First post!
OK, so I’ve done it. I’ve broken down and started doing the public journal / blog thing.
I used to think that pouring one’s feelings in a public forum for all to see was either arrogant (Are my ramblings really worth publishing for all the world to see? Do I really want to bore people with tidbits out of my life?) or involved more exhibitionism than I was comfortable with (that Not Being My Kink).
To a certain extent, those concerns are there, and still real. But having read enough web journals of friends and people who I know only more distantly, there were some comforting things which I found that encouraged me to give it a try for myself.
What did I find? First of all, that my concerns, ramblings, neuroses, etc., aren’t all that different fr om others. And this is true not just of folks who I would expect; folks which I’d consider my friends. For example, there’s one person who I only know distantly, but whose rough (and truth be told, unpleasant) exterior hides a sensitive, thoughtful, and vulnerable soul. That’s something I only discovered by reading that person’s live journal. Although I doubt we’ll ever be close friends, it did demonstrate how we all are far more alike than we are different under our skin. Most people’s hopes and dreams simply aren’t all that different. And that’s a good and comforting thing to know.
Secondly, it brought to mind Socrates’s oft-quoted line about how the unexamined life isn’t worth living. For the past two years, I’ve been so wrapped up at work that I haven’t really had time to think about whether I was happy with the direction of my life, and where it was heading. Part of it was certainly a reaction to my past breakups with previous SO’s, but part of it was simply getting sucked up into the go-go life of a Silly Valley startup. (Thank goodness I was only telecommuting as opposed to living there; I suspect I would have seriously gone over the workaholic edge if I had moved out West.) Reading other journals reminded me about my need to stop and take look at whether I’m satisified with where I am in my own personal journey.
So we’ll see how things go. One of the advantages of my recent job change (I now work for IBM), is that I’m now working for a company which takes the work/life balance thing very seriously. Of course, having said this, February looks like a disastrous travel month. It’s not entirely my fault, though. I hadn’t planned to go to Australia; but last month, I received a “congratulations your paper has been accepted; and oh by the way, how would you like to do the keynote speech?” letter. The only problem was (a) I had never actually submitted a paper to that conference, and (b) it’s right before a conference in Helsinki where I had agreed to teach a kernel tutorial. The organizer of linux.conf.au is a good friend of mine though, so I let my arm be twisted into doing it as well as NordU/Usenix 2002. (I’m really too much of a soft-touch.)
So my challenge for this upcoming year is not say “yes” to too many things, take better care of my body, and pay more attention to my social life. There! I’ve said it in public; so I’ve committed myself!