I took a too-quick journey backwards through my life and considered most of the possible safe-for-public-consumption events of my thirty-eight years.  There have been some good stories embedded in there; some that are so unique or unusual that I’m sure an audience would appreciate the novelty; some that are so emotional that they even today choke me up a bit; a bit of heroism here, a bit of cowardice there.  Some loves, some laughs, some fun.

Leaving aside for the moment whether or not I’d like to stand up in front of an audience of strangers and tell a true story from my life, it got me to reflecting on the concept of selfhood and to what extent we see ourselves as a collection of stories.  This is timely for me, because I was just recently describing to a friend how a story from years ago still plays out in my head as a defining characteristic of my life today – but it is just a story; it’s not me, it isn’t even about me, really, it was just an event, a serendipitous confluence of fate and circumstance that I still carry around in my back pocket.  But should I?  Am I my stories?

No way.  Stories are backward-looking.  And to the extent that a story gives you meaningful information about yourself, you’ve already internalized it and can make use of it for future decision-making.

So I’m sitting here what stories about myself are still relevant.  Are any of them?  Maybe they all nothing but fine china in the cabinet, nice to look at but ultimately impractical, things that have abstract value to myself and perhaps a few others.

And then I think no, that’s not quite right – stories are more than that, better than that.  It’s somewhere in between.  Stories don’t define me, but they are the glue that helps me connect to others with whom I want to maintain relationships.  I guess the key lesson is that I am more than the sum of my stories, and when a story loses its relevance, it’s OK.

Me at Serendipity Cafe, March 8, 2010.

Here’s the blurb for “Knock It Off”:

I have some recent direct experience with this. About six weeks ago I came to the conclusion that there were some habits I wanted to stop, and merely willing myself to stop them was proving fruitless.  So I put together a little template and put green dots when I did the thing I wanted to do, and a red dot (well, orange – Bartell’s didn’t have red) each time I screwed up.

Here’s my progress after almost four weeks:

(These things are things I mostly do at work, hence the blank spots on the weekends.)

You can see that I hit orange every now and then, but it’s amazing that the first day was almost all orange and then IMMEDIATELY started to go green.  By weeks three and four I felt really great about my progress and in fact as of this writing I’ve stopped tracking my daily progress on those sets of habits.

My conclusion: Three things about this type of system work well.  First is the visibility: this was 18 inches from my nose Monday through Friday.  Second was the tactile process: putting the little dots on the paper gave me a sense of accomplishment that I wouldn’t have gotten by clicking a checkbox in a website or on my iPhone.  Third: you can code the things you want to track so that you can have the sheets out in public (in your cubicle, for example) – nobody needs to know exactly what “NVD” means, for example.

I’m not normally a Type A super-organized person – in fact I laugh just writing those words, I’m so far on the opposite end of the spectrum – but this Type A tactic worked really well for me.  Hope it can work for someone out there on the innertubes.

The latest travesty came yesterday, when I spent way too much time diagnosing why log4net wasn’t outputting anything to the log(s).  Not only that, but there were no Event Viewer entries.  So I tried dinking around with the usual culprits – verifying paths, permissions, triple-checking the log4net.config file entries against known-good examples, yadda yadda yadda.

Finally I realized that my build process was not pulling over .asax files to the deploy directory.  You might remember .asax as the file in ASP.NET projects that is tied to with the Global application code-behind class.  My build process (MSBuild-based, very cool, customizations up the yang) has a whitelist of acceptable file extensions to pull over, and .asax was missing.

So I added it.  And the goddamned log4net system started spitting out log messages.  FUCK!

<flame><on>

OK, first of all, if you’re so goddamned powerful, Mr. log4net, why do you whimper and shy away in the presence of a client app that is sending log messages to a logger / repository that doesn’t exist or isn’t configured?  I mean, are you Clark Kent or Superman?

Second: who designs an app to give NO FEEDBACK – zero, zilch, nada, nil – when a message sent to a NAMED SINK can’t be delivered?  In my case, I’m looking for a logger called “Com.Foo.Bar” and it didn’t even exist.  At least throw me a warning in the Event Viewer.  But no, you like to play the strong silent type, wrecking my productivity and causing my face to turn all different shades of purple and making me think Very Bad Thoughts like “I’ll just take this here laptop and play Ultimate Frisbee with it.”

