Wandering

When folks leave their team here, there’s often a “fish” email sent (as in, “so long and thanks for all the”).  It’s quite cliche, but even I couldn’t leave without thanking the folks who helped me over the past six years (not to mention letting them know I’d be gone).  I put everyone on BCC, partly because I didn’t want to be too gratuitous with it (so I didn’t want people to know was/wasn’t on it) and partly because I didn’t want it to spawn a conversation thread.  I tried to keep it brief as well.

Anyway someone replied and added some folks, including someone who wasn’t on the initial email.  It’s a medium amount of awkward, but I guess it will fairly soon not matter.

karmendcastro:

join Wikipedia, Destructiod, Twitpic and other great sites in the fight against SOPA/PIPA and keep the internet free exactly the way it is supposed to be. Do not let corporations take away our freedom to share and create. 

http://sopastrike.com/

Well, this is awkward…

I guess you meant the 18th ;P

Yesterday was a pretty lazy day, at least for the first half of it.  My mom called to catch me up on a few things and also to get some status update from me on the whole San Francisco thing.  She’s always curious about what I’m up to, so I let her know my plans for the rest of the month.  It was pretty bizarre even for me to recount it all; I don’t think I’ve ever had such a packed two week period before.

At the time, I was still looking forward to the Saturday night festivities which included the Chinese New Year celebration that work put together, including the modern dance exhibition my friends were doing.  I also had to go to my friend’s engagement party afterward (which meant I missed the karaoke after party, but you can karaoke any time).  Tonight we’ll finally do our secret Santa gift exchange pot luck (which reminds me I need to find food to bring too).  Tomorrow will be my last day of D&D with the folks at work.  Tuesday will be dinner with my friends Alan and Sara their daughter (who they can’t really bring to the big going away party).  Wednesday and Thursday this week are open (for now), though I’ll still be working of course.  Friday will be my last day of work and the night when we do the original circle’s going away party.  It will be myself, Roy, Anais, Nam and a few folks who were with us when I first started hanging out with those guys two years back.  It should be a nice little bit of nostalgia.  Saturday I’m going to go see Jake Shimabukuro play his ukulele.  Sunday is a bit up in the air; I might go to Vancouver for dinner but I might stick around and do drinks with folks at my current job.  Monday I’m planning to be in Vancouver to check out the Capilano suspension bridge, but I’ll be coming back in the evening to share Chinese New Year dinner with a bunch of folks.  Tuesday will be my team going away lunch with my current coworkers; it would be earlier but my boss is out of town next week so we’re waiting for him.  Wednesday is open, but Thursday I’m debating to take a trip down to pick up the keys to my new place (I don’t think it’s mandatory but it might still be a good idea).  Friday Jenny and Lareina are coming down from Vancouver and I’ll be doing the Theo chocolate factory tour with them and Anais.  After that we have the big going away dinner and after party, and it will be the 27th!  The days after that aren’t planned out but I imagine I’ll be spending one or two days making the trip down with the kitties.

Anyway, the Chinese New Year festivities last night were pretty good.  There was a lot of cultural dances and a few more modern things.  Of course my favorite was to watch my friends; I think they changed their style up a bit after the last exhibition they did for last year’s LNY (Taiwanese edition), but I could just be imagining that.  It was funny to hear them introduced as PINC meaning “pretty innocent, but not completely” (it’s really “puked in Nam’s car” which may capture a similar tone).  It’s too bad the stage was carpet, or they might have done some cooler stuff, and it was already a bit cringe worthy thinking about how much rug burn they must be getting, but it was still good.

Aside from them, my favorite was probably the Geoffrey Castle and Lucy Wu performance; they had accompanying drums and keyboard, but they led the show with their respective electric violin and electric erhu (which I don’t think I’d ever seen played before).  It was decent music; I could take or leave their vocal performances (Lucy was singing Chinese anyway), but the solos on strings were really fun to watch.  There was also a number of dance troupes performing, and a lot of them were very cute.  The kids’ kung fu was really nice as well.

After the PINC performance, I stayed to watch one or two more and then headed out.  The engagement party was 7:30 to midnight and it was already about 10:00 at that point.  So I headed over to the Garage downtown.  I’d been to the place a few times before; it’s basically a bar with some bowling and a bunch of pool tables.  I grabbed a drink and wandered around for a while, pinging my friend via text to see where they were.  Eventually I found them at the very far end of the pool table hall, and I said hi to my friend and her fiancé.

Before I proceed with the rest of the story, I guess I should mention that my friend is actually an ex of mine.  We were dating when we moved to Seattle together, though that was about 6 years ago now.  We broke up about three and a half years back now, and while it was a bit of a bumpy ride we managed to come out of it as good friends.  She told me she wanted to invite me to the engagement party but only if I wasn’t going to pull any “take me back” shenanigans XD.  Anyway this part is mostly relevant because while we were dating I got to know a bunch of her friends as well as her entire immediate family, including her brother and sister who were there that night.

Now, her brother is a pretty cool guy but I realized pretty quickly I didn’t have a whole lot to talk about with him.  I asked him about his four year old daughter (who I’d seen the day after she was born) and he started showing me some photos.  We talked a little about work and where he’s living these days, as well as about how I’ll be moving and whatnot.  But it was a little awkward I think, and not in the best way (the fact that I was there to begin with was the better kind of awkward).  I later started talking with her sister, who is considerably older than her (actually her brother is as well).  She’d had kids much earlier, and actually her oldest is apparently started university last Fall.  So we talked about that, and she complimented me on getting into better shape since the last time I’d seen her (which was a long while back).  She asked if I was dating anyone, I told her I wasn’t, primarily since I’d decided not to invest myself in the Seattle area much lately.  She then told me there were plenty of eligible ladies right at the bar there XD.  She asked me if I often hung out at the Garage; and I told her no.  The real reason is probably that I tend to hang more in Belltown where some of my friends live, but I told her it’s because I haven’t been very social over the past year.

