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For new readers

2007-06-25 20:42 -

This section of my blog is about my personal life rather than my professional work in software development and systems administration.

This section was formerly dedicated to my experiences as a transwoman and my SRS with Dr. Suporn in June 2007; however, it’s since become substantially broader and I don’t feel comfortable labeling it as a ‘trans’ blog any more – it’s simply what’s at the tip of my tongue these days.

If you want to start from the beginning, A Personal Note (May 1, 2007) is a good place to begin.

She listens like spring and talks like June

2008-04-18 07:44 -

The past few days have felt like summer – the weather is gorgeous, and spending time outside is awesome. I’ve been swimming a couple of times in my apartment complex’s pool already. My apartment is feeling more and more like home.

I’m amazed by the amount of change that’s happened over the past month since my last blog post – not only have the seasons been turning quickly, but also things that I thought would take months or years to come ended up transpiring in the blink of an eye.

My friend, coworker, and next door neighbor “R” has become much more than that. We’re an inseparably close-knit couple now. “R” and I first met in July right after my return to the Bay Area, and it’s as if we’ve been dating since I moved here in January through hanging out together at gatherings of our mutual friends. We’re perfect for each other in so many ways, and I feel elated and giddy whenever I’m around her. We’ve also met a few awesome people lately including “S” and started going out and being social a lot more often.

The DeFrank transwomens’ support group seems to be a trainwreck in motion, derailed by the presence of a few arrogant individuals. I’m planning on implementing exponential backoff and retry with regard to the group in the hope that the situation improves. In short: a newcomer to the group, “D”, appeared two meetings ago accompanied by the director of the center in order to promote her new book. Cue an hour and a half of paternalistic lecturing and domineering from a self-purported “expert” rather than simply women around the table exchanging stories and advice as equals. I’m going to hold back the harsh words I would have to say other than that I don’t feel as if stories of older transitioners are really the stories that need most to be told – younger transitioners still are denied a voice. This needs to change. I finally finished reading Julia Serano’s Whipping GIrl a few days ago. I regret not having read it sooner – it sums up in a nutshell the motivations of transphobia and cissexual privilege and lays them bare to scrutiny; it highlights what’s wrong with all of the media portrayals of transwomen.

I’ve reclaimed virtually all of my life back from dilation. Only needing one hour every 48 hours is an amazing luxury – the contrast between the amount of wasted time now (~2% of my time) and this fall (20% of my time) is pretty staggering.

I’ve also started cutting back on my World of Warcraft playtime in an effort to have a greater ratio of fun to time spent. My guild has pseudo-merged with another guild, and we’re now tackling SSC and TK (2/6 in SSC at the moment!); Mag and Gruul are on farm now. It’s nice to be able to only spend maybe 4 hours a week raiding and yet make a lot of progress and experience new content.

Work has been definitely getting more and more interesting, as well. Without going into too much detail, I’ve been spotting various things that have slipped through the cracks, and as a result am starting a project to audit the processes my group uses. I’ve assumed leadership of the software tools project to which I was first assigned to when I arrived. My 20% project is making steady progress, although it’s still very much in the planning stages. I served my first week oncall recently – in short, I’ve found my place at Google and am no longer a Noogler.

Last Saturday perhaps marked a turning point in my relationship with my family. It started with an invitation on Wednesday from a fellow gaygler to come up to San Francisco for the APIQWTC Lunar New Year Banquet since she had extra seats at her table. “R” and I said yes. We left about an hour early, because I’d realized that my grandparents’ house was along the way to the banquet, and I wanted to drop in and say hi since I hadn’t seen them in over two and a half years. As it turns out, my parents were there too helping my grandparents set up their new DSL connection. It was a really wonderful afternoon, and “R” got to meet my family for the first time. My grandfather slipped pronouns/names a lot, but my grandmother was spot-on with the pronouns and “R” and her got along fabulously. My dad seems to be doing quite well. Unfortunately, my family’s dog died a few weeks ago, so I’ll never get a chance to see him again :(. My only regret is that my mom was busy dealing with the support techs on the phone and didn’t come out of the computer room to say hello at all, but I think that I’ve finally started on the road to having my family back. The banquet went amazingly too – “R” got to experience a full Chinese banquet for the first time, and we chatted with many interesting people.

