October 20, 2022

To be Understood, and to Understand

I’ve become increasingly bad at ‘people’, and I am starting to come to terms that I don’t think I’ve ever really understood how to ‘people’. As much as social graces and interpersonal relationships are a learned skill, I realize now that the amount of effort to understand and act within those parameters can vary wildly. For me, it is a constant calculation running in the background of my mind. Every time that I forget that internalized editorial process, the results are… Unfortunate.

I find myself struggling to justify my introverted nature in the face of my theatre and performance background, but when I examine things through this lens, it begins to make sense. At least, to me. A performance has constraints, structure, expectations and can exist outside of social pressures. Give me a script, I no longer worry about what I am going to say. Give me a character, now I have another personality to assume that takes me further away from myself. It almost sounds like an excuse. It wasn’t me, it was my character. I’m sure there’s legal precedent defending heinous crimes using the same logic. A Twinkie Defence for Introverts.

Sorry, I was trying to be pithy but I think that was a bit of a reach. Might be a good name for a band, though.

I hate how this particular barrier where I’m trying to be understood and not being able to understand or get clarification hamstrings my attempts to contribute to public discourse. I need structure, I need a shared basis of knowledge, I need people to stop and explain concepts to me or confirm my understanding of them. I need things to slow down and make space for me. Every time I attempt to make space for myself, I get too incensed, too frustrated, too loud, and I leave feeling like an idiot or an asshole.

Never mind the added dimension of trying to apologize for myself, that very female learned behaviour. I default to self-admonishment to defuse and excuse myself. I overextend, self-flagellate (internally), and retreat.

I’m just coming at this from the wrong perspective, my bad

This must be something I don’t have enough experience in, I’ll try to educate myself on the subject

I’m sorry for derailing everything with my questions

This is probably common knowledge for everyone else

I resolve to stop talking, to be content in the background, to literally bite my tongue, but it never lasts. For all my attempts to just shut the fuck up, I never do. I want so badly to let people know that I too, understand the thing. I too, have thoughts about the thing. I probably have a litany of useless facts about the thing, but that is one of the things I remind myself is not strictly helpful, necessary or wanted.

I want to demonstrate value. I want to belong. I want to justify my inclusion.

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.

Abraham Lincoln

I am Boo Boo the Fool. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and… Be confused, probably.

September 3, 2020

On Loss and Little Sorrows

I’m not a fan of disclosing my personal brand of meandering inner narrative to the web at large. This isn’t going to be a Facebook post, or a pithy Tweet.

On September 1st, 2020, my father finally succumbed to his long and arduous fight with cancer. It was a saga of a number of years, a slow and plodding pace to the grave. A sad decline for anyone, made worse for the prideful man that my father was, to slowly lose his independence.

I would not wish it for anyone, even someone with as complicated a life as my father.

Now isn’t the time to delve into the nuance of my father’s life and his actions. He was, like everyone, a person of layers, made up of good and bad. Above all else, he was my father and I am more impacted by this loss than I thought I’d be.

The sadness comes in fits and starts, in little regrets and remembrances. A classic car on the street, the Discovery channel, a day at the CNE. I wrote something I wanted to read to him before he passed, but could never work up the nerve, since reading it meant that I’d accepted his death and that wasn’t a thought I could reckon with. That is a regret which will follow me, and I have to live with. I couldn’t even leave it with him to read, by the end he wasn’t really able to do even that. I post it here for… I don’t know, so that the words exist somewhere.

“Hey Dad,


I wanted to give you something that you can keep, can hold and read and reread and have that helps explain the person you are to me.

I have a picture in my head of you that I will keep forever. A portrait of all the precious moments that represent ‘Dad’ in my head, the things that will always remind me of you no matter where I am. I have the memory of you making french toast on Sunday mornings, of going to car shows and sharing in your hobbies, of trips to theme parks and exhibitions, of vacations where we kayaked, road horses and cycled, and a memorable time in Spain with a maitre’d you insisted was a ‘really good looking guy’.