“The past year?  You’re just generally anti-social!”  It was in jest a little bit, but it made me think a bit on how much I’ve really changed in the past few years.  Lately I’ve been thinking about how different 2010 and 2011 were, but when I think about it, there’s an even bigger difference between those years and 2007 or 2008 (2009 a bit too, though that was kinda the transition year).  On further reflection it makes me think I really take social media for granted.

I started with Facebook back in February 2009.  I posted a decent amount of stuff, at least enough to look back and get a decent idea of what was going on that year (especially now with timeline).  I also have this tumblr which I started in October of that year.  Especially at the beginning, I think I wrote a lot that I can really enjoy going back and reading to get a good feel for how a lot of things were going in my life.

Before that, though, there’s not much record aside from what I remember.  I have emails, of course, and a few videos of my exploits with my raid team.  I do know that a lot of my time was wrapped up with WoW and work, especially once I became single (and until I quit playing).  I really wonder to what extent my having a social life has impacted my career path (it certainly lines up with when I stopped getting my promotions :P), but I wouldn’t say that I worry about it; I think it’s for the better anyway.  Before I was single there was a lot of hanging out with folks from the Fields lab (which I suppose has been replaced with the WCF get togethers).  Looking back I do wish I had recorded something somewhere about what was going on, for it was truly a different era that partly ended when I became single and almost completely went away once I started hanging out with the WCF folks (or perhaps they’re two eras).  And I suppose the same could be said about previous eras as well.

So I realized that my not-very-social 2011 was still miles above what previous years have been.  Of course I’m grateful for that.  On a side note, she also asked me how I met the WCF group.  I explained that I met one of the guys playing WoW and started hanging out with him after we both quit playing, and that turned into me hanging out with most of his friends too.  I guess the way I explained it sounded super homo, so there was this hilarious moment of “Are you gay?  I don’t mean that in a bad way, it’s okay if you are, but I was pretty sure you were straight…”

After a few games of pool I headed home.  I eventually discovered that I missed out on the karaoke that folks went to after the exhibition.  I was a little sad at that, just like I was a little sad to miss out on the Jess/Ange birthday cooking lesson event.  But I guess more than the sadness, it makes me realize two things.  One, ironic as it might be, it’s difficult for me to really go out and enjoy those sorts of events unless I’m in a happy mode, and right now my happy mode is due to the fact that I’m leaving.  Second, I suppose I had better get used to missing these things; it’s only going to be much more frequent once I’m in San Francisco :P

Back in 2002 during my trip to Boston, I had a quick layover in Minneapolis/St. Paul (it’s one of the few airports you can get to directly from Houghton/Hancock). I was with my friend Karen, and on the way through we started talking to a relatively cute girl who was also there for a layover. We walked together for quite a little while, and as we approached our concourse it became apparent that this girl had totally missed her “stop” a little ways. I felt bad at the prospect that she might miss her flight, but I was also a little flattered that I could be so distracting (maybe I give myself too much credit though).

Either way, it was a fairly unusual experience just because of how infrequently I talked to girls in those days. I was much more used to girls who assume everyone to be creepy (perhaps rightfully so) and keep up social barriers by default. I’m sure the reasons varied from person to person, but that was the impression I got.

In Santa Monica, I suppose I was a recluse on my own account. Really I never got a great idea of what the people were like around there. I met some rather like-minded folks though work, but that was it.

In Seattle I’ve again been able to make friends after a time, but it’s somewhat difficult to meet new people, and conversations with strangers are few and far between.

When I went to New York, I started to see a bit the contrast between the “freeze” in Seattle and the social climates in other cities. On a few occasions I really felt bad because I found myself not sure how appropriate it would be to do nice things for people. I guess writing it down makes it seem especially ridiculous, but that’s how I have grown to think.

I’m just finishing a 4 day trip down to San Francisco to check out places to rent, and I’m continually reminded that I’m outside the “freeze.” It’s not even very big things most of the time. I ate at the mall food court one evening and as I sat down, a guy eating next to me said “Oh is that the Korean place? It looks good.” Also walking around the mall I started a conversation with a girl stationed at one of the cosmetics stands, advising her which cities she might enjoy visiting on her 2 month visit from Israel. Even on the way to the airport this evening, as I sat down at the Bart station someone sitting there commented “you just missed it” and we started chatting.

I can’t help but feel like I’m some animal whose grown up in captivity, finally being released back into the wild. When I think about it too much, part of me thinks it will take some effort getting used to the way things work here, and it might be exhausting at times. But the rest of me is excited for the challenge and the experience.

Without even having written through, I suspect this may turn into my longest post yet.  The reason being primarily that I’ve been so silent this past year so there are a lot of stories to jot down.  I don’t really care to split them up in any sort of logical way; in a lot of ways I think it’s almost one big story anyway.  So here goes.

About this time last year, I was in a super emo mood.  It’s hard to not draw the comparison between that time and high school really, though perhaps it was a bit more legitimate this time around.  I wouldn’t say I had gotten dumped, but I might say I involuntarily stopped dating a girl of whom I’d quickly grown very fond.  Really it’s hard for me to say if it was more infatuation or proper love, but it hurt either way.  I suppose around that time I did write a little about it, so I won’t go too much into it.  I would just mention that it affected me enough that I felt the need to explain myself while I was at home on holiday.

Anyway, since I was feeling down, I cut off contact with folks for a little while.  I certainly stopped trying to organize anything on my own, and there were a lot of times I declined to go to a social event because I didn’t want to act like I wasn’t in a bad mood.  There were a few things which I kept up though.  I still played D&D with folks from work and my science friends on a regular basis.  I had no problem doing that because it was more than just a social event; I was actually doing something and I enjoyed it, so I didn’t have to pretend that I was in a good mood or anything.

The other notable activity was TV night with Anais.  Obviously we would watch TV, but in the moments in between when we would chat and catch up, I always felt very comfortable with her, and it was never awkward when I was honest about how I was feeling at the time.  To be sure she had (or had had, I forget the precise timing) occasional issues of her own, so at a certain level it was commiseration, but that was not often the case.  I’ve known for a long time that Anais and I have some differences in personality and a bit of differing values, but at that time especially I was glad that we’ve been able to focus more on the areas where we see eye to eye than not.

