Strike that. Reverse it.

Things
on the right

There is a quality of time peculiar to the early morning. The light, the quiet, the early morning feeling in your hands and face. Other times during a day have their own quality of time, of course, but the early morning seems more distinct; it stands apart from the rest.

The rain is calm and steady, and in a few minutes I will have to go collect my daughter from her friend's house, where she was invited, at the last minute, to sleep over. She had no pajamas, no toothbrush, no change of clothes, but loads of delight. I expect she won't want to leave.

It's strange, this emotion business. I'm smiling, almost laughing, simply because of the morning rain.

Kitchen table, early evening

The most fascinating and interesting people I've ever met have all been passionate about something. It could be anything, I think; from music to geology to help systems to wine. It's passion itself that seems to be the key. Having a passionate relationship with some field, issue, or practice gives you an enthusiasm that, I think, naturally transfers to other things because you see your passion elsewhere. Software appears in music. Gardening appears in architecture.

Do you choose your passions? Do they choose you? Perhaps you simply need to pay attention to your own interests, and follow where they lead. And keep trying new things until you feel something begin to draw you closer.

Me, I'm going to try gardening this year.

Living room, late

I've been thinking about the nature of trust. Someone close to me doesn't trust me -- has never trusted me, as it turns out. Not for anything I've done or failed to do, but because of previous experiences with other people. It's hard to actually say "someone close to me," because without trust, how close can you be? The whole thing makes me feel like there's no closeness at all; like I'm closer to coworkers and people I hardly know than I am to this person. Worse, I feel stupid for all those years when I thought we were close. But we aren't. We weren't.

What is it about trust, anyway? If you don't trust somebody, how do you get over it; how do you start to trust them? Does it depend on things they do? Or is it purely and simply you and your willingness to take a leap of faith and trust them? I think that trust must come first, and can't depend on the actions of anyone else. You must choose to trust; it's the cause and catalyst of trustworthiness, not the result. As Emerson said:

Trust men, and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great, though they make an exception in your favor to all their rules of trade.

All I really know is how sad I am about this, and how angry.

Grouchy, grouchy, grouchy. When you're pissed off about every decision you've made in the past decade, everything that happens today is just more fodder for the cannons. I hate this; how can it be better that every damn thing that happens has such an emotional impact? It's impossible to think or work effectively when emotional intensity is turned up to a high level. Unless you're an actor or professional mourner or something. I certainly can't seem to think or write anything worthwhile. I can't help questioning the whole set of assumptions underlying the emotionalist approach to life.

At the bar

I'm starting to understand some of the reasons why I detach myself from my emotions. It's getting difficult to keep from being overwhelmed by feelings that arent' even current. I'm still feeling hurt and angry about things that happened far too long ago, and it comes in waves that are pretty strong.

I guess I was hoping that if I just made damn sure I never thought about it, it just wouldn't bother me. But apparently it doesn't go away, and the price of not thinking about it is not thinking about any other feelings, either.

By the way, the bar is the high counter in my kitchen. Just realized that probably wasn't very clear.

Home, all over the place, wireless

I'm learning more about something that seems so simple: just knowing how I feel. I usually just don't know, at least not at any level that's immediately accessible to my conscious mind. I guess I must "know" in some way -- that is, if I'm tense or anxious, my muscles "know" and respond. But ask me at the time, and I'll often draw a blank.

It turns out that simply practicing -- taking a moment and checking all the physical sensations in my body -- seems to work. It works pretty quickly, too. It surprises me that after starting to do that, it's become a habit. I didn't set up any way of reminding myself to do this, but it just seems to occur to me from time to time. So it either quickly entered my "habit queue" or, perhaps, it's more of a physical response like an itch.

But the whole breadth of my own emotions are still not easily available to my conscious awareness, nor are the sources always clear. Today I'm feeling very confused and adrift, unable to concentrate very well and getting very little done. Why? Not a clue.

Living room, home office, and at the library

Everyone has experienced something like this: you feel badly about something, you talk to someone about it, then you feel better. Why? What is the human experience behind that? Why should verbalizing your emotions have an effect on those emotions? There must be some reason behind it. Is some sort of emotional sharing with others related to cooperation? Why do we like and strive for that "connection" feeling? Why should that be desireable? What process might there be in our minds or brains that creates a motivation for that? And why? Is it some sort of evolutionary adaptation?

Thought experiment: one group of early humans does this emotional communication thing, and another group does not. The group that does not might not be alerted to a danger, as the first member to feel fear might not communicate it. So at least in a gross sense, it's pretty easy to dream up a way in which communicating emotions might be a useful adaptation.

