Snoozing

NRE in young polyamoury

2009-12-16T04:08:00Z

I have half an hour of me time on the BART squished in between work, loved ones, vacation packing practicalities and I don't know what, which is more than I have had in a while now. I spent all weekend with Kim, digging into some deeply important stuff that she nearly convinced me was manageable and not at all asking for impossible feats of hers to bend backwards without falling. That used to be my own forte, and I do not want a busload of practice of that in her life for her unless she finds value in it in as such in the first place. It isn't about me taking that choice away from her; it just pains me seeing starvation, pain and calamity befall her on the part of NRE in my life (that I do not intend to cap or bend backward to shield and insulate her from in all ways it manifests) that pains me on her behalf -- because I love her.

I don't know where the boundary is for how much hurt I can stand in her life nor how much she will choose, but I do know that I am currently way below what I think she deserves in love and life and relationship as I currently allow myself to have and experience abundance and love to degrees far beyond what prior versions of me would allow while other people I care for were hurting. I am uncoupling that zero-sum economy of optimizing for maximum bland average in shitty compromises, but I don't have much support or experience to offer all the other first degree actors in this, where the hub only dictates choices for himself and does not rule lives of any spokes, dependents or whatever be the best terms.

When it comes down to it, I think my boundaries are foremost about simplicity and quality time together. Both have been shaky and jittery lately, and have every chance of becoming even shakier with even more people thrown into the mix soon. I need my loved ones to take good care of themselves, with or without me. The first part I know they do well. The second is much more challenging, and much more important. I think I have fought a similar battle myself the past year. I am not done. But I know we must all be really good at it to live the kind of life and lives I want to be part of.

I do not come with solutions, only dreams, aspirations and a whole lot of work. Climbing those mountains at gentle enough slopes is the challenge we all face. I only own my own commitment to.

Beyond zero-sum

2009-12-04T08:53:15Z

I have felt very emotionally abundant lately, since I entwined with a second loved one, and yesterday felt like the proof about love not being a zero-sum game that I have always felt and believed, yet rarely have had palpable data to show for it. I went to the Santa Clara HAI support group, like many other months before that, with Kim, and we connected even more and deeper than usual, just as I have felt us do in pillow talk about our relationship, lately, too. I could clearly see and feel the richness stemming from coming from my own abundance, coming from a love life and growth place supported by more than two pillars.

I met with a dear old friend from Sweden tonight in downtown SF, and had two excellent train rides there and back with non-stop TED talks. All three were great even though there was no time left for laundry at the end of it for the n:th day in a row. Which feels okay when I'm doing exceedingly well on pretty much all other fronts. I've booked all my winter vacation flight tickets -- gone Dec 16, back Jan 8 -- and work has been beautiful and flowing for the most part for a while. I think it all ties together.

Love to you all, sweethearts! I'm looking forward to seeing you next time!

NRE and what I do

2009-11-30T03:23:16Z

I'm really happy to be behind on my writing. That usually means I am living at a greater speed and depth than I can find time to keep up with in words captured in text. The balance of words captured in and reciprocated by other human being (first order) witnesses, to words captured in text, relayed to other (second order) human beings, is shifting. I know this means I capture much less of my life, growth and experiences for posterity (my future self especially), but that is okay.

Like all the wonderful thinking I have done together with S that has since evaporated uncaught, being in the process is so much of what has been missing from my life, and reconnecting with it is at least the necessary first step on the way towards retaining and being able to recall on command what perspired, came up and was revealed.

Friday night we went downtown SF and saw the Christmas Oratorio, and yesterday, we went to the Berkeley botanical garden for a delightful stroll among all the wealths of nature that converge there. I like her taste in replenishing and soul feeding activities; they feed me too. We got as far as a sushi restaurant in Lafayette (Kobe?) before sundown, and stopped for a moment on top of the hill with a great view of the bay that even outshone that from her fairy-tale house. There has been a massive flow of beauty through my otherwise more sparse life over the past few days, and I am still quite taken with it.

Only the very notion of being let into somebody I like's life is a great and wondrous thing, and all the other layers on top of that have merrily been flowing over the brim.

I'm still in the process of figuring out whether we are both emotionally ready to operate (and what kind of) a relationship together, just as, in all fairness, I am with every woman I am in some kind of relationship with. The contour, form and content is getting better defined with Kim. It's rather fluid (and early) with Katla, sounding the territory and finding what will carry and how. With S, I don't really know what would, and would not, trip my past, co-dependent behaviours around adopting, or at least carrying / becoming weighed down by issues that are not my own, were we to live closer. With A, it will be very interesting to see what relation we retain from last we saw each other back in Sweden, once we reconnect over the winter holiday and when she comes to visit me early next year.

All relations keep finding their current shape and configuration. These are just some of my closest and deepest connected ones. It is slowly starting to dawn on me to what extent I devote my time and attention to crafting and maintaining these relationships in my life, especially after the recently posed question of what I do with my time besides work, practical matters of living, the time I spend with Kim and the creative outlets I had already mentioned (writing and programming). I drew a blank. I think a little reading, and somehow relationship centric things account for most of the rest, but enumeration and making inventories are not my strong suites, so I may be missing things.

Maybe there will always be a little haunting feeling saying "is that all I do?" whenever I come up with a list. And I guess I prefer doing a few well chosen things to a great extent over doing lots of things without any kind of follow-through.

Building a new base

2009-11-19T17:17:23Z

I woke up realizing that in the culture I grew up in, shame was a tool used to monopolize people's sexuality.

And to be clear, let me underline the fact that the above conclusion is in the passive tense without an intelligent perpetrator and a specific target or victim -- because it is an evolved dynamic, whose current form can hardly be traced back to any element of intelligent design (by a human or group of humans, as I think of it, but feel free to consider a royal fucktard of a god here instead, if it pleases you to have an evil overlord cast in this most destructive role). And whether sprung through conscious intentional design or (from today's vantage point) unfortunate evolved shifts of perception over time, I am not interested in scapegoat tracking or vengeance follow-ups; I just care about undoing the damage and liberating those trapped in this poisonous dynamic.

I am aware that I can't know who is or isn't, beyond myself, but I do know that I have been at least indirectly trapped in it myself, from perceiving that my surrounding culture were, with the exception of those few who by proof of their actions visible to myself showed that they were not, or were recovering from it in a fashion similar to the path I was embarking on for myself -- breaking free of shame and arriving in territory where brains and bodies harmonize with one another in beautiful abandon, free of cultural messaging like the shalts and shalt nots of Christianity. (A spell too ill defined to be invoked in that specific a role, but I'm taking this briefest liberty of smearing some dirt over it; I quite obviously do hold a grudge about its lack of built-in safeguards against being used to abuse, imprison, hurt and cripple people. Few memes have evolved long enough to gain those, or been designed with them from day one, and the pointy finger of C is not an A grade student -- at best a weak C.)

I see quite clearly now that one ruling principle in my choices of partners, with little exception, was the will and/or capacity of breaking out of this dynamic, or (better still) never having been in it in the first place. Because I can't stand the thought of my lover being imprisoned in a brain lock about being subservient to myself, conditioned to have negative emotional response to taking the best possible care about themself and committedly pursuing their dreams and fantasies, just the way I want to, too -- and I also think I haven't felt free to do those things myself unless my partner enjoys those same freedoms, in a rather enforcingly constraining perception of fairness.

I haven't been willing or open to pursuing single-handed hedonism; unless it's been mutual and win-win, I just haven't been interested. This clearly limits partnering options.

Odd. I started writing this in the morning hours, with a ton more to come, as it felt at the time, but I think I lost the steam somewhere along the way during the work day in-between. So I'll skip to the conclusion I was aiming for, where I describe the two-dimensional life I was so often ending up in, and how I am attempting to create a new, three-dimensional life for myself now that doesn't compromise away my own needs, wants and dreams.

I have always been pursuing a life heavy on love, intimacy and sexuality, trying to create a good container for that. As I was just stating above, however, it was not okay with living in a relationship where any one of those were a compromise of theirs, rather than something done enthusiastically with great abandon together. If that triggered trauma or was not mutual, I would rather not go there, and eventually, the relationship would wither away one way or the other, as my own needs would not be met in it (I still had a rather mono-centric world -- but I honestly don't know how I would respond to a relationship I could only have a subset of those in, if I had my needs met together with other people too -- I presume it comes down to how much complexity buildup it would amount to in practice and whether it was taxing my cope or feeding us both).

Hm. I think what I'm noting, as the topic faded into the background during the day, is how much I miss thinking together, a dimension that I think wasn't even on my map a year ago. Tricky, as I don't even know quite how it works. This post would probably have worked far better in dialog form. Which is territory I have not been very spoiled with in the past. I want to learn more about that.

The sex and relationships conversation

2009-11-17T09:42:03Z

It just struck me that I know of so many cases where the love, sex and relationship conversation that needs to happen between parents and children has the direction of information flow switched. The kids possess all the knowledge, experience and insight, and the parents are the students, if not for their own sexuality, then definitely to make heads or tails of how the lives and relations, norm systems, values and agreements of their children work in order to be able to understand them and not be afraid for (or even of!) them, worry, and to harmonize and stay in touch with them.

Authority is about knowledge-, not age-disparity.

I am behind on having these conversations with my biological family members; I, and my choices, have been more insulated from them than some I know, affording me options to delay them indefinitely even -- if I so choose, without building up an accretion disc of lies to keep track of about public-facing parts of my life.

I think what I might like to share most about my life is about HAI, and second, about polyamoury, and / or relationship anarchy, and how neither is a very radical concept. I kind of wish I had had those condensation skills of my best friend's with me at a pool conversation in Harbin, where we were twisting and turning the subject of how monogamous and non-monogamous relationships are really just different marks on a scale of simplicity, communications and the rise in number of intra-relationship paths, for growing numbers of n. (n=2 => 1 intra-relationship path: AB; n=3 => 4: AB, AC, BC, ABC; n=4 => 11: AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, CD, ABC, ABD, ACD, BCD, ABCD; and so forth)

Without great tools, communication, people, choices, norms, values, agreements and much more, the whole idea of going beyond n=2 has been so deeply out-ruled that it gets passed on as infeasible, sometimes even through stigma and taboo, rather than via the more honest path of reasoning and as subject to debate and intellectual consideration.

