Stream of consciousness farewell

After 11 years, I am leaving my first real job, and I can't help but reflect on the amazing ride that it has been. I genuinely believe in the importance of capturing these reflections in writing so that some day when I am much older and the memory isn't as good as it use to be, I can revisit that younger self. But I also want to make sure that I am abiding by the blogging code of honor for these types of topics. So I have decided to attempt to write my farewell using one of my favorite writing techniques - stream-of-consciousness. Most of you won't have a clue what I am talking about, some of you might recognize bits and pieces, and a small handful of you will know it all, as we shared this time together.

Raining. Presenting my papers for the first time - excited to see him at the gate. Joking with the immigration guard-- 'Why would you ever want to move here, ah, for love, except for love.' Everything I own in bags and boxes strewn across the airport floor, trying to find his number written on one of the many pieces of paper in the folder with all that other important stuff. I need to get more organized. I have no change, so I am going to have to dial collect. But I haven't a clue how to dial collect here. The phone is ringing but no one answers. The taxi driver isn't very pleased with all my bags. He drives me to the address, and I get in the gate and tell him to leave me at the door to the apartment building. And I ring the bell. Over and over again. Finally he comes down, hung-over, half-awake. He forgot to pick me up. He forgot I was moving to Ireland.

First day in the office. The business park is under construction. The building is cold. No one is here except the guy in ICT. He is laying cables and he shows me a desk where I can sit. There is no phone, no computer, no people. Printed documents for me to read, a few screen-shots printed out in black-and-white. I am the first one to work in the new office block. The phone comes first, then a machine, the network, and slowly more people start to populate the desks. The team arrives, only they aren't going to be my team. I am being moved off the marketing team, heading upstairs to engineering. And I take a seat next to my boss. He is most people's boss. There are lots and lots of people around all the time. 

The first job is to write a suite of user guides. I am the first person to press every button, link to every page, try and complete every single business process all within a short period of time. I have lots of questions, I am gaining confidence, raising bugs, wanting to do more and more. I am driving him nuts, in a good way, I hope. Most nights I go home lonely though, to a wet, cold, dirty Dublin flat. After weeks of watching them get off the bus and go for pints, arriving in the next day with hang-overs, I finally get the courage to ask if I can join them. And so life in Ireland begins. I become the editor of the company newsletter. I know everyone and everyone knows me. I know what is going on, and people come to me for knowledge, gossip, support.

The company reaches out to NYC in their time of need. I am writing about unimaginable things. We believe in something. And we start to work long hours. All of us. A make-shift golf-course is built behind my desk. For weeks, he tried to get a ball in the hole and failed - I could not contain myself, knowing that they put magnets in his ball. Finally he catches on to my bright red face. 

I am no longer alone. I have a peer who is with me for the long haul. The team continues to grow. I have a mortgage. I make lists and I check off every item on every one of them. I am torn between the two worlds of wanting to know how stuff works and wanting the team to be successful, to represent something that is more than just the words we put to paper. For the most part, we are successful, but we do have a hard release that teaches us some very important lessons, like never stay in the office all-night. Sneak out even if it is just for a short-while, long enough to take a shower, change clothes, brush the teeth. I am running all the time, fast, far. The head is clear as I face the next adventure.

I am married now and we are trying to buy a house, which isn't easy. I am trying to embrace the notion of raising a family here while never truly being Irish. Friends move on, far away, peers are dispersed, and I take on a new job, working with the best team that may ever cross my path. We challenge each other, we respect each other, we get stuff done fast and to a high standard. We are all friends. This is our life. We don't want much else beyond the work and the occasional night of free beer. 

I am asked to leave the team that I love and rebuild. It is hard to leave that which is all I ever wanted in a career. But I do. I want to share this with the peers that got lost in translation. I am studying, I am pregnant, I am sick, I am a mom, I am finished the dissertation and back to work. Things have changed in my absence. No one writes the newsletter anymore. Childcare isn't great and it is incredibly hard to leave her each day. But I am determined to make it work, to get my mojo back. We are trying to decide whether or not to move to California. 