It’s weird to think that I met Lareina as long ago as February, but I guess that’s how it went.  I’d seen her in my friend Jenny’s photos occasionally, and it so happened that on their way back from vacation they were stopping through Seattle.  It wasn’t a very long stop for them, but it became the three of us and Anais hanging out together (we met up with Roy for a while too).  There are a few moments that stick out in my mind from that day.  The first was when we were at lunch; it’s somewhat of a tradition for us to go as a group whenever Jenny’s in town.  On this particular occasion we somehow were talking about pink eye (Roy had it?  I think) and that also led to our other tradition of NSFW conversations during our traditional lunches.  Anyway, somewhat unrelated to all that, Lareina at some point made a jesting insult toward me.  I knew it was all in fun, but I was not particularly impressed by the nature of the insult, and I told her I’d expect better on her next attempt.  The second event was when we took Jenny to the mall to pick up a waste basket of some sort.  I drove us all to the mall, and since parking looked ridiculous (add to the fact that I’m generally bad at finding parking) I offered to drop the girls off at the door.  Anais and Jenny went in to get a head start on the shopping, and Lareina opted to stay and keep me company while I parked.  Not only was it rather sweet, but I also enjoyed having her there to circle the lot with me.  By the end of it we were both making fun of my parking, but it was nice.

We stopped by my place to hang out with the kitties after that, and at some point I mentioned the nerd stereotype to have fake, Canadian girlfriends in high school.  I’m not sure exactly how awkward it is, but it made sense to mention for some reason :P  And lastly before everyone left someone mentioned how it’s nice to introduce friends to other friends, and maybe they’ll date.  ”The introducer gets first dibs though” I joked for no particular reason.

Anyway, as you would probably guess I started to have a little crush on Lareina after that.  I think March went by with some occasional messages back and forth, but nothing very substantial.  I forget when it was, but at some point Anais and I made a weekend trip up to go snowboarding at Whistler with Jenny.  On the Sunday we were planning dinner and I told her to invite Lareina.  I think I was trying to be a little nonchalant, and I shrugged it off when she said Lareina had decided on other plans.  But of course I was a little disappointed.

Anyway I didn’t give up.  Not long after that I began looking into the Germany thing, which meant taking a trip through Europe.  When I mentioned this to Lareina she made some comment about coming along; I told her quite seriously that she should, and that we could get matching flights and have a good time of it.  By the end of a few days, though, she decided against it; I can’t deny that it would have been a bit crazy but it wasn’t reason enough for me not to do it :P  I still remember also that I had been planning to take a trip up to see her and Jenny (well mostly to see her) around my birthday, which would have been just before my trip.  But then there was some chance we wouldn’t see her (as I recall, she got pretty ill that week) and while I wanted to go on the off chance that we’d be able to hang out, I didn’t want to inconvenience folks, and I guess I was still trying to play it cool.  So by the end of it I didn’t see her, and I went and did my Europe trip.

Not long after that I believe was when I met Eunice and Desiree.  My first real experience with Eunice was chatting with her at Ange’s place.  I don’t even remember what we talked about (a little about Obama vs. Clinton) but I was pretty impressed; it’s really not often I can find folks who are willing and able to talk about things in an interesting way, especially at the party type setting we found ourselves.  For a while I think I had a small crush on her as well, though it quickly became clear that she’s more in a “have fun” phase of her life than anything (as well she should be at her age).  Plus she was in Vancouver so I knew nothing could really come of it.  Over the summer I hung with her and Desiree a bit; Desiree is certainly an interesting girl but not quite my type, and I think it’s less interesting to chat with her; while I think she has a nice and thought out perspective on a lot of things, I think she also likes to decide things on her own which turns out to mean she’s a little closed minded.  I’m probably the same, so I wouldn’t necessarily judge her negatively for it, but it doesn’t really mesh well with me.

Anyway, there was the Germany thing.  Though I wrote about the trip in some detail, I want to mention a few more things here.  But I have to rewind a bit and talk about the interview I did in January.  The January interview was the result of me telling my friend that I wanted to leave Seattle behind and move to the bay area.  He talked to some folks and got me in contact with a recruiter from the Google main campus.  They were very nice and after a tech screen they setup an onsite interview down there in Mountain View.  There were two problems though; first I was riding the tail of a particularly bad interview I’d had a year prior.  The efficient folks that they are, they decided to give me an abbreviated interview and combine it with what they had from that time.  Second, I was still under NDA for most of the work I’d done over the past year or so, so all the interesting stuff I was doing I couldn’t talk about.  In large part I had to interview as a fresh college grad, and my skills from that era had eroded significantly.  In the end I didn’t get an offer, and that was part of the depressing time I guess for a while.

Fast forward to May, when I was interviewing with the applied research group in Germany.  It went really well, and in large part I believe it was because of how I got a chance to finally talk about the stuff I’d been working on (since those folks are essentially on the same NDA).  The work would have been pretty cool, but in the end it turned out that the funding for the position for which I was interviewing was taken away at the last minute.  I was also trying something with Google that month, but as I’ve posted about earlier it fell through due to some of their recruiting restrictions.

Also in May (or perhaps it was early June) I took the GMAT.  I’ve shared the score here but it was a very interesting experience.  At that time I still largely wore scrubby clothes, and the trip to the testing center was no exception.  I got there and saw a few folks dressed nicely, as you might expect from a business major.  There were a few folks there taking random tests too.  Anyway I got in and I knew the analytic writing didn’t go very well but when it was done I tried to push it out of my mind.  It wasn’t too hard since I knew its score would be separate from everything else anyway.  For the math, it was almost all very easy.  I had to write out a few things, and I had to refrain from triple checking some of the work in the name of time, but in the end I think I aced it.  The verbal very interesting.  In a way it was a big exercise in objective reasoning.  If the author of a passage said something was true, and I thought it was a bad thing, I think it’s very easy to think the author also disapproves of it.  But if that tone is not actually in the passage you have to recognize that fact.

