Learning is Change

One of my earliest memories of the ocean was with my grandparents. I was on a trip to an Elder-hostel with my brother and we stopped by the beach to swim and play in the sand. Up until this point, I don’t remember having a particular aversion to sand or the beach.

The salt water was completely unexpected. I knew that the ocean was salt water. I wasn’t completely uninformed. But, I expected it to be along the lines of the only ratio I knew up until that point: the kosher salt and water that my grandfather mixed up for his passover ceremony. It was nothing like that. One gulp and I was done. I headed back to the beach.

On our way to the beach, my grandparents had gotten us long sticks of rock candy. I was a fan of anything with that much sugar and so I started working on it almost immediately. It was a big enough piece, though, that I had to put it aside when I went in the water. I left it on the towel and wrapped it up for safe keeping. It did not keep safe. Somehow, sand made its way into the towel and onto my candy. I was devastated upon my return. I tried to eat around the sand but it kept on getting in my mouth. I wasn’t going to give up on my candy so quickly, so I worked with alternating sucking on the candy and spitting out the sand. It was a terrible idea. Before long, I felt sick from having chewed on sand and feeling it grind in my teeth.

By the time that we left, my aversion to swimming in the ocean, eating rock candy, or playing in the sand was so acute that I kept on wiping myself and the car seat down for any possible grains of sand that had made their way through my rigorous scrubbing session just outside of the car. I wanted nothing to do with sand for the rest of the trip, and when I saw the pool at our final destination, I practically hugged the water.

I recognize that sand is beautiful. I recognize the incredible sensation of walking along wet sand and dipping your toes in it and squishing them around. I also recognize that it is an irritent, that clams have to make enormous coverings for a single grain if it comes in contact with their soft flesh. The irritent is so absolute for me that I have a hard time watching my children sit down in the bathing suits and get sand into them. It is ruined for me.

It was the fact that it was my first experience that made it so potent. If I would have received some instruction about rock candy and sand or gotten a lesson in ocean swimming prior to taking a dip, I think I could have had a better time. But as it was, my first day of beach living was a disaster of childhood proportions. And it has made me much more cautious about first time experiences since.

Every time that I try a new product or idea out, I feel like I might be putting sand in my mouth. I carefully dip my toes in the water and then I ease in. I am aware that at any moment, I could be grinding it against my teeth, feeling the caustic squeak of unprocessed glass. And most of the time, my first experience is pretty grand. I have realizations for how to use the idea and I make it work for me. Quite often, it becomes something that I like and use frequently.

But, there are a few times that I get that use something or think through a possibility that turns me off to it for the rest of its existence. I may still be faced with it on occasion or even daily, but I never lose that taste. Here are some of the things that are sand in my mouth:

• Going through a touch tone menu system on a phone
• Microsoft Word (now that I have used Google Docs and Pages)
• Keeping receipts for reimbursement
• Refrigerators that freeze their contents or keep them too warm no matter what setting you have it on
• Yard work
• Paper in binders with carefully labeled tabs
• Ulterior motives
• Divisive politics
• Broken toilet paper roll holders that should be fixed quite easily, but aren’t.

When someone is dead, they are dead to everyone. While this is crass, it is nonetheless true. It is something that I have accepted, even if it is hard to imagine. I make believe that I can fill the vacancy that others leave behind with pictures and memories and stories. I try to convince myself that the relationships are still exist on some plane, even if they are more one sided than they used to be. And yet, their absence continues to creep in even as I remember the best parts of my life with them. I am forced to acknowledge the loss, just as everyone must. It is healthy and right.

It is not the same with an idea.

Even if I have declared an idea to be dead and gone through all of the stages of grief, it will still continue on for some. It may even thrive with others at the helm. The death of an idea is not universal. We do not all have to simultaneously agree to let go. And the worst part of this is that sometimes even if we have proclaimed something to be dead it may iterate and come back to us as something once again worthy of our time. With enough support, an idea can come back from the dead with ease.

When it does, we have a choice. We can either reconsider the idea and work with it anew or we can continue to convince ourselves of its death. We can call it a death knell or final acts of desperation. But, we can only do that for so long. An idea that continues to present itself must be face head on. It must be brought back into the fold and given its rightful place among our daily workflows.