And how much more defining a characteristic of a healthy relationship the choice of beliefs, norms, world views, fears, commitments and otherwise are than the choice of n, the genders of participants -- or of so many other non-traditional choices -- may seem to be to the owner of a slim world model.

Much of what makes it so complicated, of course, is that it is difficult to see, think, compare and comprehend from inside a tight space. Other things, that it gets even worse when inter-mixed with fears, with partial or skewed understanding of fragments, not to say misrepresented information, or downright disinformation in wide circulation from parties with vested interests, or spreading fear propaganda, from a position of fear of their own.

I think my own family is likely to be a remarkably easy target to bring on board when I get there, being all academics, and where fear and isolation really only runs rampant in my mother. It could be so much worse. It would also be really interesting to bring up a lot of this stuff with my mother's brother's wife (I don't know my relationship algebra well enough in any language to name that traversal of the largely binary family tree that is my family :-), whom is a psychologist of some flavour or others, and likely has some concoction of partially deeply informed perspectives on some to much of it. I think that is at the moment one of the larger carrots for me. :-)

I wonder if I'd be up for bringing any of it up over Christmas when I go back to visit my family.

Realizations

2009-11-17T05:13:59Z

I have been going on high gear more or less non-stop since Thursday, and would under normal circumstances be exceptionally beat about now, 8pm after a focused work day after an all-weekend work shop (HAI Level 2) after a really early Friday morning (6am up, at work before 7 vs typical 11) after a sudden huge time critical work load spike that came from a blue sky Thursday evening. I am not, though; if anything, I feel exceptionally high-functional right now, did some excellent UI design and implementation at work today, pulled off a great re-architecturing feat from a net café Thursday night in concert with a co-worker in less than an hour, that we had only tossed as an idea prior to that.

Thinking about cause and effect, how can I stay in this territory and what contributing factors have and have not been present in the most relevant and measurable recent past? I'll try to make some kind of inventory here, as best I can. Needless to say (it should be, it only hasn't, historically), all tidbits aim to be naked data points, not enshrouded in story pandering to expectations about specifics about how facts should be padded.

About two weeks ago I was, to my surprise, disentangled from bonds of relationship both quite abruptly and cleanly. I think that may have unlocked a chunk of brain capacity and emotional insecurity about navigating feelings of other people, not to step in their fears' way. I also lost (for the time, at least) connection with what was probably as close to an emotional home as I then had.

Friday night that same week, I headed a few hours and two hundred miles north in a rented car to visit the other similarly deeply emotionally connected friend I have on this continent, in a non-relationship relationship. Just prior to the break-up, we had met, reconnected and to our delighted surprise found ourselves share trust and touch connection on a deeper level we formerly did not have with each other.

I ended up staying with her not just over that week-end, but the work week that followed it, too, balancing work, me time and we time rather well all week. Breakfast porridge, somewhat lacking café soup lunches, rather good dinners together in the evenings, some Jeeves and Wooster watching together, magnesium tea and lots of pillow talk before going to sleep every night.

Much mirrored touch cuddling, some kissing, no shared sexuality. Lots of thinking together, exploring things like a coping trap that had slipped into my communication with Kim, specifically around a mis-understanding that happened between me and my host-to-be, some days prior to my departure. She had mentioned, after a post of mine on some relevant subject, "no wonder you feel safe with me", upon which I had felt the need to reply that I do now, but that that had not always been the case -- in order to make sure we still had a common understanding (the subject was up only some day earlier) that what I heard as present tense was indeed, even for her, present tense. The insight that grew out of the above (it was a charged subject we had worked out, at great effort, before then, and this verification, over IM, pretty much exploded and seemed undone for a while, until we met in person again) was that I had so often felt that I failed to come through to Kim, when speaking and/or acting in and from the present tense -- as doing so, and having all sorts of extrapolation happen into other tenses, past or (probably more) future, unbeknownst to me. So I was checking in to see whether we were in tune or not, when I didn't have more cues to go on than mere words in an IM window.

My typical 11 to 7 work days, but tele-commuting from a little café with nice music; Édith Piaf, and the like. Achieving better than usual results in somewhat J-heavy and creativity/ingenuity/architecting-requiring domains. Introvert friendly interactions with other people, predominantly women, sitting amidst them and light non-disturbing conversations not requiring or even cuing my direct participation, but nourishing some form of social need none the less, or maybe especially so.

Wednesday night, going together to an EFT circle, for myself on the topic of asking and having my needs worth, an environment somewhat dominated by female presence, but with sparks of really excellent participation from a deeply wounded and hardened veteran male, sharing hard earned wisdoms such as "shame disables your ability to expose the lie" and some really apt high amplitude verbal attacks on anyone and everyone that breeds fear and sells security; that hideously common modern subliminal slavery that ethically poisoned yet legally legal businesses around here thrive on so much.

Being very much at choice, liberty and independence in all respects, except perhaps living, but there, instead, cohabiting in a way that was my exact choice and preference at the time, so it did not amount to compromise at my end. Solving remaining logistical issues over the week for HAI at Harbin with useful input and tips, but doing the actual execution on my own. Friday afternoon, driving to Harbin, and then, having a wonderful and enriching time all weekend in naturism and touch centricity among exclusively (to my perceptions) highly emotionally open, available, resonating and evolved people of both genders.

Superlative catered food all three days, even including rather decent breakfast, which speaks volumes about the quality of it, as I am picky about the all-American sugar-centric breakfast, and take some issue with eggs, sausage and the like before lunch -- there were other options, including a rather good granola and real, plain yoghurt. (On top of all the really healthy-feeling and tasty food, I even had two or three rather sugar bomby nut-instead-of-chocolate-chip type cookies, and didn't crash and bomb out over that.)

Sleeping together with my HAI 1 buddy, with whom I resumed the great, uncomplicated, really connected right off the bat touch and trust connection we built in late August. No needless efforts were made to mimic how all (or close to it) the other people were keeping more distance in typical sit-down situations. Connecting closely with a woman that, somewhat like myself, had a run-away mother, but that had been dealt devastating blows by it, instead of having been safely distanced from it, by the mere difference of having had her home in her -- where mine rather was in my father.

Again, no shared sexuality, and again, me maintaining that boundary so others needn't (yet at their request, in both cases -- or all three, counting my host too). I found out that I lock myself into a role of ownership of the whole setting around sexuality, making sure it caters the needs of the other person, does not upset the needs or ethics of the surroundings and caters to my own personal needs too, unless the other person is (sexually, at least) a strong, willful, dominant woman, and/or really apt at communicating her needs, wants and want-nots, level and stable. Fail either of those last few, and I assume ownership of the situation from the conditioning I absorbed from what the Swedish women's liberation front preached about men being at fault and blame for a ton of violence and intrusion on womankind, and a lot of scape-goating and witch-hunting coupled up with it.

Not a very successful liberation movement, if you ask me, fostering a rather nasty strain of co-dependence in perceived enemies and fostering victimship in their own ranks, instead of building up strength and resistance. It is a rather smelly pile of conditioning I'm dying to get out of, over time, as I adopt better stuff to replace it with. HAI does a lot of good, and the kind of people I get in touch with through it, probably even more so. I'm not very apt at re-teaching the stuff I integrate from there myself, but really thrive in environments among the other people that have adopted the same curriculum. There be so many pearls to pick up there.

I also made a great hug connection with a Berkeleyan with whom I ended up having no workshop sessions, but where a very connected mutual flow happened each time -- her inner negative voice she was working away, to my perception, finding a very growthful place in me for picking up conveyed warmth and appreciation, to take its place. Both introverts, I approached her during the withholds / amends / paranoias / appreciations sharing (a great, great, great series of exercises and tools) -- or was it (probably) afterwards? -- sharing that I would really appreciate being part of her support network, post-workshop, back in real life. I hope I will be. (Note to self: Ferret.)

Saturday to Sunday night, I decided that I needed much sleep to not collapse during the drive home, and took it, over more cuddly or talky or warm swimming pool social interactions off-hours. I did not regret that move, and did end up driving all the way home, via Santa Rosa this time, as I wanted to drop off a library book and my computer at the office, so I needn't carry it from the car renter's on my way to work, that long hour's walk. That route wasn't as pleasant as going through Berkeley; especially those first 70 minutes it took to Santa Rosa were a dreadful drive after dark on high attention through non-stop curves and roller coaster passages where many were rightfully marked 20 or even 15 mph. (If you really have to, you can get to SFO that way in less than three hours under good traffic conditions that way, though, even if you slavishly stick to the 101 after Santa Rosa, I noted, after having tired of navigating on my own by iphone, and wanting to keep some battery, should I need it.)

The two worries I had during the drive home (that I had forgotten the soon-to-be-overdue library book I had brought, at Harbin) and that I had somehow caused thee nasty scratch at the back right wheel of my rental car, both turned out moot -- I had not, in either case, and I even got offered to be driven away from Enterprise, as they had a driver in and it was before 16:45 when I dropped it off this morning. I asked to be taken to the Palo Alto Caltrain (I think next time I'd ask to get to work instead, but I'm still practicing :-), just missed a leaving train, and instead walked the remaining half an hour through Palo Alto, picking up a Mophie Juice Pack Air that a friend of mine recently gave me a tip about, doubling my phone's battery capacity, giving it a hard shell, making it chargable and syncable through a normal USB cable and giving it a handy external hardware battery indicator, all in one, on the way -- which was really neat. The charge a single battery holds is just enough for a three hour drive if I'm running with the GPS on in navigation mode, but now I don't have to do the planning for charging I did this time around, which will be a neat gain.

