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For new readers

2007-06-25 19:42 -

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.

Through hell and high water

2009-06-12 08:06 -

Exactly two years ago, I had my SRS in Thailand. It’s been a long, strange trip, but I’m ever much the stronger for it. I wouldn’t have survived without my friends. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I can only hope of being able to repay the debt I owe you some day.

Words?

Mega update

2009-04-28 06:23 -

Time flies. A TON of stuff has happened in the past 9 months since my last substantive post. Glancing backwards quickly, there’s Misty of course, who’s been my white furry little daughter for over three months and is the angel of my life. There’s reconnecting with my aunt “E” and my cousins in Boston over Christmas. There’s spending New Years’ with fellow Alcovians, over 5 and a half years after the intense three weeks that we bonded together at CTY. There’s been all kinds of craziness at work that seems to finally be settling down. There’s spending two weeks with “R” in Colorado in September/October and a long weekend with Nora in Iowa. Between all of that, I visited Caltech once in the fall to give a round table about women in computer science. There’s finally receiving my birth certificate in August. I visited Reuven and Alyssa in Portland in March and also got to meet with my WoW guildies. Misty, “R”, and I took a trip up to the Sierras a few weeks ago so Misty could romp in the snow and live some of her sled dog heritage. I also recently re-bleached and re-dyed my hair so it’s solid purple :D. I’m heading down to Caltech for Ditch Day any time now for Tomorrow – my stack is looking like it’ll be fantastic. Nora’s permanently joining me in Santa Clara in June, which will be all kinds of fantastic fun.

Here’s to another exciting, fun, and happy 9 months, and being too busy to update my blog. :)

PS: if anyone at Caltech spots a “College Preparatory School 2005” yearbook with a light blue “scrabble board” cover lying around Blacker or Dabney, please let me know as it belongs to me and I am missing it from my move 16 months ago. If any CPS alums have a 2005 yearbook, I’d greatly appreciate a scan of my yearbook page to have a copy of (or alternatively if someone could fetch me a copy off of Harley, that works too). I’m intending upon rifling through the Housing storage areas while I’m down there for ditch day (I’m also missing some other choice things such as a NEC LCD monitor and most of my book collection/papers), but if I happened to leave it in a room in the Houses or somesuch, the chance of my randomly encountering it is next to nil…

Trans-related footnote: every 7-9 days now, ~30 min each with small and medium to ~4.75”, pain-free and no perceptible depth loss since 6 months ago even with more relaxed schedule. Nearing the two year mark!!! Thank you, Dr. Suporn! Trans angst is now pretty much barely a memory for me these days.

Words?

Thoughts on school - advice?

2009-04-28 05:55 -

I’m trying to figure out what will work best for my future career growth and professional development with regard to education and would appreciate any thoughts that people have to share.

Background:

Options:
1. Do nothing at this time, don’t bother trying to finish the degree in the immediate future.
2. Return to Caltech and find a way of making part time school work with commuting to Santa Monica (assuming I can transfer to Santa Monica).
3. Transfer to something like Colorado Technical University/DeVry/University of Phoenix/Full Sail and finish via part-time distance education.
4. Better yet, I might be able to talk RIT into letting me do their part-time online applied arts and sciences degree with an engineering focus.
5. Transfer to SJ State and finish via attending classes part-time.
6. Transfer to a local top-tier school (Stanford or UCB) and endeavor to do my degree part-time if they’ll permit me (Stanford looks like a no, UCB looks like it should be possible). Still painful, Berkeley is faaaar (but on the plus side, I’d be an in-state student for tuition…).
7. Transfer to MIT or CMU (since there are Google offices literally right off campus) and study part-time; maybe Digipen and Kirkland? Again, conditional on geographic transfer.
8. Take part-time courses for credit at Stanford or UCB and beg/wheedle Caltech option chairs to accept them and let me finish up my remaining 1.5 years worth of classes solely with transferred credit.
9. Lastly, the option of unpaid leave, take loans up the wazoo, no ironclad guarantee of my job existing when I’m done does exist. This makes a lot more things possible but ruins my financial solvency.

Am I more marketable overall as someone who chose to leave Caltech to unschool myself in the real world, or is a degree regardless of source actually going to make a major impact on my ability to be promoted/recruited? How much is a degree actually worth to me in terms of future earnings/employability given my industry background ? At Caltech/MIT/Stanford, it would cost me upwards of $70,000 to finish 2 more years. Berkeley or SJ State would be downright cheap; I could probably afford that out of pocket amortized over the next 2-3 years. I have no idea how much online part-time degree programs cost for 2 years (I’m guessing about $25-$30,000 based on back of envelope calculations), but I’m concerned about poor teaching/curriculum quality and decreased ROI due to lack of prestige. I only get one shot at this decision, attending more than two colleges could appear to reflect poorly on my ability to commit and finish things I’ve started.

I’m thinking that sitting tight for the next two years + change until I turn 24 is almost certainly the best solution if finishing at private school is in the cards.

Does anyone have advice/stories/experience with any of these potential paths?

