Life is good.

Progress report on 2012 aspirations:

• Give more -- I really enjoyed increasing my donations of both money and clothes, and want to continue this upward trend. [No donations yet this year, but will start making them soon, now that I've filed my taxes and started settling into work. I have started doing some volunteer work for my college choir, so that's going to be a nice addition to the mix.]
• Lose some -- I gained a rather unprecedented ten pounds in the last year, mostly due to my nighttime eating, so I'd like to get back to my normal weight. [I've lost a couple of pounds through a combination of changing my night time snack food from peanut butter to cottage cheese and using my chair less when at my desk. Slow and steady...]
• See people -- I find myself becoming something of a hermit (partly to spend prodigious amounts of time reading, sleeping, and watching TV, but partly out of sheer laziness). I should spend more time with people. [I've done well about seeing people more so far this year, doing some more social activities on the weekend, and it hasn't actually affected my reading, sleeping, or TV watching that much.]
• Doubt less -- I want to be more appreciative and less cynical and regain some measure of optimism. [This is actually kind of taking care of itself. Working on new products with amazing people has changed my outlook a lot.]

Work is going really well. The people are brilliant, and I'm starting to get to know more people on the team, so that I am less wary of sitting in a non-Legal building for more than 80% of the time. I feel like I'm starting to learn more about the products and the issues involved in making hardware, I've gained more credibility, and I've started having some founder-level meetings (which I never did on my old products), and I'm learning about the kind of information he wants, and the right level of detail and pacing. I even got him to agree with me (instead of the product manager) on a couple of points yesterday, so I think I'm starting to get the hang of this thing. I imagine that this is a little bit like what it feels like learning to ride a bull in a rodeo -- completely different from anything else you've done, and somewhat scary, because if you mess up, you're going to get run over by a bull, but pretty awesome if you're able to figure out how to do it. We released a cool video for the robot cars this week, and have some exciting times ahead. I'm having fun with some of the guys on my team -- one of the engineers wants to see if we can patent some goofy ideas we were riffing on last night, which totally cracks me up (but how cool would it be if non-technical lawyer me ended up as an inventor on some robot car patents??) It's amazing how much of a difference it can make to love your work. I'm making the same money as I was before I switched to this group, working more, and taking less time off, but I love my job so much more than I did in the weird post-reorg world. Superman  is still somewhat mired in that swamp, and I'm trying to convince him to try to join my group, instead. 

Also, I just ordered new business cards, partly to reflect my promotion from a year ago, but mostly because this group has its own cards that are different from the rest of the company. (Different colors on the front and back! And laser cutouts!) Yes, sometimes it's the little things.

Superman and I just spent a weekend in New Orleans with a couple of my college friends. We ate a ton, went to some museums, walked all over the city, saw some live jazz, and caught up with each other. It reminded me of my weekend trips in Europe, when my friends and I would spend a whirlwind weekend in a city, really digging into whatever food, sights, or activities we could in just two days. Lots of fun, and hoping to do more of this, although the length of flights here can make things more difficult. We also need to take a real vacation soon -- Superman has accrued the maximum of 30 days, and I've got about 20 days backlogged (I look back on my last job, when I got more days off per year and always used them all, and can hardly remember what it was like to have so much time off). We're thinking of going to Scotland in August, but no real planning has happened so far. 

I've been spending a lot of time comparing different periods of my life, like how I had so much time as a student, but no money, then no time at the law firm, and enough money (although my student loans seemed so huge then that it never really felt like I had any money), then a decent amount of time when I was in Europe, and decent money (that was a good balance -- I ended up saving pretty minimally, traveling a ton, and not really thinking about the future, because it all felt like one long hiatus from real life), and now I have less time, but three times as much money as I had before (also, even though my income was always decent, knowing that my student and car loans are no longer bigger than my savings account, and that I have enough savings to last through a five year dry spell just makes me feel much more secure). I think when I wasn't really loving the products I was working on, I was definitely a bit wistful about my times in Europe, but now that I love my work again, I don't mind the hours, days, weeks, and months, and although I wouldn't mind taking more time off and traveling like I used to, I also know that there's a decent chance I can retire by the time I'm 45, and have the rest of my life to not wake up on Mondays, unless it's to go diving (when I talk about that to my immigrant parents, especially my dad, who is still working at the age of 70, they are surprised to think that someone might do that, just retire at 45, but hey, one of the reasons I work and don't have kids is so that one day, I might be able to just do... nothing).