So I did well on the GMAT, and quickly added another weekly event to my schedule: tutoring my friend Diana.  We’d basically meet up for a few hours once a week and go over some problems.  It became clear pretty quickly that I wasn’t flawless on the verbal stuff so we ended up focusing a lot on the math stuff.  I like to think I’m good at explaining things, and I think for the right audience it can’t be denied.  However, it took me a while to get a handle for where Diana was coming from with her existing knowledge; I’m not sure I ever really got the hang of it.  I guess my mind’s not used to breaking things down below a certain point.  To be fair, a lot of the difficulty for her laid parsing the word problems.  I was also working against some short cuts (heuristics, whatever you would call them) which she had already been taught but I nearly refused to go along with.  I really wanted to impart the principles behind solving the problems, which I think would be actually useful when dealing with real-world instances.

Anyway study time was always fun, as time consuming as it was.  Things were otherwise settling down in my life with respect to girls, and I was really starting to get out of my funk finally.  The summer was also generally enjoyable, as Seattle really does have nice weather around that time.

Finally there was a rather fateful weekend in June.  The plan had been to take a trip up with a few folks to visit Vancouver.  The occasion was originally two-fold; I was going up for Eunice’s and Desiree’s graduation party, while other folks would be going up for the birthday party of someone I particularly disliked.  Anyway things started out with a Friday trip to go shopping with my friend McKenzie.  She had recently switched jobs from being a shopping assistant at Nordstrom’s, and she had agreed to help me pick out a few things, so we decided to make it that day before we went up.  I ended up picking up some shoes I really like, a new jacket I really like, two pairs of jeans that I like, and some shirts which are so-so.  It turned out to be my biggest isolated clothes expenditure to date.

I wish my memory were more solid, but I’m pretty sure McKenzie and I made the trip up the following morning.  On the way we chatted a lot, and one of the things which came up was Lareina, and how it seemed to me that she wasn’t really interested at all.  I mean, some people are just friendly, right?  I can’t recall 100% what her stance on the whole thing was though.  So we got to Vancouver, sync’d up with Roy and Nam enough to drop our things at the hotel we had, and then took off to see the city.  As I recall, it was McKenzie’s second time to Vancouver (and second time to Canada in general), so we walked and checked out some things.  At one point we went to the mall and McKenzie started looking at fake eye lashes; some for general purpose and some silly ones she could wear to the pride parade.  At some point it had become known that the graduation party was postponed, so we weren’t going to be doing that for the weekend, but Jenny mentioned there was a birthday get together with her friends we could join that night.  At some point we met up with Eunice and Des (after they got their bouncy castle fiasco sorted out) and then we eventually made our way over to the pub where the birthday thing was.

I forget exactly what happened, but I must have incidentally sat down next to Lareina.  I was chatting with folks on the other side of the table while she was chatting with the girls.  At one point I went to switch sides for the conversation and, well I don’t really remember how it went down.  There’s certainly a moment from 7th grade that I could compare, but this time I handled it much better.  Essentially Lareina had mentioned to the girls that she really liked me, and they just told her flat out “you need to let him know.”  So that’s what she did, and I told her I really liked her as well.  It was very cute, and basically while we were there that night we were together.  At some point we went outside and sat at the bus stop and talked for a while.  I knew I could have taken that opportunity to steal a kiss, but I decided not to.  I think it was a little too soon, and plus we’d already been drinking so I’d rather not have that for the memory.  I did, however, take the opportunity to ask her out on a proper date the next day, to which she quickly agreed (I mean, who wouldn’t??  ;D).  Anyway the night ended and we went our separate ways.

I forgot to mention that earlier we’d been hanging out a bit at the hotel with Roy, Nam and their accompaniment for the party.  For Nam is was a cousin of a friend; I don’t really think it was a romantic thing.  For Roy it was an old friend who’d just moved to Vancouver; I guess the main purpose for him being there was to connect this friend to other folks in Vancouver by way of the party.  It was a 20s themed party, so it was pretty cute watching them get their costumes ready and everything.  Anyway, when we finally arrived back to the hotel from the pub, we noticed the girls were there sleeping on the bed with the guys.  Actually I think Nam ended up sleeping on the floor, and the girls made some joke with Roy about “it’s not gay if it’s a three-way” but I don’t think there was really any funny business.  Yo, the friend’s cousin, anyway left super early in the morning while we were all still sleeping.

While the tradition for folks visiting us from Vancouver is usually some sort of pancake breakfast, when we’re up visiting Vancouver the tradition is to do Dim Sum instead.  So we made a reservation, I believe at Kirin, and it was really nice since there was about ten of us.  Unfortunately Yo couldn’t join, and neither could Eunice/Des (they lived too far away).  It was good though, and I sat next to Lareina and it was very cute.

After lunch, Lareina had to jet to do some studying and catch up on sleep a little bit, so I drove her back to her place.  On the way to the car she feigned being cold so I could put my arm around her, and I was fine with that, even if she wasn’t actually cold :P

At that point everyone was effectively split up.  Eunice and Des were planning to join us as well, so we were really three groups.  I met up with Eunice and Des first, and they decided they wanted to take me on a shopping trip as well.  Eunice had been making plans to open up her own fashion boutique, which is awesome in its own right, but if she likes fashion that much and wants to help me pick things out, I wasn’t about to complain.  It was a little awkward though, since while we were picking out things to try on, the other group of folks were trying to find us and we were having some trouble.  To the dismay and probably embarrassment of Eunice, I made the girls leave with me to meet everyone else.  I guess I just have this pet peeve for making people wait; I really really hate it.  I promised we could come back later and try some things on after grabbing coffee with everyone.  So we went and met up, found a coffee shop and sat around chatting while we drank.  It was pretty cool, and I got to talk to Roy’s friend a bit.