I remember going to Costa Rica with no real expectations of what I would do or see there, and you acting as the gracious host and perennial tourguide. Going hiking up a mountain, ziplining through the trees, visiting a butterfly sanctuary and staying at a hotel with more monkeys than people. All of these experiences are held dear in my heart, and will forever paint the picture of you as my father.

My memories aren’t solely dedicated to these grand gestures and decadent demonstrations. The quiet moments are equally precious to me. Of hours spent in the garage, watching you work on your latest endeavor, be it tiny trees, hot rods or jewelry making. Your bonsai, corvette and pendant necklace are some of the most vibrant images that conjure up ‘you’ in my mind. I’m pretty sure my own insatiable appetite for hobbies, to try everything and throw myself into anything full-stop, are part of me that I owe to you.

You fostered my interest in computers and technology at an early age, bringing me back magazines like MacWorld and MacAddict with CDs full of software for me to while away the hours pouring over. Your interest in technology fueled my own, and we could spend hours talking about the latest news from Apple. I will always be thankful for this, as my relationship with computers and technology has become something of a defining trait in my life.

I know that I’m not the easiest person to deal with, nor the easiest child to raise. Despite my differences and the challenges in raising someone like me, I feel like you embraced a lot of the things that make me different, and even celebrated them.

While it might not be evident in our interactions, I’m proud to have you as my father. Your entrepreneurial spirit, your dedication to being your own boss and blazing your own trail, and your determination to take your humble beginnings and turn them into a portrait of success.

I know it’s selfish to think of, even now, but I want the opportunity to make you proud of me. Where Jacquie and Lee Ann have their families and their careers and have lives that let you know that they’re going to be okay, I’ve always been a step behind and a dollar short. I can only promise you that I’ll live a life that will make you proud of me, just as you’ve lived a life to be proud of.

I love you, in every small thoughtful gesture, in family gatherings, in shared hobbies and forgiving past misdeeds. I love you with every fond memory and treasured moment from my youth up until today. I love you for all the times I didn’t say it before, and I love you for all the times I won’t be able to say it again. It will never be enough.

My one and only father, now and forever.

Devin”

It’s not enough, but it’s all I can do now.

December 7, 2018

The Long Road Back.

Okay. Well, the gist of the post that was eaten by WordPress was about my most recent descent into depression, and my struggles with mental illness and being a functional human being in this crazy world we live in. I’m going to dust myself off and try again (try again), because I think it’s still beneficial to try and put these feelings into words. 

I struggle with depression, which manifests in many different ways that I am becoming more acutely aware of as I try to meander my way through life as a semi-competent adult human being. 

It is so much more than simply ‘being sad sometimes’. It is… A fog, a haze, something like Hamlet’s ‘trappings and the suits of woe’, a heavy coat that weighs you down both mentally and physically. It is exhausting, to labour under this weight for every day of your life, and any reprieve seems fleeting and ephemeral at best. Depression sours every victory and poisons the mind in ways that twist a person into a shadow of themselves, and in my moments of clarity, of medication and manic upswings, I find myself unable to recognize the person and the thoughts that seem so prevalent in my deep depression.

This schism of personality is both stark and alarming.

Admitting to this kind of personal failing in such a public manner is a daunting task. Which is kind of funny, since the litany of blogs I’ve kept before this one, mostly in my teenage years, very freely discussed these thoughts, albeit without much of a clinical lens. There’s something less judgemental about a moody teen writing self-absorbed blog posts about the pains of adolescence versus an adult acknowledging their continued setbacks and attempts to succeed in spite of this fundamental detriment. As a teen, this sort of sometimes sadness is seen as a right of passage, a trick of overactive hormones on the developing brain. For these feelings to continue into adulthood seems almost shameful, an inability to cast off the self-indulgent navel-gazing of one’s teenage years. 

Another strange correlation that seems borne of this depressive descent is the crippling lack of self-confidence, or just an overwhelming sense of self-doubt. Just as my teenage self seemed able to publish a litany of mindless dialogues with little regard to their tone or impact, my current self pours over the words I write and finds most of them wanting. I leave skeletons of drafts, half-finished thoughts, and other remains of work left undone or un-started. A once therapeutic exercise, something I once took a middling amount of pride in, I find myself unable to consummate. 