We move to Noe Valley, so different than we remember it - all of us are grown now, lots of kids and dogs. It takes just over a month, but we start to settle in, a new house, a great daycare, old friendships renewed, and new ones on the horizon. The sun is shining and it looks like things just might settle into a rhythm. The job changes. And I am trying to embrace the freedoms that less responsibility affords me. But it isn't in me. My daughter is thriving, and I want to be that mom who is comfortable in my skin, which means I need to find that spark again. 

I think I know how to get it back, and I begin to work hard to make it happen. Someone whom I admire takes me under his wing and gives me something to get stuck into. I am studying, negotiating, running, working out solutions from as many angles as possible, never closing any door that might just be the right one. A new door opens a little bit, and I decide to stick my foot in it. I am nervous about leaving that familiar space for something so completely unknown, but I like the way it makes me feel, to be new among a settled group, to know nothing among some of the cleverest peers.

This week is quiet-- a few quiet emails from people wishing me the best of luck, some harder ones from those who are like family. I have teared up a couple of times, and felt unsure as to whether or not that is OK, to be sad saying goodbye, and yet completely incapable of separating the personal from the professional in so many instances of the past 11 years. I am nervous about the unfamiliar. Will I be as known as I have been; will I be as able? Will there be a clearer line between work and home, or will those lines become blurred again as I will love what I do so much that I will need to merge the two together? Will I have a golf-course behind my desk?

I'm bringing sexy back...

On Sunday, I ran for 60-minutes, which I havent' done in a very long time. And at some point along the run, with the sun shining over the bay, thousands of people noticing each other and their surroundings on the day that was in it, I started thinking about this week's blog, and I how I wanted very much to write something that wasn't heavy - I wanted to have fun with it.

And I remembered back in the day, being editor of the engineering newsletter, every Friday chasing up team leads for the weekly news, interviewing one or two people offsite, working on customer projects. There was something very comforting in liasing across groups, doing my utmost to convince the least interested that they could get something out of partcipating in this space. Each week, I would write an intro and most weeks I would find something funny, a picture, a story, something I wrote myself. My style back then was as I am when you meet me - babbling, warm, sometimes surprising people with a darker side of humor.

In direct contrast to my writing style as newsletter editor, most of my blog entries (if not all of them) are heavy going. One of the things that keeps me writing each week is that the blog allows me to work out the bits and pieces swimming in my head so that I am freerer and more relaxed in my daily life. Looking back across the lifespace of the blog, I have to admit to myself that if I read my blog, I am not sure I would want to meet me. I'd seem far too serious about life. As the blog evolves, I want my readers to know that side of self that is much lighter.

Running towards the Golden Gate, determined to touch the bridge before I turned back, I thought about how very much I wanted to shed the extra weight that I am carrying, both physically and metaphorically. As I touched the red iron and made my decent back towards Chrissy Fields, Timberlakes, "I'm bringing sexy back" started playing. My stride seemed to take on this little wiggle that could only be a disturbing sight for the hundreds of tourists around me...

But I couldn't help it, things are in motion now, change is happening, and I am seeing things in a brighter shade of grey.

On collaboration

This is the first time that I have decided to blog about politics. I have friends and family who fall on all sides of the political spectrum, from tea party goers (my step-grandparents), to independents (my mother), true Democrats (my sister), true Republicans (child friend, Tara), to the farthest left that is possible (my father).

When I listen to my friends and family talk about their positions, I see logic from all sides. And I immediately want to bridge the gaps between the differing viewpoints that I am experiencing.

What I am struggling with right now is that we seem to have reached an impasse in our society where we are no longer able to hear each other - we are no longer willing to embrace the very grey nature of humanness, that there isn't one right or one wrong, but that true Democracy is born out of checks and balances.

Yes, I am naturally a liberal at heart, but that hasn't had a negative effect on my relationship with any of the friends and family who fall on different sides of the political spectrum. We can openly engage with each other, and though sometimes I am angry and find myself feeling as if the ability to bridge our ideas is hopeless, we eventually get there.

There is a reason for this - when I talk to family and friends, we are interested in collaborating with each other - we care and respect each other. We want to find a common ground despite our different viewpoints. And when we do, in our conversations, in our lifestyle choices, it is the best mix of all worlds.

