Five more questions!
Apr. 15th, 2012 04:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tim(aka "no, I really don't want it to be 2003 again except in the sense of having meaningful discussions on LiveJournal.") These from luinied, who happened to overlap (mostly) with stuff I've been thinking about anyway. Well-done :-D
If you didn't ask me for five questions before, you still can!
luinied, who happened to overlap (mostly) with stuff I've been thinking about anyway. Well-done :-D- Of all the places you've lived, which has been the least soul-crushing in terms of general place-to-live factors? That is, excluding your job, who you knew in the area, etc.. (As though this is easy to untangle, I know.)
I try to aspire to a higher standard than "not soul-crushing", you know :P That said, I found Cambridge, England to be very pleasant. It's well-nigh impossible for me to separate that experience from my job, the overall headspace I was in then, where I came from, where I went afterward, and so on, but the surroundings helped. I'm not sure I would move back there, even with a reason, since it was hard to find much of a queer scene there. (Maybe that's changed.) - What is it like working at Mozilla on a day-to-day basis?
Leaving out the recent political tensions there (because that's the other post I'm working on): I still have to do a bit of pinching myself over having a job where I can pretty much do my best, be supported in that, support others, and have a remarkably low amount of BS interfering. I have two hours a week of pre-scheduled meetings, never more than that. The fact that a large percentage of work-related communication takes place over IRC, which is near-universally if not universally used, lets me circumvent my residual social anxiety as it pertains to asking people for help. (Usually.)
That said, it took me a while to adjust when I started out as an intern. I arrived in the midst of the Firefox 4 release. That was the last one before Mozilla moved to rapid releases. The release parties, and other nominally work-related events, struck me as somewhat excessive, especially for a company that was featuring the concept of "doing good" prominently in its branding. Since then, though, I've sensed a move in the direction of somewhat greater restraint. I'm getting paid past the point of "generous" (not that I'm complaining; student loans don't pay themselves) and there's still free jellybeans in the kitchen. But I no longer regularly get uncomfortable about the level of extravagance, and I'm happier that way. (Keep in mind, I wasn't in the industry during the first dot-com boom and I didn't grow up with money, so my extravagance meter may be calibrated differently from yours.)
There's also a pretty big difference between the days when I spend 3 hours on the train to go to the Mountain View office to work (where most of my team usually is), and days when I go to the San Francisco office, which I can walk to (not that I need to when I have a Muni pass). If I'm in Mountain View, I go out to lunch with the other Rust folks et al., and overhear my colleagues talking about different corners of the project than the one I'm working on all day (I like to think I learn by osmosis, which is at least better than thinking I'll never break out of my functional-programming niche.) Days when I work from San Francisco, I can go a whole day without talking to anybody in the office except on IRC, and frequently I eat at my desk. If I could magically transplant my whole team up to San Francisco, I would, but they seem to have minds of their own and it would take a lot to get me to move further south than the Glen Park BART station.
I'd really like to get more of a toe into the rest of the company beyond research, and there's nothing really stopping me except my own comfort zone. If nothing else, it might give me some more answers when my friends complain about Firefox memory leaks. - Why doesn't every mid-sized or larger city in that's at least nominally full of liberals have quality vegetarian Chinese restaurants?
Probably for the same reason that many cities don't have much quality Chinese restaurants at all, as far as I can tell (and this is 100% rank speculation): because there's so much low-quality Americanized Cantonese food out there that it's hard to market anything else, and in what may be some sort of Gresham's Law of Chinese food, bad Chinese food drives out good (at least in the US). If I really felt like pulling something out of my ass, I'd conjecture some relationship between concentration of recent immigrants and diversity of restaurant styles (like why the Peninsula/South Bay area has Indian food that isn't just Punjabi, or why Portland has decent Thai and Vietnamese restaurants but tons of mediocre Chinese restaurants), but I don't. I don't think it's to do with the vegetarian angle per se, just that Buddhist-vegetarian Chinese food, like Islamic Chinese food or Szechuan food, fails the "give the customers what they expect" test, except when there's a critical mass of people who are actually from the appropriate region.
