Saalon Muyo

If everything goes right, you should be reading this just after I touch down in Boston. It’ll be my first time back to the city in a while. How long’s a while? I honestly can’t remember. Three years? Four? Has it been that long? I’ve been trying to trace back when my actual last flight back was, and for the life of me I can’t.  Which sucks, because it used to be home.

I moved to Boston in the fall of 2000. I’d been dating Erin for three years, all of them long distance, and it was becoming crystal clear that we were hitting the point where we either lived in the same city or slammed the brakes.  Three years of monthly visits and the occasional vacation wears on a relationship, and when you’ve never shared the bumps and slides of a daily life together in the first place…well, it’s no good for the heart and soul. One of us was going to have to move, and since Erin had as much interest in living in Pittsburgh as everyone else (read: none), that meant it was on me to move.

So I moved.

What? I loved the girl. You think it was a tough decision?

Despite some crankiness from the family – I hadn’t finished college yet, and couldn’t I just maybe wait until that, and maybe until a good job came along and also have you helped grandpa with his computer? – it all fell into place without issue. Ok, finding an apartment sucked (like the night when I went out, in the rain, to see a place, and the owner never showed, and I lost my hat, and I had a full-on meltdown), and moving is never any fun, but really, it went pretty well.

I lived in Boston until 2003, with Erin, in a tiny subdivision of a house with a handfull of lunatic neighbors and the most Irish landlord in the world, ever, including the ones who are Irish landlords in Ireland. His name was Martin Battle. He sang Irish music. His accent was full frontal assault-brogue. Best landlord ever. Anyway, where was I? Oh, right. Living in Boston. The apartment was within walking distance of the T, my job was downtown, and I drove further to pick up Erin from her job at the mall than I ever did for my own job. I never, not once, drove into the city for work.

Boston was wonderful. Incredible. Thinking about it, about the charm of South Station, of the incredible lunches in Chinatown and the mind blowing salad bar down the street, and the feeling that there was something happening around you at every single second…well, the nostalgia gets a little Fellini-eque.  We moved back home to be near my grandparents so long as they’re still with us – and I can never, ever thank Erin enough for getting over her dread of Pittsburgh on my behalf – and though I was only in the city for three years, Boston remains home in my heart.

Going back after so long and staying for such a short time has me on edge. I don’t know what to expect when I get there. What will have changed? What will have passed away? Will the places and sights that anchor my nostalgia remain, or will something subtle but significant have changed in my absence? I half expect to feel like I’ve walked into a childhood home that’s belonged to someone else for years; the walls are all where they should be, but they’ve taken down the wallpaper and are using your bedroom to store Christmas decorations and surplus Costco canned goods.

Either way, I won’t have long to suss it out. Erin and I drive to Pawtucket for a Lights concert – the reason for the trip; and no, I don’t know why I wanted to see her badly enough to plan a whole trip – and won’t return to the city until the next day. That means one day in Boston, hanging out with a friend whom I didn’t know when I lived there, going to restaurants and bars in which I never ate or drank. Even if the city is the same, I’ll be passing through someone else’s Boston, and maybe that’s for the best.

At least I’ve been promised soup dumplings and possible karaoke at a lesbian bar. If you’re going to visit someone else’s Boston, you’d better make the most of it.

First, let’s get business out of the way. Stop SOPA. Stop PIPA. You know how you know they’re bad laws? The MPAA wants it badly enough to call today’s Internet Blackout Protest Thing an “abuse of power.” Hilarious. Anyway, get schooled.

Second, where the heck have I been? Well.

The important thing is that I’ve been hard at work. Maybe not as hard at work as I’d like to have been (I never am), but I’ve had my eye on the prize. The prize, of course, is writing something I can sell. (Ok, also writing something I can shoot. I have a couple of prizes in sight. I like prizes.)  To that end, I’ve been writing in my expensive little Moleskine notebook with an expensive, archival inked pen as much as possible. Things are coming together. Not as quickly as I’d like (it never is), but things are happening. Things are also moving on the webseries. Pre-writing is happening on all fronts, even if the blog makes it look like I’m curled up on my couch.

To be fair, there’s been some curling up on the couch. I had some bad days recently and that was about all I wanted to do. Which is the other side of not updating the blog. I haven’t exactly been bursting with enthusiasm of late, and I’m taking what productivity I can squeeze out of myself and putting it somewhere it can do the most good.

