Words. Ideas. Actions.

14 February 2023

It’s Valentine’s Day, so I don’t want to keep you long; you may have other plans. I just want to share my own Valentine to you. Writing these, as I’ve mentioned before, is both an alternative to Tweeting and a therapeutic exercise. They help me cope with the random ideas that get lodged in my head at times, or spur me to  craft a few hundred words about nothing at all. But every time I do, there you are. Reading them. And I can’t thank you enough. 

Obviously, not all of these are packed with revelations. Heck, some of them are just excuses to gush about a band or react to a match or even a take a leap lacking logic. Looking back on them all together, though, you get a pretty good sense of the types of things I care about. To reuse an analogy I’ve seen elsewhere, each of these posts are stones which work together to make up the structure that is me. 

So, enjoy your evening. I’ll add this small brick to the pile tonight, and we’ll keep building this together. I’m really glad you’re here.

See you tomorrow?

20 January 2023

This is not the post I was intending to write tonight. And, honestly, I’m not sure I’m really up for writing anything. You may have read that Google let go 6% of its workforce this morning. I happened to be one of the almost 12,000 people on that discarded list. 

So, here I sit, looking over an outdated résumé and a sudden abundance of “free” time and an apartment full of “Some Day” projects. I know I need to buckle down and land something new relatively quickly (these San Francisco rents are no joke, as I’m sure you know), but at the same time, I also know I need to feel some feelings and work through some emotions first. 

Honestly, though, all I’m feeling tonight is acceptance. I always felt lucky to have joined Google. But I know they never owed me anything. Just as I didn’t owe them anything more than the work I did for them. The devotion, I’ve learned, is to the people there, not the corporation. And for them, the emotion is overwhelmingly gratitude. It’s cliché, I know, but there’s a reason all the posts you may come across on LinkedIn over the next few days will be mentioning how much they will miss their teams. I get it. It’s what was special about Twitter. And it is what is special about my team at Google. 

If I type much longer tonight, I fear this will turn into a rambling wandering of all the half-finished ideas and partially formed thoughts of a man looking at an unfamiliar horizon, trying to plot a new path. I’ll spare you those for now. Instead, this is just a note to let you know how my day went, and to let my former team know how much I learned from them and how desperately I’ll miss them. Oh, and to let you know I’m looking for my next thing. 

See you tomorrow?

16 January 2023

While watching the Golden Globe awards last week, I was introduced to a movie I had no idea even existed: The Banshees of Inisherin. I didn’t know what it was about, or even who was in it, but as each new award came up, and the nominees were named, I got a lot more curious about what I was all about. So, this weekend, we sat down to watch it. 

One of the reasons I wanted to bump it to the top of my watch list was hearing how writer and director Martin McDonagh talked about male friendship. Now, I don’t want to spoil it for anybody, so let’s just say that a big theme in the film centers around how men navigate changes in their relationships with each other. There’s obviously a lot more nuance to the storytelling than that, but it reminded me of an episode of Welcome to Wrexham (which I finally binged of the holidays) that has stayed with me for weeks. 

In episode 17, called “Wromance,” there’s a lovely exploration of men and their friendships. It talks about how most of them are built around sport, or competition in general, and how different that is from how women build and sustain theirs. It was an interesting insight into the walls most men put up when creating the bonds with people we consider friends, and it reveals to me how rare it is to have close, emotional conversations between men.

So, this is a long introduction to the following thought for tonight: I am very grateful for the friends I have. Admittedly, I’m terrible at friendship I don’t know how to sustain them. I am awful at keeping in touch. I’m reluctant to take time away from my family for something which feels so selfish as spending a few hours watching a soccer match or seeing a band or just sitting quietly together over a couple of glasses of favorite beverages and having an intimate conversation about what’s going on with our lives, both good and bad. 

When I started drafting this post, I had one particular friend in mind. But now, as I think of the conversations I’ve cherished and felt grateful for over the last year, the number of people on the other end of them — even if they were just unexpected texts — became greater than I realized, making me rethink how many people I have in my court. I sincerely hope that they all know how much they mean to me. And I am publicly pledging to be better about letting them know just how much this year. And if you’re one of the few people who regularly read these, there’s a good chance I owe you a text, at the very least, to just say, “thanks.”

See you tomorrow?