Do What Matters Now

I spent the weekend in Portland. The weather was beautiful, and overall, I had a rather nice time. I got to see an online friend (I won't say who, out of respect for that person's anonymity). I got to meet some new people, and I got to spend time with my parents, my sister, and wonderful family friends from my childhood. 

The weather was beautiful, and it showed the city off well. We were staying in a hotel on the Willamette River. I could stand on the balcony of my room and watch people fish for Chinook salmon. In fact, there was a regular traffic jam of boats on the river. The hotel restaurant had a nice deck we could sit on and talk over our drinks while we watched the river. That was good for the soul.

But I was there for a very sad reason. A good friend of my family died unexpectedly at the end of February, and there was a service for him on Saturday. I am so sorry he is gone, but I am really glad I went to the service. He was a wonderful man, and the testimonials from his friends and family at the service made that abundantly clear. He was remembered as a man who helped others, and who made sure the people he cared about knew he cared about them. There were people at the service from all phases of his life, from childhood friends to recent colleagues. We all cried and laughed our way through stories about his strengths and his quirks. 

He was not a young man, but he was not especially old, either. It felt very much like he was someone who died before his time here should have been done. Many of us talked about how this was a powerful reminder not to put off the things that matter. He had plans for travel that I wish he had gotten to fulfill, and no doubt many other great things he would have done if he had more time. But on the fundamentals, I think he succeeded in doing what matters in his life. When I saw him last (during our pre-Petunia Oregon vacation), he seemed genuinely happy with the life he had made. He liked his work. He loved his garden and his deck, and he enjoyed showing people around the city he had settled in. He liked to travel, and he saw a lot of places in his life. He was a wonderful father, husband, brother, son, and friend. I feel better for having known him. That is a pretty good legacy, really, and after listening to his oldest friends talk about him at the service, I think he has such a good legacy because he didn't put off the important things.

We none of us know how long we have. It is not especially profound to say it, but perhaps we all just need to be reminded now and then.  Do what matters now. 

Weekend Reading: The Busy Season Edition

I think it is time to admit that I'm in a busy season, both personally and professionally. We're past Pumpkin's birthday now, but the end of the school year is going to come up surprisingly fast, and with it, our family vacation to New Zealand and the Cook Islands, which I need to start planning.

I've had several networking events recently, not to mention the Bindercon conference in LA. I've been working more hours than I anticipated at my main gig (which I am most definitely NOT complaining about: that's my major source of income). I have three books in flight, all of which are coming along nicely, but still require attention.

And of course, I'm about to fly up to Portland, for a trip that is mostly personal but has some professional bits tacked on. My husband has no problem running the home show on his own, but to be fair to him and the kids, each trip out of town requires at least a little extra planning on my part. For instance, I made scones today so that the kids would have their usual lunch at the beginning of next week. Did I have to do that? No. The kids could eat something different. But I've been gone more than usual of late, so I wanted to do that for them.

In my experience, busy seasons exist not so much because there is so much I absolutely have to do, but because there is an unusual concentration of things I want to do.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there. You're here for things to read this weekend, and I have some links for you.

First up, the Whitney Plantation museum looks like a place we should all try to visit.

We need to stop holding girls and women responsible for the behavior of boys and men. Also, grown men who are creeping on teenage girls that they teach aren't going to stop just because the girls are wearing longer skirts.

Amanda Taub lays out the reason that the utterly unsurprising results of the Guardian's study of their comments section is so disturbing. The fact that women and people of color take the most abuse and the way that abuse correlates with the topics they cover is almost certainly limiting whose voices we get to read on some topics.

Maura Qunit's How to Negotiate a Raise (If You're a Woman) is definitely funny, and definitely sad. It ties in to what I've been thinking lately about my career goals. My current career goal is to build a satisfying and reasonably rewarding career in which I can go for an entire week without having to hold back an urge to scream at someone. I plan to achieve this via a combination of changing what sort of work I do and learning to be more zen.

Do you remember hearing legislators poking fun at "shrimp fight club" and shrimp on a treadmill? Well, the scientists whose work was singled out for ridicule held a poster session. Surprise! None of it is ridiculous.

Sometimes Farm to Table is just a nice story someone is telling you to make you feel good (and buy their food). I wonder about regional variation in this sort of fabrication. I mean, farm to table is all well and good when you live somewhere with a year round growing season, but it is a trend in a lot of places that don't have that. Does that influence this sort of fabrication?