All that said, I hope to be blogging again soon. Maybe Friday. Maybe next week. Not beyond that. Blogging is important to getting things done. The time it takes is nothing compared to the feeling of doing something it imparts. I’ll be back.

But in the meantime, things are creeping forward.

See you all soon.

Sufjan Stevens, whose album Come On! Feel The Illinoise! is one of my absolute favorite chinks of music, released a Christmas album a few years back. It was a collection of EPs he’d put together as Christmas cards, and was a mix of traditional songs, odd takes on traditional melodies and original holiday numbers.  About half of the collection is either repetitive or unexciting, but some of the tracks are really, truly incredible.

My favorite – and, ok, my favorite is different from year to year – is probably “Sister Winter”. There’s something about the way it moves through emotions; it starts morose, becomes hopeful, and finally breaks out into joy and celebration. Just like the season itself, “Sister Winter” is a mix of happiness and pain wrapped in the chill of winter.

Enjoy.

(And ignore the boring winter slideshow. There isn’t an official video. Just listen to the song.)

Wednesday night, I was watching one of my favorite shows. The writer’s name came on screen and I realized, God, I know that person. I knew them years ago, haven’t seen them since, and there they are, writing on a show I watch. I’m struggling to get someone to publish a single stupid thing I’ve written and there they are, writing a show I’m watching. I felt the confidence crack, just a bit. It was a small thing, but that’s always how they start.

When I felt my confidence shake, I did the only thing I know to do. I put my head down and worked. I talked through my ideas for Mimesis with Rachel and started work on real backgrounds for my my characters. For the night, it helped. It felt like I’d gotten past it.  Unfortunately, when my confidence cracks, it’s not so simple. I think I’m getting past it by marching on, but the faults get bigger while I’m not looking.

I got home from work, knowing I had plans and wouldn’t get anything done. No work to do, no way to brush the crisis under the rug. I felt the self doubt finally get its claws in me. It starts, as it often does, with wasting time, wasting life, being lazy, then moves on to not as good as you need to be, not as good as you think you are, not very good at all. The ultimate destination is well known territory. Doesn’t matter how good, doesn’t matter what you do, doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter.

Some of it’s absolutely the truth. Most is just the wailing of unbalanced brain chemicals. The rest…I don’t know.

When I graduated college, I struggled to find my first programming job. I’d finished my degree at an online school, and I could see them writing me off as soon as it came up. Sometimes, I didn’t have to notice it, because they outright told me that I’d gotten my degree from a craphole. I was paying off the remains of my student loans – thankfully, not that large – on a degree that wasn’t getting me anything. I was taking jobs and getting paid for things I could have done without the degree.  Worse, they weren’t entirely wrong. I had gaps in my knowledge, I lacked experience and I was behind every other person my age in the field.

wasting time, not good enough, doesn’t matter what you do

I got lucky. I was working somewhere when an internal developer position opened up, and having my foot in the door was enough to get them to take a chance on me.  All at once, it was on me.

See, my confidence is screwy. Like I always tell people, I don’t lack confidence in myself. I just don’t have much confidence that people see what I see in myself. Unfortunately, after a pile of rejections, it turns into a doom loop. They don’t see what I see becomes maybe what I see isn’t there becomes I suck. Being thrown into a job I lacked the skills and experience to actually do was, thus, a step up. Crazy, I know, but going from not good enough, no opportunity to not good enough, have to do it anyway, right now meant it really was about what I could do, and not what someone else thought I could do.

Now that I’m back at that point, only now with an oft-rejected novel, I try to remind myself how low I felt in the year before my first coder job. Logically it helps, but these crises aren’t entirely about logic. They’re about trying to sustain an image of yourself in absence of feedback. Which means I wrestle with the logical side of it until the illogical, chemical, emotional wave hits, breaks me down, and passes.

This isn’t one of those posts with a message, or a lesson, or a statement of how I’m stronger than this and will succeed. Who knows if I’ll succeed. Survive? Yes. Persevere? Sure, as long as I can, hopefully as long as I have to. Beyond that, I don’t know. Sometimes you don’t give up because you believe. Sometimes you don’t give up because you know you’re too stupid to know whether you should believe or not, so you’d better keep going anyway. Today, I’m there. That’s good enough. It’s got to be.

I go to bed certain my mom will forget to brine the turkey.

