I tend to be overly verbose. This does not play well with social media in the 21st century, of the 280-character tweets, short status updates that fit on a single screen; gotta leave room for the hashtags, eh? So I'm bringing back my huge wall of text to air out what's on my mind, as Covid-19 restrictions have largely caged me in my own home, in my own mind, without much other outlet for my stream of consciousness. I've mourned the loss of the freedoms of the pre-Covid days, and got over actually caring that anyone actually read anything that I write -- maybe -- so away we go!
The ground rules:
[13 July 2020]
It's been four months since daily life shut down, to be replaced by shelter-in-place, distance learning, hoarding for the apocalypse, and trying-to-work from home for a full-time job. Surprisingly, work has been the one thing that has felt the least disrupted since mostly I've been the keep-it-to-yourself-and-get-your-shit-done kind...and distance-working has fit into this anti-social mode just fine. I laugh (on the inside of course) every Friday afternoon at my group's "forced-socialization" sessions -- known to the colleauges as a Virtual Beer Bash; but lately there's been little beer, no bashing to speak of, and we all seem to be going through the motions miserably for thirty minutes pretending to be interested in the personal lives of people we otherwise couldn't care less about outside of work...if not for the Covid thing; heck, if we're lucky, someone might have some ice cream on their end of the Webex or something -- and I wonder if that's what this world is coming to: people seeking out solace in sharing stuff with others. But how meaningful is it really, when the people you socialize with are conveniently the ones you work with, rather than people of your own choosing? And similarly, what happens if due to circumstances beyond your control (*cough*covid*cough*), you have not been in any contact all for four months with those who previously brightened your days, one small innocous-transactional ping at a time? Video conferencing does a great job standing in for scheduled meetings and such; but not such a good job replicating the spontaneous unplanned interpersonal interactions that provide variety to an otherwise banal existence we call "the daily grind." Sad, really.
That all aside, after burning through streaming video services, setting up video games for the kids, building more chicken coop in the backyard -- what with this extra time not going anywhere off my own property, I've turned to reading a few books for leisure (shock! but don't get too excited -- these things are on my iCloud account, and not on a shelf anywhere). Still haven't gotten a feel for what kind of stories I'm into, since reading for fun is something I stopped doing in like middle schaool, and am just starting to pick up again. Mostly stuff related to, or based on, stuff I've watched with the kids off my Plex server during quarantine "Movie Nights." Most recently, I spent many hours over the past weekend on my iPad plowing through the prequel to the Hunger Games, which might have held more meaning had I actually read the first three books instead of just watching the four movies. (Aside: There are worse ways I could have spent my glued-to-the-screen time; I could have been watching mindless youtubers playing Pokémon or Minecraft, or I could have been mindlessly playing Farmville or watching yet more Netflix). I have a few thoughts about the whole thing that are still simmering in my head, like: if C. Snow is Anakin Skywalker, does that make Dr. Gaul analogous to Palpatine? And Lucy Gray is Padme? And Katniss is Rey, kind of? Everyone loves a good origin story, I guess; but how different is it when you know what becomes of the characters whose arcs are (supposedly) being built? Can you imagine if one day someone writes a similar origin story for one Donald John Trump, about his insecurities as a young adult, and the motivations and the mentors who shaped his worldview? hmmm...
Also...I can't help but hear the UMich fight song in my head every time I see the word "victors." Weird.
Note to self: typing raw-HTML in vi over an ssh connection on my iPhone is not sustainable long-term. Need to figure out something better for next time.
[14 July 2020]
For as much as parents/teachers/kids hated #distancelearning in April and May of 2020, we could have used this as motivation to follow the science, the regulations, and not just flatten the curve, but send the curve crashing into the x-axis before joining the economic arms race to ease these so-called restrictions. Then, with viral levels under control (see: New Zealand), it may have made sense to open schools -- with social distance guidelines in place -- in the fall, if even only half-time at half-capacity, giving everyone (ok, parents and their kids) a reprieve from having to deal with each other all day, everyday. But no...out of sight, out of mind. With the school year out, and after bidding a ridiculously-hopeful "good riddance!" to distance learning, people quickly forgot the pain (or didn't care to examine the big picture); rushed like hell to exercise their pent-up freedoms, and with the lack of an overall direction from authority figures (or rather, from authority figures who could actually enforce anything), here we are, in worse shape than "square one" where we started in mid-March.
