One of the reasons I love having a little kid like David is his
incredible ability to share joy. He’s so expressive with his happiness
that it’s contagious. Last week, we went to the Google Halloween party
and they had an inflatable cauldron where a witch came in and out of it
and each time the witch came out, David shrieked with joy. Pure,
unadulterated joy. It was so amazing that everyone around him was
laughing at his intensity.
It’s funny how such things become socially unacceptable over time. It’s
sad how we don’t feel (or at least) express that kind of happiness
anymore. I honestly can’t remember the last time I felt that good and I
wonder if I ever expressed myself the way he does. But this is sort of
why I wish it was okay to be straightforward with people. Not only is
expressing outlandish joy pooh-poohed upon, but so is telling people you
think they’re great. If you say things like that you must either be
hitting on the person or have an ulterior motive.
Some days I wish it was okay to tell people that you think they’re
awesome and interesting and you’re glad they’re in your life. Like an
official “go tell people you like that you like them” day or something.
I wish people knew how to take compliments and say thank you. I wish
people heard you and believed you and it actually made them feel good. I
certainly value the bad more than the good. When someone compliments me,
they mustn’t know what they are talking about and when they bash me,
they must be right. But I wish I was good at listening and hearing, too.
Even if just for one day.
National express-joy-like-a-toddler and take-compliments-well day.
One of my non-ending struggles is to find a way to “have-it-all.”
I am constantly trying to decide what I should do and what I am willing
to give up in return. Often times, I am not willing to give up anything
completely so I try to do it all and I don’t have enough time to spread
across all so I end up doing a sub-par job at each and I get really
frustrated.
Back when I used to write, I’d always get annoyed that people around me
seemed to send out their stories more often or write so much more than I
did. Of course, many of them had no job or an easy 9-5 job as opposed to
my Wall Street insanity. Today, I face the same struggles. When I don’t
reach a goal as fast as the person next to me, or don’t reach it at all,
I get endlessly disappointed in myself. I feel like life is unfair. I’m
working just as hard as this person but I am not getting the credit.
The fact is I am not. This person is only doing the one thing. I am
doing seventeen things. When I distribute my attention and brain power
across that many things, there’s low chance I will do as well as the
next person (unless they are naturally a lot less skilled than I am,
which is rarely the case.) and it’s not fair for me to expect to.
Yet, I still do and I still get sad when I don’t get the recognition or
the opportunities others do. But then I try to step back and remember
why I do what I do and remember that the next step may not actually be
the best step for me to take. Sometimes opportunities aren’t actually in
the direction I want to go and it’s hard to pull myself away enough to
remember that point.
So this is here to remind me. The next step in the ladder isn’t always
the best step for me. There’s so much more to my life than the
accomplishments. Recognition. Being over-accomplished is over-rated. And often not
worth giving up the “other stuff” for.
For the next time I forget.
I must admit, I’ve been rejected from many things before and for many
reasons, but I have yet to be rejected for being too young. A book club
here just rejected me because they said I was too young to join them. If
at 32, I am too young, I suppose I should take that as a compliment!
What’s amazing is how much rejection hurts, even being rejected from the
smallest things. Even when you know you have no hope of getting
accepted. I try out for things, just to encourage myself to get projects
completed. And then when I don’t get accepted or win, I feel so sad.
Sometimes I feel sad for days. Even though, mentally, I know there was
no chance or that it doesn’t mean anything, emotionally it’s not
possible to ignore the rejection.
The good thing is, it doesn’t seem to have stopped me from trying to
submit, however I don’t know if that’s the answer either. Why is it so
important to me that others accept my work? Why do I need an “official”
stamp of approval? Why can’t my work be enough for me? I think I really
need to think hard about the answers to these questions so that I know
what my motivations are. If all this is just to seek approval, I need to
find other forms of it. If it’s to stretch myself and give myself
deadlines, those are good reasons. The best thing about those reasons is
that they don’t depend on the outcome. By the time I submit my work, I
have already completed something and I have also stretched myself. Those
should be enough to feel good.
If I am going to submit my work and keep putting myself out there, I
think it’s important to keep that in mind.
Rejection is part of day to day life. We get rejected in small and big
ways regularly. Just like we get accepted in small and big ways. It’s
important to celebrate the acceptances and grow from the rejections
without taking them personally. I need to remind myself of this
regularly. I need to stop diminishing the good and exaggerating the bad.
I know I have this terrible personality flow where if someone thinks I
am great, I quickly stop respecting or looking up to that person. I
figure they must not know what they are talking about. And if someone
doesn’t think I am hot shit, why they must be totally right.
And you thought you were fucked up.
I’ve been here. I know I’ve been quiet. But I’ve been here. Working
hard. Working long. Spending all my free time with David and Jake and
scrapbooking and reading and sleeping and watching TV and doing a bunch
of other not very constructive things.