I left Instant Messages for dead. I left them in high school. I left them with AOL instant messenger. I left the instant communication of text when I started blogging. I left the transient communication of messages when everything on Twitter started getting chronicled and became searchable. I left Skype when I could embed video conferencing anywhere and it was no longer a novelty. I left the simple back and forth conversation along the side of the road. I thought everyone had too. I thought that everyone else had grown up with me. They had come forward and agreed that official communication would be the way that business is done. Years of seeing nothing in the way of instant gratification and collaboration had convinced me that I was right to hold a funeral for the IM.

Now though, I am being forced to reconsider. I have participated in no fewer than a few hundred messages per day for the last two weeks. If I want to engage, I must reconsider the Instant Message as having value. I must exhume my expectations for what communication looks like. I must reassess just how fast things can move. And I have.

This idea seems trivial. It isn’t.

I had buried what was possible because of what I saw all around. Because of those who denied the existence of continuous access to colleagues and relationships, I denied it too. It took a new group of people who saw the leaving and breathing ideal of constant contact as a virtue. I have now reconsidered the IM.

I am now back in my basement in high school, talking with my friends about what I find important. It just so happens that what I find important now is more than music and Saturday night.

Related articles

• Facebook’s messaging: Rise of the IM generation (tech.fortune.cnn.com)

I have always struggled to understand the second act of Rent. The first act is so incredible. It moves me on a regular basis.

La vie boheme.

One Song Glory.

Will I?

These are songs that haunt me. They have such potency. They are so filled with the optimism of what is to come. They don’t leave me wanting more. They are enough to satisfy the truth of shared experience. These are the songs that we sing out loud in cars all over the world.

Sure, the second act has Seasons of Love. And yet, everything seems to be trying to say goodbye from there on out. They are trying to tie up the energy found in the first act. They are trying to live up to its promise while trying to conclude all the while.

A friend once told me that the composer, Jonathan Larson, died before he could fully revise the second act. That was his way of saying that the second act needed something else. It does. It needs to be the follow up to the frenetic pace and pleasure of those characters. And while I enjoy it and I will watch the play on stage any time I can, coming back from an intermission should build something inside of me. All I end up wanting, though is to see those moments of passionate confusion on the actor’s faces. I want to live in the time before Angel dies. I want to see Roger before he leaves for Santa Fe and wises up. I want Mark to keep on rolling, always rolling his camera without irony and self-awareness.

Really, I want the follow up to be something better, something different. I want it to be something that reframes the entirety of the first act and lets me know things I need in order to see the complete picture. Instead, I get a pandoras box of stories that could easily just have stayed inside.

Even as I am harsh on my favorite musical, I know that I may be creating my first act right now. While I know that no one will call these questions as influential as Rent, I know that I may be doing my best writing and my best thinking right now. I may be seeing things more clearly and with more exacting language than I ever will. The possibility is out there that I will never again hold this kind of dedication to detail or focus to a goal as I have right now.

I may be trying to follow this up with a second act that has some of the same characteristics, some of the same passion. But, I may never get back here. I am working toward a future that isn’t entirely mine. So this may be my one chance to tell my singular stories. There are only so many anecdotes from high school. There is only so much soul searching.

This first act is honest and that is all I can promise. None of it is staged. My own little revolution of bohemia is authentic. I am sitting in a parking lot screaming at the moon too. And for all of the failings that may be coming, for all of the let downs and me too’s that I can feel starting to work their way into what comes next, I know that I am doing everything I can to be present. To be me.

And it is hard to make a sequel to yourself. So, I guess I will try and ride this space out as long as it will let me. I will hold on to every note and squeeze them for all they are worth. And maybe I too will move on before my second act has to be revised.

One of the few non-AP courses I took my senior year of high school was Drama. It was, quite simply, the perfect course for someone interested in the arts but with little time to do much about it. There was no homework. There were no projects to speak of. Occasionally, I had to memorize some lines, but for the most part I just had to show up every day and accomplish the acting task set forth. Our teacher knew what the course was and she didn’t pretend that it was a rigorous romp through Shakespeare. She gave everyone credit for showing up, and we were all thankful for her.