Determined to prove that I am indeed able to learn from past mistakes, here's what I will be doing differently for distance-learning, round 2, starting on 20-Aug 2020, with the overriding theme that Work Is Not More Important (to me, the parent) Than School:
But who am I kidding? What are the chances that we're all going to be able to collectively put in the extra work necessary to make distance-learning a success? Where's the incentive?
[15 July 2020]
"There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is age 11."
-- Dave Barry
It's the kids' birthdays, in the Coronavirus-WFH-Social-Distancing age, and I guess what they (at age 8 and 10) have shown today is that they are mature beyond their years (immature whining and uncontrollable panic upon seeing a spider notwithstanding). All they wanted for their birthday was to be lazy bums at home, play video games, watch TV, and not get nagged for not cleaning up after themselves and such. That, and plush stuffed pusheens too. Very low-key (and very anti-social); but as someone who had four hours worth of Webex meetings to dial into from the next room, I didn't think much of it.
And so the real question turning around in the back of my mind: is it so wrong that the kids' ideal way to spend their birthday was at home, doing nothing and enjoying every minute of it? Is it written somewhere that a birthday (or any day for that matter) cannot be fully enjoyed if a person does not make a big deal about it, does not do something out-of-the-ordinary "special" like play hooky from work and take a drive down the coast? If it's not Instagrammable (as playing video games in one's PJs isn't. neither is lounging in a hammock with a messy backyard as the backdrop), is it inherently inferior to another experience (bouncing around in the cesspool of germs at a party place, or jumping out of a life-size birthday cake)?
Where are these expectations of what's "worthwhile" and what isn't come from? Who teaches us that our ordinary daily life activities themselves are inherently not enjoyable? And when did it become of such importance to share pictures of everything with everyone, but only a sanitized version, and not the actual kids-not-smililng, hair-out-of-place, oh-my-house-is-a-mess reality? It's one of the reasons I've quit the visual-social-media scene in favour of a wall of text.
I might suggest that there's a bigger lesson that we all can learn from the simple-mindedness of my kids. And even if society at large -- those who are so disturbed by lack of social contact that they've up and undone the country's entire progress against COVID19 -- does not agree, why should I care what they think?
[19 July 2020]
I think it all started a few years ago when the Pokémon Go! app came out and took over everyone's phones by storm or something. Within a month or two, I had gotten bored and deleted the app; but the wife and kids kept on following along and virtually catching Pokemon (cheating with a jailbroken iPhone and location fakers notwithstanding). And now, four years later or whatever, both my kids have become Pokemon fanatics, binge-watching the horribly-animated series on Netflix (I should stop paying for that if I never actually use it), knowing the ins and outs and trivia of all the different kinds of Pokemon, above and beyond anything that appeared in the iPhone app that started it all.
At first, I thought it was something good -- that the kids found something they both could be interested in. It has now morphed its way over to GBA (emulated) RPGs, which, when combined with the sheer geekdom level of detail with which they have studied this stuf, gives me a bad feeling that they may end up along the lines of my sometimes-socially-inept freshman-year college roommate. I mean, nothing wrong wtth being heavily invested in a certain video game universe and all, but allowing it to seemingly take over one's life is the bigger worry -- what with the way the kids waste away their summer days in front of a screen playing a Pokemon video game or watching a youtube video about Pokemon games, or how they engage in complete conversations with each other discussing the merits of various types of Pokemon against each other; not to mention their annoying arguments when they have imaginary Pokemon battles and disagree over whose imaginary Pokemon beat the other.
