing about the question all the time. But I’m really scared.

I’m scared not only about this weekend but the future as well. What’s going to happen if Sara gets accepted to a school far away? Besides the point of fact that means she’ll be leaving New York, it makes me feel like another knife of how differently priveledged Sara and I are is once again thrust into my heart–not by Sara, just by the situation. I would feel much, much, much better about the whole situation where she feels like she wants to go to graduate school for creative writing if I could understand what the real driving force behind that motivation is. I have to know that if she leaves me for school (I evidently have major, major abandonment issues–not surprising considering my childhood with divorced parents and whatnot), she’s doing it for a reason that’s near and dear to her heart.

Not that I think she’d ever do something so big as moving to Australia for graduate school for any other reason than one that’s near and dear to her heart, but it will be easier to take if I can at least understand–not necessarily agree with–her choice of action and why that specific action of going to a graduate school is the right one for her to make, versus something like getting a full-time job and actually getting into the mindset of writing professionally–not just learning about writing–as I know she can do brilliantly. It comes back to the feeling of resentment (and I feel more guilt for having this feeling of resentment in the first place than I ever thought I would ever feel guilty about anything ever (especially since I constantly tell Sara that guilt is not a useful thing to dwell on–we both have our guilt complexes, me from this, and her from being more priviledged in life than I have ever been)) over my being forced by the Fates to fight a hellish battle for every scrap of happiness and capability to follow my dreams that I can get, whereas Sara has the good fortune to prolong her schooling–something she enjoys–and put off the dreadful experience of having a so-called “real” job (it is viscerally disgusting to me that a “real” job is always seen as something you don’t want) and putting up with the rest of the crap of living in the so-called “real” world (again, I want to vomit thinking that the “real” world is so full of strife all the time) for yet another four years (or more, if she goes for a Ph.D. in Writing in Australia).

(As a sidenote, holy shit, that was an insanely convoluted parenthetical paragraph. Also, I don’t actually wish for her to get a job she hates, of course. I would hardly wish this hell on my worst enemy.)

Again, it’s not that I think Sara doesn’t have her own stuff to deal with. But there is simply no arguing the fact that on many scales of measurable priveledge, she got dealt the better hand. She is brilliant, a constant inspiration to me. And she is so amazingly healthy. No other person I have ever met or ever heard of in my entire life, without exaggeration, is so glowing with the unmistakable aura of a uniquely qualified intelligent mind such as hers is and has not gone through a great deal of very measurable pain and suffering as the source for their genius, the likes of which is obvious to everyone who hears about their suffering. That is the case with me. I am very, very smart. I match Sara’s awesome strengths in many ways, such as self-awareness and intelligence, kindness, and skills in our respective interests. But I have so many still-open scars that have gotten me to this point. Her body is enviously relatively unscathed by the harsh realities of life.

I don’t want this whole thing to sound like a self-pity party–because that’s not what this is supposed to be, but I can’t not feel this way right now. I’m working on it, god, I’m really working on it as hard as I can because I don’t want Sara to have to deal with this huge amount of utter shit that’s in me. I miss smiling. I miss being happy enough to just listen to music and hum to myself. I can’t remember the last time I did that.

And of course, I miss Sara. My god, I miss Sara most of all.

Sara just called! Right as I was publishing this entry, Sara called. She had heard my rambling, crying message I left for her and called me back saying that she was sorry for saying that she’d call me this morning because she was thinking in California time, and I’m on New York time, so when she meant morning she meant California’s morning. (D’oh!)

However, also bad news is that because of the airline delays it is looking like she may not be able to get to Maine until 10 AM Saturday morning, which absolutely changes our weekend plans…. I don’t know what else to do about this weekend, my job, or anything right now, except to go through the motions as normal and so I’m just going to wait things out until I can see her and talk to her face to face and actually hold her in my arms again.

These past two weeks at work were prime examples of just such an occurance. The fact that these two weeks were supposed to be the weeks that I was getting additional training just makes this fact even more frustrating. Instead of additional training, which I still feel like I desperately need to be effective at my job (because the particulars of this product are so damn, well, particular), I was tasked with a vague and unexplained assignment.

(The kicker, by the way, is that in addition to the vague assignment, I was also given the task of training a new hire. So let me get this straight. You’re going to cancel my training, and then ask me to train someone. While I apprecaite the vote of absolute confidence, that’s more than a little backwards.)

The problem with vague assignments is that they don’t give me a direction to work in. There is certainly a balance to be struck between micromanaging an employee and giving them no direction. Neither side of the scale is appropriate or helpful. It’s interesting to me, however, because never before in my life have I experienced the “no direction” side of things so often. This assigment takes the cake, even in this job.

