I’m visiting “home” for the first time in three years. Everything seems smaller, which is natural I guess, even though I’m the same size I was when I left. Probably because of all the memories that come flooding back. (”flooding”? Seriously? That’s way too cliche) …cascading back. My tree house seems tiny, but that’s because I haven’t been in it since 8th grade. Cabinets, doorways, the fridge, drawers, scissors, bowls… everything has shrunk.

Except for the trees. The silver maples in the front yard have doubled or tripled in size in the nearly-ten years I’ve been gone. I used to be able to easily reach the lowest branches (which are now the same size that the trunks used to be) and I had to sprint, jump, and kick off the trunk just to grab on now. It was never a climbing tree before, and now it can easily bear my weight.

There’s something so relaxing about climbing a tree… seeing over houses, completely invisible to the people on the ground (no one ever looks up!). The noise of the world below fades and all that is left is the wind rustling the leaves and rattling the branches, the chirp of the birds, and the sound of the clouds moving slowly by above. I try to imagine what someone would think if they saw a twenty-seven year-old up a tree… Funny how it seemed so normal at seven, despite being twenty, thirty, (forty?) feet up. Funny since it seems like these days the overprotective lawyerparents would never let their kids climb a tree. What came naturally back then… still does, but it seems much more conscious. Always step nearest to the trunk. Don’t commit your weight until you know the branch can hold it. Keep your eyes open (but don’t get stuck in the eye). Try not to crush the young shoots.

Metaphor…? Probably not.

But why is it different now, why are these things more apparent? A sense of mortality? Kids don’t think they’re invincible. They don’t think they’re anything. They’ve never been anything but alive, so why would they consider otherwise? How could they? Is it Causality? Endless what-ifs? “What if I can’t get down?” “What if I slip?” “What if the branch breaks?” “What if I die?” I thought kids were supposed to be the ones with the over-active imaginations. Maybe the difference is that adults focus all their imagination on negativity. (What could go wrong?) Kids apply it, unconstrained by practical notions, to the space of possibilities that most of us have blocked off in our heads. “What if I was a squirrel?” “What if I could fly?” What could possibly be?

Holy shit! Thunderstorm! I haven’t seen one of these in years!

[via: subconscious]

A friend of mine died of cancer a few years ago. She was my age. The only consoling aspect is that she lived more in her short life than most people live in their entire 75-year life expectancy. She is a constant source of inspiration to me, and for that I am forever grateful.

Goodbye Ellen, you live on in our hearts and minds more than you’ll ever know.

1) Writing
3) Getting Things Done/Finishing Things
2) Scheduling/Planning
(so it should come as no surprise that I’m making new years resolutions in february… ahem.)

First of all… it’s not so much that my writing is bad, just that it takes me forever to get anything written. Any of these posts have taken me from an entire night, to a week to complete. This is partly because I tend to over-think everything I think through each and every sentence a number of times before I ever write it out, just to make sure it is exactly what I want to say. I often get stuck on specific words, partly because my memory is good enough that I know there is a very specific word that has the exact meaning I am trying to convey, but bad enough that I can’t remember the exact word. Thesauruses are almost always useless in this regard, because they only group words that only have the same meaning; whereas I tend to need the word equidistant from three unrelated concepts. Maybe someday I’ll write a tool to do that kind of search, but for now I just have to deal with it.
Solution: Write things without thinking about them? I tend to avoid stream-of-consciousness writing because it’s not as cohesive as I’d like, but sometimes its just better to get things on paper (digital or otherwise) first.

The other reason writing often takes me a long time is that I go off on tangents, which are often valid discussion points but get my writing off-focus, to the extent of weakening the main point I am trying to make. This tends to happen more when I am speaking than when writing (since I don’t have time to over-think) but it still exists in my writing.
Solution: Identify (unnecessary) tangents, and don’t write them down. Stay on topic. Don’t be afraid to cut things out when editing. This seems slightly at odds with the previous solution, though… I’m sure there’s a balance to be found.

Also, like most things, writing is one of those things that gets easier the more you do it. So it’s my goal to write at least one thing a week and post it. The other thing I could do is to break up my writing into smaller pieces. Somehow I think that would sacrifice the quality of the message I’m trying to convey, but I did originally want this blog to be about the connections between everything. Do people tend to read longer, cohesive pieces or shorter, individual-but-linked-together pieces? Woo… tangent.

Secondly, I’ve always had some problems finishing things. This is not to say that I don’t ever get anything done, but I do have a lot of projects that are half-finished, or even almost complete, that I would still like to finish entirely. The reasons for this stem from the same reasons why writing is difficult for me. I tend to over-think things in general, and if I ever want to be more productive, I need to think things through to some point then just make a decision. I read something a while ago which hit this right on the head, “You can always reverse a commitment, make a different choice. You can’t reverse equivocation. The time is wasted, gone.” If you can make a decision, you should; as you will much sooner learn whether it was the wrong decision and need to make another choice. There are always exceptional cases, but as a general rule of thumb, this makes a lot of sense to me. It is something I have found particularly true of programming.

The other problem I have with getting things done, also similar to my writing issues, is that I easily get distracted. I work furiously on things when I’m first inspired to do them, but these fits of inspiration come often, and a new one will distract me from my current project. Once that happens, it’s much easier to work on the new idea than it is to go back to the old one. To deal with this, I need to keep around my inspiration for a particular project that I want to finish (or generate new inspiration regularly), and also to prioritize finishing things over starting new things. While it’s easy for my to work on something as soon as inspiration strikes, unless that project is small enough to complete within a brief time (let’s say two days) than I will just make a note about the idea, accompanied by the reasons for my inspiration, and get back to it once I’ve finished my existing projects.

Lastly, scheduling… I’ve never been one to think too far into the future. I’ve gotten to the point where I can keep an entire week’s schedule in my head, but anything beyond that is lost. I have been very good at recording how long tasks take me to finish, and because of that, I am able to come up with reasonably close estimates for appropriately subdivided tasks. When I do set my own deadlines, I tend to be able to stick to them. No, wait… that is not true at all. Only under certain conditions do I regularly meet deadlines. First, the time frame has to be the right size. Too long, and there is no pressure to start, or to work, until towards the very end (this was a major founding reason for the WolverineSoft 48 Hour Contest, now in it’s fifth year!). Too short, and the distraction factor kicks in. The optimal size seems to be between two days and a week. The deadlines also need to be self-imposed. I have to want to meet the deadline, not just have someone else tell me that I need to meet it. Although, the best results are when I can tie my self-imposed deadlines to external events or constraints. Lately, I’ve been using my 30 minute BART rides as an external deadline. It’s quite short, but it means I have to start focused and stay focused; and it seems to have improved my ability to context-switch quickly and efficiently. So, I think I just need to tie all these skills together. I’m going to get a pocket-sized planner that shows an entire month at once (already done by the time I finished writing this), write everything in it (self tasks, external events, todo lists), keep it handy at all times, and always refer to it. I’ll subdivide my current projects into estimable tasks, write them in the planner (tying them to external events/deadlines whenever possible), and continue recording how long they take, and if (and why) they slip.

That said, I think there’s something I can do to work on all three of these issues at once. I’ m going to keep to a strict schedule of posting something new on this site (however small or large) every Thursday. Also, I’m going to update the Flickr account every Monday.