Third: this is probably a .NET thing, but why isn’t my Global class pulled in to the project when I compile?  Why do I need the actual .asax file?  All my code is in the code-behind .cs file.  It’s almost like if Global.asax doesn’t exist, the Application_Start never gets fired.  Weird.

</on></flame>

So, bottom line for the others out there: make sure that you pull across your .asax file, if you’re using the Application_Start() method to configure your log4net system.

Event details:

When: Friday, March 19th, 7:30 – 9:30 PM
Where: UW, Kane Hall, Room 120
How: Buy tickets at brownpapertickets.com.  Prices range from $15 to $25.

So reading about this event got me to thinking about attraction, desire, want, love, lust, and their opposite numbers in the emotional pantheon: distaste, rejection, hate, and whatever that one-word description is for the situation where an anticipated physical consummation suddenly stops dead in its tracks – say, when your parents unexpectedly return home early and walk in on you and your girlfriend spooned up on the couch.  They’re carrying a bucket of KFC and a couple movies from Blockbuster and you know that nothing is going to happen THAT night.

What attracts you?  Head?  Heart?  Body?   All of the above?  What do you find unattractive?  It’s a complex subject, worthy of many many many readings, and in fact I might suppose that the bulk of human artistic output has been concerned with two topics: attraction (love) and war (hate).

It’s intensely personal.  The words I might use to describe attraction may be (and probably are) completely different than the words someone else uses.  But there are themes, commonalities, refrains, choruses.  It thus becomes universal.  We don’t all drive the same car, but we do drive the same roads.  It’s also less of a conscious topic than a sub- or unconscious one, and I would bet that most people would be hard-pressed to define, right now, exactly and completely what they find attractive or unattractive.  Everyone could make a start, of course: “I like a girl who…” or “I don’t like a guy that…”.  But there are deep waters below each of us, frantic with unseen life, that we rarely glimpse, let alone go actively seek out to explore.

Which brings me to one statement I can make with certainty: those who do that hard and often uncomfortable exploration are attractive.  To me. To take what is given, by birth or by upbringing or by societal convention, and then ask “what else?” or “what if?” or “what next?”.  To not accept what is given, but to use it a jumping-off point for a real journey of self-discovery.

There are other elements at play.  One thing that I find fascinating about attraction is this notion of attraction-as-mirror – that we explore ourselves, what we like and don’t like, by viewing ourselves through the eyes of others.  There’s a sort of recursive voyeurism at play.  I see you seeing me, and in doing so, I see you more closely, which you pick up on and see me through a new set of lenses, and so on.

I may make a point of going to this event, if only to put my thinking about attraction up against a new set of claims, and see what sticks, what evolves, what disappears.

You?

Michael Miller from Cloundant (YC S08) will be on hand to discuss CouchDB and their commercial offering. We’ll also have Eric Peters from Frugal Mechanic (Founders Co-op) to talk about Cassandra. We’re going to have one more speaker and would ideally like it to be someone who can discuss MongoDB. The sponsor behind MongoDB, 10Gen, is helping us find a speaker in Seattle in time for the meeting, but if you know someone who could fit the bill, please drop us a note.

The topic is relevant, timely, and should be of interest to a lot of geeky Seattleites.  I’ve played around in the last year with non-relational cloud offerings from Microsoft and Amazon and also had a geek crush for a long time on Google’s BigTable technology.  While I’m not convinced of the universal applicability of non-relational databases, I think that they definitely have a place in the massively-scalable technology environment.  And the tooling and support infrastructure has grown leaps and bounds in the last year or two, to the point where working with them is no longer a huge pain.

Hope to see you there!

I feel like that guy.  In retrospect! Right at the moment my head is less enveloped in fog and I can see forward and backward with a clarity I didn’t have at the time.  I suppose that’s human nature, to be hyper-focused on the critical moment and lose some perspective, only to recognize later the narrow tunnel through which one journeyed.

I now walk with my head up, looking forward, and finding lots of interesting life out there to observe and interact with.  Professionally, personally, and in that gray area between the two that I predict will make up more and more of our collective shared space in the years to come.  Work friends who are actually friends, and friend friends who you occasionally get together and work with.  Partners with whom you do business with, either explicitly in the old-school LLC “let’s go into business together” model, or, more likely, with whom you have an implicit, but no less important, relationship, all parties sharing the same goal of supporting and encouraging each other in separate domains.  The sounding boards.  The devil’s advocates.  The constructive criticizers.

