Home » Personal (Page 14)

Category Archives: Personal

Trying to Make It Simple

Posted on by | 2 Comments

I’ve been struggling with misinterpretations of the energy I project, so I designed and ordered this t-shirt this morning.

T-Shirt FrontT-Shirt Back

The text on the back says:

Love’s infinite possibilities
Are beyond our control.
But let it pass through us
To the people and places we love
And it returns to us multiplied
Every single day.

To those that have faced disappointment in love: there is no discipline more difficult than to let it pass through us, rather than trying to force it to go where it does not find a home.

Sunday, Blessed Sunday

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Friday found me complete worn out – I actually spoke with my supervisor about taking most of this week off. Greg, my younger son, rescued me, after a fashion. His classmates finished the transition to college this week, so he was at lose ends. Runescape is having one of its “Double-XP” weekends, and he was anticipating spending 72-hours glued to a monitor. I convinced him to come out to Barnes and Noble with me all three evenings. We sat on the bar stools along the counter – he reading an assigned novel for English and I working on C# exercises.

We did take some time off Saturday to take in The Intern, having a discussion of “class”, which I like to think of as a quality of character that preserves dignity. But while he ground away at his MMORPG, I went to bed early and slept, and added long naps in the afternoon.

I decided to go down to Culver City today to spend time with Jo Corbett and the community she nurtures with 5 Rhythms dance celebrations. It’s been more than a year since my last visit. I’ve been nurturing heartbreak, and am still very much in love with the woman that I lost down there. What can I say: the day that I met her, I was dancing alone, and turned around to find her gesturing with her arm in the air. We started dancing together, and the connection was just incredibly clear and strong. I noticed the people around us smiling. When I was done, I stepped back to bow in Namaste, and she called me closer, until I stood with my lips against her temple, whispering “That was so beautiful.”

What I realized was that, while with every woman before her, I felt like I was being drawn in and wrapped up, the dance that we had shared involved an expanding through each other. That night, my dreams were filled with turmoil, with people clamoring for my notice, only resolving in the early hours of the morning when she announced “I was Persephone.” The last time I saw her, I told her “Jamie Grace, every time I see you, I see all of life. Everything that I have done here has been in an effort to give you the power you need to heal yourself. I am sorry it hurts, and I wish that they would just stop.”

I still dream of her, but her mother is also in the community, and seems to still believe that she has the right to manage our affairs. So I withdrew, hoping that my lady would call me back when she was ready to take on the work that we were meant to do together.

It seemed that the signals were becoming more positive, so I decided to head back down. I woke this morning, however, to a tumult in my mind, with churches all over the Conejo Valley clamoring for my visit. I thought to go out to Malibu for some peace, but the early services were all underway by the time I was ready to leave. So I decided to just skip church, and go out to Malibu Creek State Park.

Pool at Malibu Creek State Park

It was not entirely a mistake. I haven’t been out there in years, and was devastated that the river was dry. The chattering voices on the trail kept interrupting my communion, so I headed down the bank to the dry, lime-covered river rocks. I crept back to the trail at the bridge crossing. A shady copse called to me, but I kept on heading down the trail, and was surprised to hear what I took to be rustling in the dried leaves from the other bank. The wind didn’t seem strong, and when I rounded the last curve, I was happy to see the source of my error: apparently the Park was diverting water to the pools that blocked the trail at its end. I sat in the shade of a reed bed to luxuriate in the air’s moisture.

Down in Culver City, I encountered many new faces, but no Jamie Grace. I did what I always do there, however, trying to clear the psychological space around those that needed it, letting them connect to the healing energies that were trying to reach them.

What was really different, however, was that others began to reach out to me. This culminated near the end of the celebration. Jo was playing a melancholy meditation on the modern state of affairs, with lyrics that prayed for patience from an unknown source. I internalized the plea as directed to the Earth itself, and felt just overwhelmed by the sorrow of the land that we had suffocated with asphalt and concrete. As I bowed my head to the floor, two people came up to press on my back.

That had never happened before.

Recovering somewhat, I rolled over, and felt this beautiful energy reaching down to me from the sky. Jack-knifing to bring my heart closer to the heavens, I was suffused with joy, and laid down on my back, arms outstretched. I felt hands on my head, and a gentleman stroking my solar plexus. They kept on stretching me out, perhaps not understanding what they were unlocking.

