incoming parents and big deal life problems

So, my parents are coming in thursday around noon. Their flight takes off saturday at noon. Last time they visited me where I lived (okay, excluding pittsburgh, it’s too close to count), they got to see me dance around on stage in camo pants, grab the ass of my fellow “soldier” and swish. And sing. =) My dad seems to have had a magic blindspot that covered me while I was front and center on stage, but it’s okay. (this was emphatically _not_ the show I had wanted them to come see). Then later than night I had the roommate drama blowup with Glenn-Paul, and I spent much of the following day with them hanging out at that pier thing outside downtown chicago (I think it’s “navy pier” or is that a san fran thing? Why do we need the navy in the great lakes? Fraid of a canadian invasion? I’d make such the tour guide) and weighing what I was going to do about it. I ended up moving out and spending some lonely months in hyde park. Lonely they may have been, but bad they were not.

And this time, I have another big deal life problem. My parents, for all my bitching about them prior to my second or third year at cmu are actually pretty fucking cool. They very much let me make my own decisions, and support me in my choices. My mom, she wants to protect me, and make sure my life is in order. I think that was what the incessant asking me about whether I’d “met any girls yet” was about, prior to coming out. The gay thing threw them for a bit of a loop, but they were never assholes about it, and are getting to be pretty cool about that too.

I feel like I’ve been a disappointment to them in alot of ways. I mean, me & my sisters are pretty bright bulbs. And yet, none of us breezed through college and went on to what is generally evaluated as stunning success.

I mean, Dad certainly didn’t have an easy time of things either. He’s a very emotionally sensitive guy. In medicine, that’s an asset and a liability. One semester in his undergrad, he was doing a pre-med volunteer dealie, or something like that, and a patient he’d gotten attached to died. It shook him pretty badly. He joined the Navy and walked away from school for awhile. He eventually finished up. I think I was like 5 or 6 before he finished his residency, meaning, early 30’s before he started practicing medicine. Lots of promise, but late bloomers, perhaps.

And somehow, I get the sense that mom expected better of herself. Or maybe I just expected perfection from her. I know that none of me and my sisters were planned, though I didn’t find out until long after my relationship with my parents had settled down. They never mentioned it. My mom’s a pretty smart cookie too. But I think living in the middle of nowhere wore her down. I dunno. Mom’s alot less open with her feelings than Dad. I run a bit of a middle road between them on that front.

Even when I was very young (I was on a tee-ball team, must’ve been like 6 or 7), I wanted to do everything. I remember a tee-ball practice, where some adult guy asked me in front of my mom what I wanted to be. I rattled off a list at top speed and it still must’ve taken a minute to get it all out (it ended with “…fireman, scientist, & ghost [so I could walk through walls]”). In high school, visiting friends of my sister’s at cornell, I was thinking genetic engineering (though I did get some pirated pascal compiler ;). I had the sort of grades & test scores where I could have gone into basically any technical field I wanted at damn near the school of my choice. I picked cmu because it had to my mind a fair diversity of academic excellence (ah the folly of youth), it was just the right distance from the parents, and it kicked butt in what I figured I wanted to do: computers.

My first couple of years in pittsburgh were gigantic growth and adjustment periods for me. I went from an ‘A’ student to a ‘B’ student, which flipped me out, but I adapted. I also started working, for real, for the first time in my life. Coming to terms with being gay was another big one for me. And all the childhood psychosexual trauma, blah, blah, blah. (see, I still minimalize, at least I realize I’m doing it now. =). I flopped in my 3rd semester. There were reasons, but reasons and excuses are easy to confuse, so I’ll skip it for now. My parents came out to see me. Very concerned about how/what I was doing. I also remember an educational/scientific programming job I missed by a couple days due to sitting on a resume for two months, but, no recrimination. I told them that I needed to be held accountable. A very republican solution. Spank me, and I’ll do better. Whatever. I remember the poised-for-suicide-attempt moments (think having the knife out, and pointed at the wrist, and thinking about life for a few hours, and whether it’s really worth it, but never actually cutting). Alot of this was while I was living in ‘s dorm room. Those were the darker times.

I moved off campus, and started living with an interesting collection of people. This is definitely verging off topic. Dissappointment. yeah.

