Settling in
2008-02-23 02:29 -
It’s amazing to me that four weeks have already flown by since I started working at Google, and six since I moved to the Bay Area. I’m enjoying my job more than I could possibly describe – there’s just so much amazing stuff to take in, and at the same time so many interesting projects available for me to work on. I can’t discuss specifically what I do, but I will say that the concept of Site Reliability Engineering definitely matches with what I enjoy doing the most – exercising all of my skills to contribute to keeping services up and running with extremely high availability and performance. The people I work with are awesome, and I greatly enjoy the atmosphere of transparency and trust at the company.
A friend of mine commented that she felt a great deal of encouragement that many of the people whose blogs she followed when she was at the cusp of deciding whether to start her transition eventually disappeared, or stopped posting regularly since they’d managed to attain a ‘normal’, comfortable life – that there was in fact light at the end of the tunnel. I definitely see my pattern of writing approaching that point quite rapidly – there are fewer and fewer trans-specific things that are even noteworthy and worth writing about at this point in time. Except for occasional notes about anniversaries and general progress checkpoints on how I’m recovering, I think that I’m going to start devoting more of my writing to the main section of the blog rather than the personal subsection in which I keep everything which may not be suitable for all audiences. That being said, the amount of energy I have available to devote to blogging is lower than it’s been in the past, so don’t hold your breath.
So, on that note, I should probably say how I’m doing with recovery now that I’m nearing the 9-month mark. Things are going fairly smoothly at this point – I’m on a regular, once-a-day dilation regimen. My schedule pretty much has me waking up at 6:30, popping 500mg of Tylenol, having the dilator in by 7:00, undilating at 8:40, running out the door by 8:46, and making the 8:50 bus to start my commute. Although I definitely am looking forward to one day stepping back to once every other day, that time is not now, and probably won’t be for another few months at least. All in all, I think that I can finally say that I’m running at 100% – it’s an annoying timesink to maintain, but I’m finally entirely healed. My depth has held pretty steady at 4” considering all of the various irregularities that I I’ve experienced over the past week.
I caught one of the various wandering plagues that’s been circulating at the Googleplex just in time for my trip down to Caltech over the long weekend to visit people and stay in touch – I started sneezing excessively on Thursday, flew down on Friday, woke up slightly ill Saturday morning, and spent Sunday miserable. I was dizzy, felt filthy and nearly passed out while showering, and collapsed straight into bed where I spent the whole day. Monday went a little better, and one of my friends brought chicken soup; I ended up feeling well enough for a group outing to Cafe Avanti in the north Lake Ave. area before my flight home early Tuesday morning. Needless to say, I didn’t get much consistent dilation done over that weekend, but aside from a few painful reminders the next session, no permanent harm was done. However, I’m still fighting off a hacking cough and copious quantities of phlegm that are mucking with my voice, but such is life; I was well enough to hop off the airplane and put in a full 4-day week without needing to take time off. Assuming I take the weekend easy, I should be able to be at 100% by Monday.
My social life seems to be a lot more varied than it’s been in the past. Google has a weekly games night that I attend if I can arrange transportation home (since it ends long after the last shuttle leaves); I get together once a week after work with a group of friends for dinner and chat/play board games/watch movies afterwards. Twice a month, I spend time at the DeFrank Center in San Jose to see friends who are various degrees along the trans spectrum and meet new faces – it’s a great resource for discussing issues, sharing information (especially about healthcare providers, etc.), and finding peer support.
On the weekends (and the occasional weeknight if I have the energy), I’ve continued to play World of Warcraft. The guild I’m in is progressing reasonably well (we recently completed our first run through Gruul’s Lair, clearing it completely with only three wipes) and I’m getting a good deal of loot from Karazhan. The loot fairies must have smiled upon me, as I received six items in the course of three runs, with four of them in a single run. The guild has a rather nice gender balance, with a female guildmaster and at least half a dozen women out of about two dozen active high-end players.
The interesting challenge I face with the guild as a rogue is the fact that I refuse on philosophical/playstyle grounds to farm player vs. player content for gear that I’ll be using primarily for raiding, and also the fact that I do not wish to change my talent spec into a “cookie cutter” combat dagger spec, but want to keep a mutilate-based build. I think I can meet all of the goals through good choices and intelligent playing, but we’ll have to see what happens over my next few raids. There recently was a bit of conflict in the guild as to raid leadership style. My personal style, at least when it comes to running 5-man instances, is to prefer leading by consensus-building whenever possible, and to provide quick explanation and post-facto opportunity for discussion if decisions need to be made quickly by an individual. That being said, I’m not averse to participating where leadership is tightly concentrated and the situation more authoritarian; I just personally believe that it is less effective overall. Ender’s Game is a classic example – Ender succeeded by training all of his team to think independently, to assess tactical strategy, and to adapt, instead of relying upon instruction to come from the top and marching in lockstep. Every raid member brings to the table not only his/her character/equipment, but also his/her own brain, and that failing to leverage that resource is a waste.
Violet Blue (warning: definitely NSFW unless your work is cool) came and gave a talk at Google recently about the nonsense of abstinence-only sex education as part of an ongoing series on her perspectives on sex education. She was a fascinating speaker; I recently had time to go and page through the links and informational tidbits on her website, and am impressed by the breadth and depth of the resources she’s written and collected. I may very well decide to take BART up to Berkeley and check out Good Vibrations (nsfw. duh.) at some point in the next month or two. While I’m mentioning bloggers I like, I probably should give a shout out to Pam’s House Blend and to Feministing which are on my daily (and sometimes more frequent) list of things to read.
On the subject of feminist stuff, go girl bloggers! – the main challenge, however, is going to be getting more women to enter technical fields during college and beyond. There’s only so much outreach that can be done – individual young women have to take initiative and pursue their dreams instead of becoming discouraged by the various barriers standing in their way. It’s even harder in the case of a field such as site reliability or systems administration which is multidisciplinary and requires many skills that are difficult to obtain from formal classes and must be self-taught. It’s one reason that I’m very proud of the fact that UGCS and the other Student Computing Consortium member clusters exist and provide a hands-on volunteer opportunity for interested students to gain hands-on experience. How can this concept be extended to other colleges? How can age/skill-appropriate opportunities be created for middle school/high school students to inspire curiosity and provide resources to explore it?
That’s more or less what I’ve been up to recently. No thanks to insomnia and coughing my lungs out for bringing you this 4am ~1400 word essay. Good night :)