Ending with some happy things:

I really like the idea of this sculpture. More genrerally, I like the idea of sculptures that you can interact with like that.

This tumblr of Classic Programmer Paintings makes me laugh.

And I'm going to leave it there, because I told my kids I'd pick them up a little early today, so we could hang out a bit before I have to leave.

Happy weekend!

A Tuesday Hodge-Podge

I am sitting in a Starbucks, drinking a so-so tea. I have a networking event to attend this evening, and it doesn't make traffic sense for me to go home before the event. I brought some work to do, but find that my brain is not willing to focus on it. My work at my main gig today was pretty intense, and involved a lot of user interface design, which is not something I enjoy or think I am all that good at. And yet, it falls to me to do it on this project, so I do my best.

Anyway, I can't focus on the work I wanted to do, so I'm going to write a blog post instead. It will be a hodge-podge, because I doubt my brain could handle anything more intense.
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The networking event is one that sort of scares me and I almost convinced myself not to go. Then I asked myself what "grown up me" would do, and it turns out she'd totally go to this networking thing and work the room like a boss.

It turns out, imagining "grown up me" and asking what she would do is a pretty good way to figure out what I should do to achieve my goals.

Grown up me is way more confident and willing to put herself out there than right now me is.

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On a related note, it turns out you can be 43 and not think of yourself as really being "grown up me." 

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I really appreciated all of the tips and ideas people posted in the comments on my post abut style, or the lack thereof. I had just about convinced myself to hire a stylist to come in and give me some tips and help me sort out what I need to buy... and then we took our car in for some service and discovered we needed about $1700 of repairs. 

We are very fortunate to be able to absorb that sort of surprise without too much trouble, but it did make me think that perhaps spending several hundred dollars to figure out what clothes to spend another several hundred dollars on wasn't the smartest thing to do right now.

So I decided I would have to invest time, not money. I spent a little over an hour trying on everything in my closet. I filled a garbage bag full of clothes to give away. I made another big stack of clothes that I should probably give away, but that I would first try on with other things- I did the first pass through without doing a lot of mixing and matching.

I have identified a few things I could go and find that would alleviate my immediate issues. I need some professional blouses that work for spring/summer here. I need a new black blazer. Unfortunately for me, both of these are really hard things to find. I will almost certainly need to get things tailored, if not just made to order outright. The problem with getting things made to order outright is that if I do it through the online services (definitely the easiest optiion for me- I can shop at night), I can't return anything I have made custom. I've already got one skirt that fits beautifully but didn't turn out to be as flattering as I thought it would be.

I might start with the easier things: a pair or two of casual pants (maybe crop pants) for weekends, and some new black shoes. 

On the other hand, I had a really hard time figuring out what to wear to the networking thing today, so maybe I should suck it up and go find some blouses.

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I am a complete hair product skeptic. I tend to think that hair products don't really deliver on what they promise in their labeling, so it doesn't matter which product I buy.

But.... I needed some new gel/mouse/styling product, and I picked this L'oreal Boost It mousse and damn, if that didn't really do what it said it would do.

I wonder if I need to reconsider all of my hair product choices now.

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Over the weekend, I wrote a Tungsten Hippo post about finding short ebooks. There are more publishers to watch for than there were when I started Tungsten Hippo. I still wish for a better browsing experience on Amazon, though. I don't want to limit my searches to the publishers I know about.

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I've been thinking a lot about having control over my own reactions. I want to be better at responding to BS in a way that doesn't derail me from my goals. I think the first step to doing this is being able to recognize the BS as BS, and accept the anger or sadness it creates in me without letting those emotions control how I respond, because even when those emotions are completely justified, expressing them in the moment is not always the best choice for me.

I am not all that good at this right now. I am pondering how to get better. Anyone have any tips?

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I think I'll close there. It is almost time to go network like a boss.

Weekend Reading: The Blink and You Miss It Edition

Ugh, I hate it when a week goes by and there are no "real" posts between my two Weekend Reading posts.

But there's nothing I can do about that now, so I guess I'll just plow ahead with my weekend links.

Sadly, I don't have that many links to share, for the same reason that I didn't write a post: I've been busy with offline things.

