godream

Entirely-too-exciting discovery of the day: when getting doored (http://google.com/search?q=doored for those who haven't had the pleasure), the really fun part actually isn't the split second where you see what's about to happen, or the flying through the air or even the hitting the ground... it's actually the moment afterwards where you realize: oh, okay, now I am prone in exactly the oncoming traffic that I was trying to stay out of. Awesome.

My solution (shrieking more or less non-stop till I got myself out of harm's way) seemed to work, although it kinda disconcerted the dude who doored me.

I walked away -- rolled away, even, on my bike, though I'm bruised and shaken and it's misaligned -- but we are both more or less intact, which I gather makes me very lucky. Whew. More taking the lane for me in future.

Dear Self:

Happy is something you achieve, not something you are given. Nobody is going to bring it to you on a plate. It probably wouldn't be satisfying if they did anyways. You build it yourself, and that's not a bad thing.

You deserve it (really! yes you do!) and there is nothing wrong with pursuing it.

Love,
Self

What do you think, do I need this?

In other news, the other day I got a "... but actually I think you had the right instinct there" from a coworker after a discussion of my approach to a kinda ambiguous design choice that I had made a sorta-wrong call on, and it totally made my day. Which made me think about seriously how much I respect my coworkers and am lucky to work with them, which was a good thing -- a nice counterbalance to some of the frustration I've been wrestling with lately. Hurrah, good place to work.

And in other other news, I think my week of Not Quite Sick Just Really Tired All The Time is just about over! Extra hurrah! I ought to celebrate by getting back on the climbing walls...

23 years old -- 24 next February -- and STILL I can't watch anything remotely scary and expect to be able to get to sleep afterwards. Yeah, I am totally rocking the Real Grownup thing here.

ME: "[Little sister], would you disown me if I decided I wanted to be Doctor Who for Halloween?"

LITTLE SISTER: "No, but only because nobody would have any idea who you were supposed to be."

Things I Have Done Within An Hour Of Arriving Home Tonight:
* Moved a dresser (really not as heavy as I was informed it was going to be)
* Got the toilet to stop flooding; diagnosed why + how not to in the future
* Set mousetraps (since apparently I am the only one who knows how to operate the mechanical ones)

I am also (though not yet today) the go-to person for opening stubborn jars, disposing of insects, and fixing the dish disposal, from which I can only conclude that of all of us I am definitely The Woman Of The House. [Which is a nice balance to that "i buy shoes to lose weight" thing from last month.]

omg worst work day ever. i hate opensocial. and shindig. and gadgets. and rpcs. and safari 3. and the internet.

time to go bake my troubles away.

An excerpt from a conversation among my coworkers today [who are parents of one, two, and one-expecting-another-soon kids]:

"So my daughters picked up this annoying meme from the neighbors' kids -- they think there's fairies in the garden, and they leave notes for the fairies. And it's not like the tooth fairy where they come running up to you going 'daddy daddy I lost a tooth' and you know it's under their pillow -- you have to search the entire backyard for notes to reply to."

"Well, you don't have to respond to the notes. It's an object lesson... on how fairies don't exist."

"Or you could respond to only one of the two kids' notes."

"When the other kid asks why the fairies don't answer her notes, you tell her 'because fairies don't exist'."

"And when people tell you you're a bad parent, you ask, 'yes, but to which child?'"

So there was a two-day class at work this week that I would've liked to have taken -- supposed to be a big hands-on overview of how lots of the moving parts of infrastructure at the company fit together. But the higher-ups on my team have really been pushing for the feature I'm working on to get done, and I don't blame them, so I didn't try to do it.

(This is the part where I digress and mention as background that I have weird deep fears about being too pushy or too forward, due to all sorts of awesome irrelevant reasons.)

Instead I mentioned briefly to the tech lead on my team that the next time the class was in town, I would really like to have the time to do it, but I understood that this wasn't the right time so I wasn't going to try now. He was totally encouraging (I heart my tech lead) and next time I will. (In some ways it might be better -- I'm told it was poorly run this time.)

This afternoon I talked to my manager, and said in passing that I was a little sad that I didn't feel like I had the time to do this right now. I told him that I'd said I'd like to do it next time. He has a really good response, and it basically boils down to this: the approach I took is actually kind of sucky for both me and my tech lead in a bunch of ways. (No, my manager did not phrase it as "kind of sucky".) Being that indirect about it means that ultimately I'm not asking for what I actually want -- I'm giving up on it without talking about it, I'm not even letting my tech lead have the chance to say yes or no. My manager offered instead as a suggestion on how to approach this: "Hi, there's this class I want to take, but I'm worried about how it will interact with getting this feature out. What do you think?" Make it a question. Which is not all that different, and still totally in my comfort zone, and yet way better -- makes it a conversation, still makes it clear that I know there are conflicts and maybe we won't be able to work them out, but directly addresses what I want rather than preemptively skipping over it and to some second-choice option that's not really what I'm driving at. This makes a lot of sense, and I wish I'd figured it out myself. But I think this is another good thing about working with + for people who know their stuff -- in the same way as I get to absorb technical knowledge left and right, it's a pretty awesome way to learn about communication too.

It's a good point in general. Ask for what I want. Not some six-degrees-separated thing that I think would be the best compromise. Don't make people guess what I'm really aiming at.

He also said that "talking about things should always be okay". Which is AWESOME. And which maybe I should have known, but is really good to hear anyways. And that everyone lives somewhere along the aggressive <------> non-demanding spectrum, and I land far enough to the non-demanding side that I shouldn't be afraid to go a bit farther towards the norm. (At work, at least.)

(On the downside, said feature is STILL NOT DONE. Gaaaaaaah. And I got blindsided twice on big-picture questions about it, one a question about timelines from tl+pm, and one just a "give me the overview" question from manager -- I think I've let myself lean too much on the more senior guy who's working on this feature with me. On the one hand, that's why he's getting paid the big(ger) bucks and I think this is supposed to be a Leadership Experience for him; on the other hand, curiosity about the big picture has always always been a driving force and an asset for me, and I shouldn't let myself fall to the backseat just because someone else is supposed to be in charge of laying out our route. Meh. Another, different, technical communication skill to learn, I guess? Thinking on one's feet?)

Books I have read recently and liked:

A Fire upon the Deep -- awesome thinky ideasy scifi; file under thinking-about-thinking
A Deepness in the Sky -- prequel-sort-of to Fire upon the Deep; file under what-is-human
Obedience -- strange and meta mystery novel, I got totally caught up in it and finished it in an afternoon
The Demon's Lexicon -- YA fantasy, funny with strong characters and awesome ending
Pride & Prejudice & Zombies -- It does what it says on the box

Currently rereading Cyteen; would totally love to loan any of that list (except A Deepness in the Sky, which I borrowed from someone else) to anyone interested in reading them and within easy in-person loaning distance; wondering if this is a useful way to get my friends to read stuff I think is awesome and talk with me about it?