Pretty good year:
- Cora is a lot more of her own person, making parenting a lot more rewarding. The “terrible twos” started around November last year (lots of “do it myself!”), but I enjoy the interactions and it’s really fun playing with her. (Even when changing her stuffies’ diapers five times in one evening.)
- Advent of Code helped me re-discover that yeah, I actually do like programming.
- Couples therapy has really strengthened my relationship with my wife. We understand each other a lot better and it’s the best relationship of my life.
I made time to read over 30 books, my most in years! Highlights were Some Desperate Glory, A Memory Called Empire, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (somehow avoided this one in high school), the first three Ripley books, most of the Murderbot series.
I’m a year into a gluten-free diet (Celiac diagnosis in 2023). Eating out on the road is the sketchiest (no more road trip spicy chicken sandwiches 😭) but for everything else, I’m pretty happy with my food options at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Thanks, gluten-free oreos and Haribo gold bears.
Work is going well enough. I feel pretty established at my role at Atlassian. I like most of the stuff I do every day and then sign off. Periodically I freak out a bit about “what’s next?”; but these are probably still the echoes of the chaotic life I had when I lived in San Francisco. Weird things are happening in our industry but I’ll be retired by the time things have become fully consolidated, and my personal skillsets (Java, Python, JavaScript, AWS) still seem to be a reasonable backbone for a senior individual contributor.
Lucky passed away at the end of August. She wasn’t able to walk any more and so it was time to say goodbye. Lucky saw so many different versions of me - academic burnout, divorced guy in a college town, workaholic startup guy, startup burnout, new dad. Throughout it all, Lucky was there. I think about all the “what ifs” - the time when she ran after a bunny off-leash while visiting my parents, where she was out of sight while backpacking and I couldn’t find her for five minutes, the time she ran into the woods behind our apartment and I had to run into a thicket to find her. Our story could have had a much worse ending, but it didn’t. She passed away in the care of the veterinarian that helped her recover from her vestibular incidents and managed her pain and GI issues for the last 3 years of her life. I miss her, but we had a lot of wonderful times together.
Things don’t seem to going particularly well in the world, but I’m not sure how unique the post-millenial “late capitalism” dread that we’re experiencing is. These information networks make it harder to hide the awful things that are happening across the world, and we have a front-seat view to it on our phones. Between COVID and the last election, I can’t believe that this information is going to make things better by itself. Maybe in 50 years the cycle of reaction and counter-reaction post-Internet will have worked itself out into a new normal, but for now we live in the chaos.
When I blew up my “I’m a cool startup guy” blog for whatever’s replaced it here in 2018, I was at the end of a really rough year; got fired from a job (that I was planning to quit in a few months), had a relationship fail (for the better), and didn’t really feel very settled in the world of being a San Francisco techie (years of Web3/Crypto-currency/Tr*mpism from SV later, things make more sense!). By 2021, I had decided to start a family and I moved to Durham to do that, but I ended up spending most of that year waiting for it to happen. After Cora was born the first year was a rush, and new dads are in a place where they are simultaneously very important but also very unimportant (mom is always #1!). I spent a good amount of time trying to “escape” into video games. I think I’ve worked my stuff out appropriately and I again feel like an important part of the family.
Nowadays I feel a big time squeeze. My own personal interests have to fit into a few hours a day and I have to pretty explicitly rank them against each other. I haven’t been able to consistently run without saying goodbye to reading or programming “after hours”. What has changed is my sense of purpose. If I didn’t know what I was doing or why I was doing things and had a tendency to wallow with an “is this all there is” prior to Cora’s birth, now I know what I have to do - I just have to fit it into the time I have! When I do try to engage in interests I used to have (for example, going to concerts), I feel a real ambivalence. Is this what I should be using my finite time for? Do even still like this?
From talking to other dads I get the sense that this is a pretty common, but I still have to figure out how to feed the self enough that I’m still finding joy in what I’m doing. Going into 2025, I’m not sure if I have any major expectations for myself. Keep eating well, keep sleeping well, figure out how to resume an exercise routine, find more of a local social connection. Maybe that’s enough.