I’m always a sucker for wordplay, for how words sound, how they look, how they grab you; what they denote and connote and imply.  “Damaged goods” is a phrase that has been on my mind a lot lately, and if you know me at all you’ll know why.  But I’m thinking that I don’t feel anything remotely like damaged.  I’m thinking I feel like the bridge was blown up by the opposing forces some time in 2009 and the rebuilding process has already proven that yes, this bridge will be made whole again.  Goods – what a great word, “goods”, in this context – will flow across.

So I’m feeling optimistic.  In spite of everything, and I guarantee that no matter how well you think you know me, there’s a lot more to “everything” than you might suspect at first.  It’s like in Anthony Stadium, there are six simultaneous baseball games being played.  Bob Uecker is outclassed, even Bob Costas. Who’s on first?  Who knows? One day Michael Lewis will write a book about it; Paul Kedrosky will pooh-pooh it for reasons that are known only to himself and Mr. Lewis; and there will be a generally accepted, but probably incorrect and/or inadequate explanation of what happened, how I feel about it, and what the net result will have been.

Optimism in the middle of what one might consider to be a tornado seems, well, odd.  But I don’t feel like I’m in the middle of a tornado.  The tornado has passed; it’s over in the next county, kicking up dust and spitting cattle and old Dodge trucks into adjoining farmland.  I feel at ease.  Every day I feel more at ease.  It’s a diffuse ease, because if I squint my eyes just right I can focus on this or that which, in isolation, appears to be Death Come Knocking At The Door, but I like to constantly take the attitude that I probably lack perspective – and I’m nearly 100% right on that assessment.  We all lack perspective.

The other part that comes into play in this is my natural instinct to be happy.

Am I happy?

Am I?

I have to say yes.  I really think that if I were to answer “no,” I’d be lying – another trait I don’t have.  I am happy.  I have experienced highs and lows of great intensity over the last weeks and months, but I am happy.  As every frequent flier knows, turbulence passes.  And turbulence is not the point of the flight – it’s to transport you from A to B.  What’s “B” for me?  Dunno.  Don’t really care that much.  I have a couple things that remain important to me – they’re little Russians named Will and Audrey – and beyond that?  Again, dunno.  I  wrote in these pages a while ago that “want is a terrible affliction,” and I’m trying not to want.  Not to force anything.  Not to try to bend reality to a constructed reality.  And I’m doing a pretty good job of it overall.  History, habit and instinct conspire against me – I have always been an idealist, a romantic, a Byronesque thinker.  And I want to believe in these Hollywoodized absolutes like sure things and true loves and success in spite of impossible odds – but as I get older and wiser and more comfortable, I get the chance – the chance! and what a chance! – to understand that perhaps it can be both – yes and no, black and white, to be and not to be – and it will all still be OK.  Better than OK, even.  Great.  Exhilarating.  Sustaining.  Life-affirming.

But things take time, and Hollywood gives you two hours, or three if you’re Peter Jackson, and so a healthy respect for time and the natural progression of things is of paramount importance.  Buds bloom, but not overnight.  Leaves fall, but not overnight.  There’s a rhythm to life that plays out on its own schedule and whether by instinct or desire we wish it would move faster or slower, it doesn’t.  If it will be, it will be, and if it won’t, it won’t.  I fall back on – I was about to say “tropes", but that sounds too negative – call them “rules of thumb”, that apply.

Be authentic.  Be kind.  Be caring. Be yourself.  Be.  Just be.

And the final chapters in Michael Lewis’ expose?  To be written.  And I have a lot to say about the storyline.  In fact, I have *everything* to say about the storyline.  It’s my book, after all.

Will you read through to the end?  Will you be there?

It’s been a productive weekend and as such, I feel pretty good – accomplishing much, stuck on very little – well, ALMOST very little.  I have a bit of a massive writer’s block going on with regard to a couple blog posts I need to write. One is for Seattle 2.0 on the topic of social entrepreneurship, and one is a review of the Balsamiq Mockups product for my personal blog.

Writer’s block is a funny thing – once I get going it seems to go away.  As with many things in life, the anticipation of inertia is much worse than the actual inertia.  I like to write, so it’s not like once my fingers get on the keyboard there’s much in the way.  Tappity-tap-tap-tap.  Words flow from me like rain from a cloud.