I truly believe that the key to fixing the stalemate that we seem to have reached in our society is for each and every one of us to embrace the principles of collaboration. Before I start listing these, I want to persuade my critics. There are lots of people out there who see the concept of 'collaboration' as wishy-washy, as a fizzled attempt to real action. 

Recently, there has been a debate in the technology sphere about the importance of fostering a 'decider' driven culture (Apple) versus a 'collaborative' culture (Google)-- thanks, Gina, for giving us bloggers a forum for this conversation (http://smarterware.org/8484/design-by-visionary-vs-crowd). Though I am collaborator at heart, I can still see the very real benefit of having people in positions of power capable of making important decisions and seeing them through. 

If we are to take the technology stage as a potential metaphor for society, then it is very easy to see that both Apple and Google make amazing products and are very successful in their industries, and they are achieving this success taking different approaches to innovation and implementation.

Let us imagine for a brief moment that Apple and Google decided to merge together, and create some very important product(s) that would solve some very important problems. What would happen in this endeavor? Would there be a stalemate, much like there is in this government? Or, perhaps, would the two companies be able to create something amazing?

I would like to believe in my heart that the best of Apple (including Steve for as much as he is able) and the best of Google would be able to sit in a room with the biggest white board of all time and start hashing out some very real solutions to those very real problems. And at the end of that mythical meeting, there would be a list of actions that could be targeted, along with the ones that were pie-in-the-sky, and the ones that were going to take too long to be worth the investment, but might be worth considering once the seriousness of the problem was downgraded. 

Last night Padhraic and I watched the Inside Story and we both went to bed feeling this very icky yucky feeling - and I haven't been able to let go of this feeling inside myself that it is time for the country to stop bowing down to the financial industry and start looking toward companies that make real products. While I can respect lots and lots of people who would say that corporations like Apple and Google are big and have their faults, no one can say that providing real product is the same thing as the mythical institutions that have become our banking and political systems.

Returning to the topic of this blog, I did a very quick 'Google' search on the 'principles of collaboration' and found a NASA document on the 'principles and best practices' of collaboration (http://ldp.nasa.gov/collab_handbook.pdf) that is fairly straightforward. In my own circle of family and friends, here is the very basic list of ingredients that have been fundamental to collaboration:

• Listen to what other people have to say and if you don't understand, ask for a simple analogy. 
• In turn, when you talk about your own viewpoint, give analogies that match others who are listening.
• Be strong in your convictions, but warm in your demeanor. The best way to do this is self-deprecation - admit mistakes and what these have taught you along the way.
• Appreciate the success or common sense of differing viewpoints.
• Never lose your sense of humor.
• Walk into collaboration with an acceptance of compromise.
• Finally, be aware of non-collaborative situations and politely disengage

I want to talk a little bit about the last bullet. I have reached this point a couple of times in my life, and it really and truly sucks. But I can also say that with time, when you choose to politely disengage (rather than fist it out), eventually, the environment becomes collaborative again, because it is what it is - we are social beings. The worst thing we can do when things are at a standstill is force the issue.

Are we truly at this point, where collaboration is not possible? Would it be better to disengage for a bit, and see what happens? Can we regroup? What does this mean on a global scale?  I'm nervous about this, and think it might be a better idea to get the tech execs in a room with a whiteboard to try and solve the political problems with technological solutions rather than completely disengage.

A sign of aging

For most generations, there has been a technology cut-off point at which time a person decides they are no longer interested or willing to take on the latest and greatest; simply put - they are happier with what they know than having to approach the learning curve and replace existing machinery. For example, my mom does not send emails. My parents-in-law have never used their DVD player.

There are always exceptions - people who are happier to learn new things rather than hold on to the comfort of what they know and are familiar with. I had always assumed that I was one of these people - I would happily adapt to life as it came at me, exploring all the great new things that are invented over the years.

There have been a few instances over the past few years in which I have not bought into the hype of certain technological advancements. For example, I never liked Facebook. I felt like it represented all the worst parts of junior high. I reluctantly used it when my husband set up an account for our daughter, and posted all our pictures there. And while I can appreciate the significance of the social networking revolution, I still believe that 'making friends' is sacred.

