welp looking back at my last post where i was like “i’m done with this activism / social work stuff, it has clearly been terrible for me, time to focus on fun technical problems and work and make money”

WELP

turns out i’m a federal employee and my workplace went from happy chill nerds to hostile workplace in the space of 3 days. like getting daily emails in my inbox saying “you suck, why don’t you quit” “if you don’t quit we’re going to fire you” except it’s all my coworkers and my supervisors and no one knows what’s going on or where we’re getting orders from (hint: some rich f*kwad probably)

i have so many thoughts on this, but i’ve just been messaging friends and writing angsty notes to myself and such instead of idk getting activism stuff done. also i have been actively trying not to get activism stuff done i guess. keep an even keel

is this how i felt about COVID in 2020? probably. but then i felt alienated from my coworkers. here i at least feel everyone is in the same boat (in some sense. some much worse than others)

i.e. there’s a high likelihood i’m going to lose the one person i work with on a daily basis to this for no reason other than random cruelty

yea let’s put the “we should traumatize all employees” person in charge of HR, A++ qualification

ugh in the meantime i still need to get science done but i really just wanted to sink into the cool technical problems for like a year or two, really, truly

i mean in an abstract sense life is still great. people would kill to be in my position. i’m not sure why i cannot let this rest and have dropped all my side projects and even interview prep (which now of all times , when stable government job turned into harassment and random firings job, should be a time to keep going). i have been trying to balance it out at least. i did not sink my all into a petition for vought (see: “we should tramatize all employees”) so i only lost one night of sleep when he was confirmed rather than two weeks. and i was crushed but the next day picked my next goal to focus on.

ah. one day i’ll stop being an angry person and just be happy. some day.

that’s enough for 4 am today i think. need to give a work presentation tomorrow, write actual data science / machine learning code so i can be where i want to be in 3 months or so (idk on the way to a publication?) which tbh i haven’t felt paid well enough to focus on (and also working completely alone made me super grumpy)

anywho

oh yea happy very late vday, this made me laugh:

https://ml-valentines.github.io

nerds, the lot of them

2025 goals

re: blissfully ignoring the outside world, that is my goal for 2025: be a rich d*bag. something about earning lots of money and donating it. turn a blind eye to … misery … or something …

… okay i don’t think i could go so far as to work on promoting tobacco but there’s probably stuff in between like “study illicit massage parlor industry and be depressed about humanity” and “figure out how to circumvent climate change regulations to expand oil and gas drilling”. otherwise i don’t think i can be useful in 2025-2029. thanks sexism. on the other hand still super proud i got to vote for two different women presidential candidates in my life time !!!! one day it will happen. even if i have to do it myself heh.

running

i guess that will be a goal. first though, finish my app, “have you run as much as my hamster”.com. my hamster ursula probably runs 1-3 miles every night heh

anger as an identity

I think a lot my identity was built around anger. it made me angry as a kid to travel and see someone younger than me, missing limbs, in rags traveling around on essentially a furniture moving dolly begging for money. meanwhile i had flown across the world.

Why would the world be so cruel and unjust? it really made me mad. this anger drove me past any insecurity and anxiety and self-hatred to keep going. i didn’t believe i could get into MIT, but i applied in part because yes, i wanted to change the world.

I didn’t believe i could get into grad school, but i applied because — okay actually i just applied because i’d be paid the same but actually get health insurance. it didn’t have much to do with anger lol

Anyway, anger in various forms has driven me through life. In some sense, anger is part of my identity, and I’m afraid to let go of it. I fear that if I stop being angry, I’ll stop trying to change the world.

But having anger at the world as a part of my identity, makes coming to terms with my inability to change it rather painful. Or makes it harder to see the small bits I do change and the change that happens over time.

I want to give myself permissions to be happy, to be confident that I won’t ever stop trying to change the world.

My wild implementation plan is to go to the opposite extreme and focus on being a rich douchebag and/or having tech bro optimism (that tech will fix the world), idk lol it’ll be a fun year

reflections on undergrad me: pep talk needed

i rewatched my hexapods video https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=qTh-OGA_LeM

(context: for the 2.007 class which is a robot competition, i elected to go do my own thing and build a hexapod, because … idk i wanted a dancing hexapod)

and WOW i can hear all the lack of confidence and downplaying and a little bit of the misery (that’s probably more my own memory though) in the (rather mumbled) voiceover. and reading my old instructables. i actually did a ton. it’s not as much as i wanted but it’s still a ton. it helps me hear it in my own voice right now.

when i watch a video of 2025 me in ten years, i want to come away with a sense of this person is super competent, confident, articulate, and rightfully proud of their own achievements and technical skills

 

friendships

i’ve never really considered the possibility of lifelong friendships before, so when a friend brought up the idea (in the context of finding emotional fulfillment) i was really stunned.

it really feels like i’m just starting to exit the unstable crisis mode i’ve been in for oh, the past decade. i mean way more stable than other people’s lives. but i haven’t really felt stable before.

a longer article another time. but essentially since my second hospitalization was such a miserably formative experience i always thought of friendships as a support network. the primary purpose is a safety net and my goal is the robustness of the network as a whole rather than individual links. it’s imperative that the graph is well-connected so that, even if/when edges fail (people move away, people start families, work gets busy, there’s a falling out, etc.) that each node is still well-connected overall. 

i would be a poor friend if i didn’t make sure my friends could rely on each other and didn’t need me.

but for her the focus is more on sharing the ups, not just the downs.

i never considered having a lifelong friendship as a goal or even a possibility.

still not sure how i feel about all this. it’s in some sense the opposite of my goal. in her framework, each deep friendship is special and irreplaceable. in my framework, having any individual link matter so much threatens the stability of the safety net.

i suppose that someone could have multiple deep friendships, grieve the loss of one, while still remaining well supported. tl;dr still scratching my head about this

supportive workplace

another head scratcher. i keep being mildly shocked each time my manager(s) are responsive and want me to succeed. i can only think of the misery of pushing my paper through on my own (no coauthors, no lab) into ICRA, and then instead of my committee celebrating that, feels like i got thrown under the bus at quals. that was, well, not helpful …

so yea, still constantly surprised and wrapping my head around this