And so it happened again, for the third time in the last three months. My heart filled with sorrow, and I arched on my back and shouted my agony. They didn’t run away, but hung on as my body arched in powerful spasms, settling only to arch again. Gathering myself, I shut the door again, and rested. When I recovered, I embraced them each in turn to whisper, “It’s going to be OK.”

There must have been some talking as I changed, because afterwards two women came up to ask if I was the man that had “cleared” today. Upon my confirmation, they said that they were really glad that I had – that everybody in the room felt a great release when I did – and thanked me for having the courage to share my sorrow with them.

I know what specific images I have when these experiences occur, and often wonder whether others share them. But they seemed confused when I alluded to the matter. They weren’t directly involved, however, but I wonder how long it will be until the consequentiality of the phenomenon is obvious to others.

Reflection: Yoga Beyond Asana

Posted on by | 4 Comments

It’s coming up on the end of my fourth year of practice in the Bikram Yoga school in Agoura Hills. Obviously the primary impact has been physiological. When I was out at the Skeptics Conference in Pasadena in May, a number of people commented that I had excellent posture. As I am painfully aware right now, that process is ongoing – I realized just recently that when standing, my right hip is shifted about an inch to the left. The pain derives from a shortened band of muscles in the right side of my lower back. Every class, I stretch them out, and every evening they crawl back to the length they have had for the last thirty years.

I didn’t realize how great the changes in the rest of my body had been until I met again with Balwan Singh yesterday. Balwan works at Bikram headquarters organizing teacher trainings. He is very Indian, struggling still at times with his English, but humble and joyful to the core. He had taught in Agoura Hills on Saturdays while the studio was establishing itself, often coming by with his lady-love Sharon (who is now expecting). The first words out of his mouth were “You look really good.” Sitting on the floor in the second session, I looked in the mirror and finally saw what people have been talking about. My body has filled in, and it responds gracefully to direction.

Most teachers in the Bikram method hew tightly to the established environmental constraints – primarily to keep the room near 105 degrees and the students in posture. The conditions were established while Bikram was developing his practice in Japan, and as a 6’6″ physically active American, they are really brutal on me. Most of the advanced practitioners in the studio are actually proportioned like the Japanese.

Balwan always catered to my challenges, and yesterday was no exception. I set my mat up in the back in the path of the air through the door. It came open early, and the oxygen that came with the air made it a very different practice. When the owner Rachel, who was set up just to my right, indicated that she wished it closed, Balwan remarked that advanced practitioners created heat internally, and the environmental controls weren’t as important as for beginners.

Rachel is a really beautiful lady, both inside and out, and I’ve been trying to facilitate her union with some angels that have been floating around in my orbit. Balwan got us to focus on breathing from the get-go, and I surrendered the tension in my chest to let the air really fill my lungs. I got into this rhythm with Rachel, each of us just looking into the other to see where the energy was getting stuck. For me, the most surprising impact of that collaboration came during head-to-knee posture. For the first time I really got up into the second stage, balanced on one leg with the other held out parallel to the floor in front of my hip.

When the practice was over, we were offered a lecture by Arvind Chittamulla, organizer of MokshaFest here in LA. As anyone who has studied the Vedic practices knows, there is far more to Yoga than the physical training, or Asanas. The ultimate goal of Yoga is to allow the purifying energy from the divine source to flow into the world through us.

As Arvind explained, here in the West yoga has spread as a physical practice. As I see it, that reflects the forces that Western society organizes to channel our behaviors to the purpose of creating wealth for those that employ us. They are reinforced by media images that impose air-brushed standards of beauty. We lack both consciousness of the psychic costs of internalizing these forces, and methods for purging them. Yoga asanas allows us, to a certain degree, to at least regain control of our physical manifestation.

But there is much more to yoga than that. Meditation is essential to management of our minds, and breath-work grounds us in the world. Asana, meditation and breath-work are connected: if we don’t have control of our mind, the corrupt thoughts that we entertain during asana practice will infect our bodies. For this reason, Arvind sees that the narrow focus of yoga in the West actually hurts many practitioners.

Arvind walked us through the other seven limbs of the tradition. In Indian studios, orientation to the first two, involving morality and life action, are often prerequisites to practice of the asanas. The remaining five manage the inward journey that opens into relationship with the divine.

The lecture was directed towards the teachers in the room, and Arvind’s ultimate goal is to broaden instructor certification to include, at a minimum, meditation and breath work. As a business proposition, he believes that the idle hours at many studios could be filled with sessions that offered students those tools.