What next? I’ll be working from Cambridge, MA next week (flying out tomorrow), and then attending ROFLCon on April 25-26. The Puzzle Pirates gathering in Dallas is still on for May 16-May 18. And I will be making it to Pasadena for Ditch Day, but Ditch Day’s unpredictability means working in Santa Monica on non-Ditch Days during my stay in Southern CA.

I’m expecting the next few months to pass in the blink of an eye – time flies when you’re having fun, and the past few weeks have been no exception.

P.S. one of the most funny experiences I’ve had since my move was going to urgent care for an UTI. I told the doctor that I’d recently had vaginoplasty when she asked whether I’d had any surgeries – she continued right on, “we’ll take your sample and check whether bacteria are present, as well as making sure you’re not pregnant”. “R” and I looked at each other, sealed our lips, and waited for her to leave the room, then burst out hysterically laughing.

Words? [2]

View from the top

2008-03-12 02:42 -

It’s been two months since I moved to the Bay Area on a permanent basis, nine months since my SRS, and six weeks since I started working at Google. I’m roughly at the point where my life is becoming stable, productive, and completely happy (albeit with a few small hiccups). I occasionally get in an introspective mood and read old journal entries or forum posts of mine – the contrast is pretty visible to me. Transition was truly magical for me. To the psychologist who claimed 3 years ago that I was confused, “transition is a simple, shortsighted solution to a set of more complicated issues [she] needs to discuss and work out”, and that “surgery won’t solve the problems… [there are] indications that [she] will be just as unhappy after SRS” – you were so incredibly wrong. Thank you for making my life so much harder when I least needed to be hurt.

My work at Google is immensely fulfilling – I don’t regret my decision to leave Caltech for a single moment. I love the fact that I can throw myself entirely into tackling problems or designing new infrastructure for hours on end (and get paid for it, instead of paying for the privilege of turning in set after set…). Although people here are a little bit less off the wall than Techers, I can imagine most of the people around me being grown up versions of Techers – very witty and smart, but quite not as crazy :). Real Genius was mentioned at lunch a few days ago, and led into an enjoyable retelling of my stories about Hell Ride, Ditch Day, and the tunnels. And of course, there are quite a few Techers that are out as Googlers, including Niniane (who was among the people who encouraged me to join Google) and Dan (who happens to be also a former UGCS sysadmin).

Unfortunately, I lost my Sidekick last Friday while waiting for the shuttle to work. I have to heap copious amounts of praise upon the team at Danger for their platform – although replacing my phone Monday wasn’t pleasant for my pocketbook, it was amazing to have my new phone magically recover every single setting, contact, and application within 15 minutes and for me to rest assured that my old phone had been effectively bricked and the data erased from local storage. It let me more or less get on seamlessly with my digitally-obsessed life (the weekend was an immense pain without a consistent connection to the internet).

Dilation is interfering with my life less and less – I’m down now to 2 or fewer hours once every 36 hours and have occasionally done every 48 hours without too much pain. I can finally make plans to stay out late and sleep in without worrying about my chores. I recently acquired a small plastic vibrator that’s about the same shape as the small dilator that I use but much shorter (so it’ll stay in without being held by hand in addition to its other advantages). I can actually be more productive during dilation time and am no longer confined to bed with useless hands.

I owe a hat tip to my father for co-authoring an amicus brief before the California Supreme Court in favor of gay marriage. Thank you, Papa. I love you.

World of Warcraft is also going fairly decently, although I’ve mostly been signing on only during scheduled raids recently. In addition to my current commute’s drain upon my energy, I’ve found that using my brain the whole day at work means I need a lot more time at home to spend quietly reading instead of taking on challenges in WoW. Amitié has been consistently running Karazhan with 3 separate groups, and clearing Gruul’s Lair. Unfortunately, only one or two of the Kara groups each week has been managing a full instance clear within a single night (~5-6 hours in one stretch), but hopefully people will have better attendance and gear/skill in the near future to make things run more smoothly. My character is now geared almost entirely in epics and has 3 pieces of her Tier 4 set. I’ve had a great deal of success with my unorthodox talent spec – I’ve been occasionally topping the DPS charts and am always in the top half now. I’d say that my grinding over winter break has gotten me to the place I wanted to be – at the same level as others in my raid groups and keeping up with a very modest time commitment each week.

