I was right. Second entry of the day.

So Emily and I have been talking a lot this week (we're siblings, that's what we do). And mostly, as with a lot of the conversations I have with people (I don't know if this is unique to me and my friends, or if other people do this too) we've really just been having the same extended conversation that resumes whenever we're back with a chance to talk more.

This week's conversation has been about tech work, money, housing, settling down or not settling down, and other "oh hey, I'm almost 30 and you're 35, let's do the overconsidered navel-gazing expected of people our age" topics. Okay, it's not like that, but I suppose someone listening in might think that.

Unlike the people I overhear in bars around here, Emily and I actually understand the things we're talking about. No marketroid sputtering about databases or B2B or stock options (that possibly because neither one of us has any to speak of) or The Capitalized Internet and how it's really a Whole New Paradigm, or a New Anything. We talk about getting things done, about the steps taken or the work required, about what it means to have a clue in a mostly clueless world.

So among other things that we mentioned (all of which I remembered most vividly until I started typing here in this white rectangle) was the comment that all this internet stuff isn't rocket science, whereupon we realized that most of rocket science probably wasn't what we think of it at all. Rocket science probably worked in its day about like the internet works now - a bunch of smart people said, well, it ought to work this way, so let's try it and see what happens, and then when it worked they revised it, and when it didn't work they fixed the most obvious errors and tried again. Repeat until you've got something that does all the things you need it to do, and wait until somebody needs it to do something new, different, or better, and then you're back to trial and error. In other words:

Rocket Science = Educated Trial and Error

So by that definition, a lot of internet work is indeed rocket science. It was good for a chuckle.

Other stuff discussed:

We talked about the house-buying idea, quite a bit. Em and Patrick have been looking for housing in Haarlem, and the market there is apparently more insane than the market in DC. Haarlem's full. There's not really any available housing, so when stuff goes on the market it's available to realtors to show privately for a week, then it's listed in the paper so people who don't have realtors can schedule an appointment the second week, then on the Friday of the second week everybody who's interested puts in a sealed bid. Highest bidder gets the house. This has led to an appalling increase in the sale prices of homes there. I don't feel anywhere near as bad about the DC area after hearing that. They're prepared to spend an amount of money it scares me to think about, and for what they'll spend they'll probably get something horribly cramped and with a bad commute (although what passes for a bad commute there is no worse, and possibly better, than what we have here). Yow.

And it's weird having these conversations, because with people you've known a long time (or, in the case of Emily, all your life) you mentally lock them into a certain age. Emily's been married five years now and has two kids, but to a certain extent my mental image of her is somewhere around age 22, finishing up her undergrad at Rice and picking places to apply for law school. I'm sure it's even weirder for her, as she's probably got me frozen at age eleven, two black eyes after losing control of my bike and ending up on my head, after she'd convinced mom that I was old enough to ride over to Jonathan Taylor's house instead of being driven.

We also talked about stuff I'm doing at work, and how I'm afraid to go into meetings and start telling people what I think out of concern that I'll irritate or alienate them. I'm involved in one project that's always been the responsibility of my department, and there's another project going on at the same time that overlaps a lot with what we're already doing, and we might be coming up with a solution for their problem while we're solving ours. I don't, however, want to go into their meetings and say, "your project is wrong, shut it down and give the budget dollars to us," but that's precisely what needs to happen.

So I relayed all this to Emily, who was reminded at that point of something that had happened years ago when I met an actor in a play she was directing. She had been giving him some direction on a scene he wasn't getting (he was Pozzo in Waiting for Godot) and it was mostly flying over his head, it would seem. So I showed up to meet her, and upon being introduced to me as her little brother, his first words were, "Your sister intimidates the hell out of me."

But wait, it gets better.

She's now doing web work for an organization in Europe, and has gone from being somebody who just maintained a couple pages to being an integral member of their web team. This is after not knowing anything about HTML at all before she started doing that first page. So now she's working with a couple other people, maintaining a rather large site, and she recently went on vacation. So somebody else who had just started helping with the site did a bunch of maintenance ... and her editing software turned all the links on every page she edited from .html to .htm, thus breaking something like 600 links over the course of a week.

Emily discovered this upon her return, ran a link check with Dreamweaver, corrected the changes, and sent an email saying what had happened and to look out for it in the future. A couple weeks later, the same thing happened on a smaller scale, so Em sent another email. The response:

"I quit." It seems that Emily intimidated that woman too. This is what I'm afraid of doing. We are both, apparently, born intimidators.