She did give us one project that has stuck with me for all of these years. She asked us to memorize the lyrics to a song and then say them out loud without the music. She made us turn those songs into poems and she made us turn ourselves into spoken word artists. She didn’t put any caveats on song choice, but she did ask that they have some meaning to us. This is the one that I chose:

We emerged from youth all wide-eyed like the rest.
Shedding skin faster than skin can grow, and armed with hammers,
feathers, blunt knives:
words, to meet and to define and to…
but you must know the same games that we played in dirt,
in dusty school yards has found a higher pitch and broader scale than we feared possible,
and someone must be picked last,
and one must bruise and one must fail.
And that still twitching bird was so deceived by a window,
so we eulogized fondly,
we dug deep and threw its elegant plumage and frantic black eyes in a hole,
and rushed out to kill something new,
so we could bury that too.
The first chapters of lives almost made us give up altogether.
Pushed towards tired forms of self immolation that seemed so original.
I must, we must never stop watching the sky with our hands in our pockets,
stop peering in windows when we know doors are shut.
Stop yelling small stories and bad jokes and sorrows,
and my voice will scratch to yell many more,
but before I spill the things I mean to hide away,
or gouge my eyes with platitudes of sentiment,
I’ll drown the urge for permanence and certainty;
crouch down and scrawl my name with yours in wet cement.

That last line didn’t need to be sung. It needed to be spoken. By me. I needed it in high school, just as I need it today. As much as I want everything to be permanent and certain. Just as I would like to sing and be free to know what beat comes next. I can’t. I must speak those words and feel their weight on my tongue.

I’ll drown the urge for permanence and certainty; crouch down and scrawl my name with yours in wet cement.

For years I have put off doing software updates on my computer. I have found them painful and time consuming. I have found the thought of having to restart just to get a few extra features that I really won’t notice to be about as appealing as taking out the trash. That little bouncing recycled earth sign (probably a Mac only phenomenon) seems brings out the worst in my anti-progress attitude. No, I don’t want the latest and greatest version. My current version is already running and I don’t want to shut down just to upgrade. Everytime I know that there is an update among all of them that really is essential, I curse the process for subjecting me to waiting around while something installs.

And yet, I update my iPad apps nearly every day. I get excited about new releases. I read the changes in the app store and I look for specific things that will make my life better. And most often, I click update all. Even if I don’t see a benefit for some of the updates, I know that I am getting the most recent version of something that I chose and the next version will probably build on this one. I watch as all of the apps update themselves and I wait with anticipation as the little blue bar goes across. I try and guess which app will update next. I open some of them up just to see if I can spot the changes for myself. I am, I have realized, an app junkie. I want to know about apps before others do and I want to be the one that recommends them. I want to know about a feature update and tweet about it. I want to promote the use of an app in interesting ways and talk about the iPad as a creative device instead of just one for consumption. I love the update cycle. It seems to keep everything fresh.

Here is the difference between what I feel in an app on my mobile device versus an Application on my computer: Scope, scale and ownership.

The scope of a mobile app is so much smaller than that of a full blown application. I have railed against too narrow of a scope as not creating the kind of change that is neccesary, but I have mellowed on the need for starting off with a grand scope. The rapid release of features on a mobile device means that you can really conquer one idea before progressing on to the next. It also means that with each release, you don’t have to try and update everything. You can continually expand an idea until it branches off into four other ones. You have the time to listen to those who are actually using what it is that you want to produce.

Scale is different than scope. The scale of storage needed for any given mobile application is smaller because it has to be. Computer applications can be as big as they want to be, but mobile apps have to be elegant and small or no one would download them. They also have to be self contained. On a computer, Applications must integrate with nearly everything in the system. We praise them for it, but it has become overblown. More conservative use of the OS features would really be appreciated because it would cut down on the things that we have to upgrade for every update. When I update Netflix on the iPad, I don’t have to update the video player or the notification system. The scale matters. I can update all of my apps within minutes, whereas large scale Application updates can take hours.