At Christmas, I was given a Kindle, and I started off buying all sorts of books, reading in bed with the very cool little light attached to the green cover. But for some reason or another, I have yet to finish any single book that I have purchased on the Kindle. I have managed to finish one textbook on the Kindle app on my desktop, but something about me reading in bed with that little mechanism hasn't quite caught on. I need to turn the page with my fingers. I like to fold the pages back and write all sorts of notes to myself in the margin. Reading in my private space is sacred.

Before I moved to Ireland, I use to get the Sunday paper delivered to my house and I would read it start to cover. In Ireland, I had to resort to the digital version of the New York Times, and I always swore it wasn't the same. Now that I am back living in the States, I get the Sunday paper delivered. There has been more than one Sunday when the paper has remained in its plastic cover for days, only to be placed in the recycling bin. I have discovered that I don't really like trying to read an article over multiple pages, having to fold back the cumbersome paper, searching everywhere for something I want to read (or finishing reading). Over the years, I have gotten use to reading the news online and I prefer it.

For the longest time, I didn't want a mobile phone as I didn't like being contactable at all times and locations. When technology made it possible for me to get email on my phone, I started to use it regularly. I still don't answer all my calls all the time, but I like being able to read and respond to mail, have access to the internet, and be able to figure out where I am going. While I love my iPod, I am not in love with the iPad. Both my husband and my daughter use it all the time. Whenever I use it, I feel like I am being silenced, as there isn't a proper keyboard to communicate what I want to say quickly and in a seamless fashion. Yes, I know, I could carry around a keyboard and attach it to the device, but is that using it the way it should be used? Surely this is a sign of aging since most techies I know love their tablets.

Last but not least, the game of Scrabble. Over vacation with a group of friends, there were many games going on among varying groups on multiple iPads. For those of you who haven't played the Scrabble application - the default rules are not the same as the 'traditional' rules. For starters, you can use a dictionary to look up words. You can also do a quick check for two-letter possibilities. The game won't let you put down a word that isn't real and you can happily remove it and replace it without being challenged by a different player. And the craziest option yet - you can ask the game to give you the best word (there is a little icon which tells the other players that you have done this).

For days I tried to argue that the Scrabble application has turned the game into one more about luck than skill. But then Julie said to me that this new way of playing is a great way to learn new words, much better than relying on the knowledge of other players using the traditional game board. And she is right - a few days playing the game, I have a much wider vocabulary and a better arsenal to work with. I am still feeling ambivalent about this - the reliance on a dictionary and a machine to do the 'thinking' for you still doesn't feel right to me.

Someday I will live up to the dream of being a 'cool-granny' (imagining myself with spiked hair, blue jeans, and a very hip vintage tee-shirt). I won't be the slighted bit nervous to own a flying vehicle, head off into outer-space, or live in the depths of the ocean. But I have a feeling when it comes to gadgets, there will be a fine line between letting go of the sacred and embracing the latest trend.

Sandy sheets

My husband is an incredibly conscientious person. He has always lived his life in this way - that as you take on new responsibilities, you must make sure that the existing ones are met first, and only after careful consideration can you let go of one responsibility in order to fill a more important one. I have always admired this about him and have tried to emulate his way of life. But what I am starting to realize is that this way of life is incredibly difficult to lead in families where both parents are passionate about their work.

In my husband's family, his father went to work for the civil service, had lots of vacation time, a long lunch every day, and came home at 5 each day. His mother had to give up her career as soon as she was married. She spent her life raising five children (all of whom have turned out to be great people). Each night when Paddy came home, he would take the children so that Nora could make the dinner in peace. After dinner, he would do the dishes with the children, while Nora could do something else on her own, like listening to the news and ironing the clothes. There was a balance to this life, a security that meant that everything would get done at a certain pace in a very predictable manner.

The women in my family have always worked. They have also raised the children mostly on their own. I am not by any means like these women. I have a supportive husband who gives all that he can to me and Amelia. But still, there is something tricky about juggling the two passions of home and career that seem to be capable of 'bumping' into each other at any given moment. And lately I have been trying to uncover that magical equation that enabled the women in my family to juggle so much more than seemingly possible.