Funny thing is. lately I’ve been thinking more and more about my life
before. Don’t ask me “before what?” Just before. I’ve been thinking
about all the classes I took, the languages, the saxophone, the
volunteering, the writing, the photography, and now the scrapbooking.
I’ve done a lot and I like living a full life.
Maybe I’m being too optimistic, but expect some changes soon.
“Isn’t that why you quit working at Goldman?”
Asks my innocent father when I tell him how busy my life has been with
work.
It is and it isn’t.
It has now been four months since I’ve started working at Google. Life’s
been hectic to say the least. However, it’s not the same kind of hectic
I had at my previous jobs. It’s tiring and at times overwhelming like
the other jobs were. But it’s also invigorating and exciting and
interesting and challenging. Basically, it meets all the criteria I had
when I was looking for a job. And then some…
So the last few months have been busy. When I’m not working or tired
from working, I generally try to hang out with David and Jake. I think
about writing often, but don’t actually get around to doing it. As is
the case with every year-end, I decided last week that writing more
often would be good for me. Taking photos more often would be good for
me. And reading more would be good for me. So I plan to do more of all
three. If you don’t see me writing for three consecutive days, feel free
to harass me.
All this ambition could be fueled by the almost ten days of
relatively lull activity that is sure to end within 24 hours but I am
still going to give it my best.
I have taken a ton of photos of David and some of Palo Alto. I have read
two books and making good progress on a third. I have even scrapbooked a
few pages. All in the last ten days. Let’s see how the next ten days work.
More to come later.
I’ve noticed a few days ago that I am at my most thankful lately. I
absolutely adore my husband and my son. I am finally living somewhere I
love. I am surrounded by old and good friends. I am looking forward to a
wonderful new job. I love my new house. I am making tangible progress on
the driving thing. I can’t imagine my life getting much better than this.
So it’s been too long, I know. But to be fair, in the three weeks since I’ve made my previous post I found a new place, moved to a new house, in a new city, accepted a new job, changed my addresses everywhere, and said good-bye to one life and hello to another. I’m finally settled in and about to leave for vacation.
It’s been a long and tiring few weeks. After an unbearably long flight, I am hoping to have a pleasant, eventless, and relaxing vacation. I will do my best to post as much as possible, but I am not bringing my computer so it will depend on how much computer time I get on the island.
Be well, more coming soon.
It’s been a rough few weeks in the karenika household. First came
some unexpected news that really threw a wrench in the comfort of the
household, then came a death, and then came another death. All these
events meant that we made four trips across the country in the last
two weeks. David, who had never been on a plane prior to April,
didn’t take well to the redeye but was a champ on all the other
flights. He loved the Florida sunshine. He cheered everyone up at
both of the funerals and reminded people that there’s an order to
life and that the most important things is for people to come and go
in order. He also added some much-needed humor to the very sad
occasions we’ve been a part of.
We spent one of our nights in Florida in a hotel. Since David’s
bedtime is 6pm, and we had a regular hotel room, Jake and I spent
6-11pm in the very tiny bathroom floor of the Holiday Inn. Like the
time we were in San Francisco, the very close quarters of the
bathroom, coupled with the whispering not to wake the boy up, makes
for some intimate conversation. We ended up chatting a lot about
life, our goals, our dreams and all the things we were thankful for.
When we’re home, Jake and I always have an unending to-do list. There
is work to be done, books/websites to read, email, cleaning, cooking,
David, laundry, are just a few things that get in the way of us-time.
When we’re away, we know we’re not going to get anything done and we
end up having the best conversations of our marriage.
Times like these make me really glad to have David around. I tend to
get lost in the little things when I’m in a bad place and forget that
the world is great. Our lives are great. David’s the best reminder of
that. His laughs, his hugs. His beautiful face. His mere existence is
a daily reminder that we’ve already achieved one of the biggest
successes of our lives.
Anyhow, this was meant to be an apology for the lack of posts. I’ve
been making an effort to post more, partly for the few who still read
me consistently (thank you), and partly for my own sanity. The last
few weeks have been hard and thus ended up with no posts. Things are
going back to normal (I hope) and such, I am hoping to be around a
bunch more.
I’ve been in a slight technical slump lately. There were many things
I hated about my investment bank job in New York: middle-management
was full of incompetent managers who found a way to make your life
miserable. There were many 120-hour weeks. I ate dinner at work at
least three out of five nights. Often more. The users weren’t all the
sweetest people you’ve ever met and technology is a male field and
combining that with the male-world of finance made the place a real
joy. (There’s a specific incident with one of my managers and a photo
of a woman and a horse that is somehow etched into my brain
permanently.)
