Brock Boland

25 And Over « Tomato Nation

This one’s about four years old, but new to me thanks to kottke. Some of this stuff really irks me in my peers. My favorite:

19. Take care of yourself. If you are sick, visit a doctor. If you are sad, visit a shrink or talk to a friend. If you are unhappy in love, break up. If you are fed up with how you look, buy a new shirt or stop eating cheese. If you have a problem, try to fix it. Many problems are knotty and need a lot of talking through, or time to resolve, but after a few months of all complaining and no fixing, those around you will begin to wonder if you don't enjoy the problems for the attention they bring you. Venting is fine; inertia coupled with pouting is not. Bored? Read a magazine. Mad at someone? Say so — to them. Change is hard; that's too bad. Effort counts. Make one. Your mommy's shift is over.

25 And Over « Tomato Nation

On Home Finances

I need thought I would be the kind of guy to clip coupons, but you see, Safeway includes some stats on their receipts. They tell you how much you saved with your club card, how much you saved from coupons, and the total percentage off your order.

Now, it’s like a game. Tonight, I got 34%. Not bad, and I saved about $21, but my high score is 44%.

Seriously, what am I turning into?

The pursuit of happiness [dive into mark]

I really like this. Straight from dive into mark: The pursuit of happiness.

1. Stop buying stuff you don’t need
2. Pay off all your credit cards
3. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t fit in your house/apartment storage lockers, etc.
4. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t fit on the first floor of your house attic, garage, etc.
5. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t fit in one room of your house
6. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t fit in a suitcase
7. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t fit in a backpack
8. Get rid of the backpack

I’m working on step 4.

Things I Have Been Enjoying Lately

• Coke Vanilla Zero
• Pretzels
• Not being a parent
• My new MacBook Pro and the huge cinema display I use it with at work
• Simpsons re-runs
• Our new apartment

Moving On Up

Erin and I have been in our lovely new apartment for a week now, and we love it. Because we decided to move at the last minute, we wound up paying rent on both the old and new place for January. That kind of sucked, but it turned out to be a blessing because we couldn’t get the loading dock at the old place until the middle of the month anyway, and then we rented it out to a family for the Inauguration after we moved out. Erin and I brought over a bunch of a small and breakable stuff in the first half of the month, and last Saturday, Jym, Jeff, and BP helped us move over the furniture and everything else.

This place is a little bit smaller, but that gave us a good reason to get rid of a ton of crap we really didn’t need, including a carload of books and clothes that we donated. The view is a lot nicer and we get plenty of sunlight, which is probably why we haven’t had to turn the heat on yet and it still hasn’t dropped below 70 in here (we’ve actually had to crack a window a few times because it gets too warm). We have a small balcony – not quite deep enough for a couple chairs – but the rooftop deck and pool make up for that. We’re only a couple blocks from Chinatown, and the fancy new “gourmet” Safeway is right around the corner, along with Busboys & Poets and Ace Hardware.

We were pretty content with the old place up until the last couple months, when the veneer started to wear off. This building is a lot nicer, newer, and seems to be better-kept. And, it’s a condo building, so I suspect the residents will have a more vested interest in keeping it that way than the people at the old building. Most importantly, though, they allow dogs. This was the reason we started looking around to begin with. We were expecting to stay there for another year, until next December, because we figured it would make more sense to get a dog after we got married in September (mostly because we’ll be out of town a bunch for making arrangements, the wedding itself, and the honeymoon). Erin had been cruising Craigslist, though, and found this place on a Saturday afternoon. We saw it on Sunday, put in our application right then, were approved on Monday, and sent in the signed lease on Thursday. In March, we’re going to adopt Erin’s parents’ Bichon, Lola May.

So like I said, 2009 should be pretty swell, and we’re off to a good start.

Brains Are Weird

This post has also been sitting in my drafts since March, after I wrote OCD and OCD Revisited.  Real quick, let me recap: I became convinced I had OCD, and the more I thought about it, the worse it got.  I got several responses by e-mail from people that wanted to share their experiences, but not in a publi forum.  In the meantime, I started helping myself to some meds that have seemed to help a great deal, and it doesn’t really bug me much anymore.

