Lessons

As I ruminated on perhaps learning a lesson about which side projects are appropriate for a software engineer and father of two in a house without a soundproof music room, I realized that I have not properly learned one of the lessons I naïvely thought learned long ago, about getting work done to have in the end more -- and more quality -- time for non-work pursuits.

First, I think that I have come to believe that working on software projects as a side project from work (as a software engineer) are not right for me: (1) By the end of a day at work, particularly in the "crunch time" which has been shifting more and more to "all the time," often the last thing I want to do is sit back at a computer and write and test code, and in the other direction, after working all evening or weekend on my personal programming project my performance at work inevitably suffers; (2) it turns out that I am terrible at web design, and while this might be alleviated by study and practice, see #1, though as a personal development goal I hope to improve in this space through work-study at work; (3) potential IP conflicts with work.

Now, seeing this, what other side projects can I indulge in as an outlet for creative expression? The obvious ones to me are music and writing. Music has been hard to find time and workspace for, as having my equipment out is a disaster waiting to happen with two children under 3, and in any case playing guitar, trumpet, piano, synth, and singing after the kids go to bed is not an option. I'm still hoping to spend much of my December vacation recording new and old music and re-recording some even older songs, but it does not work out as a good fit.

But writing seems to fit. The kids demand stories at all times, so in a sense I'm "writing" all the time, even though half of those stories are "Marco plays soccer/baseball/hockey with his friends" or "Marco goes to the truck/tractor store with his friends." It's even a bedtime story which has uncorked the latest flurry of writing for me, "The Riddle of the Koi," even though yesterday I realized that more than likely that my Tolkien-reared subconscious had produced the "ROTK" initialization of the title. I can write without piles of gear and cords strewn about one or more rooms. I can write while waiting for a dentist appointment, or in an hour and a half of free time while the kids are blessedly napping at roughly the same time, or in the hour and a half after the kids go to bed. I can write! It is like rediscovering a vestigial limb, long forgotten.

Now, the naïveté. I have often thought to myself, proud of my supposed increasing wisdom, that if I had to go back and do college over again, I would actually study and work harder -- in order to in the result have more time for a personal life and personal pursuits, as well as getting the most out of the studies I was there to pursue in the first place. In college, far too often I put off work, put off studying, and in the end this caused me to spend more time and interrupt more personal choices to eventually make up that intellectual debt, and to do so in such a half-assed manner -- just enough to make the grade or pass the test -- that I missed even getting the real, life-long benefit of learning, despite the increased time cost.

But I realize that this is actually a lesson I have not really learned. At work, I too often let distractions sneak their way into my day, causing my work to suffer and slip, leading to work following me home as deadlines grow nearer and nearer, turning an 8 hour work day into 10-12, completely unnecessarily and completely foolishly and wastefully. On that note: to work! So that later, instead of paying the accrued interest of work debt, I can get to that topic which sparked the whole topic: writing the "ninja, pirates, and zombies set in feudal Japan" novelette -- and no, at least I hope not, it is not as trite as that sounds -- that wants its way out of my head: "A team of ninja sent to capture a pirate ship finds more than they bargained for when the corpses of the pirates lurch back to life, as one member of the ninja team's life comes full circle." [More]

Whiteboarding a terribly drawn cartoon

Well, more than two and a half years since the last post; appropriate the last one was about how being a 'new dad' changes one's perspectives on things.

OK, enough banter.

I finally think I am beginning to "grok" Twitter; I'd avoided it for a long while, and finally I see some fun in it: watching Neil Gaiman, William Gibson, and a few other folks tweet their way through their crazy days is actually fairly interesting, and through those tweets I've been introduced to a few new writers that I've come to like.

But then it gets weird.

I'd been following some good-natured cross-sniping between a few folks, followed a few of them, and, after a particularly interesting (to me) exchange, finally decided that I'd put marker to whiteboard and sketch some of it out in high drama. Very, very, very low art but it's a start; I don't think I've ever actually put a sketch online before, and these may be the first six sketches I've done in over a decade.

Illustration is certainly something I never developed. I like to think I did pretty well on the music side, and passably well on the writing side. But visual art has always escaped me. I doubt I will ever sketch anything worth looking at for more than a second of disgust and distaste, but a 50% improvement will be enough for me, and I actually found the "process" enjoyable. The "process?" Basically: sketch on an 8x10 whiteboard, snap a picture with my (7 year?) old Olympus digital, shrink it to 30% size (using MS Paint no less, if I keep going I'll write a script to do it) and upload to montsamu musings on drunkduck.com.

Unfortunately I have a dozen more drawings in mind for that story alone to reach its conclusion, and already there's another one in mind for the next chapter.
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