Yesterday morning, waking up with my daughter asleep on my head, I had this flashback to my grandmother's house, that sensation of climbing into any given bed at any given time (we often rotated depending on who was living and/or visiting the house), and that strange sensation of rolling sand as your feet made their way down to the bottom of the covers. Sandy sheets. My grandmother rarely, if ever, changed the sheets in the various bedrooms. All through the summer, the sheets were covered in sand. The memories are so vivid, the smell of ivory soap mixed with ocean, sand, and the many heads that laid on that same pillow in any given summer month.

In the modern family, we try and keep everything ticking along by formulating some sort of 'priority' system - almost like our own in-house bug tracking system. Critical bugs are taken care-of immediately, like a sick child or a family crisis. High bugs get sorted in service packs (almost seasonal) - like work deadlines, school transitions. Maintenance tasks that we take on at the end of the day, washing the dishes, taking out the trash, and cleaning the sheets. I have often found great satisfaction in those things labeled as 'maintenance' - the assurance that no matter what else was left undone, I could successfully clean the kitchen. But when things seem to get squished, it is the maintenance tasks that annoy me the most. And there is something comforting in observing the cracks in the domestic space of the women in my life - their ability to push against a priority system in their worlds that did not match the way they wanted to (or perhaps were able to) live their own lives.

Brute force approach

This morning I put on my running clothes, as the probability of me heading out for a run greatly increases when I am already dressed for it. And after three hours of coding, interrupted by every sort of family member calling on a Sunday, I decided it was time to throw myself out the door.

The first few steps into the run, I started thinking about how my ability to code has gotten a lot better in the last couple of days. I like decomposition - it suits me. My brain likes to break things up into smaller parts and see the relationships between things.

In the next stage of the run, I thought about the irony, that as I seemed to be getting the hang of this coding thing, I seemed to be applying the 'brute force' approach to many other aspects of my life. And in the true spirit of stream-of-consciousness, I wondered if there was some way to logically decompose the other aspects in my life so that I could accomplish more tasks with less work.

Another half-mile, and I realized that there was something fundamentally difficult about this challenge - I couldn't seem to assign a priority to any one task over the other, or find a natural way to use one task to move another along - they all seem to meld into one 'big ball of mud'.

On the last half mile towards home, I let myself take a deep breath and appreciate the beauty of 'brute force'. While it might not be the most elegant approach, it has meant that I am still keeping things ticking along. My house is a mess, my family are feeling a little neglected, my runs are more like a slog than a jog, I haven't cooked a healthy, homemade dinner in a long while, and I could really use a make-over.

But we are fed, we are sleeping (perhaps less than we would like), we are welcoming and sending off visitors who all seem to be flocking to San Francisco at the same time as the rest of life is converging to a point, and I feel strong in what I am trying to do, even if I fall flat on my face.

Coming into the homestretch, the Indigo Girls', Galileo came on, and I felt a sense of warmth about sometime in the future, when Amelia is trying to juggle lots of things in her life, and she asks me for advice on which approach to take, I can smile and tell her that in certain times in our life, there is nothing wrong with taking the 'brute force' approach.

Authenticity

Amelia came into the bed at 3 AM and I could not for the life of me get back to sleep, so I figured I would get up and do something productive. This isn't like me, to have thoughts swimming in my head that keep me awake at night. Most of the time I am so busy doing, that any thought process I have is directly related to the very thing before me that I must try and tackle.

But I understand why I am feeling this way, as I have had this type of occurrence before, and I have a pretty strong sense of what it means. Though it is fairly difficult to capture it quickly in words, I am going to try and do so, as writing has always been the way in which I am able to process complexity and be able to happily get on with my day without that weighted feeling.

In 2006, my husband and I got married in the town where I grew up for most of my childhood-- Ocean City, NJ. And for the week before the wedding, we decided to be somewhat traditional and stay in separate houses, both of us living with our parents for the week before the big day.