I know that I have benefited from the coupling of my physical practice to my spiritual development. As I explained to Arvind, the difficulty of the conditions during a Bikram class forced me to completely surrender my ego – I had to accept that I had a lot of work to do before I could achieve the postures even in their initial expression. Given that surrender, the consistency of the sequence ensures that I am able to enter a meditative frame, letting my muscles do the work until something doesn’t work, and then focusing only on that. I have learned to ignore the other students in the room while still sharing the energy that arises between people committed to a common goal.

So I must wish Arvind success in his efforts, although I think that he might find more acceptance if he packaged them as advanced certifications.

The interaction with Arvind came with some tensions. I was glad to be with Balwan at the end of the evening. He was talking with one of the other attendees, and I circled around behind to put my hand on top of his head and share a hug, wishing him all the deepest joys of fatherhood. He sent me off with a heart-felt “Thank-you, Brian. Thank-you so much.”

Zmed Brothers

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Played at Twisted Oak tonight. They actually are brothers, on electric mandolin and guitar, both with soaring reverb that carried up and around. The tension of the week was left behind, and I feel really relaxed right now.

Eclectic mix of covers, ranging from Kentucky Old Timey to Simon and Garfunkel to Hip-Hop S&M. When not soloing, the guitarist laid down the chord progression and offered edgy lead vocals. His brother sang with a far more polished alto voice, the contrast matching the tone of the instruments.

Much of what I was hearing was electronic tone generation, but there’s a definite skill in knowing when not to play as well. That was evident in their original numbers, the voices slipping around each other like sea-otters in the pool of sound. I stood up and drifted on my feet for the last two numbers, doing some floating myself.

As I noted last month: definitely a spiritual experience.

Love Doesn’t Do Anything

Posted on by | Leave a comment

It undoes things.

It washes away dirt and fear to reveal the world as it hopes to be.

When I was working as a Post-Doc, my friend Laurent Terray discovered Yoshi’s bar down in Oakland. Yoshi’s was an intimate club that drew jazz headliners such as Dizzy Gillespie.

Laurent dragged me down one night to hear a trio play – guitar, keyboard and percussion. I found myself drawn to the back wall where I could see all three pairs of hands at once. The music entered a timeless realm, the air resonated with beauty.

During intermission, I was chatting with Laurent when the guitarist came up and laid his instrument on the chair in front of me. I didn’t know what to make of it. Finally a young man came up and, looking a little scandalized, took the guitar and walked off with it.

I just didn’t understand, then, how much people crave to be looked upon with kindness. It heightens every experience.

Be good to each other. It allows light into the world.

Staying Cool with R

Posted on by | 4 Comments

Before returning to the control industry in 2008, I was employed in business systems development. My employer was hot to get in on the off-shore gambling business, but was kind enough to ask me what I was interested in. I offered my concern that people were overwhelmed with the demands imposed by 24/7 communications, to the point that their ability to actually immerse themselves in the experience of the moment was degrading. I thought that a system that guided them through reflection and looked for correlations between mood and experience might be the basis for helping them find people and places that would allow them to express their talents and find joy.

His reaction was to try to stake me at the gambling tables in Reno.

But he did recognize that I was motivated by a deep caring for people. That’s lead me into other directions in the interim. I’ve been trying to moderate the harsh tone in the dialog between scientists and mystics. I’ve accomplished about as much as I can – the resolution I have to offer is laid out in several places. I just need to let the target audience find the message.

So I’ve turned back to that vision. A lot has changed in the interim, most importantly being the unification of the Windows platform. This means that I can try to demonstrate the ideas in a single technology space. There’s only so many minutes in the day, after all.

I began with a review of statistical analysis. I’ve got a pair of books, bought back when I was a member of the Science Book of the Month club, on analysis of messy data. That provided me with the mathematical background to make sense of Robert Kabacoff’s R in Action. However it’s one thing to do analysis on the toy data sets that come with the R libraries. Real data always has its own character, and requires a great deal of curation. It would be nice to have some to play with.

One approach would be to begin digging into Bayesian language net theory and researching psychological assessment engines in preparation for building a prototype that I could use on my own. But I already have a pretty evolved sense of myself – I don’t think that I’d really push the engine. And I would really like to play with the Universal applications framework that Microsoft has developed. On top of that, the availability of an IoT (internet of things) build of Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi means that I can build a sensor network without having to learn another development environment.