Emily's always accused me of being much worse about being smart around other people than she is, so I've learned to try to be careful when it's possible that I'm going to make people think I'm condescending or insulting or presumptuous or any of those other things people think of young people who actually have opinions that they'll defend. So I told her about my worries of going into these meetings, basically having to tell people that their project is going down the wrong path and they should give the project to me and the department I work in, that we'll be able to do it properly.

The good news is, I've talked to one of the people who's sort of in charge of part of that other project, and she's willing to steer stuff in the direction we're going, and I wouldn't be too surprised if she gives the project to us if we ask. It may not be so terrible after all. And I haven't had to show anybody up in a meeting yet. While I do get some satisfaction out of tearing stuff apart when it's done wrong, I can't expect to be able to work with anybody if I keep demolishing their projects in public.

So far, nobody I've introduced to Emily has said, "your brother intimidates the hell out of me." I guess I'm doing okay.

link (2000-03-18)

Much to say, but my brain's still a bit scattered. Maybe today will be a two-entry day. Mercury went direct Wednesday, and my brain's more able to put words together in the right order than it has been in a couple weeks.

To that end, here's entry number one.

I'm reading, like many people I know (and many more I don't), A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I just got to the end of chaper four (the end of the "nice novella length" section of the book). Many people have liked it quite a bit, others have been rather unimpressed (although those readers invariably comment that Eggers is a good writer, but the story isn't holding them).

I've found it almost too close for comfort. I'm enjoying it quite a bit, in contrast with Amanda's opinion of it, but it does strike a bit too close to home sometimes and I have to put it down. I think this is because even though Amanda and I get along quite well, and ironic distance seems to be the only way many people we know face life, her ironic distance is much more deeply ingrained than mine (and apparently Dave Eggers'). Eggers, like me, has used and continues to use irony as a buffer, a way to keep things from bubbling up to the surface and being painful every day. But where he and I would appear to be similar, and different from Amanda et al., is that somewhere under there we're still trying to work out those things that we bury underneath the irony. I suspect many people of our generation have resigned themselves to the ironic life and left their emotional baggage packed, the suitcases arrayed neatly by the door but carefully stepped around daily. Eggers and I (and others, it would appear), can't help but unpack, but we don't do a very good job of putting things away, so we keep packing and unpacking, rearranging, trying to figure out how to make the pile of baggage go away or get smaller.

While his tragedy and mine are different (he lost both parents, 35 days apart, to cancer; I lost my older brother to an unheeded stop sign and a cement truck), there are many similarities in the way we've gone through life since then. We're roughly the same age now, but he was 21 when he lost his parents and I was just shy of my eleventh birthday when Mark was killed. It's weird to read his book. His neuroses parallel mine: he does these entire scenarios in his head in the pauses of daily life; he envisions entire futures spawning from the slightest change in plans, reaction, or behavior; he fancies entire conversations with other people (well, Toph at least; I imagine he does it with other people too although perhaps not in the book) where they both portray themselves and say the things they probably would say if those conversations actually happened, and where they play the role of his subconscious or the Greek chorus of his life, telling him the things he already knows but refuses to deal with.

I've met lots of people who rely on irony to get them through the day. Hell, they're most of my friends. Where we differ is in how we deal with stuff, where we choose to be direct and handle problems up front, where we instead avoid the problem and hope it goes away on its own. Suck recently harped on the suddenly overused "elephant in the room nobody's talking about" metaphor, but in my case I keep talking to the elephant in the vain hope that he'll see things my way and leave of his own accord. When that doesn't work, there are a million distractions to be found. Eggers resorts to the drawing of a stapler. But he also wrote the book, in the apparent hope that catharsis might help.

Dear Elephant,
Please go away.
*Heart*, me.

I see much of myself in the way Eggers portrays himself. If I had a little brother (instead of being the little brother myself, as was the case) I'd probably do the same things he did. He keeps trying to fill all of Toph's time, trying to make him super-normal, constantly keeping him (and himself) distracted. That's me. Because all the time we're not distracted, we're back to talking to the elephant. As an eleven-year-old, I built ever more complicated structures out of my Legos. Now I buy CDs. That constant need for distraction is still there.

Weird.

We'll see how I react to the rest of the book.

link (2000-03-18)