I recovered, pulled myself together. I came back with a mission. Graduate. Finish it, and re-evaluate at that point. Well, my first semester or two back at school were rousing successes. Straight A’s. But it slipped. I remember sitting alone in a cold parking lot after failing a midterm (didn’t need the prof to tell me, I knew it), staring out into space. Two friends found me there. The first one saw my rather stricken look, asked me what was wrong. I told him, and broke out in tears by the end of the sentence. He stayed with me for a bit, then tried to get me to go with him. I didn’t. Another friend came buy with a group of acquaintances. He sent them on, stayed behind, held me, and tried to get me to go with him too. I thanked him, but declined. I dropped the course, and passed with a C the next semester.

I eventually ended up completing the degrees. Went through a progression of research programming jobs along the way. First one I contributed something, slowly, tortuously, but I got it done. It’s a pretty neat research idea, I still remember how the part I contributed works. Second one, I fucked around for a few month’s on professor Yaron’s dime, then left when he said that he was really getting serious about stuff getting done. It was a great idea, and I wanted to contribute, but, well, I didn’t.

I did some time as a ‘peer academic counselor’. I think I helped some students feel better about their academic lives. I don’t know that I did anything more. (the goal was to teach students useful study skills things). I learned alot of very basic cog psych. But still no feelings of accomplishment.

My academic projects were another study in frustration. The cpu and operating system simulations were incomplete, the simulated annealer never made it to fruition. Generally having some very cool, very sophisticated ideas, but not complete.

I remember a major sense of accomplishment from a later circuit design course (with as my lab partner). During one particular lab assignment, there was some conflict over methodology, I walked out of the lab, stewed, and steamed for a long time, then did the project by myself in the lab (in about as much time as we were given for the assignment overall), and came out with a version slightly superior to Aaron’s. (there was a design competition. It didn’t matter, we came nowhere near the version that the TA’s produced. I, ironically enough, had read about the exact same circuit they designed in the engineering and science library). I feel compelled to note that Aaron carried me through the lab most of the class, and I’m grateful to him for it. It marked … something for me. That particular lab was a moment of triumph for me. I took a creative technical task, and completed it, well. Not spectacularly, but well, and actually completed it.

Not too long after that, I ended up going to chicago, working for motorola, and contributing about as much there as I did to the research project for Dr Yaron. And getting paid alot more. I hated it, and quit promptly. Started tutoring math and science for very little money. Substitute teaching kicked ass. Tutoring I didn’t feel like I was doing much, but with the teaching, I got to establish rapport with a group of about 15 students, some more engaged than others, but I think I brought something to the class. And it changed me in a little way, each time. The tutoring felt like a waste of time, but the teaching, I felt worthwhile after that. I don’t think I could have kept it up. I was like a gigantic energy pipe. I put so much into the teaching, and I got so much back, but it was more than I could have taken, I think. I dunno. Still, not exactly incredibly impressive, and not enough to keep me out of debt. Besides, I was never a full time teacher.

Moved back to pittsburgh, worked as an advanced technical problem solver. I did okay by my own estimates. I learned a great deal in the role. I got supremely tired of some of the routine tasks. I also did alot of turning to other people for answers I might have been able to find for myself at least as quickly, had I worked at it. And ultimately, after being reprimanded for messing with production systems, reprimanded in a manner that I felt was unfair and inconsistent, I quit. Quit and moved out here. Temp jobs held me over until Ro discovered me, then I started this job. And I have a great deal of apathy towards the work I’ve done, but I’ve done work. This is probably the technical job, where I feel I’ve done my best work. But it’s not work of a variety I’d like to do long term, even if that were an option.

And, once again, my finances have fallen down and can’t get up. And no job to pull out of a hat. I’m disappointed in me. Fuck my claim that I think my parents are disappointed in me. I am. That’s the problem.

If my dream job were to drop out of the air tomorrow, it’d be something I could do for 6 months, with the possibility of extension. It’d involve writing code, and talking with people. The code would involve work with databases, guis, and/or webpages, and would be tremendously varied. And it’d be both cool and expected that I’d learn as I went. Doing, trying, learning new things. Some travel, like a week or two a month, would be fine, so long as it wasn’t all to one place. I’d be totally cool with people changing what they wanted, and telling me “well, we wanted it that way, but now we want it this way”. I don’t need major income. I’d be happy with significantly less than friends who graduated from cmu are making. If I had enough to cover rent, and living expenses, and some reasonable debt payment, I’d walk into consumer credit counseling tomorrow and send my credit rating to outer mongolia for awhile. But I do not have work that I’m happy doing, or a reliable income stream that will cover all the aforementioned bases.

Honestly, for all my bitching about the lack of snow and what not, I want to stay here for now. I really don’t want to move if I’m going to end up at uc berkeley for grad school. I’m still planning on chicago as my long run home, but I have some living to finish up here before starting a life there.