Is it mean if I flat-out tell them that they're the kids that I thought less of and/or ridiculed (if only in my head) when I was in elementary school, junior high, and high school?
[26 July 2020]
Over the course of the past few weekends, I've added a few significant upgrades to the backyard chicken coop, culminating in a few hours spent yesterday fininshing the roof over the latest roosting-area addition and wiring up some additional cameras. Previously, there was the actual building of the 3'x4'x4' roost-area addition and attaching it to the existing coop; and of course prior to that, nearly two years ago, was the initial build of the 6'x4'x4' coop. And by "build," I mean frame out the walls, put posts in the ground and level them, and build the thing from the floor up to the roof, all from materials that were salvaged from giveaways from neighbours (except for the external plywood -- that was purchaed at the Home Depot).
But then that got me thinking: to me, building stuff like a chicken coop (or anything else out of wood) seems easy (if time-cosuming and labor-intensive), most likely because I was taught at an early age how to do basic construction tasks: turning screws, hammering nails, sawing pieces of scrap wood, whenever my grandpa was in the backyard building who-knows-what. And as I got older and could afford to buy my own powered tools, it just sped up all these "basics" that seem as natural to me as walking backwards.
And so with my kids, I have a bad feeling that they may turn out to be completely useless in the area of being "handy" or what have you, mainly because I haven't encouraged them to do any of this stuff. Because I'm a horrible teacher. But mostly because I lack the patience to let them try (again: horrible teacher). And for their part, they don't even seem interested in any of this stuff, which makes it all the more easy to just do everything myself, my way, in what I believe to be the most eficient manner. I have also considered how much of an epic fail it would be if I were to strongly-urge/force them to do these things, as my horrible teaching bedside-manner coupled with their lack of skill/motivation would lead to a bad time to be had by all really quickly.
I've always kind of told myself that I'd be successful if I were to grow up and be able to provide my kids with the luxurues that I never had as a kid -- like cable TV. Or a roof that doesn't leak that requires them to go climb it in the rain to repair. Or the option to play whatever youth sport they want. But at some point, I worry that I'm raising a bunch of helpless selfish spoiled brats who won't know how to do anything for themselves, and will have to resort to throwing money at problems to make them go away, rather than learning how to take care of the easy things themselves; for them, I fear that there will be no such thing as an "easy" problem and all problems will be difficult because of lack of preparation.
[20 August 2020]
I took my kid to an ice rink in San Francisco yesterday afternoon for session #1 (of 9) of a GSE 10U-AA skills clinic/camp thing, which is kind of funny since his home rink in Cupertino has, on multiple occasions, taken digs at S4A/Sharks Ice in San Jose for doing the same (holding youth camps limited to 12 skaters on the ice, with no specators allowed in the building, strict mask-enforcement policies where EVERYONE on the ice wears a facemask -- and not the bird-cage kind), yet they happily funnel six of their 10U skaters to their parent org's AA-level camp.
Anyway, from my own personal experience, it probably isn't the best idea in the world to dive head-first right into a 90-minute rigorous skating/skills clinic after not having been on the ice for over five months. Put another way: this COVID-imposed rink shutdown has kept the kid off the ice for longer than he's ever been since he started ice skating at age 6. So it was no surprise that (at leat in my opinion) he looked slower and sluggish, and his hands were not quite all there.
So what, then? Well, I confirmed a few things about kids: they're resilient, they recover a lot faster than an old middle-aged fart like myself, and today, other than a sore ankle (new skates are on order since he outgrew his in the last five months), sore shoulder (from last week when he crashed into a wall at home), and some back pain (from stickhandling on ice for the first time in forever), he's nearly back to his normal self. I'd probably be lying in bed uselessly all day, doped up on Motrin if I were in his position -- skating with stiff, brand new gear, with a face mask over my mouth and nose, and exercising muscles that hadn't been used in nearly half a year.