But this post?  Personal, anecdotal, and temporal.  This weekend, I:

• Fixed a burnt-out taillight in my Land Rover
• Dropped off an old satellite receiver at goodwill
• Took some items to storage
• Dropped off dry cleaning
• Fixed an exterior vent on the house
• Went to a friend’s birthday party
• Saw “Sherlock Holmes” at the Majestic Bay
• Finished Phase 1 of an important project
• Landed an additional (separate) project
• Took care of some moss buildup on the roof
• Exercised
• Watched some soccer

…so, as far as weekends go, especially recent weekends, this one has been pretty productive.  Tonight I’m meeting a friend at a wine bar for a little catch up and good conversation.

What’s crossed my mind recently?

• Sherlock Holmes was a pretty great movie.  I should do a blog post review.  Robert Downey Jr. is as charismatic as they come.  Yes, I have a man crush.
• Herkimer Coffee in Greenwood doesn’t take credit cards as payment.  Double You Tee Eff.
• The evening baristas as Java Bean in Ballard make *the* best dry cappuccinos in Seattle (that I’ve had so far).  Excellent work, ladies and gentlemen!
• Much of social media discussion on the interwebs is a serious circle-jerk.  If I see another blog post titled “Ten Ways Your Business Can Leverage Social Media” I’m going to yack.
• I’m still feeling the good afterglow of a couple meetups I had last week.  I’m trying to arrange a couple more today for the next week or two.
• I’ll be in training this coming week at work; Experts From Back East are coming in to conduct some specialized sessions on a big 3rd-party product we’re integrating.  Should be intense, enlightening, and busy.
• I’m hoping to find time in the next couple weeks to finish out a new phase of Crowdify.  Talking through some ideas with Ray Page last Thursday really whet my appetite for some of the cool new things I can do to get the thing out the door and build some cool functionality on top of it.

Finishing with a quote: “The best way to get over something is to go through it.”

Hope you’re having a great weekend.

Wow!  What a week.  By week I mean the last seven days or so.  Lots going on.

In some ways, I could let recent events make me cynical – make myself think that the world is hard, cold, bitter, and desolate.  I choose – I choose! – not to take that view, however.  I remain, despite a lot of pressure, firmly convinced that the world is a good place, full of good people, and that it might just take some time for that attitude to bear fruit.

I definitely don’t want to go through life thinking negative thoughts all the time.

And a few things have happened that have been undeniably positive.  Take, for example, a lunch meeting I had today with Emily Hine and Chris Wilson from Global Mojo.  They are part of a team of so-called “social entrepreneurs” building a browser that, when used, helps contribute money to schools and nonprofits.  They are passionate, positive, engaged, and skilled.  How could I *not* have a good time talking about social ventures with them?  I took lots of notes in preparation for a more detailed Seattle 2.0 post on Global Mojo and the broader “social venture” trend, which I hope to have out in the next couple weeks.

What else?  I had a couple great workouts in the last week; in one, I bench-pressed my bodyweight five times (five reps), which makes me feel like I’m accomplishing something with all the weight training.

Spent some quality time with the kids, which is always wonderful.

Life spent in the right attitude – one of positivity and cheerfulness, of hope and optimism and kindness, beats the alternatives.  Life hands you shit sometimes.  Life hands you shit for MONTHS sometimes.  Nobody says you have to respond by feeling shitty yourself.  Short bursts?  Sure.  Long-term?  Boy,that’s a sucky way to live.  I choose otherwise.

Tonight: A kindergarten concert for my son, followed by a mad dash down to SODO for the first indoor soccer match of the season!  Excited to score some goals and dribble my way magnificently past six defenders for a left-footed over-the-shoulder bicycle kick to win the championship.