I had half a naked green smoothie for breakfast and three of Kim's rather hideous-tasting vitamin health pills (I brought them to work shop too, but did not touch them there), three more tonight with post-dinner yoghurt and really good catered Monday partner meeting chicken masala, veggie paella and white bread for lunch, and some more of that chicken for dinner. And now it's about 11, I'm home, and just a nice, fit-for-the-hour tired and sleepy. I'm not going to try to make much heads or tails of all the data here, but I pick up on a few trends.

Operating within cope

2009-11-09T19:47:45Z

I had a wonderful, enlightening falling-asleep conversation yesternight with S, pinning lots of things, that had hitherto been a bit of a tangle floating about. One of those things is my capacity for thought, introspection and processing, which is at an all time high with her, much thanks to skills she bring to the table that I also have myself, and need mirrored.

And the crux of it is that those shut down, and really easy, without that brand of gentleness -- and, specifically: in the presence of charge I somehow feel (and I should note that this isn't entirely an accurate representation of it -- but it's in the right neighbourhood) responsible for, or involved in.

That is a huge factor in successful communication and relationship with me, and I think I can't manage to feel deeply invested in any primary-type relationship until that part works, whether through this kind of "crutches" enablement of my getting by, despite that incapacity to stay connected with myself (shorter term), despite circumstances, or through my eventually getting past and through those issues (long term, and at the other end of some pretty serious growth, addressing and resolving big childhood issues with a mother that habitually caused lots of never addressed and resolved tension and charge).

So I can have deeper relationships to the extent I interact with people that share that light touch and language and approach to conflict and issues -- or to the level of distance and lightness that conflict or charge does not mount to or beyond my level of my cope. It's good to be aware of this intellectually too, and not just speak that language non-verbally through modeling what works well for me.

On interpretation, choice of meaning, and love

2009-11-05T18:45:57Z

I have long been thinking about communication (meaning: mutual understanding of message content), and about broadcasting (transmitting some message, without the context of an interpreting intelligence to derive their meaning from it -- or maybe rather without a specific person to do the decoding into meaning of that message).

No well-formed message is free from meaning, but each interpretation is arbitrary to an extent -- it will vary with what the recipient perceives that the setting, intent and meaning its author ascribed to it was. Also, that means, by implied necessity, that a broadcasted message does not have one single meaning, but as many meanings as it has recipients. Often there will be overlap between many of those interpretations, often not.

When I wrote (or shall I say evolved?) my profile (it is in a very real sense a product of many years of personal development of mine), I certainly had no intent at all to broadcast the one-sentence summary I condensed it to yesternight. It is possible I would have flinched hard at the notion that it was its message, though I kind of doubt I would.

I would more probably rather have been really interested to hear what made someone think it conveyed that message. In fact, and to be quite precise, I still am, because I have not arrived at that summary from reading the profile, going via a mental model of what it says and means to why it could accurately be re-represented in such words. Because I have "cheated" by being me, living my life the past decade and a few, seeing what I draw, bond with and co-create -- and whether any or none of that can be derived from that profile or not, I do not know, but I highly suspect that it can. (As can, of course, tons and tons of other agreeable qualities about myself, too.)

I am trying to do reality check, by attempting what my closest confidante here is astonishingly good at doing, on my own -- to take in some really huge, deep, advanced, multi-faceted, multi-layered interwoven systems, and condensing them to something really small, understandable and full of meaning and insight.

Understood this way, taking offense at my attempted art of doing the same, becomes meaningless. I also think, however, that offense is often our name for truth we can acknowledge (or are-afraid-could-be-truth), but hurt from even thinking about, and that the pain felt thus gets recast as if inflicted upon us by whomever reveals it for us -- or, to rephrase it in terms of coming out of codependence -- someone that does not spare us from hearing and reacting to it, by withholding it from us.

Sometimes, doing that is tact, and generosity. Sometimes, I think it is just enabling us to remain trapped, within the eye of a storm going on around us, that we choose to tune out from, hoping it will at some point just recede, all on its own.

After the disengagement from the relationship I am coming out of, I do not want to withhold any thoughts I am working with, and this being where I develop thought in writing that is not targeted -- as a mail is -- I air whatever comes to mind, that is mine to share. It seems to have struck her hard, but I am not convinced that that was something bad. I think I would have recoiled from the thought of having any part in something like that sharing, only a year ago, but I have been learning much about process since -- and especially about how interpretation is only something we choose ourselves, when we are the ones doing it -- rather than something we choose for others.

She may read these explaining words and get a whole new sense of what that post meant for me, and what thus it might mean for herself, should she read this. I can't know whether that would be better or worse than her not reading this, or not reading it until a year from now, or five years from now. Feeling pain inflicted on her, from me, may have been the spring-board she needs to set herself free again, which I think may be what she wants, or deeply needs. Humans are complicated beings, and she may have needed to create what she feared the most to be able to see that she could face it, push through it, and not stay trapped in the shadows of unending fear.

I think I in the past would have been scanning for, and removing, power tools that people I did not trust not to hurt themselves, could have hurt themselves on. Prossibly to a large degree so I would not have to experience them in pain, or hurting, or choosing really harmful (to themselves, to others, or to me) ways of acting on that pain. Not trusting them to take good care of themselves, instead babying them with an artificially safe environment, which would pad them from learning their own lessons, and enable them to remain weak, or even grow weaker.

That is not love. Specifically, that is not the love of an adult, though it probably is, to some extent, the love of an infant. I need to not do that in relationships, and I am proud to say that I learned a lot about not doing that with her. I trust her not to want me to; now, then, or in the future, however our paths may cross. And I do not seek monopolarized relationships with a fix power imbalance of adult / infant, but freely flowing relationships where the roles and center of gravity is more flexible, shifting with the shifting needs and tides of its participants.

Powerful tools, like thought, language and communication, are there to be used to good effect, and very much of the power they wield becomes possible only by not neutering them to harmlessness. Immediate proceeding from impression via interpretation to pain, hurting and bleeding to death, without engaging in communication to verify correct reception, intent and sign-off about, in this case, that I actually understood that I was causing pain, and had that very intent, is not being ready for a relationship with me. And maybe not being ready for what David Richo calls an adult relationship. I really don't like that term, though, because it ascribes negative value -- even though it is just through convention -- to all other relationships, built on different foundations.

Trust to anchor and communicate with me before being hurt by me is a very key need I have in relationships. I think that one-sentence executive summary is another, equally valid, concoction of that profile I wrote. I can't say which one has the stronger bond with the profile, but this one I am quite happy to stand for, and stick to.

Former OkCupid profile

2009-11-05T09:08:58Z

My OkCupid profile is about to expire, or it did long ago already, but I want to archive it for myself first, before the rewrite. I don't yet know what I'll put in a new one, but it's no rush. I was thinking for a moment about what the one-sentence version of it is, and based on my last decade's worth of relationships, I have my own theory about what it says. If you find one too, reading it, I'd be curious to hear it. Here's the whole thing; my one-sentence is at the very end.

I am cuddly, mind-opening, and open-minded.

My Self-Summary
If I told you that you could enter my world through my voice, reading this aloud to you instead -- would you? I would enjoy that. In fact, I think I will try to make that happen, once I get the hang of making quality recordings. In the mean time, you may imagine a somewhat British accent conveying this to you.

Relax into my voice, if you will, and picture a soothing setting we share that you find comfort in. Perhaps you're resting your head on my chest, while I am idly playing with your hair with one hand, holding the book I am reading from in the other. Maybe you are listening more to my voice than the words it carries across, maybe you are paying more attention to the slowly unfolding story, and maybe you are just diffusing into the comfort pouring in through all of your senses; the gentle massage of your scalp, the familiar smell of me, and the warmth of my arm around you. It doesn't really matter; this is quality time we are sharing together, and any which way we take the most value out of it, is a welcome way. You are not required to take notes. There is no test, and there will be no judgment.

My home wasn't always here in Mountain View; in fact, I am not quite sure where I would place it any more. I moved here in fall 2008, from northern latitudes in Sweden, as she was just about to enter the depressing month that is November near the arctic circle -- an unforgiving period between formerly sparkling colours on now naked trees, and first snow, bringing back some of the light to nature, as daylight grows really scarce through midwinter. My luggage was light, my heart looking for a new home, and my daytime job as technical founder of a little web tech startup in Silicon Valley, had after many months finally got me through the post-9/11 legal bureaucracy of moving here.

I believe in learning by doing, and learning through seeking out and connecting with mentors, far superior in the field than myself, finding ways where we amount to mutual value for each other. The less pressure and the more natural emergence involved, the better -- which means, there often is a distinct shortage of words for what my relations to people are. I either have and am deep friends with very many, or I am a student, mentor, lover, fan, or just very difficult to place, in most cases.

As it turns out though, names don't really matter much. Many of my most valuable relationships distinctly lack some well understood concept to group them under. I think that is one of the first things that happen when you unsubscribe from the wholesale cultural institution of monogamy, and don't believe that nurturing mutual vulnerability and love means claiming someone for your own. The flora of commonly agreed-upon words and their meanings don't cover much of that territory.

I am slowly learning that, while I have worked hard emotionally in my aspirations towards creating warmly, growth promoting, connected, responsive and nurturing atmospheres for those I love, feeling that they deeply deserve such a harbour to relax in, to draw strength and energy from to get traction with personal growth projects they might embark on -- it took me the longest time to figure out that I had developed that skill set even more, for myself. To understand what to look for in others, that I need. To be able to teach those that want to give something like that back to me in showing by doing style. Which is just the way I find learning easiest myself.

My warmest gifts of cuddlecraft are free. It is one of those skills that are their own reward, when given -- and their own plague, in times of scarcity, resonating with the sensory memory of the last full body rub I gave or received, in every cell of my body. I recharge more in touch and massage land than anywhere else I know, whether I work the magic, or am being spoiled by you.

I would be most honoured to make your acquaintance.