I understand now what it means when employers and managers say that they want someone who can “work independently.” What they mean is “we just want to give you some vague idea about what we’re looking for, because honestly we have no idea what it needs to look like and only sort of know what it needs to do, and you should fill in all the details yourself. Oh, and you’d better get it right.” (How the hell should I know what right is if you don’t even know, and I’m doin this for you?) Naturally, this makes a lot of sense and sounds perfect (especially to managers). After all, why shouldn’t employees do this?

Well of course they should. The problem isn’t in the paradigm, it’s in the execution. This paradigm assumes that the employee already knows what the desired result is and how to accomplish it. If this were the case, then the request wouldn’t have seemed vague to begin with. It’s the fact that I don’t know enough about the situation (see infuriating lack of context), the product (see infuriating lack of training), and the requirements (see infuriating lack of clear communication) that make it vague.

Thanks to so many reasons such as the Peter Principle and the nature of managerial work to forego employee’s interests in favor of shareholder’s interests, companies consistently sabotage their own best efforts to be successful. While I am sure that the size of a company is one contributing factor to this sabotage, I think that it misses the point. More to the point is the fact that managers are to blame.

A company that does not strive to “be large and successful” is not going anywhere. But it’s the manager’s fault that such horrendous acts of self-mutilation happen over and over again. Workers need proper training, managers need proper communication skills, and both parties need the wherewithall to understand the basics of teamwork. Frankly, these things are all sorely lacking pretty much everywhere.

Just another of the countless reasons why I know I’ll never be happy in corporate America. The more of this shit that happens, the more convinced I am that I’m here for the experience only. What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger, right? It’s just a question of when the next better opportunity comes along. There’s no point in suffering to gain experience when experience can be gained without suffering.

Oh my god. What am I doing? This situation just keeps getting worse. I’m amazed, utterly and completely amazed at the childishness of all of this. I have no idea what I’m here for, what I’m doing, what to do. I get forwarded emails with questions to which the answers are behind a single link in the email itself. (Why are you asking questions? You obviously didn’t actually read the email.) I write up huge amounts of detailed information on the situation only to be told I sound like a technical madman guru, and to please compose a Power Point presentation instead. (Technical madman guru? I didn’t even use a single acronym in the whole document, nor did I even talk about computers. I talked solely about the ridiculous interpersonal antics of the people I’m working with. Or not working with, as the case may be, because of said stupid interpersonal antics. And Power Point? Oh, I get it, no full sentences and really big text. Yeah, that does seem to be the norm for some reason.)

No one smiles, everyone talks quietly. Walking over to each other’s cubes has been replaced by email because of the tension. (What sense does it make to send an email to each other when I can hear you breathing not ten feet from me?) I can’t believe this is what the modern workplace is like. I’m so disappointed in our society right now, so angry that people as a collective don’t see this as a major problem, an incredibly unhealthy and dirty thing.

I feel so fed up with all of it, so much like just screaming at the top of my lungs at all these zombies around me. They are so dead, so…plugged into their insignificant activities. I loathe the thought that I even look like any of these people with their bland clothes and black leather shoes, identical haircuts and PDAs and black Dell laptop bags. It feels disgusting, like heavy vomit.

I hate it. And most of all, I hate that I spent the entire day doing “work” and I didn’t learn a damn thing about anything interesting.

Update: In fairness, today was a much better day, though in large part only because I found out I’ll (probably) be scheduled for additional training in the coming weeks. It was supposed to be three additional weeks, then two, but then there’s a holiday, so it’s really one and a half weeks, but that’s better than nothing. I just hope this won’t be like the first time I went to so-called “training.” I want to actually feel like I’m learning something that’ll help me.

Second update: So it turns out training was totally canceled on me, which is not a big surprise, but I did get the opportunity (probably by being pulled off the project I was on) to work from home for a few days, which was absolutely awesome (and educational!) anyway. And today, my first day in three days back in an office, I got to meet the new “boss” guy, who seems nice but, better yet, made an impassioned 10 minute speech about the importance of team building, ongoing training, and knowledge sharing to a successful team. Maybe things’ll get better around here after all. I can hope, can’t I?

I said no. I’m a little worried about that. Fact of the matter is, I’m just not that devoted. I see no real benefit from working more. I don’t earn more money and I’m not exactly having a ball. Frankly, I can’t understand why the people who said yes actually said yes. I did feel the pressure to say yes, and though I still don’t know if I would have done so, the fact that saying yes would have meant that the last time I saw Sara until she returned from Australia would have been tomorrow closed the argument. There was just no way I was going to give up the last weekend I could spend time with her in over a month for…that.