By the end of the 90-minute session, he says he finally got the feel for his new stick (the old one's blade died a horrible death during COVID-quarantine shooting galleries in the backyard), and other than his foot feeling squeezed, his skating was none the worse for the wear, and much better than I can do after my 14 years of beer league experience.
I was 12 years old when I came to the realization that there were things that I could do better than my own dad could. And now with my kid at 10, I'm realizing that the same could be said for him now, when it comes to hockeying on ice. And I'm not even upset about that. I'm just getting old, eh?
[08 Feb 2021]
Sure, I could have saved this musing for mid-March, right around the one-year mark from when I first withdrew formally from the world and into my secluded little corner of WFH/FWA/SIP/whatever the heck you want to call it. The jist of it being: stay home as much as you can, and work from home. I could write a whole book about that, and it probably wouldn't sell much. But that's not the point here. The point is: as I look back on a year's worth of cutting off a lot of what had been normal, day-to-day interactions in favor of an alternate reality where the focus is on getting as much work from home done as possible while preventing my kids from slipping too far behind in their human development, I've made a number of observations:
I'm a hermit. Maybe not to the extent as my dad was. But I live for these introspective times of isolation from the outside world. Those of you who know me well have long suspected that I am anti-social (in a hopefully non-negative sense), in that I do not draw energy from being in the presence of other people; but to the contrary, having to be in the presence of others (i.e., co-workers) is super-draining on me. So not having to expend the mental energy required to fake being a social being and a good co-worker (at least when I'm not in an online meeting) has been probably the only thing that's kept me patient enough to keep from sending my kids off to live with their relatives.
On the other hand, my wife's more of a people-person than I am. Which isn't to say she'd be a social-butterfly life-of-the-party if you dropped her in the middle of a schmooze-fest of her own co-workers, or even her loosely-associated group of friends. But she's the kind of person who needs to re-charge by being in the presence of her close friends, her siblings, parents, etc. and so to her, the cabin fever is real. And so she's our family's designated "essentials shopper," (and free-stuff claimer, and whatever else she does on behalf of her group of friends and family members). I guess it works.
Well, at mid-life (and hopefully, mid-career), I feel like I can look at the new-college-grads out there (or at least anyone who has 10 or more fewer years of experience than I do) and offer some career advice: don't take yourself so damn seriously. Stop being so scared to mess up that you're paralyzed into inaction and self-doubt. Anyone who's observed me working from home would attest to the number of times I've screamed, "what the fuck, you noob!" (or something to the similar effect) at my screen whenever a seemingly-stupidly innocent slack message or e-mail comes in from someone who I think should know better. (Mind you, I would never say that out loud at work where others could be in earshot. But in the comfort of my own home, with kids in other rooms on Zoom with headphones on? Absolutely).
If there's anything I've learned in my 17+ years of industry experience, it's that there are very few things that one can do at work (so long as one is putting forth an honest effort and attempt to do the right thing) that would break anything irrevocably. So when I ask you to help do a design change, please don't schedule a 1-hour meeting to walk through every intricate detail of the change you made to make sure I approve of it before you submit it. First of all, I'm not your boss, so what I think doesn't matter. Secondly, call me weird or inefficient, or a rogue maverick, but why can't you just "try it and see if it works" at least once before asking for another set of eyes to look over your shoulder? I imagine that if these co-workers were trying to learn to walk as adults (instead of when they were toddlers), they'd be constantly asking their mom or dad if their ankles and knees were bent at the proper angles before they'd dare lift one foot to put in front of the other (and that's only after confirming that the right foot should be lifted first instead of the left, and that their toes shouldn't be spread too far apart, etc. etc.) Whew, it's a good thing they probably learned to walk before they could talk, right?
x(Side note: I'm absolutely aware that when I was green and fresh out of college, I probably did stuff that annoyed my older, more-experienced colleagues in much the same way that these things I observe from others irk the hell out of me. And I'm ok with that. Because I can respect that those colleagues of mine at my former employer have waaaaay more patience than I do, and I have enough self-awareness of my low tolerance for incompetence (as I call it) to realize that I will never be management material (and not even "mentor" or "teacher" material).