What I’m doing with my life
Right now, much of my time is going into a spurt of personal growth after having found both tribe and alignment in HAI (the Human Awareness Institute essentially embodies my value systems and approach towards offering love, intimacy, sexuality and a mode of opening up to authentic, real, mature, seasoned and ethical communication and ownership of emotions, needs and otherwise). Besides that, I entertain a beautiful young relationship with a woman of the same orientation (she is polyamorous too), and try my hands at being a good steward for a few popular tools your browser might be using.

I'm evolving the web and improving the interconnectedness of all things. Mediating people connections and thought, meshing mind and tooling. I habitually seek out new friends, coworkers and associates, taking my picks from projects of interest to me, frequently nurturing and raising the mind babies of others, where they fit into patterns, ideas and settings of my own.

Emotionally, I often take an interest in verbal people that share much mind and heart matter, especially those with developed skills for writing feelings between the lines. I enjoy investing in relationships, and get frustrated under living conditions that do not allow me to.

I’m really good at
Improving quality of life.

Listening so people feel comfortable sharing.

Establishing loving circumstances where vulnerability thrives.

Full contact body rubs.

-- Managing to be a happy soul, without being ignorant. / Seaofzen

The first things people usually notice about me
My verbal playfulness might account for much of the first impression, as I more often cross paths with people first online than in real life. Ideally, early things people find in me are my value systems, dreams and wants, confidence in my character, and an understanding of my world.

My favorite books, movies, music, and food
"Wodehouse described Jeeves' cough as `like a sheep clearing its throat of a blade of grass on a distant hillside.' I tried practicing that, but sounded more like a goat clearing its throat of a piece of cheese on a nearby hillside. These things are difficult." - Stephen Fry

Books: Dossie Easton (great in person too!) & Catherine A. Liszt - The Ethical Slut, Isaac Asimov - Foundation Trilogy, Orson Scott Card - Ender/Shadow series, Bodil Jönsson - Ten Thoughts About Time, Jared Diamond - Collapse - How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

Movies: Addicted to Love, Bladerunner, City of Angels, Delicatessen, Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulin, Fight Club, Kissing Jessica Stein, Life of Brian, Matrix, Ninth Gate, Shall We Dansu?, Shawshank Redemption, Snatch, Spirited Away, Thomas Crown Affair, Wallace and Gromit, and extended into the realm of TV series: Azumanga Daioh!, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cowboy Bebop, Poirot

As I am all about the sharing of everything good and as this is the modern web, all links in this section of course let you enjoy sample songs I enjoy:

Music: ABBA, Beatles, Coldplay, Depeche Mode, Dover Street Jazzomaniacs, Miles Davis, Mozart, Real Group, Tim Minchkin, Visa Röster

Foods: I have a hankering for the French and Italian cuisines, and am picking up on (certified organics) smoothie breakfasts.

The six things I could never do without
Cuddling, intellectual conversation, love, inspiration, emacs and sleep (in company). Two thirds to five sixths worth of things preferred to do not-on-my-own? Yep, feels about right.

I spend a lot of time thinking about
Self improvement -- expanding my horizons, widening perspectives, gaining a deeper understanding of myself and the people and world around me at large. Anybody capable of opening worlds for me, guiding throughout their reigns or territories of expertise (at least if not bent on necessarily converting me to their beliefs or perceptions about things, or attacking opposing ideas), is a treasured friend; I like admiring people on behalf of intellectual and worldliness traits, rather than always being center stage focus myself.

The same goes for people who are still more overt, forward, unperturbed by touch, emotionally or sexually liberal and outspoken than myself. It's one of the most blissful reliefs known to my mind, the swooshing feeling when inhibitions -- and all parts of my mind catering to not tripping theirs -- blow out through a hatch into the vacuum of outer space, leaving all of my intersocial subsystems unleashed from the tether of remaining within their bounds and comfort zones. Again, bonus points for taking me out on journeys into the unknown white regions on my present maps.

Polyamoury, starvation and abundance economies, social systems, cause and effect, gender roles, norms, stigmas, taboos, thought, language, expression, possibilities, boundaries, meshing thought systems, evolution applied to unexpected things, needs, emotions, expectations, dreams, patterns, unpatterns, strategies and niches, defining parameters and perimeters, cooperation, communication, ...

On a typical Friday night I am
Chances are good I would be delving into some private matter of someone's (mine, theirs, quite possibly ours, or even yours) with an attentive ear, a supporting shoulder, and all the time in the world to ourselves, more likely than not somehow entwined physically while at it.

If not doing that, I might perhaps be watching a TED talk on some interesting topic, or be doing some creative work of my own, for the (often somewhat temporary) benefit of humankind, like making OkCupid in some way better for the share of its users that engage with the site via a Greasemonkey equipped Firefox.
The most private thing I’m willing to admit here
For what it's worth, I think this section is more about what the reader I believe I am sharing mind space with, right now (yes, you: the lovely person reading this), would be able to read and gain insight of about me without getting the heebie-jeebies, to bravely turn her tail and flee, as the bard put it -- for breach of social or gender protocol, or some such. Knowing that the kind of person I prefer also likes emotional forthcomingness, makes me at liberty to share a lot more than other mortals would feel comfy doing, slicing through the drudgery of boring small talk.

While I have spent much time the past decade understanding the atrocious territory of female conditioning, I have only just started figuring out the complementary shape, and extent, of male conditioning I have been an unwitting subject of myself. I find immeasurable value in breaking free of one-dimensionality like that and I greatly appreciate receiving mentorship as much as I enjoy providing it. My own conditioning is a topic I was led into by a close mentor of mine, where I was blind prior to that.

On my best ever date, I was blindfolded for the first few hours (fulfilling a long time dream of mine); I like placing a lot of trust in people who can handle it.

In close connected cuddle space, not only women are capable of sharing the deeply bonded comfort of their loved ones' head rested on their arm, or in her hand, her nipple between their lips -- it works beautifully well the other way around, too.

You should message me if
You like to share your mind.

To the extent that you reach out there in writing in mediums inviting response to cross-pollinate your thoughts.

Because you like to have your mind picked, and would find someone never questioning your ideas insanely dull -- in multiple interpretations of the word.

You feel stagnant when periods of time pass during which you meet or process no new ideas, perspectives or question no old long held ideas, beliefs or perceptions that you had never thought before to challenge and subject to scrutiny.

You actually enjoy being wrong, when a peer points out why your model does not hold, or better still, ways to correct it to work -- at least as long as there is no daft notion of prestige expecting or demanding you to stick to the inertia of staying wrong.

You are too smart to subject others to prestige expectancy, cuing them to be convicted to their past positions in the face of today's available evidence and understanding.

You are also way too smart to be led into your choices by the path of most prestige, which is assigned inversely proportional to the joy of retaining or attaining said position, many times.

When you do realize that you failed to note in advance that prestige lured you in, you are kind to yourself at being all the wiser now, and in a new position from which to act, and maybe change course after reevaluation.

You thrive on rather than compete about growth, learning and unlearning.

You thrive maybe even more about promoting and augmenting the growth, learning and unlearning of other people that willingly and eagerly pursue goals, dreams and ambitions crossing paths with yours.

My one-sentence thought? "I can replace your missing father."

Terser times

2009-11-03T08:22:24Z

Tired night. I'm focusing small. Breakfast, work, dinner and a walk. Hygiene. Sleeping. Talking with my friends here, and back in Sweden. Realizing that my closest confidante in the western hemisphere -- and actually anywhere, come to think of it, lives three and a half hours away from here by car, that I would have to rent first to even get there.

But I do have the benefit of time I invest, as I please, without concern of swaths of sadness wiping over the moods of loved ones having hoped for it for themselves -- which is one burden lighter, that it wasn't ever easy for me to disown even as I tried. I got much praise for trying, but it was a bit like really poor mothers doing horrible parenting, always whining about the ordeals they go through for their kids -- getting more credit for failing miserably with a loud public record of trying the best they could.

I know; I am a bit unfair to myself here, but sometimes it's relieving jabbing at things we feel we have gotten unfairly much credit for. Old patterns take work to break, and when I was working on some things, I was called to attend to others, of more immediate concern to her. I'm still somewhat glad I again attempted listening to my own needs before scrambling to hers, even though timings got borked all over the place. Bork, bork, bork, as we say, back home.

Maybe I should head over to my friend in the Netherlands before rather than after the new year, on my way back to family instead of on my way back here afterward, in company. Timing constraints are easing up a little. I'm glad HAI 2 is coming up soon. For a change, I seem booked up a lot, all on my own.

Expectations

2009-11-01T23:40:28Z

I was somewhat unexpectedly and abruptly ejected out of relationship yesternight, rather than, as I had anticipated it myself beforehand, finding myself in a situation where I would be negotiating needs with what little and brittle tools I have thus far developed in that area. A swift move that in a single big stroke immediately shifts all dynamics aside, into something else. It was, I think and hope, initiative she took for herself, for staying safe and getting whatever tools and environment she currently needs, though to what extent it was also for me, I think that part succeeded really well. (My moral compass is alerting me to the fact that it worked almost too well, for me, but I don't think I architected it.)

Waking up today, I found increasing clarity around what had yesterday afternoon seemed really nebulous, facing questions about what my needs are, what my ideal relationship is, and prior questions about what my main values were in ours as it started out and moved on, from there. Back then, I did not reach past the insight that my main unmet need was "simplicity", nor expounding more on how I started out with it, and gradually lost it as process and tension rose quicker than I gained tools and energy to keep up and meet, guide, channel, process, and help resolve them with her. I didn't have the resolve and investment she did, and so many things tore apart, as a consequence.

Today, I did see the next level, beyond that need for simplicity -- the need within the need, if you will, or its background, to be precise, and how it matched one great value that drew me in, from the very beginning.

With Kim, I could hear myself.

