Those frustrated with Twitter are frustrated because they have a belief that a story needs a beginning, middle, and end. And that it should have all of those parts before it’s presented to them. What the hell am I supposed to learn from a tweet? The point of Twitter isn’t knowledge or understanding, it’s merely connective information tissue. It’s small bits of information carefully selected by those you’ve chosen to follow and its value isn’t in what they send, it’s how it fits into the story in your head. There are great stories to be found on Twitter, but you have to do the work.

I tell a narrative with my tweets—the narrative of my life, mainly. I announced my probable bi-polar II diagnosis on Twitter long before I posted it here. [And before I got some great feedback from friends who wanted to tell me that I'm not alone. That made it worth it.] My friends have an idea what’s going on in my life, because I share a goodly chunk of it on Twitter. Jonathan figured out that I had an obsession to eating sushi last week. My tweeps know I’m sick today. [Oddly enough, I didn't tweet where I went in to work for a couple of hours because I felt I had to do it. It was the right idea, but I'm paying for it now in feeling puny. I'll live.]

I’ve often said that I don’t know why someone who didn’t know me would read my Twitter. I’m largely the same way with Twitter—I care about the people that I follow, for the most part. I know about my friend Justin’s music school debt, how it creates angst for him and has him in a job he hates because it pays him well enough to get out of that debt. I know that some friends saw a lot of snow today, and some saw none. [And folks know that I saw very little at my house but a lot out by where Stephen and Misty live.]

Now, few of these little blips of information make a whole lot of sense if you don’t have some sense of the larger picture, which is why I write here. Why I share my life online, I’m never 100% sure, but the fact of the matter is that I do it. Part of me thinks that it’s self-expression. Part of me thinks that it’s narcissism. But I find value in it, which is why I’ve done it for almost a decade [!]. But these moments make more sense in the context of friendship, which is why I enjoy it when I go visit Rick and Jessica and don’t have to fill in gaps about what’s been going on with me since they last saw me, or how I’m excited when Mike Terry or Josh Stockment come to visit and roll on up to Nashville ['cause that's how we do], or when we meet Hubbs in Nashville.

Fundamentally, I find that Twitter is a channel of that narrative, a way of taking your friend’s temperature. What has their eye? [when it comes to links]. What has their ear? [when it comes to music.] What has their ire up? Are they at GEOFCON TWO? Are they happy about something? Have they been in a car wreck? [Happened to two different friends this week. Found out via Twitter both times.] I care about Twitter because I care about people, both those I’ve met and those I’d like to meet.

As it turns out, my T score really was, as I now understand it, a repression of just how much I am ruled by emotion rather than logic. Some of you who know me may dispute this, but let me tell you … here inside me, my heart wins out over my head all the doggone time. I really am an ENFP, or what the Keirsey folks call a champion.

Where this plays out as a problem with me is that I often end up feeling overwhelmed by the intensity of the emotions that I feel about things. A case in point is today: Misty posts a photo of Eli on the way to his first day of school, and well, it makes me cry. Misty was incredulous, but I yam what I yam.

This is, perhaps, the most important thing that I’ve learned about myself in therapy. I sabotage myself when I get overly emotional, because I think I can’t handle it and/or shouldn’t be feeling this [sadness|happiness|fear|anger] so intensely, and so I try to cut it off. That’s acting against type, and honestly, it’s just about the worst response that I can give myself—because then I seek to numb things out a bit. And if you’ve taken one look at me, you might imagine that I do this by stuffing something in my pie hole.

I’m learning to just ride the waves as they come, because they will eventually go away. If I try to cut it off—or worse, bottle it—it gets even worse. I’m tired of it being worse.

And so concludes this introspection that you didn’t really ask for me to perform. Now, don’t ask me about the bullshit decision by the CCHA today—I’m still too angry to talk about that rationally.

After:

I grew the beard in my 20s to look older at work. I had plenty of reasons for this, but the main one is that I was way younger than my peers and wanted to fit in a bit more visually. Now that I’m 30, though, I don’t really care about that kind of thing as much—plus, I’m established in my position. Also, I associate the growth of the beard with the growth of my gut over the same period of time. I’m trying to get rid of one, so why not both?

It’s all in how you choose to see things. This I have learned lately. And I now choose to see myself as a cleanshaven individual. [But yes, I will Whiskerino in three months. No worries there.]

So I’m sitting here in my terribly messy house, waiting for guys to bring in my furniture. In fact, they just called—they’re 15 minutes out. Is my house a wreck? Yes, it is, but I’m working on it. My house is a metaphor for my life, I think—too much junk, too much stuff of little value being held onto, entropic, chaotic and full of music and computers. It’s just who I am, for better or for worse. There is some of that that I’d like to change—de-junk the house, learn to let things go more, etc.—and I think that I can change that if I put forth the effort. But I really don’t want to change the fact that I’m a fundamentally open person.

