The Dumb Datum

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Bright Pink Lemonade

October is ending, and I see spooky Halloween decorations everywhere. If it was eighteen years ago, these decorations would have surely frightened me and made me run back to my mom in tears. My mom would have said “you are ten years old and you are still afraid of these things?” I would both be in tears and still shake my head to deny that I am afraid, because I was a little liar. I am no longer little, and I am trying to practice radical honesty. Therefore, I must admit that I cried a lot in the beginning of this October. I was backpacking in Colorado sand dunes with a friend in the first week of this month. It was an off-season, so there were only two of us who were crazy enough to drag our heavy backpacks up those dunes, where we sank a little into the soft sand with every forward step we took. I let my friend go ahead as he is a fast hiker, and as I was walking by myself, my brain had a lot of time with no distractions to bombard me with a lot of thoughts. Most of those thoug...

Rage Lightly

I woke up today and for some reason I was reminded of this phrase “go gently into the raging night.” I told myself it doesn’t feel right, maybe it is “go raging into the gentle night.” I thought for a while, and couldn’t figure out what was the right phrase, and it drove me nuts. Maybe I do have a gold fish memory. Anyhow I gave up and asked my friend google, and the right phrase was “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Excellent, but I feel like this contradicts Aldous Huxley, who wrote “Lightly, child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.” This proves to me that wise people can’t come to an agreement on anything.

Made up Answers

A few days ago, I saw a reddit thread where someone asked this question of “does everything work out in the end?” I ask this question to myself when I am deeply hurting. So, while I am familiar with this existential question, I don’t know the answer to it. Maybe it’s because I am yet to reach the end. I still took a shot at answering it. I commented that things don’t always work out in ways we hope, but they rather work out in the ways we come to accept. But what I didn’t comment is that I am not really sure of this answer. I was just trying to give a stranger some temporary relief from their pain. Because when I was hurting and asked this question to the void, I wished I had the void shout back some made up answer like this.

Just Keep Swimming

1. Yesterday night I had to review a pull request until 10 pm, and I didn’t know a lot of things in it. I love that my job throws me into unknown waters, and asks me to figure out myself how to swim to the surface, but it’s also stressful to do it every single time. I drown 9 out of the 10 times. I wish someone throws me a life jacket, but no, all I get is a subscription to Claude. But I also have been feeling grateful lately - for the first time in my life, I am in a job role where I am overwhelmed not by the piling up of mindless tasks, but rather by the number of new things to learn. So, for now, I am trying to be like Dory, and sing “just keep swimming.” I am not expecting to become very good at this swimming thing, but maybe I will at least learn how to float! (of course, swimming is a metaphor because I don’t actually know how to swim) 2. I am learning to deal with some of my not-so-funny patterns like self-blame ...

Running with Questions

Last month I ran back-to-back 50 mile weeks. So, it naturally gave me this idea of how would it feel if I run three continuous 50 mile weeks. I am happy to report that I now know how it feels. With my morning run today, I had completed running 161 miles in the last three weeks. The first week felt the most difficult. I was exhausted and also was dealing with a mild sickness. The same week, I also ended up burning the popcorn in my microwave, which I thought was a good figurative representation of the burnout I was feeling. The second week started no different, I was very exhausted initially. But at this point, I also actively started thinking about the problem of burnout – how do I solve it using the tools I have under my control? It helped that I have been reading multiple books over past month, spread across genres like autobiographies, philosophy, and neuroscience. By the end of the second week, it all finally clicked to me. Running usually poses three types of questions...

Singing dreadful songs about summer

Cool weather is here in Dallas. Only difference it makes to me is that now I have to keep my shirt on while running, and sometimes I will even have to layer up. But one other fact I observed is that when it isn’t freezing cold, there are usually many couples out on the trail. Some are old couples who clearly have been with each other for a long time. Some are young couples who are experiencing the taste of a budding romance. Sometimes they are engaged in deep conversations, which I understand based on the look of serious concentration on their faces, but sometimes their conversations are just silly and playful. There are also couples who walk in a pin drop silence, maybe because they have found comfort even in a shared silence and stillness. Only commonality between all these different couples is that they walk slowly, holding each other’s hands, and that’s how I decide that they are a couple. On the same trails where these couples are walking, I am usually running by myself, immer...

The Backup

I realized it has been 8 years since I started working in tech. 18 th May 2018 was my first day as an associate software engineer at Accenture. I remember meeting people with 8 years of work experience in my first week there and thinking, “man, they are really old.” I regret it now. My first manager, who was definitely old, took a look at me and foretold “this is the boy who is going to be the backup.” Backup is one of those ubiquitously used IT industry terms, because people ran out of words in their word bag to describe someone who is secondary to a main guy working on a project. They could have called me a rookie, but they don’t want to, because rookie makes me sound cool and they know I am not cool. Over time I gained the trust of both the manager and the main guy, and I was later assigned as a backup to three other main guys. I was even once the backup for a backup. By the time I was about to become the main guy myself, a global pandemic punched me in the face and knocked m...