So that plan is to deploy temperature and humidity sensors in my apartment. It’s a three-floor layout with a loft on the top floor. The middle floor contains a combination living/dining area and the kitchen. Both the loft and the kitchen have large sliders facing west, which means that they bake in the afternoon. On the bottom floor, the landing opens on one side to the garage and one the other side to my bedroom. The bedroom faces east behind two large canopies, although the willow tree allows a fair amount of light through. There’s a single thermostat on the middle floor. So it’s an interesting environment, with complicated characteristics.

While thermal balance also involves the state of windows, doors and appliances, I think that I can get a pretty good sense of those other elements by monitoring the air that flows around them. Being a hot yoga masochist, I’m also curious regarding the effect of humidity.

So I’ve got a Raspberry Pi on the way, and have installed Microsoft’s Visual Studio Community on my Surface Pro. Combination temperature and humidity sensors cost about ten dollars. While real-time data would be nice, I don’t think that for the purposes of my study I’ll need to link to the Wi-Fi to push the data out to a cloud server. I can use my laptop to upload it when I get home each day. And there’s some work to do in R: the time series analysis includes seasonal variations on annual trends, and I certainly expect my measurements to show that, but there will also be important diurnal variations. Finally, the activation of temperature control appliances (air conditioner and furnace) needs to be correlated with the data. I don’t want to invest in a Nest thermostat, or figure out how to get access to the data, so I’m going to see if I can use Cortana to post notes to my calendar (“Cortana – I just set the air conditioning to 74 degrees”).

Obviously there’s a lot to learn here. But no single piece is overwhelming until I get to the data analysis. Just cobbling together of small pieces. Should be fun! And if I can figure out how to manage my windows and doors and appliances to reduce my energy expenditures – well, that would be an interesting accomplishment.

Evening Out

Posted on by | Leave a comment

I’ve found two low-key venues to hear live music in the Conejo Valley area this year. One is actually over the hill (now don’t take that the wrong way) in Malibu – Ollie’s Duck and Dive. The setting is a little cramped: they lock the front door and stand the band up in the entry. The place is aptly name – long and narrow, with the front dominated by the bar, and most of the dinner seating actually in the enclosed patio outside. But on Saturday night the four-piece bands bring people in, and there’s a collection of steady regulars. The music is eclectic, and often loud, and dance-worthy even though they don’t play much in the way of cover music.

And – what can I say? – it’s Malibu. The people are classy, and beautiful in a self-conscious kind of way. If you sit at the bar, be sure and strike up a conversation with the tenders. They’re all good people.

The other venue is The Twisted Oak in Agoura Hills. The place has a checkered history, starting off as Moz Buddha Bar back around 2000. It was a hot pick-up joint for a while, with beautiful waitresses that would dance on the bar during the seasonal parties. The cover bands that came in drew great crowds, and the dance floor was always hopping. Unfortunately, the lead guy behind the bar seemed to have connections back in New Jersey, and the girls sometimes had morals that were a little shaky. When the joint stopped being trendy in 2005, they started Tuesday night jazz with small combos. While I wouldn’t miss it, the cultured music scene never took off.

The place was revived as a micro brewery and music club with a new investor. Roger is a great guy, and loves his brewing – everything from beer to smooth moonshine to wine. He also loves music, but it’s the dinner scene that pays the bills, and the bands on the large stage seemed to interfere with gatherings. So they knocked down the stage, opened up the bar with seating on both sides, and do something pretty much like what Ollie’s does: stand a couple of guys up in front of the brew vats. The music is eclectic, original, and really, really heart-felt. I can party at Ollie’s, but some of what goes on at The Twisted Oak can only be classified as a spiritual experience. If you want to take someone out for a light-hearted date, this is the spot on Friday nights.

Tonight they had a steel guitar and fiddle duo called Skin and Bones. While they packed up, I bought a CD out of the case, and Taylor came up to chat. Just a really classy young man with his lady-friend Stephanie. He let me rattle on about my sons, and took my compliments graciously before recommending that I come back out on September 11th to hear a couple of his friends play. I certainly look forward to it.

Body Call

Posted on by | 2 Comments

A few years back after the local UU speaker’s forum, I was waylaid by an out-of-area couple in the cool of the spring evening. The husband explained that they were trying to relocate back to the Thousand Oaks area, but his wife jumped in to speak of her commitment to caring for the son that had been disabled in the Gulf War. She mourned that sometimes it was so hard to be strong in her faith, that it felt at times as if the window was closing on her.