As such, you can read my Twitter account if you wish. Warning: it can be scary inside my head.

First, let me provide you a musical setting, friends. This track runs about ten minutes, which is far more time than it will take you to read these meager words, but maybe you’ll get to thinking during the guitar solo.

Cindy was 34.

Barry was 29.

Leah was 28.

All of them left us far, far too soon. All of them left us in much the same way—their brains conspiring with their bodies to take them from us long before any of us were ready to see them go. Cindy was my sister-in-law; Noah’s Barry would have been a good friend, I’m sure, had I ever had the chance to make his acquaintance. Leah was an acquaintance, and her husband Jamie is definitely a friend. All three of these men now share the same grief—a lifetime that was to be lived together now suddenly lived apart.

If you aren’t familiar with Over the Rhine, well, I’m sorry for you. The music that should be playing through your computer is, I think, wholly apt for this setting. The lyrics are reprinted, below, in their entirety, with my emphasis:

it makes a difference
when you walk through a room
with that worrisome smile
road weary perfume

but this isn’t the place
and it isn’t the time
for this beautiful delusion
that is robbing me blind

I want to know
I want to know
will it make a difference
when I go

it makes a difference
that I’m feeling this way
with plenty to think about
and so little to say

except for this confession
that is poised on my lips
I’m not letting go of God
I’m just losing my grip

I want to know
I want to know
will it keep you guessing
when I go

what is a love
if the love’s not my own
this is not my home
this is lonely
but never alone

I just want to hold you
in my gaze for awhile
so I can remember
every line around your smile

then I want to know
I want to know
will it make a difference
when I go

For those left behind, picking up the pieces, let me answer the question: YES.

Why this is hard for me to do is irrelevant. It’s important for me to do it to keep from continuing to hurt people that I love and care about deeply. I’ve betrayed some confidences lately in ways I didn’t consider [at the time] to be all that closely held. I’m now quite clear that I was wrong about that. Knowing that I’ve caused pain in this situation … well, any words I’d have for it aren’t quite adequate to the task.

I guess it’s important to say that, as much as I can, I’ll be open about me. But I’ll have to be closed about other things, and I’ve got to learn to do that well. It’s vitally important.

True admissions here:

1. I only applied to one university, my alma mater. I had my Mississippi State application virtually finished, but I never sent in the paper signature that would have seen me fully enrolled. [MSU ignored this and still offered me a scholarship package that would have essentially paid me a few grand a year to go to school.] I visited here once, knew it was the right place, and that was it. [I've told that story here before, and hopefully I'll link it when I'm finished re-shuffling the deck chairs.
2. I never went on a job interview coming out of college. The only engineering job interview I've ever had was as a co-op in the summer of 1999. I got a couple cold calls my last semester in college, but I knew I wanted to work for Teledyne and I knew my boss wanted me.
3. I talk a lot about how I did these searches for my churches, but honestly ... I've only attended services in two United Methodist Churches in the greater Huntsville area, and I have been a member of them both.

I've wondered why I do this. I don't generally engage in risky behaviors. I waited until I was 28 to buy the sports car, and it's not like I fly around driving it at high speeds all the time. Okay, sure, I charge up Bankhead Parkway at 55 if there's no traffic, but that's it. It's not like these are impulsive decisions that I make. [Okay, some of the time they are. Hush, Mom.] But I just … seem to have this intuition for what is right for me, and when I go, I go all out. The upshot of this is that I often have large periods of life of what seems like inaction, because I’m waiting for The Next Thing I Must Rush Headlong After. I mean, I enjoy my life when I’m not in dogged pursuit, but man … when I’m all in, there is nothing like it.

Nothing like it at all.

Of course, it’s pretty great that I have a very good track record of these things. It takes a while to marshal up the forces, because it’s so draining, but I can bring them to bear.

And so I have.

Five years ago, I was single. Still am. Then I was 23 and fresh from college. I was pining after this girl—she’s all over my writings online from 2002, in ways that seem hard to believe now. [Like, I really thought the Internet needed to know all that? Really?] The week after I graduated from college, I got the royal stiff-arm, and well, I sought solace in a song from Caedmon’s Call: “Table for Two“, Derek Webb’s classic ode to singleness for Christian males in their mid-20s. None of that really matters all that much, and okay, maybe you don’t follow those links, huh?