Another big reason I'm happier is that summer is coming! The days are getting longer, the trees have been in bloom since February, the skies are blue, and I am just so much happier when I leave work, and the sun is still up.

So, yeah... after some months of doubt and uncertainty, life is good again. Really good.

Time for the weekend: quiet night tonight, Rock Band with friends tomorrow, Hunger Games and a revisit of our favorite local two Michelin star molecular gastronomy restaurant on Sunday. 

My goals for 2011, with final commentary:

• Keep calm -- This is a repeat from last year, but I think it's important enough for me that I need to keep it as a priority. [I'm doing better on this one. In fact, one of my coworkers recently told me that she wishes she were able to stay as calm and unstressed as I do. I think I do have some anxiety and frustration from time to time, but I've gotten settled enough that my reaction to stress is to just buckle down on the work I can do, keep myself covered, and lash out as much as necessary to keep everyone else in line. Grade: B]
• Carry on -- I need to get used to the idea that everyone I know is growing up, and stop letting it make me sad. [This one is still hard for me, especially since all of the married people are now progressing towards having kids, which makes it harder for me to keep my life going in its own direction without being affected. I've resigned myself to this, pretty much, and am just glad that Boyfriend is with me on this one. No kids, just dogs, and all the time in the world to be carefree and selfish. Grade: B]
• Be well -- I need more calcium and an occasional trip to the gym. [I've been good about calcium and vitamins, but terrible about everything else. I haven't gotten sick much, but have definitely gotten more out of shape than before. Also, in my end of year reading sprint, I messed up my wrists again, because one of the books I was reading was a printed book, and really cumbersome. Grade: C-]
• Be good -- I'm going to find more ways to be good. More charitable donations and volunteer work. More kindness and patience with my friends and family. More treats for my dog. [I think I've done all right on this one. I donated more than I've donated in the rest of my life combined, I think, and found several new charities that I like. I've been decent to my friends and family (although this is probably where I need to improve the most), and my dog has been getting regular treats. Grade: B+]
• Stay on target -- Stay on top of all of the other stuff, like reading, working, saving, and figuring out how to do everything better, faster, smarter. [This one has been good. I've got enough in the bank to go for five or six years, some of which I should probably invest in something. Or I could just take a few years off and play, which is very tempting... I read 150 books, which ended up being a lot, especially on top of my work and TV schedules, and I've gotten pretty good at making my work fit into the time I want it to (for the most part -- occasional nights and weekends are unavoidable). Grade: A-]

2011 Highs:

• Really good macro diving in Dumaguete (Philippines)
• Getting a 50% (and soon-to-be 100%) job with my new group
• Croatia and Montenegro with Superman, Kanga, and Roo
• Kanga and Roo's wedding(s) in Chicago and Z-town
• Hitting four new countries in one year -- this is the most I've managed in a year since moving back from Europe
• Actually making it to 150 books in one year

2011 Lows:

• Don't ever say the word "re-org" to me again -- still feeling the impact of this (no one lost their jobs, but department morale is slumping) and trying to complete my transition to my new group in order to completely shake off the after-effects
• Losing my cousin

2011 Weird Moments:

• More uncomfortable than weird. Butting heads with my manager over when my full transition will happen. We've never had any tension before, but his group is so strapped that I think he's fighting to keep people in the group as long as possible in order to keep deals covered. I understand, but it's still a bit frustrating to be in limbo.