Each morning, suffering from bridal nerves, and from jet lag, I woke up very early and would head out to the boardwalk for a long run. The first couple of days, the runs were amazing - I felt this jolt of excitement being in such a magical place, that represented the best parts of my childhood (the beach, the ocean, the boardwalk).

One morning, about the third day in, I headed out for the run, and about half way into it, coming up to Park Place, the street where my grandparent's house use to be and the street on which my husband's family were staying, I experienced this intense wave of emotion, something so unexpected, a sense of grief for the loss of a life that was gone, a memory of pain that I felt many years ago when the innocence of this place and this life slipped through the cracks.

I kept running through the tears, true to self, pushing through hard emotions through positive action. And I went through the day as any almost-bride would do, but there was something different under the layers, something surreal, this sense of self that once was many years ago as a child, and this sense of self now, as a person about to get married and start her own family, coming together in such an authentic way, that it felt almost like a collision.

Yesterday, something very similar happened. I went to the UC Berkeley campus for the first time in many years on my own. I have been to the campus with friends and family many times since graduation, but this was the first time I went on my own. And like the wedding many years ago, the journey started off very exciting, driving up University Ave, passing one of my favorite coffee shops, trying to take a picture from the car with my phone.

I smiled as I drove up the streets, knowing their ins and outs, all the short-cuts, as if I had never left. Walking up Telegraph Ave, towards Sproul Hall, seeing all the new students coming in with their parents, orientation, early arrivals, and I found myself wanting to reach out to them, to talk to them, share with them so many great memories about such an amazing part of my life.

And I went to the student cafe, bought a coffee, and sat down at a table in a back corner, remembering that the person that was me many years of go would have always sat at the front table, hoping to see someone I knew pass by and we could start up a conversation about our most-recent endeavors, be they intellectual, social, or just the normal stuff that happens to us as kids starting to become adults.

Almost like a scene in a JK Rowling book, this process of remembering while experiencing the physical sensations of that memory, allowed me to tap into that emotion that I felt so strongly, many years ago, to re-experience what was a lifetime back then in a brief 1-hour coffee break. It shook me, honestly, so I got up and decided to go and purchase a sweatshirt, which I have been meaning to do for awhile now.

In the shop, a young girl asked me to help her pick out a sweatshirt-- I was thinking that it could be her first one,  her first year, that nervousness, she reaching out to me, knowing I had come through it. And I recommended that the smaller size fit her better - in the long run, it would be the one she would treasure for the years to come - not the over-sized version that hid her young curves.

Walking to the car, in this contemplative state, driving back to the city in traffic, the tears finally came down my cheeks, that collision again of self, in the truest, most authentic sense. Each day I wake up and do what is in front of me, and as the years go by, the memories shift, even disappear, and there is an invisible veil between all the layers of activity going on around me in my current life, and the foundation that sits beneath it all.

That time of becoming an adult, of moving from the space of innocence into that space of reality, is still very much a part of the way in which I act each and every day, the way I treat my friends, my family, my daughter, the way I work, the way I think, the way I engage with the world. All those failed attempts at being a better self, until I eventually started to get the hang of it, started to find my voice, as a writer, started to realize the importance of balancing two sides of self - that relentless me that needs to get it done, with that gentler, kinder me, who is empathetic to the difficulties that all of us face sometimes when we are trying to do more than we did the day before, even if that is just putting one foot in front of the other in very tiny baby steps.

As I lay there in bed, with Amelia beside me, I wondered if there are people in this world who never experience this sense of colliding selves, as each and every memory is cherished, positive, shining, in an array of a happy life. I try and imagine my daughter Amelia as an adult looking across her life with nothing but fond memories, no struggles, no complex, grey moments in which she wasn't really sure how to match what she was feeling on the inside with what the norms were telling her to feel on the outside.

And here I am now, having spent a good bit of time writing, in a private space, closely examining the authentic self, and I feel a sense of contentment, that somehow all the bends and curves in life are much more interesting, beautiful like a spider web than any kind of Truman Show image that might replace it. I want this for my daughter, maybe a softer version than my own. But I want her to know what it means to be authentic, to experience life in all shades of color, including grey.