resting on labor day

some life updates

So, what’s new?

I moved to Seattle three weeks ago. I’m living in an apartment in the liminal space between Green Lake and Ravenna, which has been incredibly nice. I started work two weeks ago; I’m returning to the team I interned with at Microsoft last year, working on power-related things on Windows that I can’t tell you about. All my stuff finally arrived this week, and I’ve been slowly but surely unpacking into the apartment while profusely apologizing to my roommate for the boxes all over the shared living room.

It’s been a very weird time. For complicated reasons that mostly boil down to “I am bad at both communication and time management,” I’ve been working to finish my MEng thesis up until now, and so my days have consisted of going into the office, thinking about operating systems all day, and then returning home, and thinking—and writing—about parallel computer architectures all night. I’ve been in a kind of daze the whole time, feeling like I’m a ghost in a new city, which could be the culture shock of living somewhere new, but could also be the lack of sleep, to be completely honest.

More than anything, the weirdest and most visceral feeling has been a broadening of time horizons. I’ve always really liked the reminder that “MIT is a marathon, not a sprint,” and while the metaphor is true in what it gets at—that, indeed, one needs to pace oneself to make it through a school like that—it is also still a race, and you are still running hard. When I started work, many people told me that I should expect the process of onboarding to take months; that I shouldn’t expect to be too productive until maybe three months, or even half a year. While (perhaps) realistic, given the complexity of our codebase, that’s a whole lifetime in MIT terms; a week-to-week lifestyle suddenly expands to fill a month-to-month, or even quarter-to-quarter approach—and it certainly felt incongruous with my sprint to finish the thesis.

And, of course, the truth is that there is so much more life to live; the big time horizon has gone from “try to graduate” to “I don’t know, retire?” On one of the first days after my roommate arrived, we worked ourselves—or maybe just I did—into a bit of a frenzy, thinking about all the furniture we needed or wanted to buy. And then, I said, as much to myself as to her, “we’ve got time.” And it’s true, but it’s hard to remember. It’s become a kind of mantra, one of the many things I say to myself to remind myself of a fact I often forget: “we’ve got time.” We’ve got at least a year in this apartment, and at least a couple years in this area; it’s no longer a sprint, or a marathon; it’s barely even a race anymore.

Still, I can’t help but look back and think about whether the marathon environment was good for me. I can’t deny that the past three years and beyond have been some of the most productive years of my life so far: in the past three years, I’ve written three plays, two theses, and countless other things; I’ve probably produced four or five hundred pages of text in classes alone; I’ve learned about everything from computer architecture to biochemistry to biography and I’ve read dozens of computer systems papers. The heart-pumping, destination-in-sight, fixed-timeframe mindset of the marathon provided structure, more than anything, and now it’s my job to find and define that structure in a way that keeps me learning and producing new things without burning me out.

I’m living on the border of excited and nervous about everything. I love the work that I’m doing; last Friday, I spent a whole afternoon stepping through assembly code, correlating it to C code, dumping variables from memory, the whole bread and butter of systems programming; I found a bug, I put up my first pull request, and it was great. On the other hand, I’m nervous that the nerd-sniping sort of work enjoyment might cause me to break down my work-life balance without anyone even asking me to (and certainly, nobody is). I’m excited to be able to rest and control a small area that’s just my life for now, but I’m also excited to start picking up hobbies again, and I’m nervous about how these two tidal forces in my life will crash against each other, pushing me back and forth.

But, for now, I get to take a break in the evenings. I’ll turn off my work email on the weekends; I’ll pick one of the many books I haven’t finished off one of the two bookshelves I’ve built and read on the couch by the window; I’ll buy myself a digital piano and try and play some showtunes. I’ll keep trying out different bouldering gyms until I find one I like, and then I’ll get a membership there if I think I can go often enough to justify it. In a few weeks, I might join a choir, or an orchestra, or try and get involved in a theatre production. Bit by bit, I’ll build a bit of a life here, I think, and it’ll be good, or, in any case, it’ll be an adventure, and we’ve got time.