Anyhow. I distinctly remember the first time I saw [caedmonscall.net]: it was in searching for the lyrics for Tf2. At the time, I remember seeing a link for a forum of fans, but … well, I was leery of it. But come 1 Sep 2002, I dove in—because it was a slow day at work. [As I spent today doing a top-level review of hardware builds by our company in our general product category, I don't know how I had slow days back then---but I had 'em.] I got hooked in pretty quick—by that winter, that community of people largely replaced the community of people that I interacted with in college. Sure, I still hung out with my roommates, but the community space that Bryan Allain built for Caedmon’s Call fans spoke to me. Heck, I gained awareness of Calvinism for the first time there. [Unlike many thinking Christians who come from a non-Calvinist tradition and come across my Reformed brothers, I didn't buy their arguments. I do think, however, that they made me a better Methodist because they caused me to re-evaluate why I believed what I believe.]

Well, you know me. I can never leave well enough alone. I offered to help Bryan out with technical details, and suddenly … well, suddenly I was part of Bryan’s volunteer staff. It wasn’t something that I really sought out. I just fell into it. And then that Derek guy left the band for a while, and things hit this whole other level. We got to publicly break that news first [although lots of fans knew long before I did, because they were and are closer to the band than I'd ever hope or deserve to be], and from there, things just became … well, more important to me. What started as a time-killer became, well, a minor obsession. I quickly went from being the chicken at breakfast to the pig.

Of course, all that is preamble. As I’ve said, that community became terribly important to me for a while. It’s far less so now—I stepped back a year or two ago from day-to-day running the forum, although I still am the systems administrator for the server [with all the pain that causes me]. I was having that discussion with one of the few people with whom I am still close last week, and she mentioned that most friendships seem to have lifespans. I wanted to argue with her, but I think that she’s right. [She usually is, although I rarely want to admit it, and she rarely holds it over me when I do.]

Where the hell am I going with all of this? Well, okay, I’m name-checking a new song off of the CD with this entry’s title: “Hold the Light“. [Wanna hear it? I released an MP3 of it last night.] What always really gets to me is the bridge:

Standing round a willow weeping
We’re praying in the backyard
And the chill of the night, the friendship light reminded me
Who we are

I first heard the song in the context of my trip with Doug to Ohio in May. As he noted, we met up with Andy O then, and Andrew played us some Overdressed tracks and some of his Letters to the Editor, Volume I tracks before giving me a copy of the CD. “Hold the Light” is what struck me on my first listen, and it’s what does to this day: because it’s about a community of people gathering together to share good times, bad times, joys, and sorrows. Acquaintances help you move, and friends help you put your life back together when it’s gone to shit. We’re made for community, and while many in Christendom flail about with what community is, this is it—sharing life together, warts and all.

I’ve gotten a better sense of all of this through the last five years. I’m still learning and growing—and always will be, and will always need it.

I first visited campus in the summer of 1996. Mom and I had planned two trips for me to visit colleges, based on the (grossly little for the amount of importance it truly had, if I am honest with myself) research I had done into prospective colleges. My plan was simple: two trips, visiting two schools each. I was interested in five universities overall, ranked as follows:

1. The University of Illinois
2. The University of Missouri-Rolla
3. The University of Alabama in Huntsville
4. The University of Tennessee
5. Mississippi State University

State was my safety school: it had the major I wanted [although not the emphasis I was interested in] and would more than pay for itself. Honestly, I was interested in Illinois and Rolla because they were far away from home. UT interested me only because I was born there and thought that I’d enjoy going to a SEC school.

Our first visit was to UT and UAH. We drove out early to Knoxville and visited with two of my dad’s old cadets, who’d married and had kids and all that rot. They’re the cadets my folks talk about the most when they reminisce about our Knoxville years. I had a good time that night, but when I visited the department the next day, it was all wrong: poor computers, old books, etc. It was not on the cutting edge. I left there having mentally crossed them off of my list; I was only interested in their scholarship offers in an effort to extort more money out of potential suitors. [See also: how I used Mississippi State to get more money out of UAH.]

Our next stop was, of course, my now-alma mater. Despite the trip being hosed up eight ways from Sunday—I brought us into town down a route that is an hour longer than the most efficient, so we were late and there were all sorts of issues getting checked into the dorm for the night—something clicked. I’ve never really been able to express what it was that I felt—or what it was that I still feel, honestly—but it felt right. After a great visit the next day, I was sold. On the way home, I told Mom that we could forget the other trip. I’d found my top choice. I don’t remember what we spent the money she’d saved up for that trip on instead, but it was something worthwhile.

Anyhow, not long after that trip, I was accepted to UAH—yes, a full year before I graduated from high school. [As I remember it, they had to key things into the system to note that I'd start fall 1997 rather than 1996; subsequently working in Admissions that next year, I understood. It was a screwy system.] I tried to get other friends of mine to come with me, but I ended up being the only member of my graduating class there. [Alternatively, 25+ members of my class went to State.]

There were times when it looked like we weren’t going to be able to comfortably afford UAH, but in the end, some really good days taking standardized tests were paired with my hard work in school and I went to school pretty much only having to pay room and board. Mom made me a deal: she and Dad would pay for the first two years, but after that, I was on my own. I paid a lot more for my education than my parents did in the long run, because I went another three years and all that. They helped me out a fair bit with money and more than my fair share of moral support. But the taxpayers of Alabama are really who put me through school. Thanks, y’all.