She, in fact, very much encouraged me to listen in to myself and express the needs I found, which in turn helped me feel both loved and respected as an equal, despite not having done nearly as much work in that field, as she had. I was (and still am) eager to, as quickly as I could muster, catch up, and do similar work, within HAI, which proved an invaluable (if a little sparsely spaced out) school for me -- but it met my learning environmental needs really well, and was separated enough from a surrounding life full of modern complexities and concerns to get great focus and progress, when it was in session.

As I explored that path, some of what I found and acted on (more than anything, learning about the extent and nature of my me time needs and the looming prospect of other important people in my life showing up on the horizon) triggered abandonment fears and scarcity issues of hers, which, in turn, made for land-slide changes in the dynamics between us, and the more those rose, the less my world had that element of simplicity that enabled me to hear myself.

A necessary ability to be her of any help at all in finding ways to grasp the issues and come to any sort of resolution -- if neither of us could tune in to my needs, every choice of mine would become a coin flip of give in to her requests or not, not a mutual negotiation of needs and ways in which to meet them all, as best we could. (Guided by some kind of gut feel about fairness like how much we were statistically leaning one way or the other, as relates to going out of our way to meet the other's needs go, and trying to keep near that balance by strength of numbers rather than by the kind of qualitative and insightful reasoning made possible by hearing both persons' needs.)

In my Enneagram type nine ways, I would occasionally agree to keeping some boundary that seemed like a prudent concession (don't kiss someone else on the mouth without bringing it up with her first -- or reassuring her that the likelihood of reconnecting with my former sweetie would impossibly lead somewhere where the topic of sexuality might come up) more out of compassion and, from the conviction about it just not being currently plausible and postponing it until that kind of question was non-academic, than from being anywhere near my own truth. It was one of those postponed de-academized talks I had foreseen, yesterday, which took a different, rather more shocking turn, instead.

On that note, don't comfort me -- she is the person in need of all that support; my shock rather just displaced my actions towards a larger propensity for untimely actions, like settling details about my HAI 2 registration with the HAI office and a gender balance, when she needed support, or when it was dinner time at the Halloween choir loft gathering we went to. (When in disarray and grasping for something constructive at all to do -- my picks typically tend towards bad timing. Luckily, the bringing up the negotiations I had anticipated, did not come up among those really bad picks; that subject got sort of moot when separation was the topic of the day.)

Those morning musings went still one step deeper to finding what underlying fundamental was not in place between us from the get-go and never slipped into place during the relationship either, much due to neither of us (I think) really figuring it out. Unsyncronized expectations.

A concept I might describe as the failure to communicate needs where both understand what is being talked about, and agreements are met consciously and deliberately around them, so that expectations line up for both of us, or at least don't clash. Sadly, my own focus was mostly on not having any ungrounded expectations of my own and did not factor in much setting and unsetting of or adjusting expectations of hers to match me, besides some attempts to describe how I work and don't, and that I couldn't take part in the kind of future tripping I think comes more naturally for her.

The reason this writing sounds very me centric, by the way, is that it's something I am still in a somewhat early stage of practicing; my intrinsic mode of behaviour is more centered around taking in my surroundings, and creating a place within those constraints for myself to thrive in, without really changing them. I am still practicing that editing the constraints part rather than taking them for the pre-set constants they are not (in healthy relationships) and the language that comes up around it stems more from the effort and young clumsiness. I'm working with finding a balanced level of embracing myself, needs, wants and dreams, and figuring out how to make others win, too, in that equation (it wouldn't be rewarding at all for me if I didn't end up in win-win territory). I am convinced I won't go far in that under circumstances where I don't reach my own voice.

I have that voice right now, again, though, so proceeding from here is a very constructive step forwards, for myself at least. I don't find bridges burning around me on any fronts, but will not mind being out of the equation for a while, or longer, if and while Kim is working on things of her own, where I am more distraction and caustic than helpful. I do know my cope with complexity runs low really quickly.

Relationship advice

2009-10-28T09:39:17Z

Oddly sleepless, after a 12 hour work day after another short night before it, I at least get to take some delight in reading another good essay that (in its own way) describes how startup school is really relationship school, in many ways.

I can relate particularly to the following segment (my emphasis and footnote inlining -- VC standing for Venture Capitalist, and, here, has the function of being a kind of relationship candidate):

VCs themselves have no idea of the extent to which the startups they like are the ones that are best at selling themselves to VCs. [6] This is the same phenomenon you see with defense contractors or fashion brands. The dumber the customers, the more effort you expend on the process of selling things to them rather than making the things you sell.]

This is one of my most loud and clear experiences with relationship formation. Relationships where you don't (perceive that you) have to work hard to make your relationship prospect understand what is that wonderful thing about you, and what makes your prospective relationship very mutually rewarding -- those are the ones that tend towards being really worthwhile pursuing. Relationships grown out of a hard, maybe prolonged chase, whether you them or they you, tend towards not working out as well. You either don't grok each other or do but have incompatible incentives, or are moving in different directions, et cetera. Those that read and see and hear you speak the same language and have your kind of world view, so your message carries over, and it is as apparent to you as it is to them how great it is to team up with each other, and see the potential value there. Those that don't are rarely the kind of material you want. Also, it's an illusion that it took no work connecting -- it took no feat for you, because all that which you are, whatever that amounts to. You took years to get there. Which makes you ahead of whatever competition out there. Be proud of it!

I kind of wish someone had imparted that wisdom on me when I was, say, eighteen; I think it might have helped comfort me in value building, instead of getting saddened by not achieving much traction, those few years that went into steadily envisioning more wonderful things I wanted someone I loved to find in me for them. The means of shining brightly for inner qualities just get better with the internet.

I have since reworked many of the beliefs I built back then (many of whom in turn only quite recently) about what it means to be there for my loved ones, from taking ownership of difficult things, to being near and being available, listening, reflecting, mirroring and offering help and comfort if requested, verbally or non-verbally (I believe I speak non-verbal far better than I speak verbal).

A lot also is, quite simply, showing what I want and need, even while there is processing going on for them, shining through, rather than retreating completely from the stage. That part is really difficult for me still, and I tend towards only doing it non-verbally still, as best I take note of it myself. I think showing up is key, whichever side of it you're at. In the past, I would always disappear. I am practicing this a lot right now, as both of my closest relationships here are working through large, difficult emotions, that kind of touch me, but mostly don't.

And I am slowly starting to see where I am far more help not engaging emotionally in their process but staying a bit at a distance and offering a shoulder rather than shouldering. It feels a bit like being a man. A rather becoming mind set. Women can do it too, to equal effect, showing up as mothers. These things fascinate.

Real-time mirroring

2009-10-27T08:25:17Z

People don't often surprise me, because I don't often have very set or fractally deep and precise expectations about the particular outcomes of things, and because I am really giving attention to them and not to the unfolding of their story within the framework of my expectations. Which means that questions about how something differed from my expectations tend towards being a really moot line of questioning for me, that I need to remold into some kind of question about whatever I did find in something, which usually I don't know much about until I have put it to practice, or seen another manifestation of it in some other context.

More often than not, I only come up with answers that stem from my truth days later; on the spot, in an environment that isn't in my alignment (like Mark Group's communications games), I can at best blabber a bit and maybe happen upon something by chance. As for interesting digging questions like what elements of Sweden I would like to see in the US, or what kind of erotica I like, good astute answers arrive much later.

A: deliberate design taking auditory ergonomics into profound consideration, and regulations about how food is controlled and sold under what names (a word like "meatballs" is a technical term that is required to have a well defined minimum amount of meat content, for instance, whereas Krusty's clown balls is not).

B: erotica made by women. An inclusive definition, of course; I would enjoy erotica made by me too, but when I find something I really like, chances are very good there was a woman behind it, not just depicted in it. Latest such encounter was Pleasure Bonbon, a story unfolding in the city of Bonbon, where there is no tangible element of sin, where giving in to pleasure is the norm and where there is a flourishing ethical economy where female sex workers are held in high esteem, and indeed drive the whole economy, being the foundation of the society. It has lots of well crafted ideas and is beautifully drawn, in a style befitting the name. Its sexuality is tasty in that most tangibly sense-enticing way; you really want to hear, feel, smell, taste and touch it, too, not just see it, and it isn't coupled with any distasteful power structures, revenge games, degradation, insecurity panderings or unmutualities either. In short: it's good, fun, loving, present, inspiring and respectful. Fabulous, quite literally.

But let me get back to where I started, because yesterday I got really, really surprised when I reconnected with my former flat mate and sweetie. I was assuming her to be essentially where she had been last we parted ways, but worn down to the hilt, to the state of almost falling to pieces if there wasn't a very calm, warm, loving and well known, pre-established container to help hold her together and maintain growth and healing space for her. Rarely have I extrapolated less correctly -- though I would have had to guess very optimistically indeed to come up with what had transpired and transformed within her, because the formerly so accentuated trait of not being in a safe zone with touch, even with me, was now nowhere to be seen.

In its place was instead the person I knew in depth, working in touch space pretty much as myself. The girl I once met that did not turn completely immobilized with the flow of soothing endorfins at her first encounter with a full body rub, but which managed to reciprocate a bit, that first night, now unconsciously mirroring me just because it felt good and came instinctively. I knew I loved the sound of mutual mirroring when I first read about Teri reading about it in David Rico's "How to be an adult in relationships", but I had kind of expected to have to work hard to get there about doing it in touch space, with mandatory lead-ins of growing into the practice and skill set of making verbal well-formed requests first. Those aren't my fortes yet; asking verbally and requesting my 100% are both still really difficult for me independently, and harder still together. Most of my communication is non-verbal. To the extent I expound on it, I discover my deeper wishes and dreams through exploratory writing, as here, or in a kind of mutually developed dialogical thinking aloud together whose finer mechanics I don't quite understand -- but which flows with her.

It is very similar to exploratory writing in that there are no set goals or outcomes, but a continuous honing in on truth and precision about things, and that even the deepest connected of topics can be touched without a matching charge -- the exploration doesn't get clouded by emotional sentiment about it. I think. Or if it does, I think both parties are so secure about themselves and the other and knowing that the setting is excellent for opening up about those feelings, bursting into tears and hugging tight, facing them more together than alone -- mutuality and sharing in process, in session, inlined without delay. As I said, I'm not sure here. I feel a bit half-brained about not being able to instantly bee-hive about it to hone it in further.