This Saturday, I’m moving to Santa Clara and joining a friend at her apartment complex – we won’t be sharing the same apartment, but we’ll be just down the hall from each other and able to hang out spontaneously on weekends/evenings and carpool to work together. It’ll be really nice to be on a flexible 15-minute commute rather than my current fixed-departure 75 minute commute (the latter has wireless, but that doesn’t offset the suck of being in limbo between work and home). The rent is rather eye-popping, but worth it for the better balance between work and life I’ll have. I definitely should have enough room for people to come and visit as well as possibly subletting space over the summer if anyone’s doing an internship in Silicon Valley.

My next big non-work project (well, aside from completing the move and getting my 2007 taxes done) is to plan my travel for the next few months. I was planning on going skiing in Bear Valley with a number of Caltech alums this weekend, but the apartment move is going to have to preempt skiing unfortunately. I’m contemplating going to ROFLCon in Cambridge, MA on April 25-26; however, they’re down to the last 100 spots and I’m still on the fence (if I can work that week in Boston, logistics become a lot simpler). I’m definitely attending the unofficial Puzzle Pirates gathering in Dallas on May 16-May 18 to say hi to some old faces from that community. And yes, frosh, I will be popping down to Tech for Associates’ Tea and/or Ditch Day, assuming that Tomorrow doesn’t conflict with any other obligations of mine (psst, if a friendly senior reads this, please drop me a note so I can book my tickets – I won’t peep a word).

The main issue I’m struggling with is the reality that some of my friends aren’t having a smooth ride at the moment. Unfortunately, there’s very little that I can do aside from listening if someone needs to share, and offering comforting hugs. The powerlessness is what is frustrating for me – I find myself periodically reminding myself of this XKCD comic. Everyone’s path is different. Does the walker choose the path or the path choose the walker?

Anyhow… that’s pretty much my current state. It is now officially waaay past my bedtime as I have to be out the door in about 5 hours, but I tend to keep writing once I get started…

Words?

Settling in

2008-02-23 03:29 -

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 :)

Words?

Breaking radio silence

2008-02-08 06:57 -

I’ve been up to a lot of things over the past two months since my last update that I haven’t been able to discuss publicly until the whole process was over.

Everything has settled down now, so I can finally write about everywhere I’ve been recently.

As I alluded to earlier, I went through the job interview process with two high-profile companies recently – Google and Facebook. I ended up choosing to go to Google, and started there two weeks ago. This does mean that I’ve left Three Rings, unfortunately. I’m missing working with everyone – Puzzle Pirates has one of the most incredible playerbases and development/support teams out there, and it’s been a privilege being a part of it.

I had a rather refreshing break in December which allowed me to regain a good deal of my strength. I got to spend time with family and with Nora and Amber over the holidays in the Midwest.

I withdrew from Caltech the Friday before second term started, and spent the first week of second term packing all my things and getting paperwork out of the way. The next two weeks were mostly playing games, blowing off steam, and sorting out all the final logistics for starting.

Dilation is now thankfully reliably under 2 hours, and sometimes 1.5 hours or less. It’s getting a lot more manageable now for me to interleave into a work schedule. Fortunately, there’s a bus line that takes me right from my place to the shuttle, so the commute is less hectic than it could be. That, and the shuttle has wireless!

Google is a truly amazing place to work, and I feel very much at home and productive. I definitely think that I made the right decision to leave Caltech and spend some time in the ‘real world’.

I’ll be visiting Southern CA a week from now for President’s Day weekend. Ping me if you’re interested in meeting up.

Words? [1]

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes...

2007-12-13 22:20 -

Trigger warnings: depression/bipolar, unexpected death, suicide

This has simultaneously been one of the best and worst days in my life. I cannot say anything in detail about the good parts at this point in time, so instead, I’ll write a bit about the more sobering bits in order to get them off my mind.

I’ve been having problems concentrating for the entire day. A Caltech student from Ruddock unexpectedly collapsed and died early this morning; I learned of this immediately upon waking up. At the time, I decided that I should try to block everything associated with that unfortunate event out and to attempt focusing on studying for my Ph2a exam.

This didn’t really go particularly well, especially given that I was expecting a number of phone calls/e-mails and somewhat excited about them. It was very odd simultaneously struggling to repress triggers for depression while feeling giddy. The equations kept swimming and I couldn’t focus on making sure I understood all of the key ideas. At least I was late with my estrogen dose this week (forgot to get a refill) – otherwise, I’d be a /lot/ worse of an emotional wreck right now since estrogen dramatically increases the extent to which I feel highs and lows.