Of course not everything was terrible. The pay was relatively good
but more importantly, the people I worked with were very competent.
Some of them were downright brilliant. I gained more practical
knowledge in one year of working with some of these people then I did
in my four years at Carnegie Mellon. Some of my coworkers inspired me
and made me a better coder. And I miss that. I miss it a lot.
In my current job I have more responsibility in some ways and I do a
wider variety of technology. I never had to administer servers on
Wall Street, they had other people to do that. And to boot machines,
and to configure files and compile unix programs (even though I did
download, compile, and install the latest version of emacs on every
machine I’ve ever used; this girl cannot live without emacs.) While I
enjoy learning about the intricacies of freeBSD and ini files as much
as the next gal, my main love is programming. And PHP just doesn’t
cut it for me. It was fun for the first few weeks while it was still
relatively novel. I liked the cleanness of Smarty and how it let me
separate stuff so I didn’t have to fill my PHP code with html crap
etc. However, two years into it, my fascination with PHP is long gone
and I need something else. I’ve coded a bunch of Python a while back
for fun and I am hoping to get back into it if only to preserve my
sanity.
Actually, my point was that I haven’t been feeling very technically
challenged lately so Jake’s been encouraging me to create a project
for myself that would be fun. After months of his badgering me, I
finally broke down and came up with an idea I liked. I’ve spent the
last week coding night and day and even though it didn’t make me a
fantastic coder, I’ve learned some new stuff I didn’t know and I have
a new website/domain now. I am hoping to roll it out for pre-alpha
testing in a week or so. If you’re interested in photography,
writing, knitting or scrapbooking (any of them) and would like to be
one of my guinea pigs, drop me a line: karen at karenika dot com.
Only if you’re going to play along tho and feel free to pass it on.
That’s why I haven’t been writing the past week. All my free time has
been 100% consumed by this. To be honest, it felt great to be
consumed by anything (other than David who’s my favorite thing to be
consumed by of course) and even if the site is a bust, I loved
working on it. College was probably the last time I felt like staying
up and working on one of my own projects as much as I did this past
week.
Jake was right after all. What a shocker.
A friend of mine asked me about my favorite movie the other day.
Anyone who’s a movie-snob would cringe at some of my favorites and
probably think I am an uncultured, cheesy-movie-liking idiot. But I
don’t care much for movie-snobs (or any other snobs for that matter)
so I don’t really care what they think. Anyhow, my favorite movie of
all time is still the same as it was when I applied to college 14
years ago.
My favorite movie of all time is still Dead Poets Society. While I
was very lucky to not have parents like the ones in the movie and
wouldn’t nearly qualify my life as oppressed and predetermined as
those students, the message of sucking the marrow of life resonated
strongly with me then and still does today. There are so many things
I like to do and so many things I yearn to learn. So many things I
wish I could do like design and play an instrument and draw well and
write well and be more creative and artistic. I feel like the amount
of things I want to do/learn/be would easily cover several lifetimes.
I don’t know how to figure out which path to take. There are many
aspects of my life that I love and wouldn’t give up. I love being
married. I love that I’ve shared so much of my life with Jake and
that we have all these memories that we can unleash like a treasure
chest. I love reminiscing with him. I love being a mom. I love the
joy and wonder David has brought into my life. The little moments
where he does something completely unexpected, the minutes after he
wakes up from a nap all flushed, the hours we spend bonding while I
nurse him. I wouldn’t give those up for anything. I love reading. I
dedicate several hours of my week to reading books and those hours
are some of my most cherished. My little escape into the minds and
worlds of others. My opportunity to experience life in a different
way. That’s something else I am not willing to give up. Those are my
core three that need to be in my life. There are many other time-
consuming activities I like that I’d rather not stop doing like:
photography, writing this site, scrapbooking my son’s memories,
taking classes with/for David, etc.
But then there are others. Hours wasted having petty arguments around
office politics. Hours wasted trying to configure some kind of
installation or a piece of code that’s missing a stupid parenthesis
or semicolon (yey for python). Hours killed with being in a bad mood
or stuck in traffic or running stupid errands or having a fight. I
know it’s impossible to dispose of all of these. And maybe I am just
itching because it’s time to try something new. I think that my main
problem is that I feel insatiable. I feel like picking one thing is
not going to satisfy me since I still have to give up picking
something else.
I had told myself that if Jake did well enough for us to live on his
salary, I’d go back to school. Maybe get a PhD in Child Psychology.
Maybe get one in Computer Science. Or maybe I’d do a collection of
Masters degrees. One for math, one for computer science, one of
english, one for statistics. One for design. One for psychology. Art
history. Linguistics. Photography. Several individual languages. I
really can go on for quite some time. Now, I’m thinking maybe I
should just take classes. I don’t know if that’s even possible. I
don’t know that the schools I’d want to attend offer the option of
just taking classes. But I suppose theoretically if I had enough
money, I could convince them to let me. I wonder if that would quench
my thirst. Make me feel like I was finally sucking the marrow of life.