As I drove through campus at lunch, I realized that today is the ten-year anniversary of the day I moved to Huntsville. I have lived in this area longer than anywhere else in my life, and it’s the first place that I chose to live independent of my family. [Yes, I'd left to go to school in Columbus prior to that, but I was restricted to being there because I was a Mississippi resident.] I have, at times, regretted coming here, but that’s when I thought that I was headed in the wrong direction. I think that I’m mostly headed in the right direction now.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been here for ten years. It doesn’t seem like it’s been that long, but then there are many new things on campus since I started:

1. A new University President.
2. Two new dormitories.
3. The University Fitness Center.
4. Greek Housing.

I was but one voice of many in arguing for all of these things [save replacing Frank Franz; I love Frank] as a student. It’s great to see UAH making great progress as we go forward into the future. I was at UAH at a great time to be a student there, and it’s getting better every year.

I’m proud. To be. A U-A-H Char-ger.

I still think my best experience in life when it comes to race relations was living on a white-minority hall at MSMS for a year. I did a lot of listening that year.

I guess what I needed to say—and didn’t—is that I learned a lot by shutting up. I need to do that a lot more.

The other thing that got me to really thinking recently was watching the first six hours of Eyes on the Prize. I don’t know why it didn’t hit me at any level other than intellectual before, but as I watched, I realized: “The decade I value most as a fan of space history and the decade to be most valued in bringing about civil rights change are one and the same.” It helped me to realize that all these important events in our nation’s history—truly starting us down the path of equality—just weren’t that long ago. When I think about that, it gives me pause. What it drives home is a very simple message: these changes started not long ago, and we are still feeling the first- and second-order effects. Our racial rifts in this country formed over a couple of centuries, and four decades is not going to erase that collective memory. It’s a start. We have to keep walking … together.

The realization was simple: I self-identified with “Lonely Stranger” because it was really the first time in my life where I didn’t have anyone close to me. I can count on one hand the number of people from my old high school that I even bother to keep up with anymore—and two of them are married to each other, which makes that easy enough. For people that know me now—the person who networks relentlessly, even putting together two folks a time zone away—you might be really surprised to see me back then. Sure, I was still my talkative self, but I rarely if ever truly engaged with any of those folks. Kari has often expressed some … well, I guess concern … about how I consider my life in Mississippi pre-MSMS from when we’ve talked about it. I think that she’s right to do so, but honestly, I think that a lot of it comes from the fact that I was first depressed there—without realizing it until years later—and so I associate all the crappy, negative stuff about myself with that place, which is neither fair nor healthy.

Today, I’ll stand by him again as he grieves.

This is not easy, but it is necessary. :sigh:

I think that, like the rest of my family, I just feel pretty wrung-out right now. The hard part for me, I think, is that I’m usually such a verbal person, and when not verbal, I write. Words are how I deal with things and how I think things through. [Just yesterday, a colleague of mine---who is, himself, notoriously verbose---asked me to "use shorter sentences". This was on a teleconference, so the co-worker on my end and I had a good laugh at that.] My way is certainly no better than any other; it’s merely what works best for me.

So when I’m at a point when the words don’t come easily, things are definitely sucking.

I think that part of the issue lies in the fact that I feel like I have to dam a lot of the flood of things going on in my head. I mean, for my brother’s sake, I should shut up and stop verbalizing all this crap, because, on the scale of things, we all know that his life’s been far more rocked than mine. And as with the passing of any family member, the absence of Cindy in our lives merely reveals the flaws in all other relationships, as those relationships become strained as we all struggle to cope with this new existence. But as with many such things, the strain also strengthens things. [You can take the boy out of mechanical engineering, but you can't take the mechanical engineering out of the boy.]

But in the midst of everything else, well, my sleep pattern is radically off. I put some of that on environment—I never sleep well away from home—but that surely can’t be all of it. All I do know is that my body really struggles to know what time it is right now. [At work, all it knows is that it must be quitting time somewhere.] That’s just sapping anything else that I’ve got going, and it’s making me damnably ineffective at anything I try my hand at. Of course, that’s always a dangerous spiral, because I have this weird conception that, if I’m not any good at something, I just don’t do it. But right now, that’s being a bad negative feedback loop—not coming up to par on anything that I’m doing, I don’t feel like doing anything. And that, well … that’s bad.