Around dinnertime, I went to the Blacker UCC meeting to discuss the death. We discussed ways that people might be coping or suppressing the event, and ways in which to provide emotional support. After the meeting, I went to Dabney and broke down a bit. All of the barriers I’d put up came tumbling down, and I felt incredibly guilty for having tried to ignore the death of someone in my community. I emotionally triggered a bit because of the fact that a little more than a year ago, Pavel, a fellow member of Dabney, committed suicide. I had broken down then too, because his death reminded me of the fragility of life, and of those I’d lost before – my fourth grade teacher Dan Meadows, and my cousin Roger. I’ve never quite come to complete closure for any of the deaths I’ve felt connected to. Who was I to try to be unaffected by one death, and yet affected by another? A human life is a human life. Regardless, I wasn’t the only one experiencing emotional trauma, and I spent a good deal of time crying as well as comforting others. Even though I know that it’s a perfectly normal response, it just seems so surreal to feel upset over the death of someone I never had a chance to meet, and never will meet.

Cousin Roger was the first person who introduced me to computer games – we played Dune II together when I had just acquired my first computer. He committed suicide as a senior in high school, but he set me along the path of loving to experiment with computer games and computers.

Mr. Meadows was my fourth grade class teacher. He was in so many ways a friend and mentor to me. Neither of us knew in how many ways I was different at the time, but he always took special care of me since I felt isolated from my peers – he knew about isolation, for he realized at a very young age that he was gay. It’s only long after his death that I realized how much of an ally he could have been, and how much he would be proud of me and supportive no matter how I identified. The person who took his life took a large part of mine, as well. Yet, I don’t feel any anger, only acceptance of what has passed and longing for an alternative future. Hate brings nothing but destruction.

Although I saw Pavel from time to time, he was a supersenior in Dabney when I was a sophomore and we never really got a chance to know each other well. I really regret not having stopped to take the time to get to know him, and perhaps to listen to him at a time when he may have wanted others to hear his anguish. It was his death that caused me to re-open all of the emotional wounds associated with losing loved ones, because they’d never truthfully healed properly.

Swaroop’s death wasn’t foreseeable or preventable – no amount of medical treatment would have saved him. So while I don’t feel a sense of deep regret, at the same time, this brings back all of the painful memories that I experienced last year around this time, especially with finals looming much like they did last year. Although I’m in a much more emotionally stable state now that I’m post-op, I’m still not sure that I have the ability to knuckle under and finish up this final. But I don’t want it following me around and taunting me like my unopened 2006 Ph2a final either. I may ask for an extension until Monday in order to give myself some time to clear my mind and put my thoughts back together, but avoid taking an I so that I won’t be saddled with another I->F fiasco. I think that my decision to leave Caltech is making much more sense to me – I do need to make a change in my life in order to regain my equilibrium and truly be happy.

To those who are departed from my family and close community, whether I knew you poorly or knew you well, may you rest in peace.

Words? [3]

Wow.

2007-12-11 03:03 -

No, not in the addicting computer game sense (capitalization matters), although the meme of Funny Farm has been spreading through both the Alcove and through Caltech…

I got back to campus after a very crazy day of interviews in the Bay Area. Suffice it to say, my brain was very systematically and thoroughly picked apart, and the limits of my knowledge were pushed. Five (yes, 5) technical interviews, thankfully punctuated by lunch, will do that to you. I won’t discuss any of the specifics of what I was asked because I believe in keeping my NDA’s, but I thought that in general that I did substantially better on networking, design, and high-level explanations compared to low-level UNIX semantics and syscalls. Thankfully, I was advised (reassured?) that my thought process mattered a lot more than my ability to immediately come up with the right answer, but I still definitely felt very nervous throughout the whole process. It’s over and done with though, and now I just need to wait to see what happens next…

This contrasted a good deal with the company I interviewed with last week where I was asked primarily algorithms questions and very little on systems administration, scripting, etc. even though I was interviewing for a similar role blending sysadmin and coding work. Interesting sides of the coin.

Overall, having interviewed with two aggressively-growing companies in Silicon Valley, I have to say that I like the way that we hire for technical roles at Three Rings a lot better – initial phone screen discussing previous projects, drilling down into details of those projects, paid code challenge to write mini-games using our toolkit, then final onsite interviews that seemed to me to be more about compatibility with the team rather than about grilling about ability to recall/figure out information on the fly. However, I recognize that Three Rings is a much smaller company, and growing much more slowly, so it can take the time to ask people to write sample code over the course of a week and to review the code, rather than trying for immediate answers.