Consolingly, Sara told me I could explain that this situation isn’t typical and so my refusal is a special case. But the more I think about it, the more I don’t want to say that because if I am asked to do many more of those such things, I intend to say no just as often. My job should only be my life if I am doing only what I want to do and nothing else. There’s so little reason in this day and age why people should ever, ever do anything (significant) they don’t genuinely want to that I’m growing increasingly frustrated seeing such pointless things around me and as a part of my life so often.

I love technology and I love learning more about it, solving problems, working on implementing solutions, and documenting them thoroughly. There’s no question I’m better off today than I ever have been before. But it’s not good enough. I’m still doing and putting up with so much of other people’s bullshit that I shouldn’t have to–that nobody should ever have to–that I know I’ve still got a long way to go.

The way I see it, there are only two ways I can ever make doing what I want and only what I want a reality. The first is to work for myself, freelance or start-up company or something. For the several years that I did that, I was actually much happier for a much longer time than I’ve ever been when I worked as an employee of any company, big or small. I think that is because I focused on solely what I wanted to do and deemed worth doing. The only issue was that my income was not steady and ultimately not profitable enough to sustain a living doing the kind of web development I was doing. I’m not going to be an exceptional web developer; there are too many other people out there who are far better at that than I am. I lack the graphic design skills to be a designer and I lack the programming skill to be a one-man developer of anything beyond small projects.

The only other way to ever do only what I want, then, is to join an open source or open source-like organization where I get paid for it. Unfortunately, I am too unskilled and thus unknown for anyone to be that interested in me right now. Hopefully, this will eventually change, and I’ll get better and better and become a uniquely qualified individual for some uniquely specialized task that I enjoy doing. However, there is no doubt in my mind that this will never happen if I work for a company that still functions in the old-model of thinking, closed source and closed minds. It is a requirement that I task myself to ensure that I only receive tasks that I enjoy, and that is only possible in groups when collaboration is voluntary.

I am also not yet over being incredibly bitter and resentful at the world at large and at certain past situations in particular for making this sort of thing a constant battle for me. The majority of my life has been a constant struggle to make others see the most basic, fundamental, obvious things. I resent that most of my memories of growing up are about fighting with parents and teachers about my own well being. I am angry that I have had to parent myself to such a degree that I feel so much older than everyone my own age. I felt like I was 20 at 12, like 30 at 16 and now like 45 at 22. I am tired of fighting.

Helen Fisher is an anthropologist with Rutgers University, specializing in gender differences and the evolution of human emotions. Her most recent book is “Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love.” In this wide-ranging talk, she outlines the bio-chemical foundations of love (and lust), and discusses the natural talents of women, and their new significance in the modern world. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 24:13)

However, listen carefully, and you’ll hear her also make a case for polyamory, something I’ve written about before. Helen says:

However…these three brain systems, lust, romantic love, and attachment…aren’t always connected to each other. You can feel deep attachment to a long term partner, while you feel intense romantic love for somebody else, while you feel the sex drive for people unrelated to these other partners. In short, we’re capable of loving more than one person at a time.

It’s a good talk, and definitely worth a listen.

Yesterday I spent the entire, similarly-gorgeous day indoors browsing the web and reading email. My only claim to productivity is a draft for two presentations on tech stuff (keyboard shortcuts and advanced uses for Address Book), which took all of fifteen minutes to think up, outline, and pitch. I browsed the documentation for Google Maps’ API but didn’t even play with it myself.

The only thing I could think about last night was how much time I wasted, and how much I didn’t get done. I mean, if it takes me a mere fifteen minutes to come up with what I feel are two really good outlines for presentations, imagine what I could have created if I spent just 45 more minutes on that project. What if I spent 2 hours of the day actually working. What about 10?

Being alone, that is, now that Sara is visiting in Maine for a while, has one of two noticeable effects on me.

1. My productivity increases because I have more time with fewer distractions (which is not to say Sara’s a bother, it’s just that when I have more space to myself there are, by the circumstance’s very nature, fewer distractions to keep my productivity down—and I’m extremely prone to be disrupted by distractions)
2. My productivity decreases because I lose my ability to self-motivate, for one reason or another.

And that’s what started this blog post in my head. I came home, glanced at my blog comments (to get rid of the daily barrage of spam that I get hit with) and saw this entry, a draft I began more than a year ago (back in October of 2004, actually). Here’s how the original draft began:

The other day when Danica’s parents came to town they spoke with Danica about why she had decided to stop her schooling at NYU. Over and over again one recurring theme kept appearing in the conversation. It reminded me of the conversations I had had with my parents when I left school: I need to focus on being able to live a normal, functional life. That’s hard enough without having to deal with a rigid institution such as NYU.