2012 Aspirations:

• Give more -- I really enjoyed increasing my donations of both money and clothes, and want to continue this upward trend. 
• Lose some -- I gained a rather unprecedented ten pounds in the last year, mostly due to my nighttime eating, so I'd like to get back to my normal weight.
• See people -- I find myself becoming something of a hermit (partly to spend prodigious amounts of time reading, sleeping, and watching TV, but partly out of sheer laziness). I should spend more time with people.
• Doubt less -- I want to be more appreciative and less cynical and regain some measure of optimism.

I went to my cousin's funeral over the weekend. As expected, it was heartbreaking to see his wife and daughter, his siblings and dad, and all of the aunts, uncles, and cousins, and to know why we were all gathering in one place. I learned a lot about him, though. I've only ever known my cousin as... well, my brilliant cousin. It was really good to meet people who knew him as a friend, a classmate, a colleague, or a mentor. The church was full, the balcony was full, there were people standing in the aisles, and they had more people in an overflow room with a video feed. They've started a scholarship in his name at the university where he was a professor. It was wonderful to find out that this cousin, who has always been so loved and respected in our family, was equally loved and respected by the rest of his friends and coworkers. I hope that means that his wife and daughter will have friends and helpers for as long as they need them, and that my cousin will be remembered by a lot of people for a long time.

After the funeral, our family went to dinner, and after that, some of the cousins hung out for a few hours, and it was good to be together. Most of the cousins had left their spouses and kids behind, so it was just us, catching up on each others' lives, reminiscing about old times, and talking about our memories of cousin #1. We realized that with most of the cousins married off, and all of our parents aging, more and more of our family gatherings will probably be like this one. It was strange to think that, since for many years, we always got together for planned family reunions or for raucous weddings. 

My oldest cousin on my dad's side passed away last week after a long illness. He was a professor of neuroscience. He is survived by his father, two siblings, his wife, and his daughter. Those are the kinds of facts that you read in obituaries, and I always find the lack of personal detail to make them even more heartbreaking. Can a person's entire life really be summed up in a few terse words about what relatives they had and what they did for a living?

This is only the second funeral I'll have been to in my life. I'm ashamed to admit it. I probably should have gone to a couple of others, but the idea of going to them always sends me into deep and paralyzing anxiety. I'll say the wrong thing. I'll do the wrong thing. I'll cry too much and make things harder on the people I'm there to support. I won't cry enough and I'll offend them. I'll wear something wrong and my mom will get mad at me. I'll have to admit that the person is really gone, but I won't get any sense of closure. I'll get even more angry about how unfair life can be, and wonder why this had to happen.

I'll never say any of this at the funeral, it's just my inner rambling monologue, but this is what I'm thinking, as I look ahead to Friday, when we'll all gather around and try to make some sense out of something that just doesn't make sense. 

My cousin was the oldest of three siblings, and the oldest of seventeen cousins on my father's side. Not only that, but he was the eldest son of the eldest son, which is something special in Chinese families. He was over ten years older than I am, and almost 20 years older than our youngest cousin. A lot of us teasingly called him "Uncle," but it wasn't just because of the age difference. He was wise beyond his years, and wise beyond the years of almost anyone else on this planet. Our family has been lucky to get some pretty good genes in the brains department (it appears we paid for them mostly with the genes for athletic ability). Our parents all have PhDs, and we cousins have a mix of degrees that jumble together into alphabet soup.

But this cousin, even among such cousins, was special. His IQ was somewhere in the 220s. He started college at Johns Hopkins when he was twelve years old. He finished early. He got a Neuro PhD from CalTech before he could legally drink. He was the smartest person I have ever known. Most of my friends have never met him, but they know about him, because he's one of those people that you just can't resist telling people about. Whenever there is a "I know this really smart guy" conversation, I pretty much know I'm going to win, unless someone happens to be friends with Stephen Hawking.