We’ll see whether anything comes of the interviews. Depending upon how skittish the companies are regarding their NDA’s, I may at some point ask permission to think ‘out loud’ here about what factors are pulling me one way or another, as well as to actually identify the companies in question. Right now, were I to get an offer, and assuming the compensation were equal, I really don’t know what I’d choose – I see wonderful cultures at both companies and a great opportunity to learn as well as accomplishing something. I have a gut instinct, but I need to carefully think through everything as well as know what concrete things are on the table.

Changing topics to things that won’t draw the ire of legal departments, I had a rather alarming set of misadventures on my way back to Caltech. I got to the airport at 3:20, just after the 3:15 departure for LAX. My original flight was 7pm, so I tried to standby for the 4:05PM flight to LAX, only to be told that it was canceled and that I had the choice of switching to the 5:10 flight to LAX or the 5:40 flight to BUR. Except things went south from there – the 5:10 flight was facing increasing delays (first 10 minutes, then 20, then it became clear that it was already 5:35 and the flight before the LAX flight at that gate hadn’t even started boarding). After consulting Amtrak’s schedule from BUR to Union Station, I decided to cut my losses and switch to the flight to BUR. This was in retrospect a good decision, as we got into BUR at 6:35, the Amtrak train from BUR to Union Station departed at 7:05 (same cost as Flyaway and much more reliable, plus 1/5 of a free oneway intra-CA ticket on Amtrak), and I was at Caltech by 8:30.

There was just one wrinkle: while I was riding the Gold Line, a woman in her 40’s boarded the train and proceeded to yell obscenities at other passengers, demand from strangers to know where her parents and husband were, and demand that people light her cigarettes on the train. At one point, she shouted “she’s going to kill us all”, started demanding that the train stop this very instant so she could get off, and started kicking in the doors of the car and the door to the vacant operator area in the back of the train. At that point, I ended up calling the sheriff’s hotline because I had become concerned for my safety and her safety as well. Eventually, the train did come to a stop at a station where the doors opened on the side she was trying to ‘get out’, but it was a little bit hair-raising. I really wish that there would be better care for individuals who are having mental issues and are incapable of guarding their own safety…

DIlation’s been going a little bit better – 2-3 hours each day over the past few days. I think that if I try to be a little bit more regular about dilation, things should finally get down closer to 2 hours from now on.

I need to focus on physics from now until Friday. And making sure I have cellphone reception.

Words?

6 months postop

2007-12-08 00:54 -

It’s been the happiest 6 months of my life, even with all of the pain involved in the process. I read over my past half-year of blog posts and realized how much progress I’ve made. I like the person I see in the mirror and feel confident and comfortable in my own skin. I feel as if I’m living for the first time, instead of hiding. The next 6 months, and indeed, the rest of my life, are going to be even more wonderful.

On Thursday, Blacker won Interhouse swimming for the first time in at least 5 years. The women’s 200 medley relay team won, and I won the 50 breast (although I didn’t beat the record I set on Tuesday). I’m feeling less bad about the record since Justine, whom I swam with in high school, was only 0.2 seconds behind me in prelims (equivalent barely half of a stroke). Both of us beat the record, and it so happened that I was just a split second faster. The margin of victory was about 25 points. Blacker dinner went wild when we announced that we’d won. As soon as the amount of time I spend on dilation goes down, I think I want to start training again so that in a year and a half when I become eligible to compete officially, I’ll be able to attend Senior+ meets in Pacific Swimming.

Unfortunately, I missed the last waited dinner of term tonight due to a cooking class field trip tonight – there was lots of tasty Chinese food on the field trip, but I think I would have liked to be at dinner. I suppose I’ll have to say goodbye by e-mail. :(

Dilation’s been improving lately – I’m back at ~3 hours of dilation and the pain of insertion is truly getting much more minimal. Still nowhere near being able to finish dilation in 1.5 or 2 hours as I was over the summer, but much easier on my life. I think I might be able to give the medium dilator a good try when I have some spare time over winter break. Reading back over my old blog entries, the soreness after dilation I initially experienced is entirely gone, but I’m still having problems standing still in one place even 6 months post-op. Not as crippling and I don’t collapse immediately – I may just need to be persistent and keep pushing the limits of my strength there.

