The Meaning of Work: Problem-Solving

It has been clear to me for many years that I'm more comfortable fixing than creating. Editing comes more naturally to me than writing; I would rather answer questions on a topic I know thoroughly than prepare a presentation on it; I would rather debug computer programs than write them. I don't know if any programming shops have specialists in finding and fixing logic errors, but if I could work in that role I might have had a longer career in computer programming. It was never an option for me because I always worked in tiny programming shops where everyone had to be a generalist. I can remember my most consistent feelings of satisfaction in the computer business came from fixing a "good problem"--not so challenging that it would require days of tedious work, but not so simple that a routine operation would fix it. In the periods when I was considering leaving the profession, I would have that feeling of "damn, I'm good at this", and frequently think I must be crazy to abandon it as long as it paid well.

I'm well aware of a downside to always focusing on problems: The inherent negativity is wearing. In the last year I was shifted from mostly programming with some technical support to mostly technical support. There was a big physical advantage to the change because my hands were wearing out from too much typing, and changing the daily routine was positive. The biggest disadvantage was getting into a negative mind-set, no matter how much I tried to view myself as a helper. I was running downhill at that point anyway, so I shouldn't read too much into the experience, but there is a cautionary lesson there that I need some balance of fixing and creating.

Too Busy to Be Profound

Starting on Monday I've been spending a lot of time following the stock market and doing what I call "weekend work" around the house--the kind of stuff that I'd put off until the weekend and then feel resentful if it chewed up too much time. I've also started a class at the vocational college nearby and written several entries in my stock-market blog: http://iconoclasticinvestor.blogspot.com. They are good writing practice.

Pimentos for Mothers' Day

This is the seventh Mothers' Day since the death of my own mother, and it is still a mourning day as much as a celebrating day for me. I don't feel like I'm still actively grieving, but every now and then something will sneak up on me--usually something trivial--that reminds me of her, and I'm blindsided by a sense of loss.

Without thinking much about it, I selected a pasta salad recipe that includes pimentos for today's Mothers' Day picnic. It wasn't until I was spooning them out of the jar that I remembered my mother's story of the pimentos. When I was about five years old, The Dallas Morning News wrote a homemaker-cook-of-the-week profile about her. She didn't have much to say about cooking. Although she spent a lot of time in the kitchen, her passion was music, not cooking. She had exactly one "family recipe" to share; every other one came out of a book or magazine. The only thought she had about cooking that she considered halfway interesting was that she tried to use color to brighten up her servings, and she specifically mentioned putting pimentos on asparagus spears.

The image of my mother arranging pimentos on aparagus stuck with me because my eye for color must have come from her--no one taught me about color, so it must have come either through her genes or her example. It's also a perfect example of how she always tried to elevate the mundane with art, or at least with beauty.

So even though no one else in my family cares much for pimentos, they will be eating them in their pasta salad (or picking them out) later today. Thus are the watchwords passed from generation to generation.

The Meaning of Life: Four Scenes

Scene I

I am driving through the rugged high desert of western New Mexico, following I-40 and the Santa Fe rail line to Gallup, NM. Our almost-perfect baby, Kevin, has turned into an almost-perfect early walker, and although he can’t talk much yet he is excellent company on An Adventure like this. He’s been noticeably observant since he was a few months old, and with the stimulation of a different environment he is even more engaged than usual. Most people in Albuquerque that I’ve heard express an opinion despise Gallup, but it is my favorite town in the state, and my favorite area. The impossibly red sandstone cliffs and the large empty spaces, even along a major interstate highway, have a magnetic pull on me. Sharing this environment and looking for trains, I’m suddenly struck by a feeling deeper than satisfaction: something tells me that this is exactly the right thing for me to be doing right now, that this was meant to be. It’s sort of like my whole life has led up to this fairly undramatic experience, that this was my destiny.

What to make of this? Karl Jung said that the primary role of fathers is to introduce their children to the world, so doing that and getting some verbal feedback may be fulfilling some archetypal need. I don’t know what to make of it, but it occurs to me that if that experience happened more often life would be quite magical.


Scene II

Kevin is now eight years old and not so near to perfection as before. Years of dealing with a treatable but serious learning disability have stripped away the illusion that we will always be lucky parents. We are on Another Adventure, this time with my favorite friend of his, an almost-perfect girl in his class. We have been to the Natural History Museum and now we’re wandering around Albuquerque’s historic town square. In the gazebo, Kevin stands on my feet facing me, with his arms around my waist. It’s an old game he hasn’t played in a long time, where I lumber around carrying him on my feet. His friend somehow clambers onto his back, and I’m carrying both of them, or at least dragging them, and all three of us are laughing hysterically. A man walking through comments on how attached my children are. After that dies down we walk across the street in the direction of the parking lot.

Still wanting to hold onto that regression to earlier childhood, I insist we hold hands crossing the street. This isn’t really necessary and I feel a little foolish. Crossing the street, I tell myself to store this in my memory; this was a perfect moment, nothing quite like this will ever happen again.


Scene III

It is the last day of a family trip, and my wife suggests we send Kevin to an amusement park while the two of us spend a day at the beach. Conventional wisdom says that he’s too young to be in public unsupervised but we know the park is just as safe as his school, and safer than many. This is the first time we’ve split up like this on a vacation unless there was extended family available for child care. We spend most of the day walking on the beach and reading under our umbrella. It just so happens that I’m in the middle of one of the most engrossing novels I’ve ever read (The Good Husband, by Gail Godwin). For lunch we walk far enough inland to find a seafood restaurant that mostly serves locals, and we wander around a working harbor for yachts. We pick up Kevin in the middle of the afternoon and fly home. He is unharmed, and seems indifferent about being left on his own.