Anyway, writing those first two posts and reading the responses got me thinking a lot about mental health, but I never got around to finishing this post at the time.  What I came to realize is that I approach the world very rationally.  I think a lot of programmers and geeks are like this: we spend our days working with computers, where rules and limitations apply, and we come to expect the rest of the world to abide by some kind of rules as well.  The mind doesn’t work like this, though.  If your arm is broke, we can definitively say it’s broke just by looking at an x-ray.  But how can we say your mind is broke?  We don’t yet understand well enough how the mind works, or how it works differently for different people, to look at it and identify when something isn’t working properly.  As I said to one person in e-mail, it’s like diagnosing car troubles just by listening to the engine, because you can’t pop the hood and see the crack in the carburetor.  Their response:

I think you’re right in that it is difficult to diagnose OCD. OCD can be manifested in so many different ways because each person is so complex and different. I also agree that everybody has varying degrees of obsessiveness. When someone has a heightened degree of this obsessiveness it can be labelled as OCD. I believe that we do have some very good trained professionals in this world that are able to determine when someone has an unusually high degree of obsessiveness. They don’t have to crack the head open to see what’s broken. They can observe symptoms to make a determination. Just like the common cold- the symptoms give it away. A skilled professional knows what to look for- how many times, how long, etc. If someone replays conversations for 5-20 minutes, I don’t think it’s OCD. But if the person replays for 2-3 hours and frequently, then that’s unusual. There is definitely some gray area though between what is truly OCD and what is not.

This is the part that gets me: what is truly OCD?  Do we even have a clear definition of any mental illness?  How can we really know what’s going on in someone’s mind, aside from observing behaviors or watching which portions of the brain light up in an EEG?  Someone else wrote me a note that included this:

I find that even though the brain is a more complex system than we can readily understand, that doesn’t stop me from working on it. Frequently people make the comparison between the brain and a muscle, they way it gets stronger the more it is used.  It’s obviously more complicated than that, but the analogy does have some truth in it.  I have, over the course of my life, been able to shape the way I think about things.  It’s difficult, but when you concentrate on thinking in a new manner, you make new connections, the neurons themselves actually re-align themselves to work better on something.  If I consistently try to think about things differently, then after a while I do.  If I constantly refuse to let myself be bothered by something, eventually it doesn’t anymore.  Repetition -> Belief.  Which is a point not made in the 34 unconvincing arguments that you posted in your blog.  But as opposed to the existence of God, here, where we are talking about something in the way we think and what we believe, repeating something often enough can actually make it true.

Anyway, the only conclusion I’ve come to is that we do all have our oddities.  In between my starting this post and actually writing it today, Rands posted The Quirkbook, which struck me as a pretty good round-up of all the quirks I had come across in the course of writing these posts.  Unless they’re negatively affecting your life in some way, I don’t think these kinds of things are worth worrying about.

Another New Year

I’m just going to be honest here: I don’t really feel like doing the year-end wrapup.

2008 was alright. It had its ups and downs. Erin and I got engaged. Loved ones got married. Work was busy. It seems like there should be more to it, but the year went by so quick and in looking back, there aren’t a lot of times that stick out as great or terrible.

2009 has a lot of promise, though. We just got the keys for our lovely new apartment, which we’ll be moving into over the course of the next two weeks. Said apartment allows dogs, and we’ll be adopting Erin’s parent’s dog Lola May in a few months. And we get married in September, then spend a week on a cruise in the Caribbean.

I didn’t make any resolutions this year. The perennials are still there – eat better, lose weight, save more money – but I’m still not sure what my goals are for this year. I’m torn between the seemingly diametric desires to accomplish more and relax more. I want to make more time for personal projects and do more volunteer work, but I haven’t read a book in months and I barely see my friends as it is. I feel like 2008 didn’t give me enough time for all the things I wanted to do, but I’m still not sure how to fix it in the new year.

Still, it’s going to be a good year. I’ll get things done, and I’ll make time to relax, and I’ll get a new apartment, and a puppy, and married. It’s going to be pretty swell.

Maxing out your Triangle

I like this:

I find that most people take on new jobs, projects and hobbies for three reasons:

1. To learn something new

2. To pay the bills

3. Because they love doing it

These three things fulfill some of our very basic needs—they give us stability, excitement, ways to contribute and opportunities to grow. If you’re with me so far, then allow me to present exhibit A, the love-growth-cash triangle.

via Maxing out your Triangle — jackcheng.com.

Busy Busy Busy!

I really wish I had more time to write. Well, I really wish I had more time for a lot of things, but I’ve got a lot going on these days that has been keeping me busy:

• Work has been busy
• I’ve been doing volunteer work on a local homeless shelter’s website through the Taproot Foundation
• Erin and I are moving again in a few weeks – only a few blocks, but to a nicer place that allows dogs – so we’re trying to figure out what we can get rid of and make plans for the move
• We’re renting out our current place for Inauguration
• Holiday travel, of course
• Erin and I are spending the long Valentine’s Day weekend in the Smoky Mountains

There’s just a lot going on. Things should quiet down a bit after January, when we’re completely done moving and the homeless shelter project wraps up, but that feels a long way off right now.