So I’m trying to take it a step at a time—writing it out a bit, and also seeking to take some better care of my sleep habits with the idea that being rested will have positive benefits. Here’s hoping. [And if you're saying, "Yeah, he wrote himself out of this even as he talked about writing out of things," you've gotten the point. This is far more for me than it is for you. It's probably only for you if you have to put up with me. ]

I take it as a matter of faith that y’all will respect the radio silence around here. I’m still finding words for the thoughts going around in my head. And all this feels very cheap to write, because, well … you know, I’m not Doug right now, who has a far heavier burden to bear. He’s not bearing it alone—thank God for that, quite literally—but it’s a heavy burden.

God? This sucks. But you didn’t promise us a bed of roses.

In writing about the new Over the Rhine Christmas album, Jeff wrote this:

Ten years ago Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist produced a Christmas album, The Darkest Night of the Year, as their band, Over the Rhine, began to dissolve around them. Over the Rhine persisted but the album marked a distinct ending of an era with the departure of guitarist Ric Hordinski and the subsequent construction of a six-piece band.

[Jeff certainly knows OtR's history better than I do.]

The dissolution of the first era of Over the Rhine is what leads to the album’s character: dark, moody, and plaintive. To quote Linford Detweiler from when I saw OtR in concert earlier this year: “Sad music makes me happy.” It does the same for me. I’ve often sought why this is true for me; the only answer I’ve really come close to with it is that profound expressions of sadness or dismay are rooted in valuing things that we should love and cherish. Great breakup songs must lament good times, whether they’re the 80s power ballad begging the girl to come back or Ben Folds wanting his black T-shirt back (you bitch). You don’t mourn unless the loss has value.

I think that my two favorite tracks off of TDNotY are “Coal Train“, which evokes all the imagery of being in Linford’s childhood country church in southeastern Ohio, having to pause as the coal train comes by, and “Amelia’s Last“. Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” brings a sense of scope and purpose to the protagonist’s life at the coming of the solstice: a moment of contemplation before moving along to carry forward. That’s a common sentiment as the end of the Gregorian calendar’s 12th month draws to a close, as we turn weary eyes to a new year.

Similarly, I think “Amelia’s Last” brings a sense of understanding of our place in this world, albeit with a slightly different perspective. Where Frost is quiet and contemplative, Detweiler is troubled and restless; the liner notes comment that “This record is for … anyone wrestling with their own dark angel this Christmas.”

these are the (whose are the?)
these are the raw materials
you and me
these are the (whose are the?)
these are the angels’ inferiors
who
someone breathed this breath in us
“oh amelia, we’ve so far to go
oh amelia”

these are the (whose are the?)
these are the ordinary clothes
you and me
around extraordinary flesh and pulsing madness deep and close
who
someone breathed this breath in us
“oh amelia maybe we’re not that far
oh amelia is this who we really are
my amelia”

Someone breathed this breath in us, and we are in His woods. This is who we really are, and we have miles to go before we lie down our last.

Also, let’s just put it this way: November starts my fourth month of working proposals at the office. Solid. My output of non-work things was great early in that run—for example, I was driving to Nashville every Tuesday, bootlegging concerts, and getting them up in under a week—but that’s radically curtailed now. It probably hasn’t helped that church responsibilities have ramped up, as chancel choir has been doing a lot of things—fundraisers, extra practices, etc.—that have just left me with not a lot of “me” time if I don’t cut out activities. Two examples: at the beginning of October, I started a “When’s your birthday?” topic on the mailing list of our local friends, and here it’s November and I haven’t compiled anything. Sad. Sadder still, I have a concert bootleg from mid-September that I’ve done nothing with [to say nothing of two more shows since then, and ... I can only remember what the latter show was. Really. I can't remember the show before that clearly].

I want to say that things are bad, but they’re really pretty good. All the work stuff has been hard but very rewarding. As my boss noted yesterday, I could print out the corporate annual report when it comes out and point to items that I actually had a hand in bringing about. Ummm … awesome! I’ve been very blessed to have had all the opportunities that I’ve had lately, even when they’ve left me very, very beaten down.

But I think what’s messing with my head this week is that one of my mentors recently had a health scare, one the doctors are still working to figure out but one which would be easily expected to be stress-related. My mentor is fine and back at the office now, but … I won’t lie, it’s freaked me out. I’m far more concerned about them than myself, but I will admit to concern on my end. I know myself and my family enough to know that, while we’re darn talkative, we still tend to bottle up all the truly stressful things and hold them fast to us as if they’re comforting.

So if you run into me and get the thousand-yard stare, grab me by the shoulder and shake me back, would you? I find myself going into that state a lot.

The end of all this is coming by the end of the year, and the responsibilities will just shift around in different ways, for sure. I’m telling myself that it’s growth, and that growth is hard. It’s worth it, though.

[I started this with the hopes that it would help, but I've intentionally put up so many fences of vagueness that I'm not sure if it has.]