Don't hesitate to tell me I'm being a douchy whitesplainer here, anybody :P - Do you have any fun, funny, or exasperating OkCupid stories to share? (If yes, please share them.)
Besides the libertarians replying to my "libertarians need not apply" clause to ask me what I have against libertarians? Or the time when I went out on a date with someone only to realize that his primary partner was the guy I hooked up with last summer (let's be honest, one of the guys(let's be honest, one of the two guys))? (The second was in the "funny" category, just to be clear in case either party happens to be reading this ;-) Well, there was the guy I went out with who turned out to be a fundamentalist atheist (fundamentalist in the sense of believing that religion is the foundation of every oppression -- yeah, he was white and cis, how did you guess?) and, when I cited that as a reason for not wanting to see him again in an email later, tried to persuade me I was wrong. On the one hand, I made the mistake of giving a reason more specific than "just not at the same place in our lives" for not wanting to see him again. On the other hand, he made the mistake of not taking "no" for an answer. I guess it's about even. - When I read your posts / the posts you retweet on Twitter, I feel like I'm seeing part of a big, long, ongoing conversation - or sometimes commentary on such a conversation - that's mostly with horrible people. How do you deal with that day after day? (The best I can guess is that you learned how at Wellesley...)
I'm not really sure what I learned at Wellesley, but I know that back then, I felt more infuriated and othered than I ever wanted to admit to myself at the time, all the time, and never knew how to deal with that. Partly it was that I didn't fully understand at the time that I was being gender-policed; I wasn't aware that if I'd been at a non-single-sex college or university, especially an engineering school, I could have been twice as abrasive and been five times as popular for it. Provided, of course, that I'd been experiencing cis privilege (conditional or not) and male privilege at the time. That too.
That's a tangent, though. I deal with it, I think, the same way that people who have dealt with far scarier things IRL have dealt with it: because I don't see any alternative. Because I knew, from the moment I started to be able to speak, that silence was death. 95 out of 100 times when someone says something oppressive -- online or off -- I do keep silent. (People who think I'm too sensitive have no idea how much energy I burn just on that.) The other thing that helps is when someone tells me (privately or publicly) that they're glad I said what I did. Speaking up lets people -- who may not be active voices in the conversation -- know that this space doesn't just belong to het cis able-bodied white men. And now that I'm frequently assumed to be a HCAWM, the added safety that that placement confers on me makes it morally necessary (in my opinion) for me to go further than I used to in challenging the assumption that societies must necessarily be organized as coercive hierarchies.
Which leads nicely into the post I have to finish next! Thanks,luinied!
If you didn't ask me for five questions before, you still can!
(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-16 03:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-21 07:29 pm (UTC)1. Supposing you and Alex both got awesome jobs after graduation that you could both do from anywhere, and anyone you needed to work with face-to-face would move to where you were. (Ha!) Where would you move to?
2. What was the first online forum / community / whatever you participated in, and what about it was engaging for you?
3. I was looking at your LJ interests list to get ideas for what to ask you, and I saw "David Gries". Why???
4. Lately, what do you say when people who don't do CS (or even people who do non-academic software stuff) ask you what you work on? (Hypothetically supposing someone seemed to want to hear more than one sentence.) Have you come up with any cute ways to explain it to people who don't have the background? (I'm thinking more of your current Ph.D research than of Mozilla-y stuff, but if you have cute ways to explain the latter, I'd like to hear those too :-D)
5. Have you cooked anything good lately that's in the genre of "do-able after getting home exhausted from work, but surprisingly good"? This question brought to you by the fact that I haven't had lunch yet :-D
(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-22 09:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-22 09:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-16 04:44 am (UTC)I'd be up for hearing more of your thoughts about gender-policing at Swelles sometime. My recollection is one of enjoying the notoriety and support I got for being outspoken (and bitchy, as needed), but my recollections of that time in general are heavily biased, and no doubt that my sensitivity to gender issues on that campus was practically nil.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-21 08:03 pm (UTC)1. What do you mean by "different priorities than most people my age" in your DW bio? (And what's your idea of what most people, or most people your age's [either way] priorities are? ;-)
2. Perhaps relatedly: Suppose you're magically given enough money to live comfortably (that is, a notch above your current standard of living) for the rest of your life, as well as supporting whatever other feline or human dependents you choose to support. Do you stay in your current career? Do something else that's still work-ish? Or head for Maui and sip umbrella drinks? (Or none of the above.)
