Hey There, Me Again

Jesus Christ by Brand New

It's been awhile hasn't it? Life has been a bit challenging, and that's not the most fun thing to write about, so I haven't. I feel kind of bad about taking a two month long break from this experiment, because it's now hard again to think about what to write about. I thought I had succesfully solved that problem, but it turns out that it just keeps coming back if you don't work on it every day. That's basically a Bojack Horseman quote right there: “It gets easier, but you have to do it everyday".

Trust is hard. How much can I trust you to follow rule number one? I'm not sure. It's been broken a few times lately and that really hurts. I get it, once it's on Internet, it's free to grab, but it still sucks. I also understand that there was never any agreement, just an implicit ask. It's kind of hidden in a way too, so I really shouldn't be assigning responsibilty like this. But I have to do something in order to justify writing the way I do, right? Otherwise this whole game just seems a tad bit insane. Putting some kind of silly checkbox on here with a pop up saying “Should I trust you?” is almost equally insane.

(as a note, I've backspace like 5-6 opening sentences here)

Let's just start with work. I'm doing a job right now which I feel super underqualified for. Broken record I know, and it's not like I can't do it, but that doesn't change the underqualification. Thinking of qualification as a binary metric is pretty dumb, I prefer to think of it as a distribution. Anyone can do anything, it's a just a matter of how long or how many tries it will take them to figure it out. With the asterisk that they work hard of course - I've made that pretty implicit in my California life now.

In order to alleviate this problem at work, we hired another member of the team. It's hard to understate how important this was to me - we (but really, I) finally had someone who could review my work and advise me. I hadn't realized how important that was until recently. I would've gotten nothing done in grad school without it, so I'm not sure why I forgot. It's possible that my entire life I always had a mentor (or really, a technical friend) and just took it for granted. I think that's pretty easy to do in school. Slightly less easy to do in graduate school, but I was fortunate enough to have an amazing group.

This person ultimately ended up leaving¹. And then all of a sudden… I was on my own again. I felt like all of the confidence had been torn right out of me and thrown on the floor. It's pretty crazy but they are always right: “you don't appreciate what you have until it's gone". And now it's gone. There's a couple games you have to play with this too - I have to selectively be open about who I tell about this to. I think the proper style is to project strength and confidence downwards, and be open about your concerns upwards, but I dunno. That doesn't even begin to cover all the relationships you have on the same level as people.

Speaking of those, wow, had a lot of that going on. I honestly really like binning and grouping things. It's easier to keep track of things for me personally. Family, friends, work, etc. The divisions are tidy and clean. What about when they start mixing, how do you handle it now? I'm not sure and I'm still trying to figure it out.

Sidenote: I'm listening to Start Choppin’ by Dinosaur, Jr right now and the chef at this bar is just going to town on those vegetbales. Perfect timing.

Anyways, where were we. Ah right, people problems. Some good friends of mine are starting new jobs soon, and they're going to be working where I work. I'm also moving in to a new place, and my roommates will probably be current coworkers. That's way more stream crossing than I'm used to. It's not like I've lied to any of them about anything and will get “exposed” or something ridiculous. It's more like there are parts of me where the puzzle pieces might not seem to add up, and then I'll have to continue merging circles. I think this is for the best honestly, but it's still scary. The whole point of this silly website was to be more honest, and I've been doing a great job of that in real life. It hasn't quite translated here yet though.

I refuse to delete or take back any of my posts, which means I should be a bit more careful with them. I even get annoyed when people point out typos and suggest that I should correct them. Each one of these posts is a summary of how I feel in that time instance, not a global writing down from on high. Some things aren't going to age well, and some things aren't going to be right from the onset. It's up to us to figure out if that's going to be a problem, or just a part of life.