Flashback

I’ve been fighting off some respiratory unpleasantness the past few days, so I’m working from home today. It reminds me a lot of those long nights in college – it’s kind of chilly in here, the shades are drawn and lights are dim, I’ve got music playing in my headphones, no one else is around, and I’m coding away. Some of my fondest memories of college are from the nights I spent plugging along on some project, finally crashing sometime early in the morning with the satisfaction of a job well done. I miss those smoke breaks in the frigid Rochester night air, watching the snow plows clear the lots outside my apartment.

It’s weird, the things that really stand out in my memory three years later.

Fire Drill

Have you ever woken up to the fire alarm and hit your snooze button a few times before you realize that your alarm doesn’t usually go off at 3:45 in the morning? Guess how my day started!

The smoke detector was going off in the apartment next to us, but not the main building-wide alarm, so I found some pants and went down to the security desk. I could smell a hint of smoke, but what do you do? It didn’t seem like I should pull the alarm and wake everyone in the building up if some idiot just fell asleep with a cigarette lit in an ashtray or something. The security guy came and tried banging on the door and whatnot, and I went back into our apartment. A couple minutes later, I heard a fire truck heading our way, then a bunch of firemen in the hallway.

When I popped my head out the front door, they had gotten into the apartment and one of them was saying something about food on the stove, so I figured they’re here, it’s just food on the stove – it’s probably safe to go back to bed.

That’s when the building-wide alarm went off. I dragged Erin’s ass out of bed, pulled on proper pants, and started tossing laptops in bags – I’m not taking any chances. By this time, the hallway was full of smoke, so then I REALLY started to worry. But we only got down a flight of stairs before the alarm turned off, so I guess they set it off by accident.

And then, of course, Erin and I were checking out the firemen. “Did you see the butt on the guy in the helmet? Ohmigod! What about the one with the mustache?!”

Until a minute ago, the firefighters were clunking around in the hallway and the apartment next door, but I guess they got everything checked out and the alarms reset and stuff. I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to sleep for a bit anyway – and of course, now the guys next door are arguing over who set off the alarm, so that helps.

Getting The Love You Want Imago Workshop

Erin and I spent this past weekend up near Ann Arbor, Michigan, for a couples workshop with Carole Kirby.

Now, you may be thinking about the same thing I would have six or eight months ago. We’ve only been together for 14 months, and we aren’t getting married until next September – how could we possibly need therapy already? But it’s not therapy, really – I think ‘counseling’ is a better word for it.

First, let me explain how we wound up there. Like I said, earlier this year I would have been suspicious of the idea, and I can’t really remember now, but I probably was when Erin first told me about it. Her parents did the same workshop with Carole last year and found it incredibly helpful (which is part of the reason we went up to Ann Arbor for it instead of finding something similar locally), and sent us to it as a pre-wedding gift, of sorts. Hearing a little bit about their experience with it helped convince me that it would be good for us, and we both read the book, Getting the Love You Want, on which the workshop is based. The other thing that only a few people know is that Erin and I were fighting pretty frequently around that time – about four to six months ago – and I thought that, if nothing else, it would help “fix” us. Thankfully, we did a pretty good job of fixing ourselves, and went into the weekend at a really good place in our relationship.

The central theme of Getting the Love You Want is your imago: we are attracted to partners who reflect both the good and bad traits of our primary caretakers in childhood. Our caretakers unwittingly wound and hurt us in childhood, and in some way, we seek to rectify those hurts by finding a partner with those similar traits to fill that role.

At first, it sounds a little bit like touchie-feelie psychobabble, I know, but after reading the book, mulling it over a bit, and doing some of the exercises during the workshop, it makes a lot of sense. Obviously, no one is out actively seeking a partner that reflects the unpleasant parts of their parents, older siblings, or grandparents, but it happens anyway – some part of us finds comfort in the familiar, if nothing else.

The exercises in Imago Therapy generally focus on identifying some frustration or conflict in the relationship and the childhood wound that makes it a conflict. For example, as a child, maybe you felt that your opinion was never solicited, or your father never gave his approval for anything you did, or an older sibling’s achievements were more celebrated than your own. These things don’t just go away, and it would be real easy for your partner to inadvertently re-open any these wounds – by not asking your opinion, by never taking the time to appreciate what you do, by never celebrating your successes. To one partner, it may not seem like a big deal, but to the other, it’s been a source of pain for their entire life.