And it just makes me hate myself even more. 

So I try this. An attempt to make my way back to a better version of myself. A healthier version of myself. A return to words, and to have the courage to both write them, and share them.

Now let’s see if WordPress eats this post too. 

November 29, 2018

OKAY. WELL.

I wrote a really long and poignant post about how difficult the past few days have been for me, struggling with mental illness and all that, and WordPress decided to screw up my authentication somewhere in the interim and what SHOULD have been autosaved was actually NOT autosaved and so now you just get me raging at shitty WordPress Gutenburg garbage.

THANKS WORDPRESS. THANKS EVER SO MUCH YOU PIECE OF SHIT GARBAGE FUCKHOLE.

Well. At least I can feel SOMETHING right now. And that is ANGER. 

Fucking GARBAGE PHP PIECE OF SHIT ASS FUCKWAFFLE CREDENTIALS EDITOR SHITSTICK.

I am so angry I can feel it in my diaphragm. Like, right below my ribcage. That is apparently where anger comes from. 

You COULD have had a nice introspective musing on my attempt to reclaim my mind from the ravages of a deep depression that has plagued me since I was a child, but no. Now you get swears. Not even creative swears!

ASS BUNGLING SHITTY CRACKERJACK SHITSHINGLES.

UGHHHHHH. 

Fuck.

June 23, 2018

Striking Out In All Directions

In both the baseball-metaphor sense, and the ‘flailing wildly with no particular goal in mind’ sense.

Something like throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing nothing stick. Perhaps I forgot to cook the spaghetti? What is the cooking of spaghetti in this metaphor? Hmm.

Digression happens now, because I have lost the point.

Right! The point was…

Wait.

Something self-indulgent and melancholy, I’m sure. Lack of… Momentum. Upward mobility. Progress? Yes. Too many ambitions, none of them yielding any sort of traction. I suppose that’s always been something of a problem of mine. I have the desire to do anything, everything, always and all at once, but attempting to spread oneself in so many myriad directions simultaneously gets nothing of value accomplished.

I feel like I’m always trying to catch up on time wasted, time misspent. Like I have to explode in every direction in an attempt to gain back the ground I lost to other fruitless pursuits.

There’s a tally being kept of my life, and I fear my account is irreparably in arrears.

… Is this ‘FOMO’?

 

Big Mood.

May 7, 2018

Consumer Woes OR EA Doesn’t Understand Ecommerce

I’m writing this quick post while I’m waiting for a ‘Customer Support Advisor’ to try and resolve what is kind of a messed-up problem for an ecommerce platform to have.

I made the mistake of wanting to give EA (Electronic Arts) my money, by using their Origin platform to purchase a game on my PC. Seems like a regular enough occurrence, right? Literally why the Origin service exists, right? Give them the money through my computer, download the games onto my computer, bam. Steam manages to attain this base level of functionality (albeit sometimes very poorly, and with a bloated and dated UI/infrastructure), so EA must surely be able to do the most basic step in ecommerce and TAKE MY PAYMENT INFORMATION, yes?

Of course not. This post wouldn’t exist if they could. Also we’re talking about Electronic Arts here.

Oh! I’m being escalated to a Customer Support SPECIALIST. It’s gonna take a SPECIALIST to get to the bottom of this hum-dinger of a problem!

The problem being: EA does not know how to validate my credit card on their Origin platform.

So, literally the thing that this platform exists to do.

I mean, I’ve built more competent ecommerce websites/apps as a single person.

I’ll take some screenshots of the chat conversation that I’m having with the ‘Advisor’- OH HECK, they have a button where you can just save a PDF of the conversation? That’s… Actually useful. In this one particular circumstance. I’m shook.

Unnecessarily long and complicated story short, I ended up having to use my credit card through Paypal for Origin to accept my money. So I had to go through an unnecessary third party with my credit card info in order for Origin to do what it is literally designed to do. Wowzers.