• Have been working out hard so far this New Year, and I’m pleasantly sore from both yesterday’s stair-running workout as well as the chest workout from the day before.   Sometimes I find it hard to get a good chest workout in – my shoulders are strong enough that they tend to take over – but today I’m feeling that classic second-day DOMS that tells me I did well on Monday night.  More importantly, I’ve been eating well and sparingly and my weight is coming down again.  I’m pretty lucky that  when I put my mind to it, I can drop fat pretty quickly.  I was going to say easily, but it’s never easy and takes a lot of willpower.  But if I can muster up the willpower, I can do it.
• Speaking of willpower, I made a different commitment to myself on Sunday that – w00t w00t! – I’ve still kept.  How about 3 days in a row? (waits for applause)  It’s really a commitment to life, to karma, to fate, to the way things are (apparently) supposed to be in my little world – but it takes willpower on my part to keep it.  The urge to backslide remains strong, but I figure that my life – and the lives of those close to me – will be best served in the long run by me accomplishing this goal.  And it will get easier over time, as with most things in life that you set your mind on.
• Thomas Aquinas says “The things that we love tell us what we are.”  What does that make me?
• I’m going to have a pretty busy next couple weeks – work/career and personal issues are approaching perfect storm status.  Maybe I’ll get by on four hours of sleep.  Maybe I’ll invent a super-productivity ointment.  Maybe I’ll discover that my fears about getting overwhelmed are all for naught.  Regardless, I’m looking ahead with some anxiety.  Send me some good vibes, because I need them.
• I didn’t know you could get the rug pulled out from under you at the same time as getting bopped on the head.  Well, it can happen.  Trust me.
• Thomas Aquinas also says, “The highest manifestation of life consists in this: that a being governs its own actions. A thing which is always subject to the direction of another is somewhat of a dead thing.”  That quote resonates with me for a couple different reasons.
• I have to get over this feeling that a situation that I thought was cast in stone is still fluid.  #getoveritanthony.  Mostly wishful thinking, I suppose.
• I was pleased as punch yesterday to work together with my team to give public recognition to a coworker who REALLY deserved kudos for the continually great job they do.  I don’t think we give enough recognition to deserving people.
• Only a slight segue – being kind is its own reward.  Words I try to live by.  Not everyone agrees that I AM kind, but I try my best.
• I’m going to the SEOmoz event tonight at the Elysian Brewery in Seattle – are you going?  It should be fun. I can only stay an hour, because indoor soccer practice starts tonight at Arena Sports SODO at 6:30, and I’m REALLY looking forward to getting back into playing soccer.  But for an hour I can network, catch up with friends, meet new people, and try to have a great time.
• I’m guessing that most of us don’t really appreciate how much can happen in a single hour, so my goal (tonight and for the new year) is to appreciate every minute I have.  Minutes are precious.  I want to spend my minutes happy, with people I care about and whose company I enjoy, and work on things that give me enjoyment.
• One last thought: your entire life can change in a single minute.  Imagine something you’ve been wanting, and then imagine what might happen, that would take less than 60 seconds, that would make that thing come true.  It happens.  Not always, but it can happen.  Will fate/destiny/karma/God work help you to change your life in the direction you want it to go?  More importantly, will you work on what you can to effect that change?
• OK, very last thought: I have great friends.  I’m very lucky.

*novel concluded for today*

Continuing to struggle along in the face of some extremely painful circumstances this week. Trying my best to put it in perspective; trying VERY hard to accept and internalize the finality of the situation. A door has closed behind me and the only way to go is forward. Time doesn’t run backward.

Some days are up days; some days are down days. The problem with living in the middle of the whirlwind is the complete and utter lack of predictability as to how your day is going to go. In some cases, the changes are hour-by-hour. A person whom I trust told me that the key to getting through the next week/month/??? (I can’t bring myself to write “year” there) is to be able to live with uncertainty, with doubt, with indecision. I’m not normally indecisive or doubtful or uncertain so it’s going to be a challenge to learn how to do that.

I’m taking next week off from work in an attempt to regroup mentally, physically, emotionally, because right now my focus and attention is nowhere near where it needs to be. By way of example, this week I missed a deliverable on a side project, which is so unlike me – I can’t even begin to describe how that felt, priding myself as I do on my ability to deliver when it counts.

I feel like I’ve lost a friend, a dear friend, and part of the loss is the everyday intimacy that a good friend brings into your life – not physical intimacy, mind you, but the emotional intimacy of shared backgrounds, shared interests, shared understandings, verbal shorthand, inside jokes, mutual care and comfort during challenging times, the non-verbal cues that sometimes say more than words, the attention, the ability to just talk and say anything and know it will be OK. Everything that you need a friend for is momentarily derailed (again, because of me), and my task is to try to address this new challenge, this new circumstance, in a way that’s good for all involved.