That thinking together deal is something we had pretty much from the start, once we got past our initial shynesses (I think mine might have seemed hidden at the time, but I am not sure -- I was probably too fully absorbed with enjoying her enjoying her bakalava to give it much leverage). We jumped to all sorts of conclusions about having found a mate for life over it because of the immense augmentation of ourselves it was to have our language, thinking and emotional comfort zones mirrored in real time; it took a while to figure out that while that part is amazing and a preciously rare find, we were crashing heavily into each other in other ways that were really destructive, and both had growth and healing to do elsewhere and apart. To copy her sentiment, I don't fault us much for the oversight -- we weren't even aware of those blind spots and conflicting needs, or their roots, at the time, and we were in limerence.

It is a deeply fulfilling thing to have going, that thinking in concert, and the mirroring in touch none the less. I don't know more about the future than usual, but I am sure that hers has a strong side of musicality in it and that neither of us want to live without the kind of container and meeting point of minds that we create and uphold together. And I'm curious, as always.

Graham Flour

2009-10-25T18:24:38Z

Graham Flour ^[1] is good for you! Google and my long lost friend Sereno Edwards Todd, saving the human repository of knowledge, one document at a time. This post brought to you courtesy of Kim's awesome graham scones.

Phrenological Journal — The Science of Health — On Hygienic Principles [July, 1881.]

Boundaries

2009-10-22T08:55:38Z

I once lived in a student dorm which also featured a girl that had a most awesome combination of self distance, extraversion, sour wit and light cynicism that factored together into what technically has to be called whining, but which was always very delightful to witness. She was called Maria, and I had a serious crush on her, so feel free to discount for that, or take my word for the awesomeness of it. Anyway, we'd often end up spending dreary autumn evenings in the social room sofa by the kitchen, her winding away on endless little rants that would lovingly bash her general progress at life, in underhand screwed understatements that clearly spelled out what she really meant in the subtext.

Being a bit of an introvert, I especially loved those evenings, as they bountifully met my social needs in a way that I didn't even have to drive myself. I might interject something here or there -- add a word she was looking for, drop an occasional question at her, slip in a lightly teasing remark somewhere or just banter a bit, when in the mood for it, and she'd always roll with it. The atmosphere was always light and replenishing, maybe in part because she never needed or sought anything from me that ever cost me anything, nor request anything in particular for her graces. It was just a mutually pleasant atmosphere, that wasn't complicated. Maybe it would have been for some, with unrequited attraction, but it wasn't for me. I think I was far into the mindset of being happy making the most within whatever constraints I found in life, and particularly in relationships, and, admittedly, was working hard at not asking my 100%.

I haven't quite turned that ship yet, but figured out that I want and ought to, over time and as I get more familiar with it and secure, I guess, in that practice. I have long horizons in that kind of growth, and no immediacy of hurry. When encountering particularly growth conducive settings, I spurt, particularly corrosive ditto, I stick with standard etched-in operating procedure -- maximizing effect and potential within the constraints of really complex systems is my forte. It's what I do for a living and what I intrinsically do in all sorts of contexts and environments.

For a while, I created particularly many deep friendship-style witnessing/touch oriented relations with girls I liked, while I was approaching awareness of the greater world of polyamoury. I was building mutually emotionally fulfilling ethical uncommitted relationships within a monogamous framework. It was great, if typically asexual; only a few of those girls that were most into me, sexuality and/or forward and adult enough not to assume that dynamics would sour up with a second layer of sexuality would ever venture beyond that, and I never pushed the envelope more than showing that I much preferred whatever kind of atmosphere where they felt loved, seen, heard, cherished, in control, and where touch/cuddling/massage was a part in that.

I haven't done much or any of that over here, really; it has been more back to a kind of serial monogamy, of sorts, though I presently am in a polyamorous relationship. I struck "committed" from that sentence more for not quite having words to describe the particular committments than because it is skanky, communication-failure withholds-based "mock" polyamoury. It's definitely continuously reasoned and mutually evaluated rather than a vows-based self-delusional house of cards of impossible-to-make unconditional promises. What I'm pondering is if I'm having any codependencies in my own stance. I have a gut feeling I do, as I have been bad at checking in with myself when others express needs, historically.

The first tendency of mine has always been to slow down whatever competing interests of mine I might have to a halt, and operate in a world with one more constraint, making the most of this new, smaller world, instead. It's just always been a subconscious reaction, not conscious choice (except on the level of conflict avoidance, which I think lies at the bottom of this) -- and that has started to ring as codependence, probably since about Saturday's David Rico talk about mindfullness and being an adult in relationships.

It's entirely possible I should try to identify and make an inventory of all these little feelings and constraints tugging on me. I can feel my mind wanting to slip away from the exercise with the feeling of admitting unflattering sides of my loved ones, and entirely disowning them. In some contexts I'm told I am already good at this, but in others, I would not rate myself as highly; I am still bad at subjecting others to forced growth or confrontation with issues involving needs or wants of my own. Even to the degree of starting to ponder about and draw the map of them myself. My mind reels at it, which honestly feels a little embarrassing. I know better than that, I just don't act it yet.

HAI is kind of like an excursion from that mind set. For controlled, scheduled periods of time, at specific locations and in a luxorous pre-made container environment of someone else's making: free all-I-can-eat grazing in the kind of connected emotional and tactile meeting place where heart, body and appreciation among lots of people meet up, and then it's back to a state of the disconnected dispassionate normalcy again with everybody except my sweetie, with whom I can read bedtime children's books, kiss, cuddle, sex, snooze, sleep and spend a lot of natural organic time with. I think that's me catering to a large set of needs and likely fears I may have guessed or plain honed in on nonverbally. It is well meant, but quite probably sub-ideal methodology.

There may be more astute words than codependence; self-sacrificial might be one. And I am rather sure that I'm not doing it because my partner wants me to do it for her, deep down, or if it is high up, perhaps. I'm quite convinced of the opposite, in fact, and that part is the most uplifting and wondrous part of this relationship. It has awesome ethics. I have just been rather slow on the pick-up about confronting my decades of practice in taken for granted and as is constraints based systems. Rather amusingly, this is stuff that is coming up for me when readin Gödel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid, on my daily commute to work, on formal systems, axioms, theorems and the like.

And it applies so well to so much emotional matter too -- what the implications and emergence of another new axiom added to a system is, for instance. It became crystal clear the other night what added royal fail to a very close friend's family life -- a lack of enforcement of accountability, multiplied by a lifetime and some severe maniacal tendencies equals a horribly unsafe set of living conditions. Seeing a similar past in another close friend of mine raised another interested eyebrow yesternight. And right now, I'm placing my own mother in the lack of accountability trap, too. Fortunate for me, she rather ran away from her problems and isolated herself from as much as she could (astonishingly without dying somewhere down the line), than wreak any physical or psychological havoc on anyone else; she just modeled a lot of behaviours not to copy, showing very paedagogically why, so I wouldn't be tempted following.

I think it'll be nice to see my former flat mate again soon. I may have reverted to mainly tracking her ups and downs when the chaos of her life was playing out here daily, but there was something about witnessing and sharing her processing and intellectual exploring that turbo charged parts of my brain in a way that I like. I just don't know yet if I have rigorous enough boundaries to handle that kind of living situation again. I kind of wish I do. But whether or not, I think there are things I need to do for myself. Pace making my own life rather than chasing along others' is probably on top.

Mission / Vision Statements

2009-10-11T14:02:56Z

I just woke up from a dream where an esteemed hacker friend or colleague of mine asked me, on a very abstract plane, if it's okay to ask others about their mission and/or vision statements. I responded that not only is it okay, but a really good thing to do.

I think the sub text of the query, somewhat back handed as it were, was one or many of: the assumption that it wakes people up to (potentially) realizing that they are straying far off their paths, if they have one, or that the query prompts existential crisis about not thinking or having thought about that kind of thing, or that prompting people to might berob the world of a few of its most successful or useful people in the present who are deeply flowing with what they do and in that sort of dormant state affecting huge productive change on the world, in the field of their expertise and passion. And in our common (tech) geekly niche, that subject may or may not be in the realm of personally important enough foci to show up on people's inner compass, should they stop to think about it.

So I'd say the concern behind the question was whether the cue might drain that world of some of its best brains, maybe into refocusing on themselves, or their families, tribes or the other things in their lives that are important to them.

As a sort of background there: our community recently lost _why the lucky stiff -- a delightfully eccentric, whimsical and productive artist, visionary, teacher and programmer, quite likely to child rearing (my guess), in a showy magician's self-disintegration trick, wiping out his persona and work alike, in, I'd say, an effort to show the world that he would not come back to anything he'd formerly been part of. Other things I think he might have foreseen and intended in that move being that our world should and would go on just fine wirhout him, that the net would mend itself, reviving the works he had done that people still cared for (books, tools, tutorials, even languages and environments, little morcels of wisdom, et cetera), that this would also effectively disband those of his works that nobody had cared enough about to recognize the loss of (also burying things his contemporaries were not ready for yet, admittedly) in a sort of pruning of the bad, leaving the good.

And finally, I'd say, as a practical hands-on demonstration of how much can be lost to the whims of individual people or organizations that sit on sole ownership or control of things you care for, if you let them, and that culture is better in a commons environment where it's resilient against that kind of threat. Do you have backups of your mail? If you lost your X, could you recover from it? If you opt in to recent "buy the limited right to personally consume, not the artifact itself" schemes like e-books like Amazon's Kindle, the many sorts of media in Apple's iTunes store (movies, TV shows, iPhone applications, audio books, music -- of which all but the last are still sold and served encumbered with digital restrictions management, so have today can be gone tomorrow outside of your own will and control), and so on.