Eventually we all went back to the shop and tried on things as I’d promised.  The girls were really excited mostly because they were effectively living vicariously through me, since they didn’t quite have the disposable income to buy all the things they’d love to sell people.  In the end we found a really nice shirt and one more nice pair of jeans.  McKenzie commented that if I’d been wearing those clothes to my interview in January, I’d have gotten the job.  It stung a little but not too bad.  The other girls said it’s fine anyway, at least I could now use them to get myself a wife :P  I bought the clothes, which was fun but rather irresponsible since Vancouver is known for having prices so high that folks take trips to Seattle to do their shopping.  Anyway Roy and Nam were nice enough not to say anything and just let us enjoy the expensive moment.

Afterward we wandered around a bit and eventually stopped at the Spaghetti Factory for some drinks.  I think someone was eating as well, but I was waiting for the date to have dinner.  At one point the person I particularly disliked joined us.  I was borderline childish, but I really didn’t care.  I basically avoided any conversation with her or even looking at her.  It didn’t leave me much to do, but that was all right because I had to leave soon anyway.  When the time came I bid everyone farewell (Roy had kindly agreed to drive McKenzie back for me) and left.

The date went really well.  For one thing I learned the proper way to do dol sot bibimbap.  But we spent a good three hours chatting over dinner and then during our walk down to the beach.  We talked a lot about family and stuff, though at one point I called her out on using the word “acclimatize,” claiming that “acclimate” is the proper word.  She was a very good sport about it, and it actually began a pattern of us playfully arguing over US spellings vs. Canadian/British spellings of things.  All in all it was a great night, even though I had to drive back home rather late.

As well as that went, I was still as awkward as ever and did a bad job of calling her after.  Thankfully she didn’t really mind, but for a while we said “the distance is pretty rough and it’s not something that will be solving itself, so let’s not worry about it.”  After a week or so of that, I think I told her we should try it out anyway.  So I started making fairly regular trips up to see her.  It wasn’t too bad to drive; usually the most painful part is the border cross but I’d had Nexus pass for a while so I could almost get through right away.  I think the first time I went there to see her, we did some shopping with Jenny for present for a friend of theirs.  There was a small amount of gratuitous crowding between the two of us, and at some point we went back to chill at her place while Jenny ran some other errand.  I guess it was pretty obvious how it was supposed to go :P  She said something to the effect of “it’s endearing; you’re the sort of guy who could go 20 dates without kissing a girl.”  I suppose it was meant to elicit a kiss, and I have to admit it was super effective.  It was good though, and not much else happened that night; I can’t remember if we ever did meet up with Jenny though (maybe super late).

So we started doing a real long-distance thing.  There was one weekend she went on a retreat and we Skyped, and generally we would Skype rather often after that.  I’d still make frequent trips up to see her, and we’d talk about how she might be able to live in random places once she gets into an accounting firm.  Overall there were a lot of things I grew to really like about her.  Not the least of which was how good a mother I knew she would be if and when she finally has children.  I’m pretty sure I’ll be a great dad, so it was kinda fun to think of the possibility of having a family with someone like her (I know I probably sound like a schoolgirl right about now :P).

But, of course, the more you know someone, the more the incompatibilities come out.  Part of the problem, possibly, was that I never really felt like we spoke the same language.  For example, she would occasionally talk about how she tries to avoid being judgmental.  I always claimed that it’s impossible to avoid judging things really, but that doesn’t mean you have to judge everything as bad.  So when she’s say something like “you’re judging me, aren’t you?” it was always difficult for me to respond well.  Anyway, it did make it difficult to resolve things when they came up, but we did okay for a good while.  I suppose the critical point was during a shared birthday celebration for some friends of mine.  She was down visiting with Jenny to celebrate and hang out.  Everything was going pretty well until we went to the bar after dinner.  We sat down with some friends, and at one point Halim called me over.  Things had been pretty tense with him for a while, somewhat on account of him having fall outs with two friends of mine, one of which I consider to be one of the nicest folks I know here in Seattle.  Anyway I guess things had finally cooled down, after probably over a year and a half.  He was calling me over to do some shots, partly as a means to mend the bridge between us.  I figured it would be a great occasion for him to meet Lareina, so I first went to find her.  I didn’t see her, and when I asked, someone told me she had gone out for a cigarette.

Now, this is where I need to explain, or at least note, my (arguably irrational) dislike for cigarettes.  I have really always hated the smell of them, and since about the middle of high school I’d been subjected to it fairly regularly on account of my brothers.  For a while, my brothers have been made to hang out on the porch when they smoke, but sometimes they don’t (mostly because there’s not much out there and it can get cold), and anyway when they’re up having a cigarette in the middle of the night, it often wakes me up leaving me even more sleep deprived than usual (not to mention it often aligns with when I’m sick and trying to recover).  One of my brothers will occasionally ask if I want to stay at his place when I’m back in Michigan, but I can’t just because he smokes there all the time and everything smells like it.  I guess the net result is that I dislike it more than the normal non-smoker.

I never really went into the whole big thing with Lareina, but I had made it clear that it was something I detested.  And it wasn’t like I’d not seen her smoke in front of me before (though it was pretty clear then as well that I didn’t like it).  But, she had essentially told me she would be quitting, and the biggest thing of all was that I knew she had tried to do it covertly, which made me feel like I was being lied to and it really hurt.  I guess one of my friends had talked her into it, but it didn’t really help the situation from my point of view.  I went out to see her, but immediately came back to have the drink with Halim.  She and I eventually talked it out, and it was kinda better, but I dunno, I think it’s one of those things that takes a little while to get better (talk is cheap, after all).  To be fair, I also did something stupid that night.  We went to Purple Dot after drinks to get some food.  One of my favorite things there is their chicken wings, which are ridiculously salty.  It apparently slipped my mind though that Lareina hates salt until she was already trying to eat it.  I felt terrible, and I’m sure she did as well.  But we didn’t dwell on it too long at that time.

The next day we grabbed brunch with folks, but not at the usual pancake place.  I acted like somewhat of an idiot, mostly due to some mix up between Thanksgiving and Canadian Thanksgiving.  Afterward we went shopping, which bugged me a little bit because it’s so boring and it took up virtually all of the time Lareina and I could have had to ourselves that weekend.  And there was a small argument on the way back I won’t even go into.  But things ended well enough I thought.