I totally judge people by how they behave when they share their screen. Things I observe:
And not exactly related to screen sharing, but I have a bad habit of judging one's character/smarts based on their grammar (although - not the caps and punctuation so much as the words themselves). Because if these guys can't be bothered to care about the important details that affect the meaning of what they're trying to communicate, then does that mean they ultimately don't care if I can understand the message or not?
My kids exhibit the worst of my worst childhood behaviors, I bet. Take my 8-year-old third-grader. He's got a really short temper/fuse, whines a lot, screams at me and demands stuff without making a case for why he's earned it (I'm talking about screen time, specifically). Makes a mess and doesn't clean up, throws/destroys things on purpose when he's angry, and is an all around whiny brat...when he's hangry or sleepy, or otherwise frustrated (which happens way too easily). Yeah, when I was his age, I bet I tormented my own parents in similar ways (whether it was as bad or not is debatable, but times were different back then than they are now). For as much as I think that I never disrespected my parents in the way that I feel that my wife and I are being disrespected by our kids, I actually won't know for sure, since my parents aren't around to tell me how horrible I was to them, in the moment, when I would get heated and angry as a kid. That, and if they were still around, they'd probably have chosen not to remember the worst of my childhood demons. My hope for the kid is that he learns to mellow out and develop some self-awareness. Self-control and less destructiveness would be useful.
As for my older kid (the 10-year-old ice hockey player): he reminds me too much of myself in other aspects, and I just hope he doesn't spend so much attention on being a perfectionist that he misses the chance to enjoy being a kid/teen/adult-dependent and passes up on opportunities that I may have some slight regrets passing up myself.
I've been sad (not uncontrollably so) at times during the past year, thinking of all that we've given up, the personal connections that are no longer made, from the random amusements shared with co-workers, other parents at the kid-drop-off, to the general sense that I've perhaps cut off more from the rest of the world than I should have. I've missed the beer league, the hassle of travel hockey for the kid, all the little nonsense in my life that was once taken for granted, and just suddenly plunged into silence when the world stopped. And this is what particularly frustrates me and makes me angry when people won't just wear a damn mask when they go out in public.
[31 Oct 2021]
Semi-chronological thoughts of my first trip to Scottsdale/Phoenix in nearly 18 years...[12 June 2022]
I will be intentionally vague, so as to avoid making possibly-identifying statements about any particular person or another.At about this time last year, I first formed a conspiracy theory regarding youth sports team selections -- specifically about how some kids get picked over others in the absence of any compelling evidence/evaluations that justify that selection. And my conclusion was that there are always political forces at work that are outside of the control of any kid or parent, and learned to accept that what I can't control I just can't control; just roll with it and make the best of it (and in an extreme case, try out for a different club next year). [and apparently I'm not the only one who observed the political crappage in youth hockey] And as the season wore on last year, I was still convinced that a handful of arbitrary picks of some kids over others are not merit-based; and set my expectations accordingly this year.
And so this year, being on the "favoured" side of the political spectrum which meant my kid's spot on his desired team was only mildly in doubt (what with a club policy of "rewarding loyalty"), two things:
[28 April 2023]
Really quickly: apparently in some cultures, it is normal typing convention to intentionally put a space before punctuation marks like exclamation marks, question marks, periods, and even commas. And here I thought for the last four years that my co-worker was just being sloppy in his emails (never mind the cringey grammar issues I have with his emails). But what I really get a kick out of is that in French or something, only "high" punctuation (question marks and exclamations) get the extra-needless-space-before treatment. Periods and commas are tacked on to the preceeding word as in American English (or so I assume, since that's all that I've ever known)
And now that I've learned this, I simply cannot un-see these intentional spaces before punctuation. That, and I wonder how many other people I've crossed paths with in the last twenty years also did this, but I wasn't yet old-and-jaded enough to notice.