And being a dream, I would also say it was me asking candidly whether I should or might wake myself up to the same kind of effect. Naturally, I woke up pondering visions and missions in my life and to what extent and in what niches I'm pursuing them, or want to be, and would, in the future.

I'd say my statements, to the extent I have them, revolve around "helping you do more, learn more and be more", with qualifiers such as "at less effort", "without losing context or focus", "despite structures that formerly confined you not to" and "because you can, and want to".

I think I'll save for a future post going into them more, though. If you have any, what are yours? As you can see from mine, they needn't be crystal clear formulations like Google's "organizing the world's information".

Food

2009-10-09T09:44:31Z

I have been thinking more about food over the past few days, as the various feeds I consume have brought the subject to attention in interesting and profound ways. This morning, I saw a TED talk by Carolyn Steel about how food shapes our cities, describing how cities and life evolved around food sources and innovations in technology and distribution, and how easily the anonymization of cooking and feeding us on the one hand, and the dissociation between food and value, on the other, happens as a byproduct.

If we find the problem of feeding a city largely solved, how do you feed a nation? I started reading Plan B 4.0 from Earth Policy Institute the other day, and as it turns out, this is becoming a growing concern for many countries, large and small, that depend on importing grain (as cars have started to run on bio fuels, cropland turns into desert, paved roads and parkings, water tables fall and multiple other factors contribute to limited supply and rising world market prices of staple foods). Interestingly, buying or leasing arable land to farm in other countries is becoming increasingly common. Ominously, the countries giving up land this way are typically countries already incapable of sustaining their current population. Tellingly, several governments that have attempted this and been found out, have already been overthrown by citizens revolting.

Zooming back in to the micro-resolution of my own life, I have become increasingly apathetic about cooking over the past year since I moved here. That saddens me a little. My cooking habits did not quite make the culture switch. I am blessed with wonderful cooking of Kim's, though, when we see each other, which I delight in a lot, but it feels wrong on lots of levels not participating much in the process. It's not a kind of gender role I really like, but it is difficult to fight comfort, when generously offered without even being brought up as some chore to be negotiated. (When I think about that on a conscious level, that feels like some time warp pocket relic of the fifties, that could have been from my grandparents' life.)

Which, I guess, has become my own main perception about it -- work. The only passion I can muster for cooking these days is doing it as a social activity with dear friends, at which time I really do enjoy the creative process, company and result alike. And the rest of the time... ...I eat out a lot. I'd love to have more role models for and host more home cooking.

But food focus keeps getting a very low priority, second to a lot of activity and schedule driven things that I'm figuring out (very slowly) how to fit in or expel from my life without, I'm hoping, depleting my inner introvert.

People are beautiful

2009-10-03T02:41:22Z

The more HAI experience I get, the easier I find it to see how beautiful people in general are naked, without actually having seen them in a state of undress.

I don't find that particularly surprising in retrospect, but it was not something I had anticipated. A sort of nakedness vision has developed autonomously, to which clothing merely changes flavour of a body to something artificial, to some varying degree.

It took me a bit by surprise today, noticing so much beauty at the strictly geek tech conference I was at. I'd be even more surprised if more than a fraction knew how good they look.

A rather different kind of beauty struck me as I left the venue on foot an hour before sunset, heading for first a bite of dinner and thereafter a few hours of work at my startup, for a pitch we're delivering Monday. Somewhat tired feet, but a generally happy feeling inside, as it's somewhat artistic creative work, rather than high-complexity or grunt work. And the sunset lighting the first leg of the journey was yet another calming, beautiful companion.

I'm so glad to be among people that have recultivated themselves to delight in the freedom from clothing. It's difficult to convey the relaxed delight of it to someone that hasn't tried in some environment that has normalized it, or maybe it's more difficult to know how well I manage to convey it to someone with decades of behind-walls-of-fabric conditioning still in place. Do I come off like a strange recent convert of some cheesy cult? 1.5-way communication is tricky for that kind of line of inquiry.

Oops; I forgot

2009-09-28T08:52:52Z

It of course takes two and a half hours to walk home the ten kilometers (6.7 miles) from the office, not one and a half. At least it's night time and pleasantly cool, though; this would be insane during California daylight hours. And far less beautiful.

Life version two

2009-09-26T07:55:14Z

I have been busy growing a lot lately, in all the right ways, and been really happy about both what I have started seeking, what discoveries respond, what I have started asking for, the responses to that, and things that I no longer seek. It is also quite spectacular to be part of the greater HAI community, and partake in workshops, support groups and community nights where the magic atmosphere of vulnerability, trust, openness, presence, loving, tenderness, touch and intimacy is created, not through my sole expertise and over very drawn-out periods of time at great effort and patience investment with a single person at a time, starting from scratch every time, but rather created around us, like an area of effect spell, among mages, all speaking the same languages; the listening, respect, authenticity, sharing, welcoming, surrender and more -- asking to be replenished, gently and delightedly receiving something I'd agree to call communion, more from an interested culturally but not faithfully Christian. I delight in every moment of it, and more, the more it puts me in that state of emotional flow where I get to weave feelings of being seen, heard, loved and cherished in people I deeply appreciate and feel connection with. If anything, it's sweetened by the fact that we can share that without first erecting the container of a relationship to bless and validate the appropriacy of that connection. I very deeply feel at home in this environment.

It redefines a more humanworthy framework of normalcy that sets the real me free, from having to create it within the confines of a twisted, contorted, repressed, battere, and often downright abusive set of expectations and perceptions about how things are, work and are supposed to. It's like life, version two; the refactored version almost rewritten from scratch, with all the bugs from version one shaken out and left behind. It's difficult to describe the joy and sheer delight I felt, the other night, tracing caresses and love across the entire body of a woman in her forties or beyond, I believe, in that stunningly beautiful interplay between giving, receiving and sharing tenderness and appreciation. The instant responses, little moans of bliss and presence, as I freely paint love, body to body, within REAL, freshly communicated boundaries, amounting more to freedoms, requests and wants, than something that feels like confining shackles. This is how it's done. This is how I want you to love me, this is the level of closeness I invite you to bask in with me, sharing yourself any which way you feel inclined to, within my state of openness towards you. An atmosphere of maximizing trust and love to create optimal wonderful feelings and settings, rather than one of fear and burning scars, set up first and foremost to minimize harm, and second to find pleasure or connection through.

I think I had accepted that people in fear were the building blocks I had to work with and that it would always be like that, despite not being native there myself and having had at least two great little relationships where the defining trait really was a love, trust and confidently knowing security foundation was in place. I'm blessed to at the very least be allowed and encouraged to feel that way in a third one right now, and built on a polyamorous frame to boot, though I can't say for sure that this security is mirrored yet.

It can be a bit tricky not to attempt tracing that fact back to things about myself or my conduct that could be optimized to clear that hurdle for her, too, but whether true to some extent ornot, I have decided not to even try owning that myself, and to let her communicate requests and needs in the delightful HAI inspired way she is coaching me. It's all very rewarding work for me, and I'd be surprised if it isn't for her, too.

I don't seem quite fit for growing new additional well connected connections beside her, judging by the rather zero to a hundred approach in minimal time's outcomes, so far, but I don't terribly mind, and it might help her to have a lower pace of really just us, for now. My kind of hello takes a rather strong, confident and brainy person to go anywhere, and apart from her, my former girlfriend and a close to heart Asian friend, I haven't made lasting friendships or loves over here yet.

But I no doubt will, at some point, and in the mean time, it's a fantastic life I'm leading. My own part of it is both very free and uncomplicated. I've got a November to look forward to with HAI levels two and three (most likely, at least, assuming I get a gender balance for each, but between my HAI 1 buddy and Kim I have been promised entry to both -- so I'm not too worried about missing it).

A weekendful of more of the same lies ahead. I knew, a year ago, back in Sweden that my growth had ground to something of a halt, and that I most likely would start sprouting again over here. I couldn't have been more right.

Emotional wealth

2009-09-11T07:08:44Z

My sweetie is having a really bad cold, and we decided together to stay apart for a week or so, so I wouldn't pick it up just in time for Lupin community night next weekend. I'm also a bit curious about if the sudden drop in time together will collapse my inner balance into touch and connection starvation or if I'll stay happily afloat and emotionally affluent, and so far it is looking rather promising.

It was a bit difficult making that choice, but it's a difficulty I'm glad to get to practice: things that feel like or amount to saying no to someone else (that I love and care a lot about, no less). I haven't done a lot of that, and have lots of rather counter-free-choice conditioning saying that men (specifically) that make selfish decisions are jerks or parasites. The land of guilt and double standards (I much prefer sin and double entendre) also happily praises women making the exact same decisions for themselves as strong, confident and independent. So I'm going for being a strong, confident woman here. :-) Give or take a character here or there. I feel blessed to get to practice with someone I admire so much and can adopt as role model a lot for myself. I also feel I, too, am modeling a little for myself; a slightly recursive feeling.

And, as always, I'm reading good essays by Paul Graham, as they pop out of his mind. In recent time, I'm finding that everything he writes about startups and creating wealth strongly feels like it applies pretty much hands down to relationships and quality of life. Amusingly, I think that has been a big draw for me in what he writes for a long time without me realizing it -- I have never been particularly interested in companies, business and economics, but when Paul writes about them, it has always been fascinating. And I think it is because he writes about the realm of startups, founders and creating value, and not of huge, slow-moving bureaucratic beasts of ingrown corporate culture, where ideas go to slowly wither away and die.

It has been especially interesting reading about what makes a good founder, and what to look for in a peer yoy might opt to do a startup with. And I'm bemused by the sudden realization that bridged the gap for me in figuring out why I felt a certain warm camaraderie with serial startup founders that have spawned several healthy companies that just keep on thriving, some amazingly successful and well known. Think polyamoury, tribe, growth promoting lasting institutions.