Reading that made me think about my job. I like my job. I like my job a lot. In fact, I can honestly say it’s the best job I’ve ever had. It’s better, in many respects, than even my freelance time because I’m constantly surrounded by very intelligent, super-friendly, extremely personable people. In fact, it’s downright awesome because there’s a huge focus on my very favorite thing: learning more about technology. I constantly have to stay up-to-date with the latest goings on for both hardware and software developments to do my job well, and all of that self-development is not only encouraged, but mandated.

However, for me, mandates pose a problem. Long-time readers (aka, people who know me really well) will think they know where this is going: my problem with requirements, rigid rules and regulations, authority, and what not. Well, they might be right. But here’s how I’m approaching it this time.

I’ve struggled for years, and I’m still struggling, to get myself discipined enough to motivate my own personal goals without external pressure. At the very least, I want to find appropriate external force to instigate such motivation in myself. That’s not easy to do. The problem is, having a job, where my bosses tell me what to do and it’s clear, every minute of every day, exactly what needs to get done, completely destroys any sense for self-motivation I have outside the workplace. That is a disaster, and should not be the case. I’m hoping it’s not, that I’m just in a personal slump, or maybe I just had a lazy day. (There’s nothing wrong with taking a lazy day for oneself, is there?)

However, my personal projects continue to pile up. Things I’ve said I’d do for months now have still not even begun. I need to organize my finances. I need to inventory all my hardware. I need to (re-)organize my workpace to take advantage of all my new equipment (yay for flat-panel displays and the increased desk space they provide, not to mention KVM switches!). Plus, it’s summer, which means if I don’t get my hotspot in the park up and running soon I will literally beat myself for putting it off.

And that’s just naming a few. I also have four or five programming projects I want to do, I’m absolutely drooling to learn more about Xcode 2.3, and somewhere in the middle of all of that I want to continue my certification training courses (hopefully with some kind of discount/voucher because those are really putting a burning crater in my wallet).

Of course, my other bad habit is turning projects like these, overwhelming and huge as they are, into obstacles rather than opportunities. I look at all of this, all of the stuff I have not done, and I think, “Gee whiz, I can’t possibly do any of that. It would take me forever and a day to do it all!”

The sad part is that even if I’m right, I’d be happier doing it and never finishing any of it than I would not even starting. So why am I still writing this entry and not doing anything about it? Good question, Meitar. Let’s change that right now.

Which of the following operating systems use Kerberos for authentication? (Select all that apply.)

• Mac OS X Server
• Windows 2000 Server
• Windows 2003 Server
• NetWare

If you selected all of them, you got the question wrong, even though you’re technically correct. All of these operating systems can use Kerberos for authentication, but according to my prep tests for the Network+ exam, Mac OS X can not implement Kerberos.

It’s these kinds of questions which are totally pissing me off about these certifications. The last thing I wanted was this whole thing to turn into something I just wanted to get over with, but now it feels exactly like that because these goddamn test questions are quite simply wrong.

::writing slightly huffy email to these people::

Update: earlier today I have obtained my fourth computer certification in as many months, the Network+ CompTIA certification. :) Now to choose my next goal….

One of the reasons I think I had a good day today is because I’ve acted on some good habits. I’ve learned a bunch of new tech stuff in the past week or so and it occured to me that I should probably write all this stuff down. So I sat down after work and tried to remember exactly what all this new stuff is, and then add it to my growing so-called knowledge file. This is a plain text file with a simple format that basically stores every little tidbit of knowledge I learn or deem useful enough to have at a moment’s glance. Some random excerpts:

Operating modes refer to the state of the processor. There are three operating modes that the PMU can be set to:
* Run single – the processor is awake and running
* Idle – the processor is asleep
* Sleep – the computer is asleep and the power light is pulsating

New in Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” on portable (laptop or notebook) computers is an option to read the number of charge cycles of a battery inside of system profiler.

If Mac OS X hangs or freezes on boot at the blue screen just prior to the appearance of the Login Window try moving or renaming the /Library/Preferences directory and restarting.

I also finally got a good night’s sleep yesterday evening for the first time in about a week. It seems that even though I usually only used to get somewhere betwen 5 and 7 hours of sleep a night, the whole on-my-feet-for-the-whole-day thing requires a bare minimum of 8 hours of restful sleep in order not to come home feeling exhausted.

And I really would like to be able to come home and spend my evenings in a productive manner, whether that be pushing on with personal projects, blogging, or something. New workflows are always difficult to settle into, so I’ve returned to my previous strategy of trying to find ways to organize the workflow and make things faster and easier to do.

For now, sleep.