Make me feel like I was actually living several lifetimes in one.
It’s been a relatively long week and hence the lack of updates. Even though I’ve had nothing urgent or critical to do, I’ve felt remotely annoyed and stressed out all week. Normally, I’d look forward to the weekend to get some rest but I have two shoots this weekend, which generally means I’ll be working my ass off and before I know it, it will be Monday again. And, as opposed to most normal companies, my place of business does not feel MLK day is an important enough holiday to observe. Good Friday? yes, absolutely. MLK day – no fucking way.
Thanks to the generous number of replies to my askme thread, I checked out twelve new books from the library. I gather some of them should be good. David has also generously lent me one so I am hoping I am set at least for the next few weeks. I am still in the blah zone for books, and feeling like there’s too much mediocrity there compared to excellence but I guess that’s the case by definition isn’t it?
I find that when I am in this mood, I am always tired, constantly eating bad crap, unable to focus and/or function in a positive manner. I am impatient with people i love and frustrated at the drop of a hat. I often don’t know how to get out of the funk either so I hide under the covers with a good book and pray it goes away sooner than later. I have two evening fun-events to go to next week and maybe they’ll be what I needed all along.
Or maybe not. Who knows?
I’ve been putting off posting because I am struggling with what resolutions to create for 2006. Normally, I pick the typical stuff like losing weight, quitting Diet Coke, eating better, exercising more, writing more, reading more, etc. Last year, I knew better than to assume I would have any control on how my year was going to go and I am still quite confident that next year is also going to be as unpredictable and “not under my control” as this year. However, for the sake of having some goals, I’d like to set some resolutions anyway. These are a bit more atypical but quite important.
My main goal for this year is to be more patient and pleasant. I want to be kinder and more about others. I want to listen more closely. Most importantly I want to remember that my “list of things to do” is often crap. It’s stuff that doesn’t matter and such I shouldn’t stress about completing it over being with my family or keeping in touch with friends. I find that I often prefer to stay at home and do my list of items over hanging out with friends or taking a walk with David.
Like other “busy” people, I have a hard time keeping up with my emails and staying in touch with my friends. I want that to change this year. Living here, I’ve learned the importance of good friends and I don’t want to lose touch with the people who mean the most to me just because I am posting on my site or scrapbooking David’s first year. These things are not worth falling out of touch with friends.
I want to work on judging myself less. It’s okay if I am not the best programmer, photographer, mother, wife, or the prettiest woman. Things that make me who I am are unique and they are perfectly fine. I know this sounds like a self-help section but I really have trouble keeping track of what matters sometimes. I often worry that I will be exposed for the fake that I am and will lose my job or the clients will ask for their money back. I didn’t study years of photography after all. I wasn’t a CS major at school, just a simple IS one. I get frustrated with my husband at times and I don’t play with my son enough. I need to lose weight. I have a huge nose and sunken eyes. These are all true. They are facts I try not to stress about but often dwell on at length. I want 2006 to be the beginning of the new me, who dwells less, appreciates more and takes action when possible and necessary.
I want to get influenced by others less often. Things that people say get to me. Someone’s off-hand remark may kill my already low self-image. Someone’s look can cause me to feel small. Even someone’s lack of words can have a negative effect on me. I am too affected by other people’s opinions of me. Or my skewed notion of their opinions of me. I take all the bad to heart and gloss over the good. I want 2006 to be the beginning of the me that realizes people are allowed to have their opinions but it doesn’t mean their opinions are worth more than mine, especially when they are about me. As a friend of mine told me years ago, it’s the person staring back at the mirror that counts the most. I know it sounds cheesy but, to me, it’s important to remember it, so I am writing it down.
Most importantly, I want to be more open, honest, caring, and patient. I want to look, listen, digest it all. I want to take fewer photos but with more meaning. I want to read fewer books but with more substance. Do fewer things but enjoy them more. Really live. So I can be calmer and wiser. I want to be a good example for my son.
I was much happier in 2005 than I’ve ever been in my life. I had really hard and terrible moments but deep inside, I feel happy and content on many levels. I know that was David’s present to me. And I want my present to him in 2006, to be a more grounded and confident mother.
Happy 2006 everyone, may all your dreams and wishes come true this year.
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projects for twenty twenty-five
projects for twenty twenty-four
projects for twenty twenty-three
projects for twenty twenty-two
projects for twenty twenty-one
projects for twenty nineteen
projects for twenty eighteen
projects from twenty seventeen
monthly projects from previous years
some of my previous projects
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