Random Traffic Through Nick's Brain

Last Job

So, I’ve been feeling bad / torn about my decision to leave my last job… until an IM conversation with an ex-coworker.

ExCW: Hey, you could have stayed here!
Nick: Yeah... I could have... I was very torn... but also feeling very
      burned by project... I didn't feel confident that I wouldn't
      get sucked back into it...
ExCW: I can confidently say you would have

Shape

Signed up at the Y. Got the tour yesterday. Let’s see how long this sticks. It’s fascinating how, even though I’m out of shape and Dina’s been going to the gym for a year, that I can easily lift at least twice as much with my arms.

Blog Down

Paranoid Fish is down. Wow. I can’t imagine losing that much work. To top it off, it was an awesome CSS / HTML blog and I needed an article on the site.

Use The Force Cash Register

In Dunkin’ Donuts. Buying coffee. Cost: $5.48. I give the cashier $21. He punches $20 into the register, puts the $20 in the cash, leaves the $1 on the counter in front of him. Then he becomes confused for about 30 seconds, trying to figure out how much change to give me. I’m thankful that I have the brain I have, and that I have the friends I have.

Stoicism

Danced a C2 * tip. I got a stern yelling at in the first sequence, when I was doing something right

for a change. I confirmed that I did it right the 1^st time the 2^nd time we did the sequence. Anyway… I got flustered for the rest of the tip, and then people were constantly yelling at me to fix myself. Oops! I need to learn how not to lose my composure when dancing Challenge.

Ouch

I’ve been trying to avoid mentioning this, but, unfortunately, it’s too painful not to. I’m subjecting myself to immunotherapy for my allergies. This means one shot per week per arm of substances that drive me nuts when inhaled, forget injected. So please, please, please, try not to poke, tap, scritch, or otherwise touch my upper arms for a few months.

Update: 2005-02-15: So far, 3 people have hit my shoulders, a couple violently. All have read this entry or knew about the immunotherapy. It has been suggested I wear a little sign. I’d prefer plate mail. I don’t hold it against them. They were friendly signs of affection (or annoyance at me, but who can tell the difference), and I don’t expect people to remember. Sometimes I don’t, and hurt myself. Oops.

I actually thought the needles would be the hard part of this… apparently, it’s not… it’s the itchiness, tenderness, and allergy symptoms that go with it… weird… Next step: Look at the needle as they’re giving me the injection.

Car

Car’s in the body shop again (person who hit us in the parking lot was nice enough to leave contact info, thank you). We got a mid-size car. <grumble /> Apparently, I like small cars. I want my compact back.

Good Listener

Somehow this week, Dina got promoted to someone who calms people down for my family, as my dad’s two siblings were in the hospital.

It’s Not Tax Season Yet

I tend not to like funerals. I normally attempt to visit people in person beforehand when possible. On the upside, I get to see them and be with them. On the downside, one of the problems with a family spread all over is that we generally see each other at weddings and funerals, so missing funerals means missing family. When one can’t visit people in person beforehand… whether because of sudden death, or because the person isn’t lucid… well… that just sucks.

I’ve already mentioned this article about Geek Social Fallacies.

Points #1 (Ostracizers Are Evil), #4 (Friendship Is Transitive), and #5 (Friends Do Everything Together) have come up a bit lately. One person expressed dismay that they weren’t invited to Dina’s Birthday celebration this weekend. Another cautioned me against inviting them dinner in someone else’s presence because said 3rd party might be hurt by not being invited.

Time for a meta-pause here, I guess. I don’t know why I’m blogging about this. I suspect it’s partly because I want to figure out why this is OK with me, partly to be able to deal with it when it happens to me, and partly to explain myself to others.

The second meta-pause is to note that I’ve been sitting on this topic for about a week, and still haven’t figured out how to verbalize it to my satisfaction. I figure that I should just write it and see where that takes me. I’m willing to clarify in comments / email / IM / conversations. Social / group dynamics is a topic that I like, and barely understand, so I enjoy discussing it.

We do things. We invite people. We don’t always invite everyone. There are reasons for this. Not all of them are good. Not all of them are kind. Not all of them are reasonable. We are the way we are, though, we’re open to constructive criticism.

One of the main reasons is time. There isn’t enough of it. Scarcity brings about the dreaded social ostracizer, prioritization.

A secondary time restraint is that inviting everyone means that we need to cater to everyone’s schedule. Time spent dealing with communication and infrastructure increases and becomes unmanageable.