Despite being so superhuman-ly intelligent, he wanted to do all the things that we normal people do. He sang silly songs at family reunions, and played games and rough-housed with the rest of us, even though we probably bored him. He tried to explain his research to us younger cousins, using analogies to Big Macs and French fries. He worked in Germany for a while, and brought back Kinder eggs, little plastic toys tucked inside little green plastic eggs, nested inside chocolate eggs, and wrapped in foil. He played Ultimate Frisbee and went on hikes. He fell madly in love with another brain scientist, and life seemed to have finally caught up to my genius cousin, who had spent so many years so far ahead of everyone else.

Then cancer came, and it came as a shock. The diagnosis was grim, and I wondered how any disease would dare to touch someone so young, so special, so gifted, so certain to make a difference. My parents worried that his new fiancee would decide not to marry him and break his heart, and then they worried that she would decide to marry him and get her own heart broken, instead. She married him, and they battled their way through treatment. They had a daughter, and he decided that his ultimate dream would be to see her start kindergarten, even though all of the statistics were against him. Never one to simply perform according to average or even above-average levels, he went through treatment after treatment, countless setbacks and hopes, and saw his daughter past kindergarten and through several years of elementary school. (It gives things a vertiginous kind of perspective, doesn't it, that someone who had reached such great heights had but one burning desire, and that desire was to do something that the rest of us do every day, with almost no effort -- to live.) 

At some point, I think that I started accepting his over-achievement as a patient in the same way I had always accepted his genius mind. That's just how he was, and that's how he always would be. Every time he took a turn for the worse, I would assume that soon, he would take a turn for the better, because that's what he had been doing for over ten years.

I can't imagine how hard his fight must have been, how much pain he suffered, how it must have felt like to drag a one or two year battle out over twelve years, how heartbreaking it must have been to watch his wife and daughter and wonder how many days they had left together, and how the years would treat them after he was gone. I wonder if he managed to pack more life into his years than a normal person would be able to, given his incredible capabilities, and if so, if that would help to make up for the fact that he was short-changed in terms of actual years. Even if it does make up for it (which I think it probably doesn't), it seems like the rest of us around him are still missing out.

I looked at the shared spreadsheet where we're all filling in our flight and hotel information, and so far, it looks like 29 of our family are flying in. In the old days, whenever all of the family got together, our parents would line all of the cousins up in age order, oldest to youngest, and take pictures. You can track the passage of time based on the number of cousins in existence, the size of the glasses we wore, the perms and bowl cuts, the gap-toothed grins of the young kids, the reluctant smiles of the teenagers, but it was always a big group, and the line was always led by cousin #1, and we'll never be able to take a picture like that again.

RIP, CB. Maybe we're each only allowed to have a certain number of intelligent thoughts in our lifetimes, and you used yours up faster than the rest of us. We'll miss you forever.

I was talking to my dog last night (yes, really), because Superman is visiting family for Thanksgiving, and I realized that I've had my dog for about 9-1/2 years now. It's so strange to think of the idea that in June, it will be ten years. I can't remember ever having had or done something consistently for ten years. 

• That's longer than I've ever lived in one place.
• That's longer than all of my serious relationships combined.
• That's longer than I've ever worked at one job. It's as long as all of the jobs I've ever had in my life, combined. And he'll have gone to work with me for eight of those years.
• That's longer than I've ever gone to one school. Actually, it's longer than I've ever gone to any two schools combined.

He's seen me in law school, at a law firm, at an NGO, in-house, in New York, in Europe, in California. He has said hello (and goodbye) to many friends and boyfriends along the way. In my random life, this odd, sweet, funny little guy is the one thing that's always there. 

Things my dog is afraid of:

1. Thunderstorms
2. Fireworks
3. Baths
4. Moving
5. The thing I do to him that my mom used to do to me that involves rolling him back and forth while saying the Taiwanese words for "knead the salted vegetables"
6. And apparently, the low battery alert for smoke detectors and carbon monoxide alarms

What my dog does when he's afraid:

1. Crawls under whatever is closest, whether that's a bed or couch or a pile of dirty laundry
2. Stalks the nearest human
3. Vomits

Two more moments of d'oh or near-d'oh:

1. Fiver, while dressed as a pumpkin for Halloween, came very close to licking the bare feet of the founder in a meeting, stopped only by frantic whispered commands from me.
2. My coworkers and I were talking about working from home one day that the office was pretty slow. As we walked down the stairs to lunch, I said "Well, the main difference between working from home and working from work is that when you work from home, you don't have to wear pants." Then I noticed that our General Counsel was walking down the stairs about two feet behind me. 