What am I doing? Well, after reading that weekday TV and video gaming seems to lower students’ educational endeavors, I got to thinking: what do I do at night when I get home from work? Well, I usually sit down, watch ABC World News Tonight, then sit down to scarf down whatever my TiVos have recorded for me. That sucking sound you hear is any chance that I will get much done going out the window.

Now, I get a fair amount done at night on the things I choose to work on, but the things that I choose to work on are not really the things that I’d value—reading more, especially my Bible in preparation for teaching Sunday school classes, maybe a little programming, Web work, etc. Instead, I half-watch TV while I piddle aimlessly on the Internet. It’s … bad.

So, I’ve decided that, for the month of October, I’ll timeshift all my non-news TV watching to the weekend, when I really don’t have much concern in the way of goofing off. That’ll add a few hours each night not spent wondering what TiVo has for me and maybe I’ll, you know, clean my office, or work on some bookcases, or any of the number of reasonable projects I could knock out…

If you’d told me seven years ago that I’d have “manager” next to my name in any way, shape, or form, I would have laughed at you. [I might have laughed at you two years ago on this date as well.]

I have been blessed: with opportunities, with support, with mentoring. The people who were a large part of my decision in continuing employment here after graduation continue to make that happen now.

Let’s win, baby.

I believe that I pulled up to such a sign today. Now: which way will I turn?

[Yeah, I'm hopelessly vague here because I don't wanna get dooced. You may feel free to call/email/flag me down/invite me over for dinner.]

Just as with a corporation, your board is going to change: sometimes, you change jobs, so you’ll lose regular contact with the workplace mentors—folks in and out of your direct-reporting architecture—with the folks whom you keep in your circle. [If I sit down and think about the people I have on my own board from my workplace, only one is in my direct-report organization---my boss. Everyone else is either someone who has left the company or, oddly enough, works in our Quality organization. Dad must be proud of that. ] Just as with other relationships, friends who were close to you at one stage of life aren’t later on, and your lack of contact sees you relying on them far less. [The reverse, of course, is true; sometimes you find that new friends are people whom you quickly put in a position of trust.] And then, if you’re me, one of your old role models ends up shattering all that.

The key, as with any kind of investment, is diversification. Have people near and far in whom you place trust. Have directors in various facets of your life. Mine fall in various places: my parents, good friends of mine here in town, colleagues present and past, folks from various church organizations of which I’ve been a part over the years, and partners in crime. These are people whom you should be able to name when you stop to think about it, but stopping to think about it is important. What should you ask yourself? “Is this a person whom I want having a say in the direction of my life?” is quite a fair question, one you’ll ask with friends and family likely most often. Now, I love my parents and have a very good relationship with them, but not everyone is blessed with parents like my brother and I have. Some folks are going to be taking their parents’ counsel when it’s simply not worth it, and that’s sad but something you need to get away from. Additionally, you’ll have some friends whom you realize you’re hitting up for advice again and again, but then come to realize that, hey, that’s a bad idea.

What’s another good question to ask? “Do I have enough people from all facets of my life?” If you have people in your career in whom you place no trust, you probably are not really all that invested in your career, and you need to think about changing careers. One person—whom I won’t name—where our relationship is definitely that we’re mutual directors for each other as much admitted to me a while back that he didn’t have this, and it’s one reason that he’s looking hard at a career change. It’s a change that I support, even though I have given him a lot of grief about it in the past.

And that’s another thing: do your directors always tell you what you want to hear? If so, you’re probably not getting good advice. You should be troubled and frustrated from time to time when you see the counsel of people that are important to you, because sometimes, you’re doing things totally wrong and that person will have the perspective to say, “Hey, wake up!’ My aforementioned friend approached me about his career change and felt like I’d long been one of the people holding him back on such a thing; I told him that the previous advice I’d given him was because I didn’t feel like he was committed to the prospect of change in the past, so I was being fundamentally conservative with my advice.

If you’re reading this and can name a group of people—on two hands!—in whom you have placed trust and respect, keep on doing that. Having more than ten folks is probably unwieldy and likely has strong overlapping anyway. Having too few folks means that you’re probably not getting enough diverse advice in your life. If you don’t have enough, intentionally seek out mentors in your life—find people who are doing what you’re doing or what you want to do and ask for advice. Talk to them about your situation. You’ll see where that leads you. If you don’t invest in your friends and family, start! Nobody’s got it all together, and we can all stand to hear from folks about our direction in life.

Advice is seldom welcome; and those who want it the most always like it the least.

– Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, Letters to His Son, January 29, 1748

РFran̤ois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections, maxim 378

Communication Skills: Rating 5.0 / 5.0

Presents ideas effectively and conveys thoughts clearly and concisely. Communicates well in writing.