I don’t know if it was because of how things had gone that weekend, but Monday through Wednesday I was a little depressed.  At one point I was worried about Diana, that I wasn’t helping her really study at all.  I was also worried that I was taking up too much of Lareina’s time when she needed to be working and studying a lot too.  I was talking to her about it, and I think she said something as simple as “don’t worry about it, those aren’t your problems.”  For some reason, it made me feel a lot better, and I was suddenly very glad that I had the relationship with her.  So much so that I ordered her some flowers to have sent to her work; something I’d done only once before, around the time we started really dating.  Of course, it’s always a next day delivery thing.

That evening I had Doug and Alan over to play some Arkham Asylum at my place.  They hadn’t ever seen it and perhaps never even seen the kitties.  It was nice to host for them and we had a good time with the game.  Right after they left was when Lareina happened to call me.  I thought it would be a normal evening chat but instead she opened with “I can’t do this anymore.”  From the beginning we essentially agreed to keep dating as long as we were happy with it.  I can certainly understand if she wasn’t having as much fun anymore (there are a few things I didn’t mention anyway) and I supposed I could only blame myself.  I felt bad about it, and especially considering how nice it felt earlier in the day, it really sucked.  I think probably the thing that sucked the most was that I hadn’t done a good job of making her feel as special as I should have.  I did what I could at that time, but I also knew it was too late.  We agreed to just turn things down to a casual level, but I think we both knew that would be impossible given the distance.  After all, there really wasn’t anything that brought us to each other’s cities aside from each other.

I guess there’s more I could write about it, but at the end of the day it was somewhat clear to me that it’s just a matter of incompatibility.  Even at the time, though, I appreciated that fact that the incompatible elements can really have a way of disappearing after it’s too late.  I think she mentioned to me shortly after, when we’d occasionally chat, that she was trying to really quit smoking.  And I am really interested in getting into even better shape, and perhaps even taking up yoga.  Anyway who knows what will happen down the road.

I suppose the NYC trip fell into that time period too.  The trip was fun, but it was supposed to be so much more.  You see, this was the year that I turned 29, which I consider to be pretty old.  I thought it was occasion enough to do something special with my old friend Elliott, who happens to have been born three days before me.  So I thought, everyone is going to NYC this year, and I’ve never been, and Elliott’s never been, and it’s not too far for him either.  I can just find a place to hang for a week and fly him out with me.  I was really wanting to pay for us to just hang for a week, and perhaps take him shopping with Eunice and Des (who would be there at the same time).  Instead, what happens was as follows.  For quite a while, I kept asking when would be a good time for him to go.  He could never really tell me, so I eventually just picked a week in July and made the plans.  Unfortunately that lined up exactly with a job interview he needed to do, so he couldn’t come at all.  I’ll say that it was a great thing for him, since he was able to make the transition from subcontracting (tech support) to working in-house at some company.  So that job gives him a decent salary and his wife is even able to stop working.  So I can’t really be sad about it, but the week in NYC would have been a bit more fun.

So while I was in NYC I did a combination of wandering around on my own and bugging Eunice and Des.  They were there on business, meeting with prospective partners for the business Eunice was starting.  But it was also sort of a honeymoon from University, and they partied quite a bit there that month.  I spent a few good evenings with them, even making it out to the park (Brooklyn Bridge Park I think) for a “movie in the park” event (they showed some extremely old movie, but it was fun).  I also got to meet up with Ange’s friend Mei, which was very cool.  We hung out for one evening, which started with me joining her and a friend at dinner.  I was really bad at taking the public transit so I got there very late, but they were patient and waited for me to eat and everything.  Mei’s friend, whose name I feel bad for forgetting, was a sweet little Korean girl who struck me as very odd.  I suppose it’s mostly because the Korean girls I know back in Seattle are mostly very loud and feisty.  This girl, in contrast, was fairly quiet and seemed very shy.  It was nice talking with her; she told me about how she loves NYC and will sometimes go down to Times Square and just soak in all the lights and energy.  I mentioned to her about Seattle and how much it rains, and she said it sounded very romantic.  I was very confused by this, but I found out later that it tends to be a bit of a cultural thing.  I suppose in some settings, the right amount of rain can be romantic, but I never feel that way here :P

I did manage to catch a Broadway show while I was there (Mary Poppins), though it was mostly because I was planning to hang out with Steffanie Leigh, the lead actress.  As it turns out, she was long distance dating my cousin at the time.  So I went to the show (which was a lot of fun) and then we wandered around looking for some place to stop and chill.  We ended up stopping at some coffee place, I don’t recall if it was Starbucks or not, but we went in and ordered tea.  I got a little bit of a kick out of sharing tea with Mary Poppins herself :)  We talked for a while, and she turns out to be an extremely sweet girl.  She’s a bit religious though; at one point she was saying something about how people are weak but we can look to god for strength, or something like that.  Part of me wanted to shake her and be like “This is all you, you are capable and you can do it!  If something looks hard, attack it as a challenge and revel in your success!”  But I’m sure it would just have upset her if anything.  Still, I began to look forward to seeing her at the holiday time, but as it turned out they didn’t carry on the relationship for much longer.

Aside from the people I met, I did walk around quite a bit.  I can almost forget how sweltering it was for the entire trip; I think every day it was hitting 90 degrees, if not 95.  I went and saw ground zero a bit, and the place where they’re doing the new construction.  I walked over three bridges and made my way through Central Park.  I was really impressed with Central Park; I wouldn’t have imagined it would be so massive, right in the middle of the city like that.  I also went to the Met and looked at some cool art.  There was one area which was mostly just gigantic canvases with just big black rectangles on them.  I guess it was an exercise in absurdity and I was quite amused by all of it.  The Alexander McQueen exhibit was there, but the line was ridiculously long so I just stopped at the gift shop to grab some souvenirs for my friends.  Finally there was one night where I went clubbing with Nam and some folks who were there for a bachelor party.  I felt a little bad because I was drinking but didn’t go in for the table/bottle service, but no one made a fuss about it.