During dilation lately, I’ve taken to watching Torchwood in order to take my mind off things. I first watched an episode at Salia’s place last weekend, but I think that I’m now a big fan. While the writing is not at the same quality level as Firefly, I do have to mention that the exploration of bisexuality in mainstream Sci-Fi television is incredibly hot and I heartily approve of it.

Oh, lastly, winter break plans – I’m staying at Caltech until the 19th, then leaving for Tulsa to visit my cousin Bobbie, then returning to Caltech on January 3. I have no idea what start dates will end up being possible, but I’m hoping to finish up moving sometime around January 6, have a week to settle in, and to start working the week of January 13. It’s definitely going to be high time to start checking Craigslist for apartments and/or housemates as soon as I know where I’m working and what my budget is going to look like.

I’m going to bed early tonight and dilating in the morning to re-normalize my sleep schedule in preparation for the next few day’s events. That, and I need to work with diurnal people in order to get my ph2a finished.

Words?

Insanity

2007-12-05 20:11 -

The past three days have been quite a blur.

My interviews on Monday with $MEDIUM_SIZED_INTERNET_COMPANY went fairly well – I had four interviews and think that I did especially well on two of the four interviews, and did reasonably well on the other two. I’m cautiously optimistic (I will find out whether or not I’m getting an offer by early next week, more likely Friday-ish). I’m now pretty excited about them, and think that I’d fit in really well there; they have very good growth potential and wonderful benefits.

Yesterday was the prelims for Interhouse swimming. I swam the 50 breaststroke and the 100 IM. I ended up at 4th in the IM going into finals, and 1st in the breaststroke. I’m a bit conflicted about having broken the Interhouse record for the women’s 50 breaststroke, as the IOC rules require that one be two years postop prior to being able to compete; I’m only 6 months postop, and have been on hormones for only 15 months. To be fair, I did take 3 years off from swimming, so it’s not as if I inherited or continued to build up muscle mass under the influence of testosterone. I really doubt it’ll be an issue for anyone at Tech, but it’s more of a conscience issue.

Today was my phone interview with $LARGE_SIZED_INTERNET_COMPANY. I think I rocked out and gave a really good impression of the depth of my knowledge. Because of the possibility of an impending offer from the other company, I was invited to come on-site and interview on Monday. I’m really excited about this opportunity, and looking forward to having my thought processes picked apart in new and challenging ways.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get my Ph2a homework in on time because I’m still trying to understand the material. Bleh. Also, finals for Interhouse swimming tomorrow! Yay!

I need to formally break the news that I’m leaving at some point in the next few days during the last few house dinners. :(

Words? [1]

Butterflies

2007-12-02 19:24 -

Tomorrow, I have my second-round interviews with one of the Bay Area companies I mentioned earlier.

I have major butterflies in my stomach, because I have no idea about what’s going to be thrown at me. A number of friends spoke very highly of this company compared to the other company that I’m still in first-round interviews with (one friend already has accepted an offer there). I’m very excited and nervous. I just hope I don’t get skewered on algorithms questions, as theoretical CS is not my core strength.

The weekend was fairly relaxing – I escaped from Tech and spent the weekend with Salia in Sacramento, and am now headed down to Stanford to spend the night near Palo Alto so I can just pop over to Facebook downtown in the morning. We played Catan and various other games, watched TV, and ate tasty food. It’s truly wonderful to share cuddles and develop a close emotional bond instead of being isolated and alone.

I think that dilation time really heavily depends upon the quality of my bed, which might explain why dilation became much more difficult after I arrived at Caltech in October – I managed to get dilation done in under 3.5 hours today, which is much better than the 5-7 hours dilation’s been taking over the past week.

Unfortunately, I didn’t make very much time to work on physics, but I am going to have to crunch really hard on that to get the last problem set done and get ready for the final exam. Bleh.

In general, I think my mood has been significantly more upbeat whenever I’ve been away from Caltech, so I think I’m making the right decision to take leave. I’m tremendously excited for the future, although a lot of the details are still hazy. The other song I’m tempted to quote is from Wicked, but perhaps I shall save that for when I have more concrete information to write about.