Ownership is a little bit harder to quantify, but for some reason when I buy something in an app store and I receive constant updates I feel as though they are listening to me. When I can make a comment directly to the developer and see an update in the next few days or weeks that specifically addresses my issue, I know that I own a little bit more of the app. I also think that it helps when I get to touch and interact with the application itself while it is updating. I want an experience in the update and not just in the program. I don’t want to set the update window up and leave it, I want to see the things all around my iPad updating. I want to anticipate what is going to happen next. The update process on a computer is boring. There is nothing to do but watch the bar go across the screen.

Perhaps I am simply jumping the gun. Now that everyone is creating app stores we will see more of this. But, I think that we can go further.

1. I want things to update on their own.
2. I want things to show me what has changed.
3. I want to be able to comment on individual features.
4. I want to talk to the developers on the day of release in a public forum.
5. I want to be able to go back through revision histories of apps and see just how far it has come.

We should learn from the mobile platform, but we need to merge it with the computer and not simply make the computer like the iPad. They are capable of doing different things, it just so happens that in this case, the iPad does it better.

I am heading into my 10th winter of living in Colorado. While this is not an accomplishment to many of the natives that live here, it is something that I cherish more than almost anything else. It means that I will have seen the best snow that exists for an entire decade. While I neither snowboard or ski, the snow is the single most convincing reason I came to Colorado in the first place.

Before moving, I lived in a suburb of Cleveland. I knew snow. I saw it coming off of lake Erie every year (for most of the year). I saw it dump into the snow belt and stick around for weeks. I saw it become muddy and black with cinders. I saw the snow turn into ice and cause enormous wrecks on the roads. I saw the individual snowflakes fall seemingly forever with only an inch to show for it in the morning.

Denver snow is different. It comes in beautiful and fluffy pieces. They fill your mouth as you walk toward them. They stick to your hair and they are heavy. They feel like a blanket is coming down all around you and all you have to do is stand still long enough for it to tuck you in. And Denver snow accumulates. In minutes. From the time your run into the gas station and come back, you have a single coat of fresh powder. From the time you go into work, you have a well earned workout of clearing it off and seeing the piles all around your feet. This snow is perfect. It is good for playing games about how much there will be. In these games you will always be wrong. You will always guess too little or at the wrong time. Colorado snow has a personality all its own. It doesn’t stop for any event and it doesn’t care what the temperature was yesterday. It was 75 yesterday. It is snowing gorgeous and downy today.

And when I look out my windows and see what is the start of the accumulation season, I know that I am in for a treat. I don’t have to hope for it or wish it to come. It comes without fail. I can see the layers of snow interweave and stack on top of one another, making inches and feet with abandon.

And I wonder about my own accumulation. I wonder if others can see the things I am doing and I wonder if they notice what I have added. It is coming slowly and it surely isn’t as beautiful as this, but I think that the clumps that I put down are sticking to the ground nicely. Someday, I will be at inches and someday after that, I will have feet of my contributions that others will simply have to work through. They won’t have a choice. It will cover them and those that choose to will only be able to shovel me out of the way. Others, though, will pick up those things and play with them. They will make sculptures and they will throw them around. They will make mountains out of it and see all around them. They will pack it tightly and throw it at those who don’t know how to enjoy it.

True accumulation is continuing to contribute because you know that no matter how small each snowflake is, you are making a difference and your work will be noticed.

Does calling you a “lucky bastard” mean that you are doing something right or something wrong?

Does it mean that you have made a good decision for your career and are moving on to a place that others would like to be? Or are you being blamed for everything that is wrong with your current workplace and the fact that you are leaving is simply proof that you weren’t worth the position you are leaving?

I am, in fact, a lucky bastard.

I am so thankful for everything that I have learned and all of the opportunities that I have been given. I found people to support me and nurture my projects through their shaky early stages. I don’t know of anything that I should have done faster or more or better. I am the learner and collaborator I am because of my work of the last 7 years.

I have had a single employer since my college graduation. One check per month, nearly 84 times. I married my wife in this job. I bought my first house. Had my first and second child. I saw both of my brothers get married. I wrote 1000 blog posts. It is so much to have done and seen and been.

The science of leaving is the hypothesis that your future will be greater than your past. At this exact moment, it is hard to see how. I know I am leaving to test out this hypothesis.

I know that I am a lucky bastard, both because of my past and my future.