So NYC was fun, even without Elliott.  I guess this year will be 30 for us so I could give it a second try.  Maybe I can get it to overlap with his visit to SF; it will be hard enough for him to manage the time for that anyway.

One last thing I wanted to write regarding Eunice and Des.  There was a weekend they came to visit this year and wound up having a free day.  Mostly it was because Ange was out of town, and I think it coincided with when I took the GMAT (because we did a celebratory dinner I think).  We started with a brunch down in Belltown near where Ange lives.  I forget the place but it was very delicious.  I don’t remember too much about our conversation there but I did tell a little of the story about the person I particularly dislike.  Afterward I took them to go see Gasworks Park, where we walked around and eventually sat for a while to chat.  It was a great time, and it was particularly hilarious when we finally got back to the car and I showed them the magazine article I was in.  After that we went and walked around Ravenna, the neighborhood in Seattle where I had lived before.  The house I had rented had a yard which was very dense with flowers and bushes, but I didn’t realize how common that was in Ravenna until we had walked through more of it.  Of course we also walked through Ravenna Park and found the folks who LARP there, and we tried a little of our own role-playing as we walked through the park, but I guess I’m a bad DM so it didn’t work too well.  It wasn’t too long after that that I had to go to my own D&D meetup, so I dropped the girls back where they were staying.  I saw them a bit later that night but it was mostly the time at the park and in Ravenna that I look back to fondly.

Anyway, I think this catches me up to about mid-September.  When things fizzled out with Lareina, I guess things just got very boring.  I had effectively moved on from my emo at the beginning of the year, but I had a new emo-ness which was work related.  Despite my fruitful efforts at work, I was given a terrible annual review.  Actually I had really been expecting a promotion (if things were based on merit).  To get a good picture for what happened, you have to understand that for calibration (ordering of a lot of folks from a lot of teams) I’m grouped up with folks who are my rank as well as one rank below me.  Folks from the lower rank may do really well but typically they should get the lower ratings.  As for myself, they gave me a rating which placed me somewhere in the bottom 20% of that group.  So it seems I’m worse than virtually everyone my rank and most of the people of the lower rank, which is ludicrous.  The only thing I could speculate is that it came out of the interviews I did in Germany (since they knew I was considering to leave).  They did try to feed me some line about why it might be a proper rating, but I wouldn’t be convinced.  Honestly they could have gotten away with not giving me a promo, but bottom 20% is just laughable.  When I mentioned it at D&D with my coworkers, they asked me what I would do, to which I responded “everything is on the table right now,” indicating that I might switch teams or companies or whatever.

So I was a bit upset by that, but September was also the time when we had our \\build\ conference, and all the things I couldn’t talk about I could suddenly talk about.  Unfortunately I was having a hard time getting excited about any companies that I might go look at.  I was contemplating internal transfers to join my old dev manager (who should realize the review score was bogus) or waiting until January to have one more stab at Google.  I was looking into the internal transfer thing but for some reason it just wasn’t progressing.  I eventually found out that my old dev manager and I had entered a sort of deadlock, with each of us thinking the action belonged to the other.

That much did eventually get cleared up, and I started talking to the leads in that group.  I found one team which I thought would be really cool, and would provide a good opportunity to learn a lot of new stuff and do cool work.  I sat down to do small screening interviews and both guys told me they’d need to see my two previous annual reviews.  So I guess I wasn’t escaping the bad review after all.  I didn’t really care, so I sent it along, but it overlapped with the holiday season so it was kinda on hold for a while.

Around that time, my friend Sherman turned 30.  For his birthday, our friend Phil came to town to celebrate with us.  I had mentioned to Phil before that I would want to interview at Groupon, where he’d gone several months prior, so while he was here I asked him a bit about it.  He told me it’s a great place to be, and they’re quite competitive, so I told him to see what he could do to set up a loop for me.

Now, I’d been chatting occasionally with a coworker of mine about how we have been wanting to get to California, and silicon valley in particular.  He even wound up doing some interviews down there, and aside from our usual discussion of algorithm problems and the like, he gave me one very interesting piece of advice.  You see, here at work it’s common to run into very opinionated people, who are often convinced that they’re the smartest people in the room.  Or perhaps it’s partly that they just want to make sure everyone knows they’re there, but the effect is often that they’re very loud and very interrupting.  I refuse to be either of these things at any of the meetings I go to, and the unfortunate result is sometimes that we waste time talking about random things that have to be sorted out later in email.

Dealing with that sort of thing for 5 years really has an effect on you.  In fact, my coworker had been dealing with more frustrating office politics, though for a slightly shorter time, so he had also gotten a little jaded and cynical towards people.  He told me that without thinking, he took this attitude toward some of the interviews he did down in California, and for those ones he didn’t get any offer.  He eventually realized his mistake and did a second pass at some other places, and then he got a offers everywhere.  So it can be largely influenced by what sort of person they think you are, he told me.  So in addition to the practice that I was doing, I made a point to get out of the mindset I’ve been in for some time now, and just try to be as nice to everyone as possible.  I don’t know if it worked really, but as I wrote in the previous post I got invited out not only for an interview but also to party with everyone.  And of course I was trying to be as nice as possible to everyone at the party and people I randomly met in SF as well.  Really I think it was a big part of the reason I was so happy to be there.

I mean, looking back, ever since I graduated high school I’ve been in very cold social climates.  At University, maybe I just think of it being with the girls because every socially awkward nerd (including me, I’m sure) would creep on them.  And here in Seattle there’s the relatively famous Seattle Freeze.  I can’t help but consider myself lucky that I’ve made such a good set of friends, but the general temperature of folks in SF (and probably everywhere) make me optimistic that I won’t have any trouble establishing myself there socially.  I’m really looking forward to it actually.

