Wed, 02 Jun 2010

2008, in summary

Here's an old bit of text that, for some reason, I never posted. It's a review of 2008, from the perspective of Asheesh on the first Saturday night in 2009.

There are some thoughts in here that I had trouble recognizing. Here are some notes that might help you understand what I was talking about:

• In May 2007, I graduated from Johns Hopkins, having spent nearly five full years in Baltimore. In July 2007, I moved to San Francisco to start working at Creative Commons.
• "a new metric": This refers to the joy-drain calculus.
• The teaching I began in 2008 was the Python class I helped Seth with, to EFF employees, and then the Noisebridge/SF-LUG "PYCLASS" that I started all by myself. (This class is continuing in my absence!)
• The visions of my future self, then, were as a computer science student pushing the field forward and pulling policymakers closer to us. I imagined working with Ed Felten and his Center for Information Technology Policy program at Princeton. I also applied to MIT's Decentralized Information Group. Neither program accepted me. Going forward, the next step would be working with security researchers to get published, but I seem to be busy right now with something else.
• Things I did that were pretty unthinkable to me a few years back: Abstractly speaking, one has to do with minimizing jealousy; the other has to do with causing it.

Somehow this 2008 restrospective fails to mention probably the singularly best thing I did in 2008: I went to Debconf.

And now, some writing from a year and a half ago.

8----< CUT HERE >---8

Two thousand eight

"Saturating the metrics."

Toward the end of 2007 I was worried I had run out of ambitions. All the things I could have named in 2006 that I would have said I wanted, I already had, or I had a clear path to getting. Thinking through it at the time, the list didn't even seem very long.

You could say that from the summer of 2001 up to the middle of 2007, my path was obvious. I would graduate from high school, and I would go to college. I would keep some old friends, and I would have great difficulty with the increasing distance between me and some of them. I would eschew proprietary software. I would be whimsical and earnest, if sometimes melodramatic. I would graduate again and again. I would be in a safe, understandable environment that would provide me outlets for all these things.

Getting out of school takes away that last one. It also takes away a peer group, replacing it with a nebulous concept of friends who suddenly aren't all in the same place of life as you.

"No one's watching"

Around Halloween 2007, I said I felt like no one's watching me. My friends for years aren't around to see what I'm doing, and to tell me if I'm crazy or wrong. All they get to hear is what I tell them. If I don't say what is wrong when they ask, they'll never know to ask again. They won't be surprised at who they see me walking around with because they'll never see me walking around here. "Watching" meant "watching out," like a big brother but not like Big Brother.

That was 2007. In 2008, there still aren't people who see me every single day who know me well enough to tell me firmly that I'm doing something I should not be. But I don't feel the same sort of loneliness as I did a year before. A few really close friends can make a world of a difference for me. I now know enough people here whose struggles and character strengths and flaws are familiar to me; I trust them enough that I'm eager to have mine become familiar to them. It helps that I really believe that these people care about me; it also helps that I think I can see that care in people. They want to know what I'm doing, and they can help me find out how I feel about it. I guess I've learned to smooth over the temporal distance between conversations even with close friends.

One of those people scared me when she told me she might leave San Francisco. I was saddened, and I wanted to tell her all the things I'd miss about her. Before I got a chance to tell her, as I thought about them, I found that I had a lot of the characteristics I liked in her. I guess I really like me, and I would sure miss me if for some reason I found myself missing.

By the middle of the year, I came up with a new metric: not for me, but for my relationships with other people. How much joy do I get, like by sharing a smile or a sigh? And how much does the person drain me, like from the anxiety of waiting or by our repeated failures to communicate? What a perfect year in which to suddenly lose a particular neediness that haunted one friendship.

"They try what they're not"

There were a couple of things that I did this past year that would have seemed pretty unthinkable to me a few years back. One I tried and found it was much more painful than I thought; that taught me a lot. The other was less painful than I had expected, and the absence of pain taught me a different sort of terror. In the end, neither of them showed me I was someone fundamentally different than who I thought I was, but that certainly wasn't the only possible outcome. Somehow these self-experiments of 2008 touched me a lot more deeply than the ones in 2007.

"Anything"

The other sensation I had a year and a half ago, just as I left college to start working, was, "I could do anything." It was overhwelming; suddenly out of college, there was nothing to bind me to anything at all. I could program computers, or I could sell ice cream. The realization came to me as a reflection of learning that while Lawrence Lessig could keep informing the world about copyright, he would ditch that success entirely and start a new crusade.

The overwhelming thing was how empty "anything" was. Let alone a better idea; I couldn't really come up with anything I wanted to do other than what I had been doing. I can still keep sliding forward, I knew, but I felt unprepared to decide what I would do next.

In 2008, I remembered that I like teaching people. I think I should do that more, perhaps in a professional setting. And I have a few ideas for visions of my future self; they require the cooperation of others, so we'll see what they say. But I've seen the visions with enough clarity to know who to ask, so now I'm waiting on something concrete. And rather than just squint at the hazy distant future, some friends helped me gain the self-confidence to apply that to this moment: Of course I should try to teach ninth graders about copyright and Creative Commons. Of course I should try to speak to the anarchists of Baltimore about it, and (this one finally my own idea) of course I should give a tutorial at the yearly PyCon.

Suddenly present this year is a sense that I feel comfortable in my skin. I'm really grateful that some of my friends seem to have found that for themselves this year, too.