3. What's it like working in a field that is (I'm guessing) less than 95% men? To make that a more interesting question, what kinds of hierarchies or microaggressions that migrate from the outside world into your professional world do you find you have to bite your tongue about (or don't have to, perhaps!), if any? Do you ever experience exclusion?
4. Have you driven to any cool places in SoCal lately (as in, driving someplace not for work or errands or whatever, and with stuff to see that could be appreciated by car)? Where, if so?
5. [Sorry, back to kind-of-heavy questions] What would you say to yourself-ten-years ago, if you could?
Re: gender-policing: I certainly didn't have much sensitivity to gender issues at the time, either. It's only something I noticed retrospect, years later. Sure, I got support too, and got to know some of my longest-lasting friends through being visible on Public/Community (hello!) But as I've told someone else in a different context, sometimes it's the single negative word that sticks with me even if ten people just said something positive. Being called "the meanest bitch on campus" -- for not much more than telling people to check the phone book -- was something that stuck with me. And it's hard to imagine having been called that by a fellow student at a non-single-sex college, if I'd been using a masculine name at the time. Not just because "bitch" is a gendered slur, but because people seem to apply a filter to things people-perceived-as-women say that makes any harsh words seem much more harsh, and apply the reverse filter to things people-perceived-as-women say. (Boys will be boys, he's teasing you because he likes you, etc.) There were women there who said they really missed "the male perspective", having guys who "had a sense of humor" (or whatever) around, and so on, and while I don't know exactly what they meant (and suspect they were referring to specific people they knew, rather than some nonexistent universal male perspective), whatever they were looking for, they wanted it in a package that was shaped a certain way (so to speak).
Not sure if that actually clarifies anything! :-D
"What's the opposite of soul-crushing? [...] No, not that far from soul-crushing."
Date: 2012-04-16 05:30 am (UTC)Besides the libertarians replying to my "libertarians need not apply" clause to ask me what I have against libertarians?
Yeah, I think that's pretty much the expected result of having that on your profile. I pretty much avoid any statements about who I don't want to message me, as I haven't thought of one where the people in question would actually read my whole profile, want to message me, and be deterred by instructions not to. (Plus my profile's long enough already.)
when I cited that as a reason for not wanting to see him again in an email later, tried to persuade me I was wrong
I know you probably mean that he tried to persuade you that this wasn't a good reason, or maybe that you must secretly have some other reason, but I like to pretend that he was instead attempting to argue that, no, actually this makes you want to see him again. (Also, I'm sorry.)
People who think I'm too sensitive have no idea how much energy I burn just on that.
Maybe this is a difference between us, because, while I have definitely burned energy keeping quiet - and I surely have to do this less than you, so maybe I haven't felt how this can pile up, but still - I burn out much, much more quickly when I speak up and am ignored, countered with wilful ignorance or worse, or whatever.
(I'm also vaguely curious how you run into so much awful shit on Twitter. I mean, the stuff relating to current Mozilla events I can understand, but in other cases, do you follow a lot of people, on Twitter or elsewhere, who report the goings-on of awful people to their followers? Do you follow the awful people themselves? Do you (*shudder*) actually search for things or click on trending topics? Because Twitter isn't like most sites where there are threads right under articles or whatever where you can see the awful people being all awful, and I know I'm always surprised to find out (usually from you or from a few other people I follow) what "the Twitterverse" is "having a conversation" about.)
Re: "What's the opposite of soul-crushing? [...] No, not that far from soul-crushing."
