One Man’s Walk through life

I Want A Wife

I want a wife.

I’m ready. I have spent a lot of time not being ready. Of messing around and playing. Of experimenting and looking. Of just plain being young and irresponsible. And it was good.

But I’m ready.

I want someone who will laugh at my jokes, even as she groans. Who wants for my touch, and understands it. Who challenges me, and tells me when I’m full of shit. I want someone to be there when I fly. I want someone to be there when I grieve. Someone that will embarrass the kids by dancing in the freezer section of a safeway. I want someone who radiates joy. and pain. Someone honest, and passionate, and authentic. Who knows me. Who knows me better forty years from now.

I’m ready.

It’s funny the way life works. Four years ago I met someone four years older than me who wanted a husband. And I didn’t understand. She said she had played enough, she wanted something more. And I didn’t understand. I found her, but she didn’t find him, in me. She would find him later. Good for her.

Now I understand.

And I am ready too.

This is hilarious

http://oldeenglish.org/gymclass.html

When To Say No

When is saying no appropriate?——
There are 2 “rules” that have played a big part in my life:

always say yes to a dance

always say yes when someone asks you for help

These are GOOD rules. I’ve seen what they do to a culture, and it is amazing. However, I am a pragmatist, and every rule has a context where it applies as well as a context where it is inappropriate. When should you say no?
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In Dancing——
Throughout the world, swing etiquette is to always say yes when someone asks you to dance unless you have a good reason not to. If you say no to one person, it is extremely bad form to say yes to someone else.

Because of this, dancing swing is some kind of bizarro version of regular club dancing. Not everyone at a swing venue is there to get drunk and hook up, sometimes no one is. People are smiling, talking, gossiping, and laughing, not to mention, dancing.

Stepping into a swing club “everone knows your name”, and that is because people say “yes”. Going to a new city, I can go to any venue and have a good night of dancing, meeting tons of new people in a safe 1-on-1 environment.

The fear of rejection that so permeates our culture, paralyzing guys who want to ask “that girl” out. The coldness that most girls feel they need to use to defend themselves from an unending flood of guys who just want to get in their pants. The whole clubland cycle of shit. Goes. At a swing venue, the answer is always yes…at least, as long as the question is a dance.
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At Work——
One of the simplest and most important lessons that I’ve ever learned from a book is to always say yes when someone asks for help. ThePragmaticProgramer taught me this a year after I got out of college. I have seen this simple rule transform corporations.

*”What do I have to do to make you and me, become an us”?*

When you strip it down, this is what I do at work. This is what I rake in the big bucks, what I get flown, dined, and recommended for. This is why I can afford to take year long vacations. I transform groups of individuals into teams. Or more correctly, I help a group of people transform themselves into a team.

It’s not ‘my’ problem, and ‘your’ assignment, and ‘his’ use case, and ‘their’ story. And it had better not be ‘his’ fault. Language is important. A team that uses this language is not a team, it’s a group of individuals pulling in different directions, redoing eachothers work when they are not undoing it, or putting cracks in it. It is wasteful, inefficient, and a terrible environment to work in, once you’ve seen the alternative.

This cover your ass mentality is what I struggle against. At the end of the day ExtremeProgramming is just a vehicle to get a team to gel. A team where everyone is team-oriented instead of self-oriented. Where everyone is pulling in the same direction. Where people will drop their own lines to help the people on the team that are pulling what is most important for the team. It is so much more fun, so much more efficient. What good is it if I succeed in my assignment if the team fails?

And again, the way this happens is by saying yes. When I say yes when someone asks me where the !CompanyThomlet is, or how to make a web service, or why this test is failing, when I go out of my way to be generous with my time, people respond.

By positively reinforcing their asking for my time, a cycle starts that continues with them being generous with their time. Not only do I always say yes, but I assume others will as well, and when you see someone that you respect (hopefully me) constantly asking unabashedly for other people’s time and giving of his own, it starts to sink in that maybe this is okay to do.

And after a while you get a team where people aren’t afraid to show their ignorance. Where my solution becomes your solution as well, where your failure is the team’s failure and the team’s responsibility to pick up. Where your story is equally important as my story, and I’m not worried about “getting in trouble” for taking time out of one part of the team’s deliverables to jump start another part.
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But it doesn’t always work——
In Dancing

Sometimes you’re not feeling it. The worst thing is to dance with someone who doesn’t want to dance with you. It would be much better to get the no, than to dance with someone who obviously doesn’t want to be there, not looking at you, frowning. Fuck that. I don’t want to be that person to someone else.

And sometimes I can’t help it. I want to want to dance with everyone, I want to “love what I do” as opposed to only “doing what I love”. I think. But sometimes I can’t. Sometimes it’s the end of an exchange, and I’m not going to see my three favorite follows for a year and I just want to dance with them the entire time. It’s selfish. I’ll hate myself for it tomorrow, but right now…

Is that wrong? What is the line between being selfish, and being healthy in looking after your own concerns first???

At Work

I asked my last team for feedback before I rolled off, and a couple of them mentioned I was easily distracted. Saying ‘yes’ to one person often means saying ‘no’ to another. Often it is not ‘my time’ that I’m being generous with.

If I’m pairing the entire day, then what do I do when one of my friends IM’s me to ask me a question that will take half a minute to answer, and what do I do when that half minute turns into an hour. Helping someone means ditching my pair, and what happens when 4 hours of each of my days is spent jumping around? And if the answer is to not actually have a pair, then what happens when I’m helping one person and in the middle of that, someone else asks me a question, and in the middle of that…???
——
So…

So obviously this post doesn’t explain when to say no. Instead, I’m asking y’all. When is it okay to say no? Especially against the obvious benefits of saying yes?