I don’t want to get into any specifics about our relationship, but Erin and I both found a lot of this to be true throughout the weekend. Some of the exercises are geared toward identifying the positive and negative traits of your childhood caretakers, and others are to help identify the childhood source of current pain and frustration. We both found a lot of ways that we reflect each other’s parents – in both good and not-so-great ways – and when we stopped to think about it, had little trouble identifying very particular reasons that something that might not seem like a big deal to one of us really was to the other. Again, I don’t want to get into the particulars, but trust me on this.

There were seven other couples in the workshop with us, and I think we learned almost as much from them as we did from the workshop itself. We were definitely the youngest couple, and had been in the relationship the shortest. I think everyone else fell in the 35 to 50 range, give or take. Some had been together for only two or three years, but some of the couples had been married for 10 or 15 years, and were there trying to work through years of conflict and baggage. A relationship as young as ours may not need outside help yet, but meeting those other couples made a huge impact on us both. They were obviously all very in love, but had spent years hurting each other and had that much more to work through because of it. We were able to go and learn a lot of healthy ways to deal with conflict before getting married, and before spending years doing damage to one another.

Erin likes to point out that a lot of people – generally the religious right – want to make it harder to get a divorce, but no one questions how easy it is to get married. I mean, I’ve only recently started learning how many couples begin marriage without even hammering down some of the basics – things like, are we going to have kids? Where are we going to live? I have no idea how you could make it all the way to a marriage license without figuring that stuff out, but a lot of people do, so it shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone that half of all marriages end in divorce. I really think that everyone should do something like this before they get married. And I’m not just drinking the Kool-Aid here: I’m not saying it should be legally mandated, and I’m certainly not saying that divorce will ever be non-existent. But, it seems like common sense that a little preparation up front can go a long way to maintain a stable marriage.

I really couldn’t be more thankful that we were able to do this workshop. I have a much deeper appreciation for Erin and the happiness she brings me, and I feel like it helped make me much more aware of her needs, her desires, and her hurts. A lot of the problems we used to have boiled down to my own ignorance and arrogance – I would see something as trivial and dismiss the fact that it was a big deal to her. I know I still have improvements to make, but I feel that this weekend was a huge help in that area.

On top of that is the fringe benefits. I have been in such a good mood this week. I’ve been furiously jotting down ideas and notes all week – it’s like I cracked a door this weekend and found a room I didn’t know about. Some part of me opened up and I got past some kind of bottleneck that had been holding me up and stressing me out for weeks before this.

Doing the exercises this weekend also gave me a much deeper appreciation for my parents. One of the first things we did on Friday night was identify positive and negative traits of our parents and specific memories that were positive and negative. I came up with all sorts of good things to say about them, and thought of all sorts of happy memories that I hadn’t thought about in years – and now I can’t seem to remember why I was so miserable as a teenager. My parents have always been loving and supportive of everything I’ve done, even when they don’t necessarily like it (like when I moved 9 hours away from home). All things considered, my childhood was pretty swell, but all I can remember from my teenage years is wanting to get out of that town. I don’t know why I ever implicated them in that – my desire to cut and run had nothing to do with my family.

Anyway. I think that’s about everything. I was going to spend a few minutes collecting my thoughts on the weekend before I started, to make sure I didn’t forget anything, but then I just got going and couldn’t stop. Here’s the short version:

• Read the book. Doesn’t really matter if you’re in a relationship – it’ll do you some good in later ones, if you’re not.
• “Therapy” or “counseling” doesn’t necessarily mean trouble or mental illness. Any doctor or mechanic can tell you that preventative maintenance is a lot easier than trying to fix it after the fact – why would relationships be any different?
• I love Erin. Like, a whole lot, and I’m going to marry the shit out of her.

Still Broken

With regards to my wrist:

I’m not sure I’m convinced it’s carpal tunnel syndrome. The pain has mostly been in my wrist, and everything I’ve read about carpal tunnel indicates that it causes discomfort, weakness, and numbness in your fingers and palm – none of which have been an issue for me.