Date: 2012-04-21 08:12 pm (UTC)Heh, no, he was trying to convince me to see him again (or at least, I can only assume so, because why else would he bother), and convince me that I was wrong about religion not being the source of all evil, but he wasn't *explicitly* trying to convince me about what did or didn't make me want to see him again. I wouldn't be surprised if he thought I was wrong about my own thoughts, though :P
Maybe this is a difference between us, because, while I have definitely burned energy keeping quiet - and I surely have to do this less than you, so maybe I haven't felt how this can pile up, but still - I burn out much, much more quickly when I speak up and am ignored, countered with wilful ignorance or worse, or whatever.
Well, you're right, I'm not exactly sure which is worse. And I'm not exactly choosing because those two things, because anytime I speak up, it's either going to end in the other person saying "oh yes, I was wrong" (which happens occasionally! but not usually), or in me deciding not to continue the discussion. Which is also being silent.
I'm also vaguely curious how you run into so much awful shit on Twitter.
Mostly by following people who RT stuff, but I also look at the conversations that some people I follow have with random, awful people. And then, of course, there's the phenomenon where people who seemed okay overall have some awful opinion on some particular issue. Basically, people are a problem.
Re: "What's the opposite of soul-crushing? [...] No, not that far from soul-crushing."
Date: 2012-04-22 05:07 pm (UTC)Everyone who uses ! or ? as a comma gets into heaven (except Nazis? perhaps even Nazis, to the extent that does not contradict laws against speech contrary to the democratic-republican order).
You could ask me five questions if you want, though at this point, I think about four people (including me) actually read my DW.
Re: "What's the opposite of soul-crushing? [...] No, not that far from soul-crushing."
Date: 2012-04-22 06:19 pm (UTC)Heh, I was going to make fun of you for being a prescriptivist, until I realized I'd read this the wrong way. Possibly. Brains.
You could ask me five questions if you want, though at this point, I think about four people (including me) actually read my DW.
Well, the point of keeping a blog is mainly (as I wrote in my other post answering
1. Since I have been paying very little attention over the past four years,
what's the deal with Canadian politics? Is it still preferable there to the US
politically at this point?
2. Are people in Germany as bad about assuming "long hair = woman" as they are in the
US?
3. Taken any epic train, bike or bus rides in Europe? (as in, more than biking to work :-)
4. What are your thoughts on trying to change the culture of CS from within? Besides calling out microaggressions when they happen (which is worthy in and of itself), what do you do, or want to do, to use your privilege for the better?
5. Can you ever see yourself working in industry? What would it take, if so?
Re: "What's the opposite of soul-crushing? [...] No, not that far from soul-crushing."
Date: 2012-04-22 07:25 pm (UTC)I approve of using ? and ! like commas, and disapprove of anyone who would prescriptively proscribe this practice. (But of course, proscribing prescriptivism is just like being a prescriptivist.)
Re: "What's the opposite of soul-crushing? [...] No, not that far from soul-crushing."
Date: 2012-04-22 08:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-16 10:56 am (UTC)[I think I have something to say here about people who do and don't give up, and visibility, but it's not coming clear right now.]
(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-21 08:25 pm (UTC)Yeah, I think that's right. To compare it to something relatively trivial, I used to think I could *never* give myself injections. And then I realized I needed exogeneous testosterone. Oops. Turns out it wasn't actually that hard. (And there are actually ways to get exogeneous testosterone without needles, but they're all more expensive, so it was really just the desire to save some money that overcame my desire to not give myself injections, not a medical need.) Most of the "I couldn't deal with that" stuff happens because people do exactly what they have to, and no more. Not to say that things don't happen because people go further than what's necessary (running back in to the wreckage after your plane crashes to save the other passengers), but then, maybe not, because maybe in those cases people do it because they can't stand living with the knowledge that they could have and chose not to. Which raises the question of whether having a strong conscience is something that deserves praise or is just something people end up developing not really by choice, and various other philosophical questions that I haven't thought about much since college :-)
I just wish it was easier to tell "how can you" that's the same sort of othering from the "how do you?" that is asking for hints or techniques that the asker could use in their own life.
I feel like if the asker is disclosing something about themself at the same time (like, I don't know, "My ankle bothers me half the time, how do you get in the subway stations?") as opposed to just asking about *you*, that's the difference between asking for hints (first case) and othering (second case). But that's probably approximate.