What if emotions are primarily a way to communicate? For an individual, screaming is probably not very helpful in trying to survive some kind of danger. But it certainly helps a group if a member in danger screams. And in a group context, it probably does help an individual, as the group may respond and assist.

I have no idea whether it can even be shown that emotions have a primary function, let alone whether communication might be it. But it leads to some interesting ideas if you assume for the moment that emotions are mostly for communication.

Rosemary has complained that I don't "connect" with her on an emotional level. Her emotions are very sensitive, and her own internal connections to emotions emotional responses are very strong and fast. She reacts instantly and strongly in emotional ways. Perhaps I've made the mistake of assuming that her own strong emotional reactions meant that she would be very sensitive to others' emotions (well, mine), even if they're expressed with much lower amplitude. Given the evidence, that doesn't seem to be true; she assumes instead that there aren't any emotions there at all. While to me, she's "shouting" all the time.

At the bar, late

How many words do eskimos really have for snow?

Why is it that telling somebody how you feel makes you feel better?

Midmorning, home office, on a cloudy Wednesday

So here's a change: I'm not recording these entries by date any more. In fact, I've removed the dates and listed my location when I wrote each entry. I'm amazed that I remember, but when I thought about it, it was quite clear.

I wonder whether the date on which I write something has much to do with that piece of work. Most of what I write is topical but not temporal in the sense that it's tied to any particular time. Also, I believe (without any real evidence) that my physical surroundings have an effect on my writing. Or perhaps it's more of an interaction. I've noticed that some writers talk about the importance of the things around them when they write. There was a documentary about Paul Theroux a while ago (on PBS, I think) in which he showed off his special writing desk, which he has also mentioned in at least one interview.

One of the things I want to find out from this experiment is whether my writings from different locations seem different to me.

Now, my entries are still separated by time -- for example, I don't have a "Desk in Burlington" bin into which every entry written at that location is dumped. Instead, I create entries at different times and identify each one by location. So the time of an entry is still makes that entry unique, but now the time is simply unspecified. Hmmm. Of course, in other blogs it's usually the location that's unspecified (if different at all). So when I return to a given location, should I have a single place for entries I write there? Maybe.

The Public Good, The Hacker Ethic, and Passion

As sometimes happens, several things I've had floating around in the back of my mind for a while have started to stick together. Sometimes it feels like these ideas get together privately when I'm not paying attention and start talking. Anyway, in light of all sorts of current events (Enron, DMCA, ICANN, patents, copyright) I've been thinking about what the "public good" is and how it should be served and protected -- if at all. For instance, is the natural tendency of business in favor to the public good, or in opposition? Also the "Hacker Ethic" as discussed in Pekka Himanen's book. And the idea of passion, which in the hacker ethic is a driving force, and which is so often associated with deeply interesting things. When you meet someone who is intensely interesting, more often than not you can also use the word passionate to describe her or him.

If you look at all the values of the hacker ethic, a clear picture of the public good emerges. [I'll have more to say about this]. But if you're driven by profit and money alone, are you necessarily working against the public good? I think maybe you are. Because even though your long term interests are probably aligned with the public good, your short term interests are yours alone, and would often work against anyone else's interests -- more to the point, everyone else's interests.

More on this later; gotta go.

While there are any number of ways to approach whatever job -- or even task -- you have to do, I think it's clear that some approaches are better. I'm not sure that a given approach is objectively better in the sense that it would work more effectively for anyone. But I personally favor a thoughtful, deliberate approach that combines awareness of your own position in the "system" you're in with heightened perceptiveness of the immediate and extended aspects of the task.

I can't always achieve this state of mind, but I do much better work when I can. And I can sometimes see it in other people, sometimes in a simple gesture or posture. The way a programmer positions a mouse can carry that message, as can the way a carpenter wields a saw.

I've found two wonderful sources of clear explanation of this state of mind, and they come at the idea from completely different directions. Zen and Zen, as it happens.

A desk in Burlington
 
The question of the day: is the RDF/AI approach to the world so fundamentally wrong that it's hopeless, or can something be salvaged from this black hole of flawed thinking?

From the kitchen table
 
Bah. I don't like January, I don't like wet weather in winter, I don't like the projects I'm working on, I don't like my back hurting, I don't like putting 30,000 miles per year on my car, I don't like driving at all any more (thanks to the 30K per year), I don't like working, I don't like New England, and I don't like my house. Next question?

Okay, now I feel better.