For one thing, my oldest daughter turned 9(!!!) and we of course needed to celebrate that. I was also catching up after logging some extra hours at my main gig (they had a short term project that they wanted my help on). I want to keep my other projects on track, and they had suffered a little bit during the previous two weeks, so I tried to make that up this week.

So anyway, it was a busy week.

But I do have a few links for you:

Is Soylent really any different from Slim Fast?

This article about the somewhat miraculous recovery of a man with a brain injury was really interesting.

Melissa Harris-Perry interviews Anita Hill. The "Anita Hill hearings" (which were really about Clarence Thomas) were a huge part of what made me realize in college that the men around me were experiencing things very differently than I was. Looking back, I think listening to my male classmates make crude jokes about them was one of the first things I stuffed in my internal "bullshit box." I'm not sure I could stand to see them dramatized, to be honest.

Here's a nice review of Hope Jahren's new book, Lab Girl. And here's a nice interview with Hope Jahren about the book and her science.

The Toast is running a series from Anne Boyd Rioux about women writers that deserve to be rediscovered, and her first choice is Constance Fenimore Woolson. I featured her novella, A Florentine Experiment, in Missed Chances.

Speaking of old stories... one of the things I got done this week was to make good on a goal I've had for months of creating a "thank you" gift for Tungsten Hippo subscribers. I formatted the classic short story Daisy, by W. Somerset Maugham, into an ebook and new subscribers will get that once they confirm their subscription. Existing subscribers will get links to download it in this week's email. My plan is to switch out the freebie ebook every six months or so, always sending the latest freebie to the current subscribers.

I believe this series of tweets was prompted by something that someone said about Hillary Clinton, but regardless of what prompted it, I applaud it:

Today is the day I stop apologizing for any and all ambition. I've been doing this my whole life and I see clearly now that it's fucked.

— Heather Havrilesky (@hhavrilesky) April 6, 2016

Stay small and you'll be a better person = such a message women internalize. Fuck that noise.

— Heather Havrilesky (@hhavrilesky) April 6, 2016

Fuck it, ladies. Let's hustle like a motherfucker until the end of time. Time to make all of the $$$, brag about it forever, give back, etc.

— Heather Havrilesky (@hhavrilesky) April 6, 2016

You can apologize for every single stupid thing you do, and it does no damn good. Time to start owning what you want without apology.

— Heather Havrilesky (@hhavrilesky) April 6, 2016

Go out there and upstage everybody. Take it all. Be the boss. Be hated. Let the rats come out of the walls to take you down. Welcome them.

— Heather Havrilesky (@hhavrilesky) April 6, 2016

Happy weekend, everyone!

Weekend Reading: The Spring Break Edition

It is spring break week here. My parents are here entertaining the kids during the day, so I've worked a fairly full week. But I haven't read as much online, because I've been spending my down time socializing or grabbing some extra time with my kids.

Still, I have some links for you.

This New York Times article on the funding struggles of a start up aimed at women's health is... telling. Also, I can't stop laughing at the fact that someone once thought the "S.S. Napkin" was a good name for a line of sanitary pads.

The firing of a Nintendo employee targeted by the GG crowd is disturbing, even if the company claims it was for some other reason.

The oil and gas industry is causing a lot of quakes in Oklahoma... but not from fracking.

This article about people wanting power for autonomy, not to tell other people what to do, really resonates with me, and bears really thinking about if you run a team. How can we give more people the power of autonomy?

In defense of Aaron Burr. (My knowledge of revolutionary era American history isn't up to this... I may have to read some biographies!)

An app that tells you when you're at a location that features in a poem... very cool!

Does the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle explain Donald Trump's hard to pin down positions?

Donald Trump cannot simultaneously know his positions and his momentum! and given that he's CONSTANTLY talking about his momentum...

— Alexandra Petri (@petridishes) March 31, 2016

I love this:

Powerful #womenalsoknowstuff #rupikaur pic.twitter.com/ShhyJg3Dzk

— Anognya Parthasarath (@anognya94) April 1, 2016

Too. Much. Cute.

You say that now, @drmichellelarue but can you handle this cute? pic.twitter.com/2Tf8Cpmvqz

— Anne Hilborn (@AnneWHilborn) March 28, 2016

Happy weekend everyone. We're taking advantage of our short term live in babysitters to have a date night tonight, so I'm signing off early!