My love has never been a slow-moving rigorous bureaucracy full of fix procedure, heavy process and inertia. It has always been quick, nimble, unafraid, unconventional and moving in some odd direction, built on some surprising foundation, exploring and often overcoming some constraint or constraints, while also being very grounded in the present, and in the nature and ambitions of the people involved. My first relationship began as a line in a web server log file, where a visitor to my online diary at the time came stumbling in from another online diary, of some woman that had read it and found herself fascinated to encounter someone thinking and feeling like herself. My current relationship more or less started with a naked hug in a hot pool full of equally naked people in a back yard in San Leandro. It's still growing in all sorts of interesting ways and directions, and there are no fix, hard coded constants anywhere protected from scrutiny or discussion.

Many of the old institutions are really firmly specified and not up for any kind of challenging or discussion. I think the idea is to protect their inhabitants from making bad decisions for the company, as perceived by the outside world, by stock holders, the press, and the like, rather than for supporting employees' goals, well-being, freedoms and vulnerabilities. It's doing it the wrong way, from my point of view. I want to create value in a company that cares only about the well-being of its employees -- and about sharing the wealth they create liberally with the rest of the world, where there is a surplus or where it costs nothing to let it spread virally.

The wealth creation is indeed most of what it is all about, and the personal investment and the payoff are linked to all sorts of little interesting things like what kind of company abstractions and supporting properties are in place, what kinds of hours we work, amounts of vacation, concepts like 20% time projects to work on favourite pet projects that might grow into something the company embraces, and on and on it goes.

I'm not convinced I am startup founder material in the strict business sense of the word (though I technically happen to be one), but I am fairly convinced I am a tender and caring gardener when it comes to the relationships I partake in. I wonder if I do best as a founder, an angel investor, a venture capitalist or otherwise. I'm not yet quite sure what all these map to in my analogy, but I am sure they would vitalize the territory if we opt to create the corresponding roles in love and relationships.

And I note again that my brain kicks into high gear when I find myself with sudden bouts of completely me time. I don't yet have any notion of how I enter and leave that space or how much time to set aside for myself, when and how, but I think I'll be learning more about my needs, now that I have a healthy environment enticing me to get in touch with them.

I love my life and my loved ones. Expect more ponderings along the lines of this.

Me space

2009-09-06T09:06:02Z

The flow of discovery about myself is still strong, after the passing of HAI level 1; there are things about myself and the people I have tended to gravitate towards that I am getting a richer perspective on now.

I have, for at least the better part of the past two decades, been an introvert, and I have enjoyed having friends and loved ones who either are not, or who light up conversations with me about all sorts of things -- that is a setting I feel very at home and familiar in, whereas opening and holding conversations entirely of my own is more foreign territory.

I am slowly changing that, but it goes a little against the grain, as I haven't thought of myself as taking up or wanting to take up a lot of space. When I got myself into relationships where there was no space at all for me or my growth I could tell I wasn't happy and needed more nourishment, time and freedom, but I don't think I understood that I needed the other person to hold more space for me and hear my needs too. I certainly did very little of asserting them, maybe less still knowing or relating them in spoken language.

I had the good fortune, skill and/or presence of mind to pick a wekend buddy at HAI that was exactly the kind of person I have had the easiest to connect to and bond with in the past without contorting myself -- a very verbal and outspoken woman that thrives on touch, is far more sexually oriented or experienced (and unshy) than myself (=radiates, on all frequencies, an uncharged normalcy, or indeed a confident joy about sexuality, happily blabbering on and on about it like coffee table material), and that reads me well enough to have no shread of fear about me.

All of that instantly dispelled the kind of fear driven atmosphere that largely was what I left Sweden to get away from -- and that more than anything else was blocking my growth. It was everywhere, and I just drew more of it, after having (grudgingly and putting up a, measly, fight about it) internalized that it was MY responsibility to manage other people's fears about myself, or men, or being intruded upon, et cetera. A very unhealthy and misconstrued effect of the angle of attack of Swedish internal propaganda about men oppressing women. Very scapegoat oriented, aimed at men in general, and not at oppressive behaviour.

I think a vulnerable mind earlily fed a lot of that can be forgiven for adopting a lot of guilt-by-default about just being a man, and embarking on a difficult quest of creating a maledom that did not partake in that whole game seemed the only way to go. I hate oppression, no less for having felt oppressed by that kind of scripture most of my adult life. In Sweden it just isn't at all about religion, but a sort of mock Feminist movement, one vocal black strand among the many warm, gentle, feminine ones, if I'd venture picking an apt word myself. There is nothing loving and constructive about fighting oppression with oppression, but it's a common story throughout history. I am very glad to be out of its reach.

Anyway, connecting with this woman was great, because she helped keep me centered all weekend long bybeing firmly in my comfort zone of touch connection, and for doing lots of talking, in ways I was used to. It let me focus more of my own energy towards all the growth exercises and less towards managing myself, starvation and the like. I felt very abundant all weekend long, part thanks to her, part thanks to my sweetie back home, that holds lots of space for me, is unafraid of touch and does an exceptional job of owning and managing her own negative emotional responses.

Much of the time, as exercises left us a slot of time to share our reactions with each other, I didn't fill much of my time. I have started to grow there, though, and it's delightful to see for myself that I have that space and am being welcomed to occupy it. I still need a little pull now and then, but largely I am getting there. In the past, I have been more about helping and cheerion on others to get there, without having anyone coach myself. And now I think I have that; maybe several.

I have probably had lots of them all along, but I haven't known to seek them out and request their help getting there -- much for not having figured out that was where I wanted and needed to go. Now I know.

But I still don't really know how to create for myself the kind of cuddle connected talking atmosphere for me-centric geeking out about growth and above topics, and returning to reality a few hours later to realize it's high time for a meal or two we might have missed. Maybe I'll know more after HAI level 2.

Open

2009-09-02T09:46:01Z

The valves open ever wider and the flow grows stronger, richer and more abundant. There is plenty of affirmation, affection, attention, acceptance, acknowledgment and allowing in my love life, nourishment to grow in and so much to attempt, adopt, advance and augment all around I'm all A:s, acing about. Much mutual mimicry manifested too, I think. And there is more to pass around where that came from, and more to receive from my many inputs still.

HAI level one was fantastic. The same weekend, while I was happily off net for some continuous sixtysome hours (probably hasn't happened for close to a year before that, at the very least), Apple released its snow leopard in the wild (I caught one on University Avenue this morning, on my way to work), and it's essentially a love letter to developers, and an apparently already successful attempt at symbiosis with non-Apple players in advancing the state of making the most of current and future computer hardware.

Just before the weekend, I closed an onerous long chapter of badly needed rearchitectural work at work, and by lunch I polished off a straggler left behind from it, and since then everything has been whooshing by; my mind has been set free from the tar pits I have struggled in for a good while, and the todos that were looming numerous have been struck down one by one at lavinous speeds.

Over the next few days or weeks, there are several additional HAI events planted on a schedule I neither have to maintain or do much work of my own to meet, which I am figuratively but not literally indebted to missk for -- she happily supports and extends my least well developed capacities, including me in events that meet our mutual interest and passion.

I'll also be connecting with two renowned geek peers for a lunch and state of our field and future kind of brain storming / coorientation, that I hope and believe will do the web at large some good, over the next year or so. Bonus fun in getting to see the google campus, at long last.

After a whole weekend soak in expressions of love, openness and trust nurturing, my mind is racing along all sorts of lines of where the same can be applied in other contexts too; how it resituates to other domains; what it could or would look like in sexuality -- and connecting new dots with what I experienced at Harbin / HAI.

The only little stain I can think of at the moment in all of that was some few additional data points about the correlation of great looks and history of sexual abuse. On the flipside, though, I can't help wondering if the causality might not partially be the counter-intuitive one: a drive to put down some disproportionate amount of energy and compulsion into looking just positively astounding, perhaps so as to be treated as more precious?

Another realization, from yesternight: while an intrinsically polyamorous event as a matter of practice, with the complete lack of giving it any such name, the many relationship wise monogamously inclined did not shy away in fear. Relationship anarchic triumphs in practice. :-)

Buying Shoes

2009-08-25T18:15:13Z

I recently had my first US shoes-buying experience. My taste in shoes is simplistic: light, no flair, and good foot support. I don't seem to share that with the typical US male. Options on offer focused, predominantly, on bulky, extravagant, and good insecure-ego support.

Fortunately, a slight step outside of the box saved the day, as it turns out that my taste is better matched with buyer category stereotype two, which the store also catered to: women. As luck has it, female feet are much like male feet, only attached to people of better taste.

And, much to my surprize, don't seem to have much by way of insecure-ego support either, even for female scares -- if anything, actually, quite the opposite. I'm used to being a size 42. In European, evidence-based sizes based solely on foot morphology. Over here, that translated to size nine. But only in the men's section. In the female section, I'm a size eleven. If anything, I would have thought that gender forking metrics would offer females, living in a climate where it is considered more feminine having small feet, the comfort of deflated numbers, so fewer customers would be triggered about going two-digit foot size. Not so, apparently.

Maybe it's another one of the many facets of our ill-wrought society that treats men with compassion (in commercial contexts) and women with shackles (of insecurity, guilt, fear and shame), perpetuating past roles and structures for future generations.

At least I got a pair of shoes that could have carried an Apple logo of elegance through functional minimalism.

Create

2009-08-20T08:53:20Z

Whatever your medium, never stop creating.

This could have been another eulogy for _why, who withdrew from the world today. It won't. I think he has changed medium from gardening the minds of strangers and nourishing the web and ruby communities to having green loving fingers with a young mind of his own lineage. We can all but guess; he always had excellent boundaries around his real-world identity.

As I part with loneliness as connection grows stronger and the presence of my sweetie grows into more of a natural part of how my world is configured, I start to thirst more for getting back into my creativity. I have very poor data about how that part of me works, though; all I can tell well is things that block it.

Channeling love and creativity with great abandon while not triggering fears of scarcity of time together may prove an interesting problem. I know I have a lot to learn already about how not to get stuck in uncreative places, and how to unstick. How do you do?