Communication Skills: Geof does a great deal of work outside of TBE in the areas of announcing and reporting. These interests and talents have provided him outlets to sharpen his ability to effectively convey wrtten and verbal thoughts clearly and concisely. It is my experience that gifted engineers and technical professions rarely have exceptional communication skills. Geof’s communication skills are well respected on our team as he often called upon to edit charts, documents, memos and emails

[Please note that the errors above aren't mine. I joked with my boss that he was probably pissed that I couldn't review all his employee evals. He nodded, laughed, and walked out of my office.]

I do a lot of wacky stuff outside of my engineering nerddom: broadcasting hockey, hockey public address [hopefully more of that next season], Web stuff, etc. Writing and communicating is what I probably do best. Dr. Szilagyi was right: I would have made a great English major. [And if you're reading that, shaking your head, and parsing my grammar: remember, I wasn't one.]

The funniest bit of non-managerial praise I’ve gotten lately was when a colleague hopped in my office the other day astonished at the depth of meeting minutes I’d prepared for a telecon we’d had last Thursday. “I could never have done that! Reading that was pretty much like being there.” Well, you’d hope that I’d have learned what good minutes look like in parts of eight years of Student Government. [I really want to stay and finish these minutes tonight while they're fresh on my brain, but I've been working proposals for the last hour-and-a-half and have a presing engagement tonight to boot.]

When I hired in as a co-op, and when I was hired as a full-timer, my extracurricular choices—Student Government and hockey broadcasting—were cited as reasons that I stood above the pack. I make no bones about my technical skills: I’m merely an above average engineer. I’d argue that I’m average-to-below average, but I can’t convince my manager of that fact. Maybe I’m bluffing, or maybe I don’t recognize my own competence.

[I think this comes from having a lot of friends who have Ph.D.'s and advanced degrees and feel inferior due to my shitty study skills and desire to do a lot of wacky things outside of my job, all of which keep me from being preternaturally focused on graduate school, which is what you have to do in order to work full-time and do graduate school. If I'm honest, my disappointment with MSMS alumni is disappointment with self.]

I keep going back to that whole “clearly and concisely” bit and find that it’s not often true, that I’m circumferential and allusive and elusive and meandering. [Have you had a conversation with me that's lasted over ten minutes, uninterrupted? You're nodding.] But I guess I’m back to that old saw:

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.

– Sir Francis Bacon

Exactly what all the above is, I don’t know for sure. But the little performance eval did certainly start some wheels churning.

Lately, I’ve been feeling pretty apathetic: work has been frustrating because we’re pushing paper and not building hardware. I know intellectually that pushing paper is what gets you to building hardware, and while we’re now on the verge of building hardware again, it’s just … gah. It’s not even that I suck at the paper-pushing—I think I do it really well. I’ve just not found much energy for it, and as a result, my work has suffered. I’ll admit it.

I’ll admit that part of my issue is that I really stunk at doing the vacation, and I realized as I drove home tonight why: I wasn’t gone long enough to matter. I don’t mean that from a “I needed a longer vacation”—which, hey, I do—but more from a “I was only going to be gone two days, so it’s not like I was a non-functioning team member that you just had to write off.” I don’t have the vacation banked to do a multi-week vacation, but I think one’s going to be needed next year. As soon as I have an idea of what hardware we’ll be building in the next 12-18 months, I’ll start planning in earnest: come next summer, I should have three weeks banked up. If I took two, I’d be gone long enough that everyone would have to just write me off for that time.

As to the title of this: I just got disgusted with myself today and started to return my faith to the system. It’s worked pretty well—I’ve gotten the bonus of having tackled some things, and the things I’ve gotten done have been relatively important. My @Actions mailbox is clear, and so is @Responses. I don’t owe anyone any email, and that’s always a good feeling.

I just need to wake up with this feeling in about seven hours and push on through tomorrow. Yep … more proposals.

B&A: Then let’s talk about opting out. When we are in control, we have the option to hide, to consider which face to put forward, even to manipulate. Will we still have this ability? And if not, are people ready to lose this control?

AG: I’m not so sure we will retain much of this ability, which in sociology is generally referred to as “presentation of the self.” With so much information about our past and current activities available to be searched, cross-referenced, and made available in real time, when we meet someone for the first time, we are likely going to lose control over the image we present to them.

Imagine what this will look like in practice. Whether you are interviewing a prospective new hire, meeting a potential romantic interest for the first time, or simply sitting next to someone on a plane, you no longer have to take a person at face value. It’s easy to see that this can occasionally be very useful, if you happen to be on the empowered end of the transaction. The trouble is that this ambient intelligence—facilitated by a ubiquitous deployment of informatic systems—cuts both ways.

And with the ability to control how others see us, I believe that we lose also a certain protective and beneficial hypocrisy that allows us to function as a society. We all, without exception, have habits, behaviors, experiences that we don’t necessarily want to share with the wider world. When you evert these experiences, and archive them, and tag them with metadata, and make them persistently accessible, it gets very difficult indeed for anyone to maintain the unimpeachable public façade our current mores require of us.

