exploratory committee

Posted by rick Fri, 27 Apr 2007 04:29:00 GMT

Hey, today I can officially run for Presidente del Republica Banana de los Estados Unidos, or something like that. I think I’ll start an exploratory committee.

I can remember when 35 was incomparably old. I mean, my dad was 35 back then.

I wonder what my 8- or 12- or 18-year old self would think about me now.

When I was 8 I had just gotten over being on a baseball team, pretty much for the last time ever. I had just gotten my first cassette or so. I was learning about fractions I think.

When I was 12, I frankly can’t remember much from being 12. What was that, 7th grade? Maybe a girl at the swimming pool who was my age and looked about 18, having sproinged out in all the right/wrong places. 6th and 7th grade were a social pain in the ass, and everything was about to go upside down for everyone over the next few years. Shit we didn’t care about before was about to become almost all that was “important”, and the dice were starting to roll—what nice people were about to become cool, or vain, or superficial, or neglected, or mean, or “unpopular”?

At that point I’d also just about decided that the whole Catholic Church and whatever they were calling “God”, “Jesus”, “faith”, and “religion” were basically full of it. That would cause some fun in the following year. I suppose I’m still not supposed to let my grandmother in on that secret (hope she isn’t reading my RSS feed). I got my first computer at age 12, having won a $2 bet on a horse race at 99:1 odds (the same grandmother placed the bet for me). How’s that for mixed transcendental signals?

When I was 18, I spent all my time in school and in clubs and the like, staying away from home a lot of the time, enjoying myself, and really really looking to get out of small town Kentucky. I listened to a lot of music, but in hindsight it wasn’t a very wide selection. I was seemingly always fighting with my father, and I knew everything (right?). I’d had a lot of girlfriends, and had even once been in love. One of my teachers told me that, by the time I got to 30 I’d either be a millionaire or in prison.

So, now, I’m 5 years past (well outside the margin-of-error I’d say on my teacher’s prediction) and have been neither rich nor in jail.

If I’d stayed at that hedge fund until now, and somehow found a way to keep from jumping in front of a train living on Long Island I’d definitely be a millionaire by now. I knew that when I left there back in 1997, I mean the mathematical inevitability of it, and let it go. And that wasn’t a mistake. Instead I went out on my own and spent my money down for a few years as I reapprenticed myself and learned a shit-ton that I’m still building on. Best investment I ever made, though it cost me most of a million bucks.

If I’d gotten unlucky a few times I’d probably gone to jail too. Too many crazy ideas, too many wild nights (and days), too many impulses to see what in the hell would happen if I do this. During the crazy years the accomplices were absolute nut-cases, and I think the crazy years had a high high tide. Most of those guys have settled down a bit too.

Now, I have maybe half a dozen computers (down from a high of around 15 or so running at one point a few years back) and I can do almost anything imaginable with them without too much effort. I can get any music I want other than a few exceptionally hard to find pieces, for free, on demand. I’ve got an unbelievably beautiful and wonderful wife. We have our own house that we just bought. We have only one debt: the mortgage. We make more than we need and we have lots of interests. I think my younger selves would be happy with all those things, though I think they would misunderstand some of them in a lot of ways.

Back in December I had some major revelations that fundamentally changed my outlook on life and how I live it. I finally accepted that I’m a Buddhist, rather than just being interested and inclined in that direction. I cut my hair, gave up alcohol, became a vegetarian (again, though this time more strict than ever before), and took the Boddhisatva vow. Of course, I live in the world, and the world is often too much with me, and it’s hard often to hold on to those realizations, but I know it’s important. It’s changed how I think about many things and it colors how I live day-to-day. It lets me know, deep down, that “everything will be alright.”

It’s not necessarily been rosy, though. Some people take change personally, or more than others. I don’t do all the things I used to and so that puts me aside or outside or less alongside a lot of social circles, which is ok, though I hope people understand that it’s not because of their personalities that I’ve changed. There have been a few times when people have pushed and asked what’s the deal, “why don’t you eat meat?”, “why don’t you drink booze?”, “don’t you believe in God? you don’t go to church…”. A lot of times I haven’t really given the straight dope, because a lot of those people know me to some degree and I’ve already seen a few people comment to others, “looks like he crossed over” or “looks like we lost one”. Someone recently kept pushing and I told them about the changes in December and they just didn’t know how to take it. But some people do, and some people are excited and interested and helpful. The most surprising thing, I’m finding, is which people are which way.

Anyway, what’s threatening? Maybe the things I believe. I believe we are all One, we are all Divine. I believe that time and space are an illusion, and that it is an illusion that we are separate beings. I believe that love and beauty and truth are objective and that they are identical with the Divine, and suffering is their mirror image, and is the product of distance from the Divine. Finally, the universe is All, is consciousness, is divine, and it contains both love and suffering. The whole is both yin and yang, in infinite complexity and unity. As Bill Hicks noted, it’s pretty dangerous to think this way, after all “what’s going to happen to the Economy when we realize that we’re all One?”

Anyway, back to the State of the Union… I’ve got a very interesting job. We are building a large software system for a mental healthcare non-profit. The team of people we have drawn in is unbelievable. They are the best team I’ve seen since working at that hedge fund, and in some ways are better. We are also helping people. Every thing we accomplish will help thousands, perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands of people to live better lives. That’s seriously awesome, and I now see that as a real benefit to the work we’re doing. What we’re doing is hard as shit, though. I’ve been working 60-hour weeks since about October of last year, and it looks like it’ll be another couple months of that—and I’m not the only one. It’s not a death march but we’re all on a long-ass sprint and hoping to “get there” soon. But the thing is big, even with using Rails. We’ve got ~15,000 lines of code, which in any other language would seriously be at least 125,000 lines of code, but you can’t escape coupling and interaction between components, which is really what kills you as systems grow. Anyway, it’s almost ready to launch and people are really pushing for it and getting antsy. Noone outside the team has a real conception of what it takes to build a system this large, and it’s impossible to fully “manage expectations” to make that happen. So, every so often I find myself talking to someone who is agitated but gives us great feedback as they begin to talk, and we do everything we can to take that in and use it and thank them and let them know, “it will be alright.”

But, every week these days I have a day or two where I wake up in the morning, or come home in the evening, or go to bed at night thinking “jesus h. motherfucking christ this shit just ain’t worth it”, and of the people who’d rather I come work for them, without the long hours nor a “customer” unaware of what they want or get; or of simply doing part-time work and hiking and gardening instead. And then I think maybe of buddhist sand art which takes months for a monk to make, placing a grain of sand at a time (only to wipe it all away at the end); or perhaps of some of the guys in my team who have had talks with me and who have stepped up to make things better for us and the people we’re serving; or perhaps I just go to bed and let sleep make it better. Regardless I keep going, somehow so far.

If I sent this back in time as a letter to my 18- or 12- or 8-year old self how would they feel? I think probably the 8- and 12-year olds would see it as some sort of science fiction and maybe would distort it as part of the chimeric personal mythology I carry around in my head still. But I think the 18-year old self would mostly see that it’s been good, with one caveat, that he’d advise me, could he write back, to have more fun and fuck with things quite a bit more, because there’s really no downside, and there’s no point in working all the time and not purely enjoying it.

Maybe I should listen to that self a bit more. I think he’ll be the first appointee to my exploratory committee.