Words? [1]

Breakaway

2007-11-26 10:19 -

My Thanksgiving holiday has been an absolutely insane, but fun, mess. After Thanksgiving with a colleague from Three Rings, I flew out to BWI to have a reunion with my friends from CTY and the Alcove in Silver Spring, MD. I loved seeing people from my years that I’d kept in touch with but never been able to re-visit in the 4 years since my nomore year, as well as meeting people from different years (both on the older and younger ends of the spectrum). CTY still has, by far, the niftiest people that I have ever met in my life. Caltech is still similar (hence why I fell in love with it when deciding on colleges), but seems a little bit more bland by comparison.

It turned out that Friday night happened to be a They Might Be Giants concert at the 9:30 club in Washington, D.C.; a bunch of people from the reunion were going and had extra tickets, so I went as well. My groin area really killed me for the standing up and bouncing up and down afterwards, but it was an awesome first concert experience, and the band rocked. I feel privileged to have heard them in person. Mmm, Birdhouse, The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas, and Istanbul .

Humza and his parents cooked delicious food for us during the reunion, and the house was filled with about a dozen awesome people. We played 1000 blank white cards, Egyptian ratscrew, (sadly no Scum: the Masquerade), and Taboo. Unfortunately, I had to dilate and missed out on a good deal of the fun, but still have no regrets whatsoever about having come out for the weekend.

Ken and I ended up dashing out the door at 9:50am this morning to make a 9:58 Washington Metro train, but it turns out that the red line was running late and we were all incredibly delayed. Fortunately, the airport shuttle bus was running every 20 minutes instead of every 40, so I made it to my gate with plenty of time to spare. Amazingly enough, I have not been held up a single time in security the past three flights I’ve taken – someone must have sent out a memo explaining what dilators are and demonstrating what they look like on the x-ray.

The BWI-LAS flight was very uneventful, and I managed to get a good deal of sleep as well as have some fascinating conversations with my seatmates (a pharmacist and a pilot not from Southwest). The interesting thing I’ve observed about Southwest’s new boarding procedures is that although I end up way farther back in the boarding order on average, the people ahead of me don’t necessarily care for the exit row seats I covet, so I end up getting my choice of good seats anyways. My initial skepticism is largely assuaged, and the new process is much faster because of the two-thread parallelization of lining up one side of the line while the other side boards.

I wasn’t able to book myself through to LAX using Rapid Rewards, and all the flights from LAS to LAX were oversold, so instead I planned on flying to Las Vegas and taking Megabus into Los Angeles for $43. Problem is, traffic was really bad (causing our bus to arrive late in Las Vegas, leave an hour late, and arrive somewhere around 3-4 hours late), but it was still better than the alternative of a night in Vegas or stuck on the East Coast given the number of errands around Caltech that needed to be done on Monday. The bus ended up pulling in around 1am, and I finally got home at 2.

On the plus side, I got to watch Flightplan on the bus. It was incredibly inspiring to see the strength, resourcefulness, and perseverance of Jodie Foster’s character. I want to both be able to take care of those I love, and to know that someone cares about me and will catch me when I stumble.

Switching gears, and on a more somber note:

I’ll spread my wings and I’ll learn how to fly
I’ll do what it takes til’ I touch the sky
And I’ll make a wish
Take a chance
Make a change
And break away

Out of the darkness and into the sun
But I won’t forget all the ones that I love
I’ll take a risk
Take a chance
Make a change
And break away

Though it’s not easy to tell you goodbye
I gotta take a risk
Take a chance
Make a change
And break away

Out of the darkness and into the sun
But I won’t forget the place I come from
I gotta take a risk
Take a chance
Make a change
And break away


-Kelly Clarkson, Breakaway

I spent this past weekend reflecting a good deal about what I want for myself and for my friends and for my future family.

It really pains me to choose ‘either or’. I love Caltech, in so many ways – everyone I’ve met at Caltech has been like family to me. However, Caltech feels academically very claustrophobic to me, and I don’t think that there is room for me to experience personal and professional growth.

In a way, I feel like a survivor. I’ve been treading water and trying to re-establish my physical and emotional equilibrium now that the crisis is over, but now I feel ready to emerge from the cocoon and reach for new heights. I want to be independent instead of dependent upon other people.

I am coming back to the Bay Area in early January. It’s time to start looking at logistics, and figure out where I’ll be living once I know where I’m working.

I’ll be back at Caltech from time to time (probably every month or so). I do mean it when I say that I will miss Caltech, and leave a large portion of my heart here. However, I can’t hold myself back. Opportunity only knocks once – I can’t sit and wait for exciting things to come my way, I need to actively pursue them myself.

Words?

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