This is something that people who consider ubiquitous computing from a purely instrumental or technical perspective frequently miss: it’s not just a change in the way we use computers, it’s an alteration in some of the very foundations of the self as it’s been constructed in the West for the last few centuries. We’re in for a wild ride.

B&A: You know that when we’re doing something “on the record,” we tend to act and speak a bit differently, even in contrived ways at times. So how will this awareness of everyware affect how we present ourselves?

AG: Well, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. Anyone who’s had, for one reason or another, to get used to being in front of cameras or microphones with any degree of regularity knows how hard it is to be “natural” when confronted with the prospect of being recorded, or transmitted to a large audience, or both.

When artifacts like cameras and microphones (to say nothing of sensors capable of recording one’s position and location, and verifying one’s identity via unique biometric signatures like retinal patterns or even gait period) are embedded in the objects and surfaces of everyday life, we all potentially become subject to the most intense kind of mediation. Barring some regulatory or other intervention, we’ll be forced to assume that we’re at least potentially “on,” just about all the time. And the sheer ubiquity of output modes offered by the robust deployment of everyware means that whatever once goes into the network can come out again just about anywhere.

Among other complications, this strikes me as being very likely to give rise to many of what MIT sociology professor Gary T. Marx calls “border crossings”: irruptions of personal information at an unexpected place or a time, in an unexpected context. Again, I don’t think we’re even remotely prepared for what this is going to do to social cohesion.

[Emphasis mine on both parts.]

As I had folks over this weekend, I was interested, as usual, to hear Jeff and Adriene talk about marriage. Adriene related a hilarious anecdote from their second week of marriage regarding how Jeff likes his sandwiches made. It’s such a trivial thing, but … it’s important to us.

I sometimes write about the secrets that we keep from others and even ourselves. I’ve heard many folks—Jeff and Adriene, Stephen and Misty, Mark and Karyn—talk about how marriage is a refining process in their lives. The quote that sticks in my mind from Jeff this weekend is this: “It’s like you go through life with blinders on, and after that first year of marriage, you realize, ‘Oh man, I’m such a horrible person!‘ ”

One of the reason that people so judiciously defend privacy in this age of ubiquitous information is that there’s the risk of being burned. Having an illicit affair? You could be outed. Flirting with some chippie online? Hell, the guy you’re flirting with could be your son! [Try explaining that one to your husband.] We crave privacy because we’re afraid of our true self being rejected.

It’s obvious to me, though, that we want people to be real. When it’s clear in our society that people are being phony, they lose face; many folks believed Rafael Palmeiro’s stern statements about having never used steroids until he was caught by a drug test. Some people always felt Kobe Bryant was putting on a facade, and then he was busted for sexual misconduct. Alex Rodriguez was raked over the coals for his “will he, won’t he” approach to the World Baseball Classic until news came out that his mother wanted to play for the Dominican and his wife wanted him to play for the U.S. [Hey, as much as I'm not a fan of how A-Rod handles himself, that's a shitty position to be in; either way, you're going to make one of the women in your life unhappy.]

I think Greenfield has it right: it’s all about the sociological phenomenon of presentation of self. Some people have found this out firsthand: Mark Pilgrim got fired for writing about his addictions, and, yes, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Heather Armstrong’s firing creating the term “Dooced”. Just as we’re all shocked, shocked, SHOCKED! to find out that we’ve been living next to a serial killer for fourteen years, or maybe even going to church with him, well … yeah. These things happen. Sometimes that guy you thought was a great friend turns out to be a … not-so-great guy.

Some people mourn this loss of privacy. I’m not sure that I do—even as I cover up the things that I want to cover up and keep hidden. Hypocritical, sure, but the answer is that I’m willing to be known as a hypocrite primarily because we could all easily be found out for being one!

I think that the fundamental tension in my writing here is being torn between a desire to flay myself open and the understanding of social norms that prevent me from doing so. Chew on that as you will…

I’m fairly sure that I’m not alone in this. I guess writing this is my way of asking if I am, though; introspection is nice, but flaying myself open a little and letting everyone look inside is both useful and not. Maybe, in looking at my problems, you’ll see your own.

That said, I am going to take the advice I just gave, because I really do think that I need to take it. I’m not ready for all the steps yet, but … I’m ready for this one.

See, honestly, I’m high maintenance. I won’t lie to you. [Well, I would lie to you if you'd let me ... yes, I'd be the worst kind: high maintenance, but pretends he's low maintenance.] I seek approval and affirmation. I can be manipulative. I’m self-aggrandizing and all those really horrible character traits that we associate with being high maintenance. It is not enough for me to know that I’m smart—I have to show you, and I need you to tell me!

Societally, though, we don’t lob the “high maintenance” pejorative at the male of the species. I wonder why…