EA is garbage.

May 4, 2018

Still Here!

Still queer, get used to it, blah blee bloo.

Just wanted to drop a note for myself, and I guess… For the internet? Dunno. I got a neat idea for a mother’s day gift. Well, I think so, anyways.

I’m going to turn my mother’s writing into a font. Typeface. Whichever.

I’ve always liked the way my mother prints letters. My writing is awful, but I’ve always wanted to write like she does.

So I’m going to get her to write out the alphabet in her printing, and transform it into a free-to-use font for everyone to share. Yay? Yes. Also I will learn how to make fonts. Which I know a little about already.

April 18, 2018

How I Code Good?

The easy answer is: practice.

But that takes time and dedication, and who has the energy for that kind of endeavour in a world with Amazon Prime?!

So instead I keep half-starting ambitious coding projects and inevitably get frustrated with myself, put them on the backburner, and kind of… Collapse into a heap of self-deprecation. I’m quite good at that last part.

I’m trying a few new small-scale initiatives in order to try and get back into the ‘swing’ of ‘things’, as it were. I WILL DOCUMENT THEM HERE FOR POSTERITY.

  • Codewars/Hackerrank/etc. Coding Problems – A good way to practice the fundamentals and expand my thinking in regards to best coding practices when using Ruby/JS/etc.
  • Learn a new JS framework (JUST ONE AT A TIME) – Probably going to work on learning React, since that’s one of the… Three(?) JS frameworks I was attempting to learn simultaneously (Note: Don’t do that. It’s not smart. Patience, young grasshopper.)
  • Learn a new programming language – Working on Python currently. I think it will help me work through my problems with thinking ‘programmatically’, where my brain has some trouble parsing the simpler coding concepts into the more involved process of application building and testing.
  • Work on a personal portfolio project (JUST ONE AT A TIME. AGAIN.) – I’d like to resume work on Curator, and I think I have the appropriate API knowledge and Rails skills to get the basic structure and API integration/OAuth credentials/etc. to work. I mean, the bulk of it is there in some form or another in the uniD app.
  • READ STUFF – I’m really good at reading words. Programmatic concepts, not as much, but reading them is making me think more critically about coding and how to apply more advanced concepts to my knowledge base.

I think that this is a pretty comprehensive plan of attack. The trouble is sticking to it and not letting myself get discouraged so easily. I also need to make sure to pace myself and set reasonable milestones. Maybe after I’ve gotten into a better place, self-esteem-wise, I’ll start doing the freelance thing again. It’s really difficult to sell yourself as a freelance web developer when you have no confidence in yourself. That’s a tip, from me to you. You’re welcome.

BELIEVE IN YOURSELF. I’ll get there eventually.

April 17, 2018

Introduction

I guess since there isn’t really an ‘About’ page or info bar or anything, this could serve as some sort of starting point for… Blogging.

Hello, my name is Devin, and this is a website.

In particular, this website serves as a tiny corner of the internet where I (supposedly) keep all of my assorted bits of writing and whatnot. I’ve had various blogs and personal websites for… Well, since Livejournal was a thing and not used as some kind of shadowy Russian server farm or somesuch.

On that note, I’m surprised to discover that my LJ still exists. The last post was over ten years ago. Wowzers.

I might do a trawling of all my old archives and assorted other blogs that I’ve kept over the years and try to integrate what I can recover into this site. Just so I can cringe at myself from the comfort of a single domain. IDK, masochism.

I think writing more will be good for my mental health, maybe? I’d like that.

January 3, 2018

Hello world!

Welcome to the… Oh jeez, I’ve actually lost count… 5th? Incarnation of what is supposed to be a no-nonsense repository for things that I’ve written.

Unfortunately, when it comes to maintaining any kind of blog, I tend to choose the nuclear option when I lapse in writing on a regular basis. So now, instead of a spotty and irregular backlog of content, I have yet another fresh start.

This is a bad habit I have.

Is there a word for choosing the nuclear option out of shame? I’m sure there is. I bet you they have a term for it in French.

 

Or German.