We’ll see how I feel a week from now, after some time off and some ability to rest and regroup and refocus. My goal is clear; the plan to get there is a little muddy and scary. We’ll see.

I biked to work today, and the big news when I got home was that a cougar had been sighted overnight not one block from my home.  Yoink!  Guess I should think twice about biking tomorrow.  It was raining a little bit when I left work to ride home, but I didn’t melt.  My gear protected me pretty well.  Perhaps – just perhaps – I AM made of sugar, but some people are just not able to recognize it?  I continue to be confused over what people see in me vs. what people don’t see.  Am I opaque?  Or, more likely, too transparent?  Does my personality manifest itself honestly?  This year has me a bit over a barrel in regard to that question.

I got some good advice today to stop beating myself up so much in light of recent events.  People get knocked down all the time; sometimes it’s self-inflicted; sometimes it’s not.  Regardless, the thing is pick oneself up, not overanalyze, not keep blaming oneself for missed opportunities or critical mistakes; just keep moving on.  That’s hard to write when one is currently living with so many deep regrets – so one hopes that the sense of regret, the self-blame, the pitiability, all goes away in time.  I guess the idea is to make it happen – today.  Stop blaming yourself – today.

You know what I miss most when someone moves out of town?  The casual, friendly, serendipitous interactions.  I really enjoy the timely back-and-forth of an open, frank friendship, and miss that when someone leaves.  Distance – of whatever sort – makes that hard.  Here’s to hoping that the distance between you and your friends lessens over time, to enable that banter and rapport.

No workout tonight, since I biked back and forth to work today – tomorrow I may challenge the Blaine Street Stairs again.  Can I get six reps tomorrow?  Only the Shadow knows….but I’ll be sure to blog about it, win or lose.  Wish me luck!

Wow, what a week.  I’m sitting at home as I write this, home sick from work – my stomach just refuses to cooperate and I feel nauseous 59 minutes out of 60.  So far, no action, which is disappointing, because it means I get to continue to feel ill without any relief.

Funny thing about upset stomachs, even (especially?) psychosomatically-induced upset – you’re still somewhat functional.  It’s not like I have a 104-degree fever that is keeping me physically down.  My appetite is way reduced, which may be a coincidence, but other than that it’s just this reoccurring nausea.  I can get up, walk around, write, etc.  But the thought of sitting in my cube at work, with the Big V about to hit at any time, was too much for me to contemplate facing.  So I’m home.

********

So what did I learn from this most odd of odd weeks?  That there is a such thing as Finality.  That it sucks.  That “getting closure” is a timid, misleading phrase,  a bunch of horseshit Ph.D gobbledygook that is meant to isolate and distract you from the raw trauma of events.  When you’re in the shit, the only solution is to keep wading until you get out.   There’s no shortcut.

I learned that I’m human.  I can be smart most of the time, and dumb some of the time, and I can (hopefully) learn how to deal with the dumb parts.

I learned that I can be a terrible reader of others’ intentions and representations.  Which is funny, because I thought I was pretty good at it until recently.

I learned that I still have it in me to care, to want, to desire, to pursue goals – in other words, I have emotion and passion; I’m not dead or dying or numb.  Not everything has descended into irrelevance and non-caring.

I learned that making decisions can be very hard.  The more complex the decision, the more contradictory the decision-making factors, and the harder it is to draw any firm conclusions.  I also learned that sometimes decisions are forced upon you.  That’s not a great feeling.

Perhaps, at some point far in the future, I’ll look back at this week with a sense of humor, or appropriateness – as in, the right things happened – or who knows, resignation, regret, disappointment; you name the emotion and I’ll probably experience it.  Several times apiece.

Continuing to look for the silver lining.  A friend said “the reason you don’t see it is because you’re looking for it.  Stop (actively) looking and it will appear.”  Maybe so.  But I hope something manifests itself soon.  I need it.

UPDATE: Tony Wright posted his slides to SlideShare.

So what’s been happening over the last couple days….