Basie Centennial

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So I’m in New York this weekend. It is strange. I know this town, I love this town.

I see so many of my friends around me here, and I am struck that perhaps I HAVE made a difference in this world. In 9 months here, I touched lives, I think, and made friends. I cannot tell you how moved I was to see this site http://geocities.com/bluesparties/. New York now has blues, and I helped that along, in a way that people appreciate.

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The people here… Steve Watkins, Devona Cartier, Ellie Thomas, Sonya Kranwinkel, there are so many more. I love them, they are my friends, they made the time I spent here one of the best times of my life.

And now.

So much has changed, so much is the same. But looking at what’s left 6 months after I left, I think I’m on the right track. I need to keep doing, and searching for more of what I did and searched for here in New York.

People keep asking me how I’ve changed since South America.

I’m a bit more laid back, patient, and more balanced. I’m a bit sadder, honestly, and I’m not sure why. My dream of going and finding my “big dream” is mostly gone. I don’t think it works that way. I think it works much more the way New York worked last year. Know what you believe. Know what matters to you, and live that. The “big dreams” that need you will find you. The little dreams will do the same. Greatness is not what I once thought it was.

Orlando Exchange2004

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aww, florida…

I love florida follows.

The weekend, in brief:

• Hang out with Haley in Tampa
• Party to some nice blues and trip hop along w/ Liz, Adrian, Julie Anne and some spaghetti

• Nicest meal I’ve had in a good long while w/ Haley and Mihai at Roy’s in Orlando
• Dance
• Dance

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• Sleep and hang out with Lisa and Tamar – I love my Florida girls…
• Dance
• Dance
• See Jacki again, and dance with her and Mihai till the sun comes up and we all pass out

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• Dance & eat, Orlando knows how to feed it’s guests – yay
• Dance, nice 2 room venue, with the DJ’s taking a good measure of chances
• Dance, I love Tina’s DJing
• Drive back to Tampa w/ Haley and fall in love with her all over again (along with most of the other leads in the states)
• Massage (yay!) and sleep (like the dead)

• Wake up and start driving to Asheville, NC our next stop

Did I mention I love Florida follows?

St Louis Exchange2004

awesome, great music before anything else, wonderful follows, hosts, dances, and conversations

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Well, that was weird

I’m back in Austin after being gone for just 24 hours.

You can squeeze a lot into 24 hours if you try. For example:

• a flight to LA and 3 hours of sleep
• the wedding of a dear friend from college
• the resulting quasi college reunion
• watching USC, our alma matter, kick LSU’s butt
• getting in an accident (which was TOTALLY not my fault)
• hanging with a people.DanielAndresFresquez for hours, catching up over beers and then breakfast
• 3 hours of sleep at the airport
• a flight out of LA and 3 more hours of sleep

So anyway, now I’m back.

Random.

Now to make up that dancin’…

Don’t know if blondes have more fun…

I’m back in El Paso, for a week. This is me about to go out with my brother to a see some band.

What are you going to do about that?

…is my new favorite question.

Living Each Moment As If It Was Your Last

*”Live each moment, realizing that you and everyone around you is dying”*
I’m currently reading the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, and really liking it. It talks about the constant awareness of imminent death and how this realization of our own impermenance can affect the way we live. Reflecting on this a bit (at 5AM) I am recognizing this same message has been coming to me from many different sources. I like this, because this is usually how I recognize something as true, I suddenly notice that everyone has always been saying the same thing.

Experiencing a city before moving…again

I was bitching for the umpteenth time that I couldn’t believe I’m leaving in 3 days, and I started to say that I should get that out of my head or else I wouldn’t enjoy the rest of my time here. And then…I realized that wasn’t true, and furthermore, it is the same situation that the book talked about. At the end of every trip, or move out of a city, I realize “suddenly” all the things that I really want to do and I go and try to do them. I always do more in the last 2 weeks than over the month or months that I have lived in the city. But in the cities where I have lived shorter times, I go do stuff sooner. It is human nature to deny things that we don’t want to think about, like leaving a place and running out of time to experience it, like New York, London, Argentina, or this existence we call Life. The more we force ourselves to acknowledge the truth that we are just transients, that we had better enjoy ourselves, because we may never see this road again, the better off we’ll be.

Christianity
Now, I am a Catholic, and don’t worry, Mom, I’m not thinking about converting to Buddhism any time soon (and yes, my mom reads this blog…). I was just thinking about the early Christians, and wondering if we didn’t have this same message back then? They really and truly believed that the end times were just around the corner, that they might happen within their lifetimes. They had to live their lives accepting that the world could literally END at any moment. …wow. That was the time when much of the world became Christian based solely on the admiration of those Christians. I don’t think Christians today live with that realization. It’s okay to do bad things, to sin, to hate, because we can make it up. It’s okay to run up a huge credit card debt as long as you have a long time to pay, right? 0% interest for 12 months…

7 Habits
One of the habits in SevenHabitsOfHighlyEffectivePeople is “Beginning with the End in Mind”. It starts with an amazing exercise of imagining your own funeral. It asks you to imagine your friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors there, and ask yourself what it is you would like each of them to say. It’s a really cool and is a great tool for recognizing what’s really important to you in the different worlds of your life. Imagine living very moment with the constant awareness that above all else, you want to be a husband that always has time for his wife and family, that you want your coworkers to see you as dependable, that you want your friends to always be able to confide in you.