Words? [1]

Closure

2008-08-24 07:25 -

Words? [1]

A belated update

2008-07-22 21:40 -

I can’t believe three months have gone by so quickly since I last wrote. I’d predicted that “the next few months [would] pass in the blink of an eye”, but I didn’t expect things to be this smooth. I won’t even bother trying to commit to a regular schedule of writing at this point – last summer, I tried to blog at minimum once a week, but I can hardly find the time and motivation to pick out noteworthy events to muse on even once every quarter.

My trips to Cambridge for work/ROFLcon and Santa Monica for work/Ditch Day turned out quite well – I got to visit with friends, stay in touch, and be extremely productive on projects with folks in Cambridge/Santa Monica. I haven’t traveled since, but am hoping to do something between now and my upcoming trip with “R” in late September. I’ve started regaining parts of my family – I met with my aunt and her family while I was in Cambridge, and found full support. I also had a post-Thailand reunion with Dale in Boston – our coincidence of having SRSes and birthdays one day apart is still remarkable to me.

Now that I’ve been at Google for nearly 6 months, I’ve started to get used to the rhythm, just as I got used to the rhythm of Caltech. Things are not nearly as imbalanced in terms of cycles of short vacations, regular classes, the hell that is finals week, and summer – there’s a weekly cycle of setting goals for the week, reacting to breakage, and spending the rest of the time on projects and a quarterly cycle of team-wide goals, but I can generally go home on Friday and not need to think about work until Monday morning (unless I’m carrying the pager). For some reason, I seem to be a page magnet – I tend to get twice as many pages during my shifts as my colleagues do. My first project shipped, and I’ve been super super busy keeping a number of other plates spinning – I have both my 20% project and a new project with a hard deadline that’s coming up in the next few weeks in addition to the outreach work I’ve been doing with women and CS/games. I’m on call this week (oncall week #3), but have still managed to make time to hang out with “S” and her friends and cook/play board games.

With regard to my SRS, my 1-year anniversary passed last month without incident and I find myself in maintenance mode – dilating at minimum twice a week, but really having a good deal of latitude as to how early or late I do it. I’ve reintroduced the medium size to my regimen and haven’t been having problems – in fact, it makes dealing with the small after a few days’ gap a TON easier. I’m satisfied with my depth, happy with the cosmetic appearance, and happy ecstatic with the sensitivity. The entire ordeal of last year feels like a distant blur, and the awkwardness of my childhood seems like an dreary fog which has since burned off and been replaced with bright sunshine. Now that I’ve settled for the intermediate future, I’m finally getting a regular primary care physician and will be seeing her tomorrow to get everything checked out. Still no birth certificate – the California Office of Vital Records is facing budget cuts, so chances are that from the time of one’s SRS, it takes about 15+ months to get an updated birth certificate – 3 months for a court date, 2 months for the OVR to acknowledge receipt of the forms, and 10 months of processing time.

I’m also now 21 (yay!) – “R” and I put together a banquet at a local Chinese restaurant to celebrate and 14 of my friends came. I was disappointed, though, that my parents didn’t contact me on my birthday, and that they excluded me from a family gathering soon afterwards to celebrate July 4th. “R” and I ended up dropping by to say hi anyways, and having dessert with them. What followed was interesting – I finally got to see my parents and my childhood home again for the first time in nearly three years and was elated. Sadly, the feelings were not exactly mutual – my parents felt imposed upon and uncomfortable with me. I’m hoping these feelings pass over time. Afterwards, “R” and I went out to dinner at a local restaurant that was still open after all these years I’d been away and walked around Montclair a bit. It was quite romantic.

Over the past few months, my interest in WoW has fluctuated quite a bit. The guild merger I alluded to in my last post went south, and my old guild pretty much fell apart. I spent two months barely signing in, before I resolved to try out a different guild and join some of my friends who had left Amitie. Perseid has been very fun for me, and I’ve already been able to contribute to the guild’s progression in SSC/TK a small bit.

All in all, things are asymptotically approaching normality. I’ve fully blended into ordinary society in the Bay Area – I’m just another woman you pass on the street in Mountain View or Sunnyvale or Santa Clara (okay, fine, I’m unusual, I’m a woman wearing a pager, we comprise 5% or less of the folks in the field of operations, but that’s a digression…). I happen to have a unique past and choose to write about it openly, but it no longer directly affects me on a day to day basis. My story could be called a ‘successful’ transition, but there are thousands, perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands, of stories like mine that aren’t out there in the open but exist nevertheless.

P.S. When I got the bill for the urgent care visit from my UTI, I wasn’t nearly as amused by the pregnancy test. I hadn’t yet paid my deductible, so I was out $300 for a prescription for ciproflaxin (a bottle of which I already had from Thailand) and a negative pregnancy test result.

Words? [1]

She listens like spring and talks like June

2008-04-18 06:44 -

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 01:42 -

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 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 :)

Words?

Breaking radio silence

2008-02-08 05:57 -

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 21:20 -

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]

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