The meds and wrist brace seem to be helping, though, along with the stretches and Vitamin E supplements my mother-in-law-to-be recommended. The problem is that my left wrist is starting to bother me now. I used to type with my left hand resting near the edge of the keyboard, and my right hand would cover about two thirds of the keys – which probably caused my problems to begin with. Now that I’m trying to type properly, my left hand actually has something to do, and it’s been getting kind of tired and a little achey now too. I think I may need to get a second wrist brace for the other side.

Anyway, I’ve got a bunch of posts I’d really like to write, but it’s still kind of slow and uncomfortable to type a lot, so I keep putting it off. I just spent 10 minutes looking into dictation software though, and MacSpeech Dictate got my attention. Just this Monday, they released an update that addresses most of the complaints I’ve read in reviews, so it looks pretty promising. Amazon has it for $165 – $35 off list price – and it might be worth finding some stuff to sell in order to save my wrists.

My Busted Arm

So, I might have Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. What fun for me.

My right wrist and forearm started bothering me a couple weeks ago. I twittered about it at some point, and the illustrious Brian Flores sent me some info on stretches he does and gave me advice on my desk setup. I did get a new keyboard and mouse for the office, and I’m still trying to learn how to type properly. Over the years, I developed my own frantic, flailing means of typing, which probably caused this mess to begin with.

This past Thursday, I saw a doctor about it, and it only took her a minute to decide it was properly carpal tunnel. She prescribed an anti-inflammatory med and told me to get a wrist brace. If those don’t help in the next couple weeks, I have to see an orthopedic surgeon.

Now, I’m trying to type the right way, while wearing a wrist brace, so it’s both slow AND uncomfortable. I find myself reluctant to open anything that will require typing – e-mail, blog posts, code – because it’s frustrating either way. If I don’t wear the brace, my wrist hurts like hell. If I do wear the brace, I can barely function. Everything is a pain in the ass. Hopefully, the meds and brace will help get me back to normal, and I’ll get used to typing the right way.

On Parenting

Once in a while, someone will ask Erin or me if we’re planning to have kids. When we say no, I already know what response we’re going to get. Our peers, and the few friends who don’t already know where we stand, will usually ask why not, and we’ll have a nice chat about it. But among parents, older relatives, and older co-workers, the response is almost always the same: “Well, we’ll see.”

First off, if you think you know the answer already, then why did you bother asking? And second, why do people seem to think they already know what we want to do with our lives? It’s true that most people grow up, get hitched, and make babies – that’s the norm. Pretty much anyone asking us about kids followed that route themselves, and I don’t fault them for expecting that we would too: as the ones bucking the trend, it’s on us to explain why, I suppose. I have no problem explaining why we don’t want to have kids, but it’s really frustrating to do so to someone who doesn’t consider me adult enough to be capable of making decisions about how I want to live my life, and who I want to live it with.

When I was born, my dad was 26 – about a year and a half older than I am now. Mom was only 23, a year younger than I am. They had already been married for over 2 years. The way I see it, they were no more qualified to make such decisions at that point than I am now.

It’s not hard to see why people expect us to have kids. Like I said before, most people get married with plans to start procreating soon after. A lot of people grow up expecting that they’ll do the same, and looking forward to it (or so I assume). I, too, always assumed I’d be a dad someday. I looked forward to having a son to play catch with, teaching him how to fix stuff like my dad did, and seeing him graduate from college.¹

But that’s all I saw. I saw myself as a parent almost as if you might in a movie about someone’s life – just the highlights, really. My vision of parenting was about 90 minutes in a comfy seat with air conditioning and a tub of popcorn. I never thought about the 18 years, minimum, of effort that would go into it. I didn’t consider the late nights up with a screaming baby, the incredible financial burden of a child, or the fact that I am decidedly unqualified to be responsible for a tiny helpless person. I never wanted any of that. I just wanted to be able to look back, late in my life, and watch the highlight reel.

I was 23 when I met Erin, and getting married and having kids started to look like an actual possibility. I had never seriously dated anyone before, so I never really had to think about it, and I just carried on with my unexamined assumptions. Once we started talking about it, and once I took the time to really think about it, I realized that it was the first time I had stopped to think about it, and really, I didn’t want to have anything to do with that whole mess.

I could change my mind. I could decide, after five or ten years, that I actually do want to be a father. I could also decide that Hitler was right all along. I’m a realist, so I don’t deny that I could change my mind, but it’s a pretty slim chance. So I suppose they’re right: we will see. I wouldn’t start buying baby clothes for us, though.

¹ Aside: I could never have daughters. Having been a teenaged boy once myself, there’s no way I could have a daughter without becoming the violently overprotective father that threatens to emasculate every punk kid that looks at her. (return)