I think this is the best vacation day I can remember. Would it have mattered if the weather was less pleasant, or the book got dull, or was this milestone of Kevin's growing up the entire meaning of the day? It’s impossible to repeat the experience, so I’ll never know for sure.


Scene IV

It is February, 2006, and we are on a trip with Kevin, now 15, and his almost-perfect girlfriend. We are in the mountains of Southern Colorado and our plans for a snow-play weekend have been upended by poor conditions. On Saturday the two of them had gone on a dogsled ride, but cross-country skiing on Sunday looks like a losing proposition. We decide to go to Mesa Verde, the national park with the prehistoric cliff dwellings inhabited by Ancestral Pueblans (formerly known as Anasazi). I was haunted by the cliff dwellings when I saw them at age seven, and the Ancestral Pueblan sites still capture my imagination. The experience has a new meaning when going with Kevin’s girlfriend, who is a member of a modern pueblo. These were the homes of her ancestors, at least generically speaking, and clearly this place was critical to the development of the culture and customs she observes today. And judging by the number of pictures Kevin is taking, he is at least intrigued by the architecture and/or the aesthetics of the place.

Riding back to our lodging as sunset begins, I have a feeling similar to Scene I. Taking these adolescents together on their first trip to Mesa Verde is what we were meant to do.

What to make of these scenes? On a literal level I suppose they suggest I should be a tour guide, since they involve travel and sightseeing. I don’t think I could handle telling people the same thing over and over, however, and I’m sure I’d get sick of the same questions over and over. Or the point could be to spend more time with children. Unfortunately most children annoy me or bore me; the almost-perfect ones are hard to come by.

Another thought I’ve had is that maybe less intense scenes with meaning are happening all the time, but they are too mundane for me to notice or remember. Maybe all that travel and sightseeing do is to shift my perspective, or remove the blinders, so that otherwise hidden “meaning” comes to light. If that’s the case, then I could save a lot of gas and money if I learned to shift my perspective without changing my location.

Saying Good-bye

It became clear early this week that I won't be doing any part-time consulting for my employer, so yesterday was the end of that relationship. I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand some consulting income would have eased the cash flow situation and left me with some familiar routines; on the other hand a clean break forces me to confront the future and expands the palette of life-design possibilities considerably.

Contrary to my expectations of Monday, the week was not dominated by a series of major work-related crises. There was plenty to do, but I was more focused on closure and leave-taking than fighting fires. With just 4-1/2 years on payroll, I didn't qualify for a going-away party (only the rare occasion of a full retirement at 65 or so warrants an official party), so there wasn't a ceremony for the psychic work of mourning or closure. An extrovert might have been disappointed or offended at the lack of attention, but it was a relief for me to not be the center of attention, and I was content to say good-bye individually.

The Pre-Vacation Syndrome

It seems that whenever I went on vacation I'd get a crush of problems and pressures in the last few days before I left. I never bothered to analyze how much of that came from new problems springing up and how much was from the build-up of postponed projects that I couldn’t stand to push off past my upcoming vacation.

Now with four working days to go, I pessimistically expect the same phenomenom. I have no illusions about clearing my backlog--that would take weeks of dedicated programming and troubleshooting. This time the problems are all external, and they started coming at me late this afternoon. With my motivation fallen off a cliff, I’m tempted to stall them until I’m gone, but my last shreds of professionalism are hanging on my need to please people, or at least demonstrate that I’m competent. The need to prove my competence was ingrained very young, and it’s caused me a lot of stress. On the other hand I can see how it’s helped me in school and work, so I can’t say it’s been all bad. Anyway, it will be a new experience knowing that these problems really are temporary, as far as I’m concerned, and won’t be waiting around for me after a vacation ends.

A Death in the Family

At noon today our son’s iguana died. She came into our lives 4 ½ years ago and had made herself part of the family, and now it feels like our family is incomplete. Our son has taken it pretty hard so far, with a lot of emtion coming through his usually stoic demeanor. I wasn’t as intensely bonded as he was, so mainly I’m grieving for him.

After we buried her in the backyard I remembered a line from the liturgy used in our church’s blessing of the animals service. The congregation reads a list of reasons why our pets are important, and one is that pets teach our children to love and to grieve. I’d always appreciated the wisdom of that line, but from now on it will have heart-meaning too. Whenever I read that sentence I will remember the tears at the graveside by the lilac bush.

In college I was depressed for a long time over the break-up of a relationship, and I seriously considered that maybe the natural state of human emotions is neutrality, and that every ounce of joy and love must be repaid with an equal measure of sorrow and grief. Although there may be a philosophical argument for this symmetry, the evidence of our lives says not so, or else we would learn to live in numb isolation, never taking in pets, never marrying except for a tax break, and never voluntarily having children. Some inner optimism drives us on to seek love and relationship, knowing full well we will pay a price in grief, unless we die first.

Two Weeks To Go

The anticipation and anxiety are growing as I wind down to the last two weeks of full-time work. I didn’t give a standard two-week’s notice to my employer but instead tried to negotiate a transition that would start after May 12. Nothing has come of the negotiations and I’m treating the next two weeks as my last. Whether or not I do negotiate some technical support work for them after May 12, things are going to change dramatically. Certainly it will be the end of full-time work and a steady paycheck for the foreseeable future.

Most of the time I’m looking forward to rearranging my work life, but I am already having anxiety attacks about money. That is my biggest fear on the work front, that all I will accomplish is trading the stress of holding a job I’m not interested in for the stress of not earning enough to maintain our lifestyle without running down our savings. Then I remind myself that a major goal—maybe the biggest goal--of my life redesign is to apply my creativity to figuring out ways to make money that aren’t at all obvious to me now.