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Mon, 31 May 2010

West Philly Free Software meetup: Tue Jun 1, 7:30 PM, Rice N Spice

In West Philadelphia, free software and open source fans are going to meet up for dinner on Tuesday (June 1), at 7:30 PM. Want to join us?

We'll be meeting and eating at an inexpensive, tasty Indian place called Rice N Spice. It's located at 4205 Chestnut St.

(Need a map?)

It looks like a grocery store, but if you push on forward past the shelves of packaged goods, there are seats and tables. I'll be there at 7:30 sharp. There's a picture of me on the OpenHatch about page.

If you live, work, or can get to West Philadelphia and like free and/or open source software, come on out! And if you can't afford to eat out, just come by and sit with us. It's quite a casual venue.

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Fri, 28 May 2010

Joy minus Drain

Start by picturing someone you know.

When you spend time with this person, how much joy do you get? It's okay to include sarcastic jokes, dreamy smiles, sharp political discussions, useful shopping advice, or drunken stupors in this figure. Do you and your friend share a sense of humor? Do you feel good about yourself by hanging out with this person? You can include anything that gives you a sense of fulfillment. Usually you feel this joy when you're actually spending time with the person.

Next, add up all the ways this person drains energy from you. Does she show up randomly late in a way that makes planning hard? Does he tell you sad stories that drain you past the point of sympathy and into boredom? Do your personalities clash, leaving you both frustrated and unable to understand each other?

Now, subtract: Joy - Drain. If this figure is negative, you're probably better off if you don't spend a lot of time with this person. (If the drain comes from the person's flakiness, there are some useful mitigation strategies: Simply tell the person where you'll be within a time range, and if the person shows up, great. Also, just stop believing the person when he says he'll be there.)

High joy, low drain people are a blessing. A relief. Treasure them.

There are some more interesting cases. Low joy, low drain people are probably safe to keep around. High joy, high drain people? Oh boy. It's probably okay to keep them, but it's probably also smart to balance them out with other high-joy people. (Relying too much on the high-joy, high-drain people might make your own happiness turbulent. For that reason, it recently occurred to me that it might be bad news to date such people.)

P.S. While it's sensible to order your own friends this way, it's probably low-joy, high-drain to imagine your friends calculating these functions on you.

P.P.S. This concept started out as "Joy - Effort," where Effort primarily represented the work needed to successfully arrange a meeting time with the person. Chris came up with the idea of generalizing it.

P.P.P.S. So long as I'm on firm emotional footing (like I seem to be generally this year), I want my friends to tell me how I cause drain so I can try to improve.

P.P.P.P.S. Maybe this "Joy - Drain" calculus is obvious to most people. I discovered it in mid-2008 when I was feeling weighed down. Before then, I didn't express a whole lot of intentionality on who I spent time with; a surfeit of high-drain people that summer made that necessary.

P.P.P.P.P.S. It might be productive to apply this to countries/cities/neighborhoods to live in, jobs to keep or quit, or companies to do business with.

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Sun, 23 May 2010

Kat and Asheesh, on identity

Six months ago, I was talking with Kat. We were talking about talking.

On imperfection

Kat wrote:

<mindspillage> I think I have to be very very comfortable around someone to be able to be imperfect around them.
<mindspillage> (at least, without feeling horribly embarrassed about it)
<mindspillage> More so if what I'm doing is part of my identity.

It's safe to be bad at dancing, she explained; she doesn't consider herself a good dancer, so nothing's at risk.

On flames

I had recently written about diversity in free software. Kat showed me a piece she had written, but not yet published, on a similar topic. I thought she should simply publish the piece as-is. Instead, she worried:

<mindspillage> I feel like I have a hard time getting across what I think without coming across as antagonistic.

I've felt the same way. Years ago, I told my friend Venkatesh that had sent a flame to a mailing list we're both on. He retorted that my flames lack flame.

So then I thought about why I might feel I've written a flame, even when no one else felt that way. I wrote to Kat:

<paulproteus> Expressing oneself is a frustrating experience.
<paulproteus> It may seem like you're taking this out on other people.
<paulproteus> In fact, you're just frustrated.
<paulproteus> And fighting (successfully) your own urges to just be quiet.
<paulproteus> So at the end you'll feel like you fought a battle, and that seems like you wrote something that others would feel is antagonistic.

Maybe for Kat's writing and my "flames", there was some sort of antagonistic process in which we fought ourselves. That fight doesn't have a lot to do with the resulting text, so it's invisible to the reader.

I think this process might leave us vulnerable in another way: if our urges to stay quiet come from a sense of isolation, and we manage to stay quiet about that feeling, no one will sympathize with us. We'll appear to be healthy, active participants in a conversation where we express ourselves. Other people with a similar "process" for self-expression won't get a chance to empathize.

(This is why I'm interested in putting together a Debian for Shy People caucus. I hope my Debconf proposal for a Birds of a Feather session is accepted!)

On finding a way out

We concluded on a happy note:

<mindspillage> I haven't been answering Wikimedia mail for a while. Then I figured out that I don't have to use my real name, so I don't have to answer as someone with responsibility, I can just be some random volunteer.
<mindspillage> Most of it is silly and trivial. But sometimes I am really able to address someone's concern or change someone's mind, and I forget how good that feels.
<mindspillage> (There are some real jerks too.)
<mindspillage> I got someone who was being snarky to apologize for being so rude. That was kind of awesome. Sometimes it doesn't take very much to make me happy.

P.S. A note from the archives

Apparently, for me, speaking French is exempt from the above restrictions.

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Copyright © Asheesh Laroia. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Open Hatch is my current project.