Anyway, like I wrote before, I got the offer.  I suppose I didn’t yet mention that I finally accepted the offer shortly after Christmas.  My start date will be February 1, and I let me lead know today that I won’t be able to work past January 20.

The day before I left to go home to Michigan, I went out and met with McKenzie, Ange, Candice and eventually Anais for dinner and drinks.  It was very nice because I had never really gotten a chance to hang with Candice one on one before, but that night I did while McKenzie and Ange were out smoking.  We saw some guy at the bar who McKenzie used to date, and she was a little off-put by it.  I was trying to figure out why, and she said something like “maybe it would bug him if I don’t say hi to him, but I don’t really want to.”  I tried to sell her the “not your problem” line that she’s so fond of dropping herself, and I think it helped a little.

After that, Anais had to go home (so she could sleep and drive me in the morning before work <3) and McKenzie had to meet up with some coworkers.  Candice had to leave even earlier, so Ange and I went to meet with Roy and Nam who weren’t too far away.  Ange was a little worried I wouldn’t have time to pack, but I promised her that there was nothing that could screw me up; even if I had to take dirty clothes I could wash them in Michigan.  So we saw Roy and Nam, and then Jack dropped me a line that he was hanging out with Stef not too far away.  I see Roy and Nam way more than I see those guys, so I soon left and went to join.  It was good to see them both, even though it wasn’t anything very eventful.  Anyway I finally went home and I think I got there around 3:00 or something.  I threw some laundry in the washer and set my alarm for a quick nap.

Of course, I slept through the alarm, yet managed to wake up when Anais texted me at the time we were supposed to leave.  We had planned to leave me some extra time, but it was more so she wouldn’t be late for work.  But there I was with everything I wanted to pack soaking in the washer.  It had been a while since I had felt so stupid.  I told Anais I’d have to cut it down to the wire so I’d grab a cab, and then started to think about what in the world I would do for clothes.  I realized that I did have a number of dry and clean shirts, and I wasn’t washing the fancy jeans (you don’t do that often, apparently) so I packed those things and threw the underwear in with some dry towels to help them dry more quickly.  I just barely got the necessary things together at the last minute, threw the rest of the wet clothes in to dry and left for the airport, arriving just in time to make my flight.

So the stupid laundry thing was a close call, but the story is mostly about running around and seeing my friends.  In some ways the whole things reminded me of the movie “25th Hour,” where Edward Norton is trying to do a little bit of everything on his last day as a free man.  By then I knew I’d be leaving, but of course it would be a much different story.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m going to miss Seattle.  Or at least, there are a lot of things about this place I’m going to miss.  But I’d rather leave now and miss it than stay and get any more upset at it.  It’s kinda how I used to feel looking back on high school, or how I might occasionally look back on University.  I look forward to missing it, and I look forward to coming back and visiting it as a somewhat strange place.  I’m going to like seeing Sherman’s baby and Alan’s baby and Lucas’s baby more grown up, or any new babies that people have in the meantime.  I like the idea of coming back and seeing new construction suddenly.  But if I’m honest, I’m mostly just liking the idea of getting back to California.

The salary negotiations I tried didn’t work, and I can’t help but do the math and find that I’m coming out quantitatively in the red.  But I’ll be very in the black qualitatively; the work should be more interesting, I’ll be happier to get to know the people, and I’ll live somewhere amazing.

But more than anything I feel like I can finally move on with a lot of things.  They say we always wait for life to start, even while we’re living our lives.  While I can’t help but look back on the year and be happy with all that I’ve experienced, I can’t deny that I’ve been putting off a lot of things, waiting until I commit to one location or another for a matter of years.  I tend to look down on folks who talk about spirituality, but I can’t help but think of the transition as something that will restore my spirit in some sense.  I’m really hoping, and I think it’s reasonable to expect, that it will put me in a way to really go out and do things.

The trip home for the holidays was a little interesting.  It sucked that I was sick, especially since I had to miss my favorite part of the holiday, which is the big family get together.  But finally signing and sending my offer letter was a very nice little belated Christmas present to myself.  It was great to hang out a bit with Rachel’s friends and see Elliott, Matt and Jason.  I was really noticing how, compared to when I saw Matt two years ago, I’d come a long way in terms of my ability to be normal and social rather than very quiet and awkward.

And even though there was a little bit of drama, it was really nice to spend New Years with folks here.

I think I’m going to call it here for story time.  There may be some more reflections later; we’ll see.

Today I learned that the girl who most recently broke my heart (for lack of a better way to put it) has just gotten engaged.  I don’t know how to describe the feeling when I heard it (a shock to the heart?); it came largely out of the blue.  It’s how I used to feel hearing her name at first, or the name of her now-fiancee for a little while.  Really the most surprising thing is how long it took, but then again I was shocked to know that any guy had screwed up his chance with her in the first place.

Anyway I was thinking back a little bit.  I guess with so many nice things about her, I can’t help but wonder which I’ll realistically find in another girl some day.  I won’t even attempt an exhaustive listing, but there were two qualities that really stand out in my mind after all this time.

First, when we’d go anywhere to eat or drink, she’d always ask our server’s name and address them by it.  I like to think that I’m nice to those sorts of folks, but she was really good and I think it goes a long way to demonstrating good character overall.

Second, whenever I’d be driving us somewhere that she knew the way, she was really good about directing me; keeping me from missing any turns (or even worrying that I might have done so).  It’s something I probably blow out of proportion, but making wrong turns while driving is just one of my pet peeves (I don’t know why).  I think most people (myself included usually) are really bad about making a driver feel comfortable in a situation like that, so it always made me feel that she was being especially thoughtful.

As expected and overdue as it was, I had managed to forget about it for a while.  Now she’s invading my thoughts a little again, but I think in a lot of ways I’m able to reason the whole thing away better than ever.  For a long time I guess I’ve been hung up on the “we could have been great” and ignoring some of the more subtle incompatibilities.  I suppose that meeting other interesting girls in the meantime and discovering similar incompatibilities has helped quite a bit.

Anyway, regardless of all that I’m really looking forward to meeting folks in SF :)