Insomnia Log 8

There's the whir of air escaping into an abyss in my bedroom. The vent normally blows in cool air this time of summer, but right now air seems to be leaving out through it into nowhere. It's about the same sound you hear when you listen into the deep hole of a composting toilet, which I also think is a portal to the Abyss. As my best good friend P and I know from watching As Above, So Below, there are some unconventional ways to get to the underworld if you only look hard enough. Or listen hard enough.

I think a lot about the legacy we leave when we die. This has probably been amplified by several important family members dying in the past couple years. In my pocket notebook I once wrote, "I always think, if I die, someone has to deal with my Speedy Rewards card." Even trivial things like my about.me website or my unused Wikipedia accounts are digital refuse that live on long after the animate matter of me is gone. Digital ghosts. Facebook offers some feature for others to suggest deletion of the accounts of the deceased. That has to be strange to perform. I don't even tell most people I have four Twitter accounts. How will anyone know to delete those? Or will they just pile up like in the dark memory dump of Riley's mind? I was reading about Frances Cobain tonight, about how former Nirvana members see her dad living on through her, while others idolize him even though neither she nor they really knew him. That's the only form of afterlife that makes sense to me, and it's pretty Absurd.

Sometimes dead relationships also suffer a digital haunting. Two of my friends from Dallas liked each other very much and eventually got engaged. They made a wedding website through a service called The Knot that told their story and details about their wedding ceremony and reception in fabulous San Francisco. I visited that site tonight and read "11 days to go!" there. Except this couple is no longer together. I was one of the last of our friend group to know. One day I noticed one of the people in this relationship was no longer Facebook friends with most of our old Dallas crew (previously our "Mutual Friends" on FB). I remember seeing the wedding site years ago but never got a formal invite. I asked this person what was happening. They ended the engagement. I got more of the story when I visited Dallas this past spring (post coming soon I swear!), and I understood why the old crew detached. How strange that in some digital parallel universe the clock is still ticking for this couple to be wed and I'm probably stressing out about dry cleaning my suit.

Speaking of San Francisco, you should see Inside Out if you haven't already. I can't remember the last new movie I watched that had had me tearing up at multiple moments for multiple viewings of the movie (and it is worth multiple viewings). P changed his shirt that said, "Bring back Bernie Mac" to "Bring back Bing Bong". You'll understand that after watching the movie. Go tomorrow! I used to like WALL•E and Up the most of the Pixar crop, but I'm now more aware that I really just love the beginnings of those movies (and their remainders I think are just fine, but not moving). (Somewhere (where?!) I read that the dividing line between mere entertainment and art is in its ability to help us understand the human condition.) I think the beginnings of WALL•E and Up should be their own short films, both pretty tragic. Inside Out, on the other hand, is just as affecting (moving) as the beginnings of WALL•E and Up while still being genuinely funny, smart, relatable, and intriguing for the entire runtime. There are other Pixar films that hold up for the whole movie, but I don't think they have the same poesy as a film entirely about emotions, family, coping, and loss. While other Pixar films primarily focus on the things that bring us joy (a good thing for whole-family movies), Inside Out (literally) turns the spotlight to sadness as an important and neglected emotion that must be felt to be truly human. It helps us connect with the people we love when we need to be loved. I'm going to say this so that it's somewhere on the Internet for those whose search for these kinds of opinions: Inside Out is my favorite Pixar movie.

Blue or Kind Of Blue has a Sunny Border Blue,
Art

Insomnia Log 7

It's that time of the night when the only thing I can think to do is write. This seems to regularly happen after a decent streak of nights of going to bed "on time". Maybe I feel defeated about missing "bed time" one night and just stay up with an attitude of apathy. I don't think that's all of it, because I'm not yawning or feeling that heavy sack-of-sand feeling in my head, so I'm also not physically tired.

I've got The 88 stuck in my head but I'm happy to have them as guests. OC is OK with me. Before that I was listening to how quiet it was in this room. I couldn't tell if what I was hearing was coming from my head or the space around me. Sort of like how when it's dark enough black looks black with your eyes opened or closed. Sort of like how dark it is in the room except for this lighted screen.

A mentor of mine at work reminded me on Monday that it will always take a long time for anyone's impression to change of anyone else. Put another way, trust is built slowly like habits, but it shatters like porcelain with a few mistakes. I won't go into those mistakes here, but I've got some habits to work in that I think will allow my coworkers to trust me as one of their own. These will take time to develop. I think I often want instant results, but there's no magic pill or "program" that I can throw money at. (Believe me, I've thrown some serious money at "programs" before. The lasting effect has always been, "Wow, I guess I really should do that," while leaving it to me to do the work on it. No quick fix.) I think it will work the same way that I don't realize how much my hair grows in a day but notice it over a few months. (I don't cut my hair very often.) And yet, according to Annie Dillard, "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."

I realized this the other day: I think it's challenging my ego and self-esteem to have so much "constructive" feedback from coworkers all the time, but I think I prefer it to the non-feedback I used to get on the job. "Yeah, you're doing fine. ["Fine." No better way to sound insincere.] Just keep doing what you're doing." There's no path for growth or mastery there! A book I'm leafing through called Apprenticeship Patterns (appropriate for me as an apprentice in this company) suggests to "Be The Worst". To surround myself with people who are far above my level and gain whatever I can from them. Seems like it would work like learning a foreign language by immersion in another country, immensely stressful at first, but builds a language in my brain out of necessity rather than sheer willpower (which I know is a limited resource I'm good at burning through). I think while I'm still "learning the lingo" I'm going to be stressed because I don't know how to speak yet.

I'll need to accept that I have some shortcomings as a developer. Some are inherent to my character, because whether we call traits "strengths" or "weaknesses" are just labels for perceptions of how common inner mental structures affect other things. In that way, my strengths lead to my weaknesses, and vice versa. I'll do what I can to go further than my short arms can currently reach. Until I've developed confidence in this "pattern language", as the book calls it, I'll look to this image for inspiration.

The sun's the closest star, but it's dang dark,
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