These impulses come over me at times: I formed a ball before my heart with my hands, then shifted them to the right and opened them higher and lower. “Here it is.”

She paused, hand held against her breast, and offered “Thank-you.” And they looked at each other and asked, “When does Jesus return?”

“When enough of us say ‘Yes, we understand now. We are ready to love as you did. Come to us, right here, right now.’”

These are the closing lines of my exegetical book, The Soul Comes First. The most significant contribution of that work is to explain the Book of Revelation (not interpret, but explain). What is left unanswered still is the why. Why does he have to come again? Why wasn’t once enough?

One part of the answer is that we have free will. I have addressed this before: the true evil of “sin” is that it disposes us to believe that we deserve our suffering. We’re like the judges of the Darwin awards that celebrate those that have committed such incredibly stupid acts that they’ve provided the rest of us the benefit of removing themselves from the gene pool.

To recognize our “sin” is to convince ourselves that we must earn our healing. In Jesus’s era, that was transacted through the priesthood using a system of indulgences based upon blood sacrifice. Jesus came and said “Well, enough of that bullshit. I will be the last sacrifice, and for my sacrifice you will be given forgiveness for your sins.” Now, looking back to Cain and considering the eternal nature of the Divine, obviously Jesus was not changing policy. He was simply trying to get us to stop beating ourselves up so that we could be healed.

In a recent discussion, I asserted that the authority of Jesus over heaven and earth is rooted in the irresistible admiration that comes with his perception of the possibility of our wholeness. This is what gives him the ability to heal the world: the fact that it comes not with scorn, but a joyous “Good job!”, much as that offered by the father to the prodigal son. “You were lost to me, but – Lo! – you have shed your burdens and now are returned!”

So in this framework, Jesus comes again to deliver us the promise of healing that can only be received when we stop believing that we don’t deserve it.

But there’s more.

In the end-times prophesy of Daniel and Revelation, we have the appearance of three corrupted beasts. The first of these in Revelation famously bears the number ‘666.’ This was first explained to me as a numerological reference to the days of Creation, with the conclusion that the beast was man. But that is to make too much of ourselves: it was not only man created on the sixth day, but all of the mammals.

Carrying this back to Daniel, it becomes clear that the beast (the fourth to appear in the dream) is the collective spirit of the mammals. In Eden, human intelligence was protected by the presence of God, but the Fall forced us out into the world to struggle with all the primitive urges that preceded us. Daniel sees this only abstractly: the beast bears teeth and claws of iron that destroy life. These represent the machines that we use to reorder the earth. We use them as predators, not attempting to integrate ourselves with other life, but exploiting it for our gratification.

In Revelation the personality of the beast is resolved in more detail. There are two of them, the second a red beast ridden by the feminine avatar called “MYSTERY.” So what does this tell us about the second coming? The masculine expressions of the primitive urges, represented by the first beast of Revelation, are the hunt and sacrifice. Jesus confronted and mastered them on the cross. The feminine expressions of the primitive urges are intercourse (the mingling of personalities through sex) and maternity. What about this aspect of human nature? When does that submit to Christ?

I feel this confrontation in my own life like a wall around my soul. It comes to the fore when I walk into a store and the counter girl pushes her breasts up at me, or when a pastor looks at me, interrupting my meditation on the cross to suggest that I am sexually harassing the members of his congregation. It has been the focus of so much conflict in my life, from the Sterling Men’s group that tried to force me to stay in my marriage, into the family law system, and in the workplace where brilliant women at home find that I disrupt their influence over the men at work. It is a wall rebuilt every night when I wake up at the witching hour with sex crawling all over my body.

How to resolve this problem, the problem of “MYSTERY,” the influence that reaches into our souls from a distance and leaves us wondering “Why did I do that?” Is the image of Christ in confrontation with this influence that of the rock star with a bevy of beauties moaning in the audience? Or is it the image of the celibate, relinquishing all experience of sexuality?

My two fiction books, Ma and Golem, are meditations on this problem. Ma begins with two dysfunctional erotic encounters – one a casual hook-up and the other a long-term political bonding – and evolves as a slow-moving train wreck with the men struggling against the consequences of their failure to honor their women. Golem elaborates with a truly amazing sexual explosion between Corin and Leelay, both introduced in Ma, that arises as an expression of their service to the survival of Life. And it confronts us with an encounter between the Goddess Zenica (Corin’s mother) as she uses sex to break the will of an old adversary to accomplish the end of her re-incarnation. In relating the events to Corin, she simply offers “I did what I had to do.”