Related to time, is, of course, space. Some venues, and socialization activities, lend themselves to small gatherings. Sure, we could only choose group friendly activities, but that cuts out a whole swath of things we’d like to do. A good example of this is pumpkin carving. We generally invite a core set of people, people who’ve expressed interest in the activity, and then some other people who we think might enjoy it. At a certain point though, our apartment is only so big.

Related to space is space in the social fabric of the group we’re bringing together. Sometimes people don’t get along. If it’s something important, like a wedding, we invite them, and they just deal. Sometimes, there’s nothing that can be done, and we see the people separately. Sometimes, someone irritates the whole social group we’re gathering, so, considering the greater good, we pass, and see them some other time.

I guess appropriateness comes next. We’re not going to invite a teetotaler to our filter-cheap-vodka-through-our-new-Brita party, nor are we going to invite people who make wise-cracks when I say that football has an interesting intellectual component to it (and might I note, that square-dancers shouldn’t throw stones…) to our Monday Night Football party. Nor will we invite someone who uses the word geek in a derogatory fashion to our gaming night (if we even hang out with them at all…). And shrinking palettes won’t be present at our surface-of-the-sun-spicy cooking night… and harking back to a previous point, neither will some people with adventurous palettes, since a dinner party for more than about 6 or 8 people at our current apartment just doesn’t fit… not to mention how taxing it is on Dina…

Last, sometimes it just doesn’t work. We’re a couple. This means that for things we do together, both of us have to like you, or, at the very least, one of us has to like you and the other not dislike you. If you’re a couple, well, it usually means that we have to like you and your SO, or some non-neutral combination of like and not-dislike.

Yeah… doesn’t sound all that warm and fuzzy… sounds downright cold in some ways… Having been on the receiving end of all of these reasons, it feels downright cold too… Maybe I’m wrong in thinking that this is just the way life is sometimes… I’m open to opinions to the contrary.

Last, I use the word “we” a lot here, but these are really just my thoughts on how things work…

We have mice. Again. Least we’ve seen them, and we haven’t noticed them eating anything… yet.

First, it was a calendar. Then it’s appearing in various places on the internet. Now, a company, Luna Imaging kindly asked permission to use our image for their promotional material. They sent me some copies of the oversized postcards they used. Flattery will get you everywhere.

We paid about $50 for the use of the ants from a photo stock agency for royalty free use.

Would you allow us to use your image? There are other free images out there but we like yours just a bit more.

I left squares because I wasn’t feeling up to dancing. To add insult to injury, as I’m walking down the steps at MIT, I slip on a patch of ice cartoon style. My feet go flying forward out from under me, and I land on my back, hitting the small of my back on one step, my head on another, and hurting both my hands / arms in an attempt to break my fall.

I called for the new C1 class on Monday. All in all, pretty good. Here’s an abridged version of my synopsis.

Just to keep fellow callers apprised of what was taught, and noting down some things, since this is a learning experience for me too.

My goals were:

a) To survive.

Accomplished.

b) Have some danceable sequences.

Accomplished. As much as I think that drilling is important, they need to dance to get their blood running from time to time and give their brain a break. I had a few flow and traffic patterns issues, but fewer than I expected to have. Mind you, I couldn’t call a good Turn & Deal to save my life.

c) Cover problematic Advanced.

Accomplished. I think there are still problematic calls, but the class is much better than they were last week. I called Mini Busy, Split Transfer, All 8 / All 4 Couples, Motivate, Chain Reaction (from many odd formations), Checkmate, Scoot And Weave, and similar calls a lot. I didn’t cover all of Advanced though. I pushed them a bit and did things from weird positions to shake brains into thinking more like (what I think of) as challenge dancing. Coordinate from 3 & 1 lines was fun. I didn’t call enough Turn & Deals. I didn’t call enough Trade Circulates. I didn’t call enough Crossover Circulates. I think most of the rust has been shaken off. What remains are actual issues that need to be fixed, or will resolve themselves with time and practice. I can go over what I perceive these issues to be if you want, but this message is already too long.

d) Drill last week’s calls.

Mostly Accomplished. I must have called ~40-50 (or more) Tally Hos, from a lot of different positions, including the one that gets you into Triple Boxes, lines facing out, lines facing in, 2-faced lines, waves, etc. I didn’t call it from generalized columns though. Some parts are getting into both memory and muscle memory.