When the call comes at 7:30 a.m. the next morning, I’m already awake, having driven Erin to the airport an hour before. She says, “I really screwed up,” and I know what’s coming. The turkey isn’t brined.

“I forgot to add the preserves to the cranberry sauce and ruined it. Can you go to the store and buy some more?”

Oh. Is that it?

————

I’m being loud. I’m always loud, especially at my mother’s house. I don’t expect to be shushed. It happens anyway.

“There are people sleeping upstairs.”

People? What people? I have to cook and deal with house guests? This was so not part of the plan. I spend until noon answering questions from a thirteen year old I’ve never met, wondering if it really is too early to start drinking.

————

Things are going well. There’s a turkey breast in the oven at my grandmother’s, and the full bird in the oven at my mom’s.  My friend Christine comes over to get a glass of wine – her family is having dinner just down the street – and I start to tell her how insane our Thanksgivings usually are.

The oven starts beeping.

And shuts off.

We head down to the garage, flip the breakers to cycle the power and turn the oven back on. A minute later, beeping and shutting off. Again. The turkey only has a half hour left, I think. Just let it go. We can finish it at my grandmother’s if we have to. And cook the stuffing and sweet potatoes there too, somehow. It’ll work.

I stay zen for a full twenty minutes. Then the oven starts working again.

————

My mom, of course, does not have a meat thermometer. I walk over to my grandmother’s (for the third time) to get one of hers. I bring Christine so she can say hello.  I storm in, say I can’t stick around, grab a thermometer, and bring Christine upstairs to my grandfather for a quick hello.

“Christine,” he says, “I have a picture of your grandmother I wanted to show you, but I haven’t found it yet.”

“We have to go, grandpa.”

“You have to go. Christine can stay.”

————

We cut the legs and wings off of the turkey and carve only the two breasts.  There are, Hallelujah, compliments and good cheer over the bird. The dinner goes great. Everything, on the whole, has gone great.

Leftovers get packed, and people notice that we never served the wings or legs. One by one, people approach me and say the same thing.

“Next year, why don’t we just cook a turkey breast?”

The story starts on Thanksgiving. Any Thanksgiving, it doesn’t matter. The family sits down – there are a lot of us, enough that we have to push the kitchen and dining room tables together – and the food gets set out. People take a few bites before it begins.

“I don’t even like turkey.”

It’s usually my grandmother who gets things going, but if not, she’s onboard immediately.  This meal, this cake-eater, Thanksgiving meal, is too much work for something nobody likes anyway. Oh, sure, we love the stuffing and the sweet potatoes and the cranberry and the gravy (ok, who doesn’t like the gravy?), but the turkey? That thing’s a bitch. It takes forever to cook and you’re always afraid it’ll dry out before the inside’s done and then you have to carve the thing and then nobody even wants it.  The griping goes on for a little bit before someone makes a suggestion.

“Why don’t we just cook the turkey breast next year?”

Agreement. Hearty agreement. That’ll give us the meat we need, it’ll still be Thanksgiving, but cooking it will be so much easier. Sometimes, for variety, the suggestion is that we do a chicken instead, but the point is the same: easier, simpler, and maybe people will even like it better.  By the end of the night, it’s decided. Next year will be different.

This conversation’s been going for fifteen years.

I didn’t learn why until I took over the cooking of the bird.  We had our pre-Thanksgiving pow-wow to decide what we were going to buy, and we – we being me, my mom and my grandmother – decided that we’d try out cooking just a turkey breast this year and see how that went.  Lovely. Fantastic. No whole bird.  We were actually doing it.  I ordered this giant, organically grown local turkey breast that could feed the whole family, got my recipes together and prepared for the big day.

A week before Thanksgiving, I get a call from my mom.  ”Grandma bought a turkey,” she says.

“What? I already have a breast. It’s like a million pounds. Why do we need a turkey, too?”

“She wants something to stuff.”

Things descended quickly into a shouting match about who they thought was going to cook both a turkey and a breast, and anyway, why had I gone out and bought an expensive and gigantic turkey tit if we were just going to end up with a Butterball anyway?  The shouting match continued through the week and on into Thanksgiving morning itself. A two-oven strategy was devised, where I would cook the breast and grandma would stuff the bird.  Compromise.

Food gets laid out. Family starts to eat.

“I don’t even like turkey.”