Is that where it ends: sex as a tool?

Revelation does offer us an image [NIV Rev 22:1-2]:

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

To me, this imagery is incredibly sexual. And I think that is as it should be: there is no part of our nature that cannot be sacralized, that was not given to us for the purpose of healing ourselves and this reality of corruption by selfishness.

I believe that intercourse must be brought into the service of Christ. So this means that it should be a means of bringing Christ into our lives, of pouring the love that we receive from him out over each other. My interpretation of my experience in church is that the opposite has happened: we take sex as the center of our intimate relations, and when Christ enters into that he is perceived as a threat. Or for sexually active single women, the presence of Christ in a man is interpreted as an opportunity to have really great intercourse – that is, to receive a love that would be given to them directly by the source if only they would ask for it.

As long as this persists, we are going to continue to struggle. My question is whether this is really the business of Christ. Eve was sent to Adam as his help-mate. Jesus confronted the masculine pathologies on the cross. Is it really possible for him to do the same work on the feminine side? My sense is that the end game would be far less painful if women stood up to take ownership of their problems.

Being Boxed In

Posted on by | Leave a comment

The management guru fad of the ‘80s wound itself up just at the turn of the millennium. This may have been due, in part, to the rise of information technology that shifted analytical emphasis away from the personality of the leader toward those directly involved in creating value. That was evident in the last book I read on leadership, which warned managers that knowledge workers would simply walk away from organizations that did not adopt collaborative management strategies.

I find myself in such a situation at this point. When I started my current job, I sat through meetings that devolved into pitched shouting matches. Such altercations were a daily event between some of my peers. When I intervened with the HR staff to bring this to an end, I exposed patterns that dated back to the formation of the company by people that used competition to maintain control of knowledge workers. Circulating to upper management an essay on triangulation and its consequences did not make me a popular person. When I put a copy of “Breaking The Fear Barrier” on my desk, they just stopped coming into my office.

They kept me on because I sat in my office and did what I do best: create a garden in an overgrown software jungle. The application that I manage, which has always been a critical part of the user’s experience of our products, has gone from being something hidden until the sale is complete to an essential part of the sales process. At the same time I have created component libraries and leveraged them to build new applications, algorithms and regression test suites. Having gone eight years without a pay raise, however, it’s time for me to move on to a place that understands and appreciates the principles that I use to understand the needs of my customers and create success for them.

So I’ve been working on my resume and trying to visualize the kind of place that I would find success in. I have a certain sympathy for Microsoft, and went out to the Research site on Saturday to see whether I could put up a resume. The site indicates that researchers are expected to be recognized experts in their field with a substantial body of publications. Well, shoot, most of my career has been spent in top secret facilities or in small companies that use trade secrets to protect their intellectual property. Microsoft Research does have a category for applications developers, but that link led me through to the main Microsoft site.

And so I find myself where I was eight years ago: a really smart guy who was told by an honest recruiter that “if I knew someone starting an R&D program, you’re the guy I would recommend, but you just don’t market well as either a manager or a software developer.” Where most developers focus on coding efficiency and the arcane syntax, most of my effort is invested in understanding the application domain so that I write the right code. Whether it’s produced in JavaScript or C++ or C# is pretty irrelevant – once I’ve established the design, I evaluate and select an implementation platform, read a book, start writing code, and use the web to find answers to arcane syntax questions when they come up.

Most hiring managers don’t have a clue how to evaluate a person like me. They want a known quantity – a specific skill set that will allow someone to come in and deliver value on day one. They’re not willing to take a risk on learning, and don’t know how to evaluate that capability by probing past experience to determine whether a resume represents individual contribution, or simply takes credit for work done by others.

So I’m resolved to find my own opportunities this time – searching the web for job openings and pushing my resume through directly. I’m making culture an explicit issue by declaring that my loyalties lie first and foremost with the customer.

To those of you who have been following this blog, this probably resonates. I’m hard to pin down because I don’t specialize narrowly. Rather, I examine relationships (personal, institutional and intellectual), and advocate for deepening them where others pick a side. But, damn it, I don’t want to be in a conveniently packaged box that can be moved easily around (itinerancy being the biggest problem faced by software companies). I want a home, and I’m willing to meet people where they are.