I called about ~30-40 Counter Rotates from a lot of places. Pretty much every form of generalized parallel lines and tidal setups. Twin diamonds. Hourglasses. The formation you get when you call Acey Deucy 1.5. Most forms of generalized columns. Is. I didn’t call any Counter Rotate and roll yet. One thing I should have done that I didn’t was say “I’m going to call a Counter Rotate. Point to where you’re going to go.” I think some people just start the call without thinking about what they’re doing. This is good if they’re right, but sometimes they’re wrong. I accidentally called Split Counter Rotate from tidal lines with everyone (in their 1/2 of the set) facing the same direction. Oops. They were confused enough that I was able to hit the Undo call quickly. I guess I could have done Quadruple boxes, but I figured I shouldn’t melt their brains with 3 more tips to go.

I didn’t do enough Ah So’s. Only about 20 of them. I didn’t do enough teaching of getting the schleppee to fix things if the shlepper goes astray, or freezes. But I did do some, and a bunch of double Ah So’s from tidals.

e) Teach.

Mostly Accomplished. I called and drilled a lot of Dixie Sashays, including a few All 8 Dixie Sashay. I think they’re pretty solid on the execution of the call.

I called a bunch of Triple Box stuff. Mostly starting from Parallelograms. I called a couple starting from parallel waves though. I was quite happy with my Triple Box Box Transfer call. They had surprisingly few problems with it. The next person to call may want to do more interesting things with Triple Boxes. People complained that I wasn’t pushing them hard enough on these calls.

I taught Cross Roll To A Wave slightly badly. I called it from the ‘wrong’ position initially. Oops. But they have the basics of it. They will need a lot of drilling on it in the future. Both it, and Switch To A Wave/Line are still shaky.

Calling Notes To Self:

• Not resolving except for pre-written sequences works well for *me*. Telling people to square up when broken instead of trying to figure out where they go, or calling to fix them, works for me. I think I get to drill a lot more problematic calls that way instead of little calls. It seems to save a *lot* of time for me.
• Though, my sight calling was actually surprisingly decent by my standards yesterday. When I needed to drill something, I rarely had to say “Make Lines”… I could normally get them where I wanted to with one or two quick calls (Runs, Trades, Trade The Wave, U-Turn Back, Tags, etc.), which takes about the same time as the confusion of telling them to make an arbitrary formation takes, without frying the brain. The calls to get there may have been a bit monotonous, but it worked.
• Learn to deal with ‘weird’ columns (calls, getting out of).
• Learn to deal with 3 & 1 lines (calls, getting into).
• Learn to deal with inverted lines (calls, getting into).
• Find more ‘tricks’. People were getting tired of Tag The Line.
  • Tag The Line, {Face {In|Out|Left|Right}, Zig Zag}
  • 1/2 Tag The Line
  • Columns: Trade & Roll
  • Switch Handedness: Trade The Wave. U-Turn Back.
  • Runs are my friend. I just need to figure out how to use them better.
• Watch out for flow.
• Watch out for traffic patterns.
• I think differently about dancing in some ways. Handedness and other things like that don’t register with me. I don’t really notice which part I’m getting. So I don’t pay attention to that in my calling. I think this is a good thing, but I need to remember that if I’m calling something problematic, I need to watch closely to make sure they get it right.
• I can only focus on 1/2 of the square for now. So, make sure to have people look for their opposites. They don’t have to remember their corners though =]
• I need to watch my enunciation.
• I need to find a pace for my call delivery. I was mostly happy with it, but I think I can call a bit faster and a bit smoother. But when I push it, I overload people. Best to err on the side of caution for now.
• How much should I say things like “Foo, U-Turn Back.”, “Bar & Baz, Trade”, “Qux, other direction.” etc. to fix people once they’ve done the call. I’m not sure. I think it depends on everyone’s learning style and the class. This class doesn’t seem too sensitive to being named explicitly (I’ve been told some people don’t like that).
• SD is an awesome tool. On the other hand, the interface is frustrating.
• Doing stuff that’s odd, can be fun. From a squared set, Sides Single Wheel, Zig Zag worked. On the other hand, I think I’ve called enough “From a Squared Set, Get To 1/4 Tag, Chain Reaction” calls.
• Having both a learner and an experienced dancer read the sequences was very helpful.
• Os, Butterflies, Make Magic, Magic Columns are all useful tools I wish I had this week.