Reciprocal muses. Your Zelda to my F. Scott. My Beatrice to your Dante.

Think of this as two possibilities: on the one hand, a tandem bicycle – both riders pedaling the same machine in the same direction at the same pace – vs. two separate bicycles; yes, both going in the same direction at the same speed, but with an acknowledged – I will say necessary – distance between them. 

It’s this distance that fascinates me right now.  Too much – too far — and the other fades into the background noise, part of the cacophony of everyday life; the half-known and the partially-recognized and the almost-important; too close, however, and that slight gap, into which the arc of electricity, the firing of the synapses, the place into which the mysterious alchemy of true collaboration (at all levels) takes place, gets squashed and squeezed and cramped.  It’s like placing a candle snuffer over an incipient flame.

Distance is a funny and confounding thing, though.  I think most of us are hardwired to clutch, to grab, to possess, to hold – not to “see the other whole against the wide sky”, to pull a quote from Rilke – but to see narrowly right through the other’s pupils, as it were.  Some people are conditioned by family or circumstance to feel lonely, dispossessed, and despairing when distance separates them from their desires.  And there’s a certain (illusory?) comfort in falling in to the other, collapsing the gap, willingly giving up individual purpose in pursuit of a more immediately comforting embrace.

Is it possible to develop and carry a new paradigm around in one’s head?  To recognize that some distance – however slight, and in whatever dose is comfortable – is not only valuable, but required? To leave space for the relationship to flower, the collaboration to germinate, the partnership to bear fruit?

I think so.  I hope so.  My curiosity on the matter is waxing strongly.  My personal vectors are all reorienting themselves along the lines of this hypothesis.

So – about the talk. Stiglitz spoke for about 50 minutes on who and what was responsible for the 2008-2009 economic decline and what we can do about it.  He pulled very few punches, giving out sharp raps to Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Wall Street, the anti-regulation crowd on Capitol Hill, free-market fundamentalists, and even Robert Rubin.  Economics is not my forte, but I gather he’s a sort of a contrarian sort, the smart-as-hell guy who sits outside the clubhouse and doesn’t let relationships or tradition get in the way of facts and evidence.  He’s sort of charming in a professorial way, not a fire-breather by any means, and talked simply but not patronizingly about a very complicated set of subjects.

What to make of it?  I came away thinking about a few things: corporate governance; what are known as the “agency problems”; the role of the old-boys’ network in ignoring and/or fomenting the mess we got ourselves in; and his obvious distaste for the blindly obedient invisible-hand adherents.

Interestingly, he didn’t once talk about individual decisions that people made to take on more debt than they could afford; matching, I suspect, both his personal views as well as that of most of the audience.  I’m not sure that a fully-fleshed out argument can accurately leave out personal agency as a contributing factor to the mess.  I mean, someone can offer me free heroin, but I still have to inject it.

I also found out last night that Dr. Stiglitz has a family connection with someone whom I used to work with and still admire very much; meaning that I’ll be following his talks and writings more closely than otherwise.   Context and personal relationships still matter in this day and age of stateless interwebs.

Bedhead and a rueful smile at Zoka, early on the morning of February 27, 2010.

I soar up – I drop down.  My shadow flickers on the water and I drop my hand to feel the cold, wet spray misting off the whitecaps.  Abruptly, I dive, submerging myself, quickly losing the sunlight.  My head’s on a swivel – I’m aware of other things, also diving – for fish?  Are they other predators?  They burst down between the waves, awkward in the water, looking for something, then just as quickly turn and balloon up to the surface, some successful, some not.  They fly away.

Strong muscular pulls take me quickly forward.  I hold my breath.  I pass rock outcroppings and steep cliffs; bottles and timber and pirate-ships dot the landscape.  Large mouthy eels poke their heads out of the cannon-holes in the wrecks, silent observers to my quest.

My catch is down here somewhere.  I’m convinced of it. The other shadow-shapes have not yet found it. My eyes widen and pupils dilate to adjust to the darkness. The longer I am down, the more visibility there is.  I see the full expanse of underwater flora and fauna explode around me – coral and kelp and massive red tangles of dulse; crabs and anemones and schools of silver mackerel.  I’m close; I can feel it.  I’m warm with anticipation.