First, last night’s STS presentation was stellar. Two great speakers – Chris Hopf and Tony Wright – gave two great presentations, Chris on the Freemium business model, and Tony on profit and conversion metrics. Chris has already posted his Freemium presentation slides up on his blog, and I suspect that, based on the frequency of Tony’s blog posts on his personal blog at http://tonywright.com, it may be a while before you see his slides The STS wiki will probably have links to video before too long, so keep checking there.

Next: kickball. Tonight was the first playoff game for PPA’s summer kickball league, and unfortunately….we had to forfeit, for lack of female players. We think they got scared away by the huge rainstorms that occurred right before the match. Massive bummer, but stuff happens. We ended up playing an exhibition match against the Steve Pool Sluggers, and had fun, tying 7-7 after seven innings. Overall I had a great time this season. My teammates were fun and competitive, and I’ll look forward to next year if I’m still with PPA.

Third: project work is progressing nicely. I’m doing some new stuff with LINQ and Expression Trees which is bearing immediate fruit. I would have spent some time tonight programming, but for….

Fourth: personal. Another down day, thinking of things that could have been; lost opportunities; missing elements in my life, etc. etc. ad nauseum. By the end of the workday, after an unanticipated surprise, I really did feel like throwing up my hands, wrapping up the entire day and returning it to sender. What I’d like to do is go back in time a couple months and rewrite history according to my needs and desires; of course that’s impossible. We have to take life as it happens, not as we wish it would have happened. But I’m sort of wondering when I’ll see the light at the end of the tunnel. As they say, every light lately has turned out to be an oncoming train.

Careful readers will suspect, and rightly so, that most of what I’m going through right now is self-created, but knowing that you put the rake down in the yard doesn’t make your nose feel any better when you end up stepping on it. Not the first time, nor the tenth time. Nor (god forbid) the hundredth time. Frankly I just want all the rakes to go away. I’m continually considering, and constantly (thus far) rejecting, making big changes in my life – personal, professional, you name it – to, in effect, force changes where none seem to be organically occurring. A good friend has counseled me that “the grass is not always greener on the other side of the fence.”. That could be true, but remember, it’s a relative formulation. And, in truth, the bright emerald green you see just over the white picket fence could truly be the most earth-shattering green lawn you’ve ever experienced.

You just never know.

So? You wonder about direction, solutions, probable tangents on the road to re-acquiring health and/or a healthy outlook, and I just don’t know. Burying myself in work – both day job and side projects – seems to be the most likely option; burying myself in an exercise program – to, in effect, try to become the Fittest Geek in Seattle – is another. My initial 30-day program is over next week, and I think I’ll pick up another 30-day program immediately. Re-invigorating myself with a serious round of tech/networking participation is a third option. Unfortunately, none of those things are my first choice; my first choice is now and forever blocked to me, so items 2-infinity will have to serve as pale replacements of the original need.

More to come later, as the inspiration strikes…

So, how does one get “up” for a blog post when one doesn’t really have anything that momentous to say? Or rather, nothing that momentous that you can actually write about in public. Lots of churn, lots of turmoil, lots of emotional hostage-taking, with subsequent rescue by the Counter-Emotional S.W.A.T. teams, yadda yadda yadda. Nothing that probably wouldn’t bore you to tears, if you have any fluid left to cry with, what with the temperatures here in Seattle approaching 95 and the populace collectively melting into various coffee-colored puddles while waiting for the bus.

I’ve been doing a fair bit of writing on the side, in private – journaling really, although I’ve firmed up an outline for a short story that I’d like to get submitted sometime in August. I have yet to learn the pro tricks that let you get into fiction-writing mode on demand. I’m too young and unestablished a writer to be able to handle alcoholism, which is one method that I’m pretty sure a lot of the Established Guys have turned to, often with great success. Similarly with tranqs / ludes / shrooms / pills: I have too much to lose to even start to go down any of those paths, no matter the likely salutary effect on my writing. So I struggle along sober

So, what’s going well? The workouts are going well – eight days in a row as of today, and I feel really good about getting to a month with no gaps. The kids are great – they continue to be healthy, happy, polite, and engaged in all of the normal flighty things that five-year-olds are known for. Today, for example, it’s the movie “Coraline”, which my daughter finds incredibly scary and yet compelling.

I have some side projects that I continue to work on that are going well, although at any point you might ask me the status and it might be good or bad. This week it’s good. Such is the nature of side projects – sometimes you have the energy and motivation to make major progress; other times you feel mired in sticky mud, with no one in sight to throw you a rope.