Two years later, I gave up.  My family had cyclical Thanksgiving psychosis and there’s no way I could cure it.  I decided to opt out of the whole turkey process. Every year it was something new. A different last minute change, a slight variant on the argument. But it always ended the same, with a family who didn’t even want the thing. Rather than subject myself to the Groundhog Day-like horror of it all, I told my family to give me something else to cook and subject themselves to the turkey that they just couldn’t quit.

This was last year. The night before the big day, my mom calls, all desperate, because my grandmother has dumped off the turkey on them and they have no idea what to do with it. Could I please, please, please come help?  The shouting the previous two years had nothing on the righteous Thanksgiving fury that followed.  A full morning of rage, of my shouting while I grudgingly went about roasting that stupid, stupid bird. Why am I cooking this thing if everyone hates it? Why doesn’t one of the people who keeps forcing us to serve this bird at the last minute come over here and cook the damn thing themselves! I am so sick of this holiday! I’m going out of town next year,  just you see!

Well, it’s Thanksgiving again, and here I am. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about this holiday, it’s that there is no escape from it. On the phone with my mom last week, I had one request. “I don’t care what we cook or how we cook it. Just please decide everything now. If I wake up Thursday to another turkey surprise, I’m going to lose it.”

I shouldn’t have even bothered. After all, there are two certainties on Thanksgiving.

I’ll lose it.

And everyone will hate the turkey.

In case you missed me flogging this video on Twitter yesterday (and you’re as behind the times in seeing this as I am), I give you this as thanks for your support yesterday.

Something retro on my necklace!

For my first developer position at TrueCommerce I was provided a standard issue whiteboard for my cubicle.  After a few weeks of providing developer support – your first developer job is light on the development and heavy on the sitting at people’s desks, waiting for an error – I wrote, “The doctor is IN,” on the top of the board.  When I went to lunch, I’d erase it, write OUT, and off I went.  When you’re debugging Windows COM errors, you try to make your own fun to get through the day.

After a while, that got old, so I started erasing everything after “The doctor” and putting in some kind of movie quote or song lyric.  You know: “The doctor’s life flashed before his eyes: cuppa tea, cuppa tea, almost got shagged, cuppa tea.” That sort of thing. People’d stop be to see what I’d written, to see if they caught the reference or not. It wasn’t long before people started calling me, “The Doctor.” Including the VP and CIO. “Doctor,” Russ would say, “we’ve got a problem and we need your help.”

At the time, I’d never seen an episode of Doctor Who, and thought he was called ”Doctor Who” and not “The Doctor.”  The whole thing started as a reference to Lucy from Peanuts. I walked around with the nickname for years and it never clicked.  Even after I started watching the show, it didn’t occur to me that I’d walked around an office for four years, getting called “The Doctor” for my notable ability to sort (technology) problems that had everyone else stumped. I stumbled into a nerderific and fantastic nickname and hadn’t the faintest clue what I’d done. Even after I’d watched Doctor Who and become *ahem* a bit of a fan, it didn’t click until I’d decided to dress as the character for Halloween. If there comes a nerdier moment in my life than when this all came together and didn’t stop me from choosing this costume, it’s probably time to call it a day.

Anyway, that was how The Doctor dressed up in a Doctor suit for Halloween, and his wife joined in on the fun.

I ran out of the house so quickly this morning that I forgot to vote.  Election Day is important in my clan. Being a member of this family means you’re either into politics, or you watch mutely as the dinnertime shouting match rages over you. Either way – whether you’ve voted or not – you’ll end up on a phone call, reenacting one of the family’s most over-told stories.

My great-grandfather, Tony Bologna (that’s Ba-low-nya, not the sandwich meat, chumps) was at work, and one of his coworkers was asking him if he’d voted yet. This works better told, not written, so do me a favor and imagine this in a nice, thick, stereotypical Italian accent. It’ll help.

Coworker: Hey, Tony! You wote?
Tony: Yeah, I wote.
(later)
Coworker: You wote today, Tony?
Tony: I wote! I wote!
(later)
Coworker: Tony, you wote, yet?
Tony: I wote every time-a you ask me, he win for sure.

Election Day, people. Rock the wote.

You need to see Paprika. In fact, you need to see everything by Satoshi Kon, because it will mess your mind up.  But you’re busy, I get it. You don’t have time. So let me bring you this one moment of awesome. The opening credits for Paprika. You can thank me with words or, preferably, beer.