Sigh.

So I've mentioned that I started working on experimental projects at work, and today, a bunch of articles went out about that team: New York Times, cnet, Mashable (which features a picture of Wolverine, for some reason), and Engadget have jumped on the news bandwagon so far.

It's kind of cool seeing it out there, and rather hilarious reading what journalists write when they have next to no information. They seem to be able to write impressively long articles about a lab "where robots run free" (as opposed to the rest of the company, where they are imprisoned and enslaved), and they aren't sure whether it exists, how many people work in it, where it's located (the Engadget article featured a picture of the sign that sits outside the Legal building, making it appear to be some important lair of secret engineering), and what it's working on. As far as I can tell, they just made products up (space elevators!), since the only one that people know exists is the self-driving car. The articles cite each other and refer to an anonymous source who doesn't appear to actually know anything about the group at all.

Coincidentally, we had a team meeting today, in which we all laughed about our alleged robot minions and space elevators, watched demos and presos about all of the things we are actually doing (some of which are insanely cool, and some of which are just insane), and talked about how cool it is to be on the team, and how frustrating it is to not be able to talk to anyone about what it is that we actually do. There's a good chance that I may start working on these projects 100% of the time, instead of 50%, in which case my working life will become that much more awesome (but also that much more secretive).

I decided to be a lawyer when I was eleven, and the plan just kind of stuck, and here I am, 22 years later. It has always seemed to make sense, to some extent -- I like hypothetical situations, I like trying to figure out where the tipping point is between two different arguments, I like writing, I like editing. My parents said that when I was little and I would get in trouble, one of the first things I would do was to start trying to talk my way out of it, or to at least argue for a lighter punishment.

On the other hand, after working as a practicing contracts lawyer for over three years now (before that, my work was more focused on research, writing, and editing), there are some things about the job that don't seem to be my thing, and the main part is negotiations. I like writing and editing and then obsessively re-editing to try to make a document exactly capture what we want it to do, it's a solitary pursuit, and I have control and the ability to predict how long it will take and how it will turn out, but once it's time for negotiations, I get really uncomfortable. Part of it is that negotiations always mean moving away from the ideal and towards something that sucks. That's what compromise and negotiating is all about, right? Giving up the perfect ____ in exchange for something that kind of sucks. And then there's the fact that in every other situation in my life, I only had to negotiate when I was in trouble: negotiating with my parents to lighten my punishment for some misdeed, negotiating with teachers to give me an A if I got at least a 97 on the final exam, and so on. Negotiations just trigger a Pavlovian panic instinct in me. If I have a call with outside counsel, or if I get an email with a new draft attached, no matter how smooth the relationship is, it still makes my shoulders hunch inwards and my heart tightens up a bit. I found it surprising when I mentioned this to a coworker, and found out that she is the opposite -- she prefers the negotiations and hates the drafting. 

The other thing that concerns me about being a lawyer for too long is that it really seems to change my entire outlook on life. My job is to shave things down, sand off the corners, smooth things over, assume the worst, and try to get the most out of everything while giving the least. In real life, it bleeds over, so that I'm constantly looking at the world with a critical eye, wondering who is going to try to cut a corner or screw things up, calculating whether I can force someone else to bear the risk and take the blame, and considering everything as something that needs to be fixed. I've never been a particularly optimistic person, but I am not sure I was always quite so cynical and filled with contempt for every little aspect of life that isn't perfect.

Facepalm moment of the week: I had my first one-on-one encounter with one of the founders this week, and...

1. I failed to actually introduce myself
2. We talked about shoes
3. I got distracted and started talking to someone else

*sigh*

On the bright side, I got to go for a ride in one of the robot cars, and that was pretty cool.