I continue to have a mild Obsession with a certain Subject that is certainly occupying a significant portion of my mental background-processing time. Speaking as a former gamer, these sorts of obsessions can be fun and yet at some point you find yourself scratching your head and wishing desperately that you can move on and bend your thoughts to something more immediately fruitful. Not to mention that this particular Subject is of a type that doesn’t lend itself well to anything more than a casual level of attention – hard to get in as deep and as involved as one might like, to fully exercise the Obsession; it’s just sort of circumstantially difficult. It’s like trying to get into golf without having the time available to play. Just not gonna work. I know this; the question becomes, when does the rest of my lizard-brain wake up and realize it.

This Obsession, by the way, is not David Foster Wallace, with whom I’ve developed a serious man-crush, despite him being dead and worm-food and etc etc.. I’m just about finished with Infinite Jest, his magnum opus from 1996, which is most certainly up in the top 5 of my personal list of Best Novels of All Time. I have yet to draw any conclusions, still being neck-deep in the prose, but I hope to be able to find time to really give the book a serious rehashing here on this blog at some point soon. After Infinite Jest I have The Broom of the System lined up. w00t.

I’m wondering who gets to decide which work becomes a given author’s “magnum opus”. Does Michiko Kakutani send out an e-mail with decision by fiat?

I have a vacation coming up from work in the next week (August 3 – 7) and still don’t know what I’m going to do! It might end up being a Staycation (love that term). I’ll probably end up doing a fair amount of reading and writing no matter what happens, and searching hither and yon for some social gatherings to spend some time at. Know of anything coming up?

Ciao for now.

The title of the post is supposed to be a homonym of Capote’s “Holly Golightly” – did I succeed in the reference?

Not many thoughtful posts lately. I’ve felt just sort of cruddy, wiped out, and majorly stressed out, which sort of saps the creative juices. Not even the fattest bottle of Absolut or lengthy row of ice-cold Stella Artois can get the writing going when your mind stubbornly refuses to be present.

I went into work early this morning, but my mid-morning I felt cruddy so I took the rest of the day off and had a four-hour nap, which was delicious, and which did the trick – for today anyway. We’ll see how I feel tomorrow. I’m missing tonight’s Seattle Tech Startups meeting in preference for resting and storing up my energy for tomorrow. The first kickball practice for the work team is tomorrow afternoon, so we’ll see if I feel up to going to that. I’d like to suit up and get out there and kick some butt, work off some loose, unproductive energy, and have some fun, but not if I continue to carry around this wiped-out feeling.

Mentally: I suppose “not present” is as good a way to describe it as anything. I’ve been able to focus in bursts, and get my work done, but once the work day is over, I’m off to la-la land. Just a ton going on that takes time to process; by this time next week or next month things will likely be 100% back to normal. In the meantime, I’m distracting myself with programming tasks, and have been having fun learning PowerShell and re-learning F#, both of which take a certain amount of brain power.

I’m looking forward to BarCamp this weekend as a sort of forced exposure to the kinds of people and conversations that I love – motivated techies, optionally with beer – even though I might otherwise bow out based on how I feel right this moment. This wiped-out feeling will pass by the weekend, I’m sure, and I know I’ll have a TON of fun at BarCamp, so there you go. No reason to stay home. I have to remember to bring business cards for all the new people I expect to meet. There’s a fun period of about two weeks right after a conference like this where you make appointments for coffee or lunch with all of the new, interesting people you meet – I’m looking forward to that and expanding my horizons a bit. Lately I’ve felt insular or static in my thoughts and in my daily habits. Exposure to new people will help bust me out of that rut.

I was thinking about giving a talk, but my friend Marina is also thinking of giving a talk on the same subject, and since she does that productivity / effectiveness stuff for a living, I’m going to cede the floor and listen to what she has to say. After all, nobody pays me to tell them how to get productive! Looking around my house right now, I can tell why. Lots of little household tasks have been piling up, and I haven’t much felt like doing them. That’s got to change, and soon, or else I’ll be so far behind I’ll never catch up.

That’s all for now – thanks for listening! Reports from BarCamp will be forthcoming following the weekend.