Nate Dickson Thinks...

A lot of what I have tried to do my whole life is ignore fear and stress and pain. Push them away, and insulate my life so that they don't come close to me.

And some of that is reasonable, right? We should try to make our world good and safe, that's called being wise. We should seek to make the world better day by day.

But pain and fear and stress are part of it. We shouldn't be afraid of fear. We shouldn't try to close discomfort entirely out of our lives. We should accept them as part of the world and make space for them, tolerate them and let them teach us their lessons.

This doesn't mean we should dive into them, we shouldn't move all the way to depression and fatalism. But optimism can exist alongside fear. I can be uncertain about the future and still be hopeful about it as well.

We lost our old dog this year. It hurt. It was hard. But the pain of losing him in no way offsets the joy of having lived with him for all those years.

There are times and places where we simply need to make space in our hearts. We need to make room for grief to sit with us, and let it do its work. We don’t need to fear or loathe pain, though of course we needn’t seek it out either.

What stories are we telling our selves as we interact with others? Is there a way to moderate the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves as well? —Me, a few days ago, not sure when.

This entry is a potpourri of a lot of things that have been swirling around in my brain, so yeah, it's a bit disjointed.

I've been thinking about why I like Doctor Who and Harry Dresden. I mentioned to a friend of mine that they are similar in my mind; they fit in the same “slot”. And I wasn't sure why. I've been thinking about it more.

They are both characters that live almost permanently on the cusp of the disaster curve. But in both cases that constant fear and stress has made their characters kinder, not harder. The Doctor has two hearts.

It's hard to talk about the importance of an imaginary hero. But heroes ARE important: Heroes tell us something about ourselves. History tells us who we used to be, documentaries tell us who we are now; but heroes tell us who we WANT to be. And a lot of our heroes depress me. But when they made this particular hero, they didn't give him a gun—they gave him a screwdriver to fix things. They didn't give him a tank or a warship or an x-wing fighter—they gave him a box from which you can call for help. And they didn't give him a superpower or pointy ears or a heat-ray—they gave him an extra HEART. They gave him two hearts! And that's an extraordinary thing. There will never come a time when we don't need a hero like the Doctor. —Steven Moffat (emphasis added)

So that's the lesson I'm trying to learn. If I'm going to be a “leader” or some kind of important person in other people's lives, I want to be the one with two hearts. The one that listens more, that accepts other people's stress and pain and turns them into kindness and understanding.

Dresden is a little different. He was always kind, but he has a hard edge. But the effect pain has on him is to make him able to tolerate it better. In the early books he's weak, he's almost human. In later books he accepts that he's taking a beating, and that it's okay, he can roll with it and keep going, keep helping. He never lets go of his principles, even if he has to twist himself to fit into a bad world. I can understand that world. I want to accept that. That I can get through things, and stop worrying about them when they come my way. I don't need to hide from hard things.

When I first started my career as a software developer I found some little trendy piece of pop culture ephemera, a printed dictionary of “hacker slang”. I wish I could find it again, because even though it was instantly outdated, it still influenced my mindset for a while.

Anyway...

One of the terms it defined was “putting on the tie”:

Put on the tie verb: to transition from programming to management. “Did you hear about Jake?” “Yeah, someone told me he finally put on the tie. Poor sod.”

The concept being that programmers wear t-shirts and shorts and managers wear shirts and ties.

I have no idea if everyone has ever used that phrase, ever.

But I have just recently, officially, put on the tie. I'm moving from my comfortable roles close to software development into a “Directorship” role, a position of actual management instead of just overseeing a few fellow devs.

Clear back in the day, I was sure I would never make the move. but as I've grown older I've wanted to spend more time influencing people and less time fixing bad code.

I keep telling myself things like that. There is much that I like about management, there is much that I enjoy about being in a position of responsibility, and I have a lot of ideas about how to make things better.

But part of me is definitely sad to leave that other world behind.

It's been interesting, talking to all my developer friends, and seeing their responses to this move. Overall it seems to blank incomprehension: why would anyone want to be a manager?

My only real answer is that this is that I like working with people more than code. I still hack around on projects in my free time, but this is more my speed. So we'll see!

I'm doing NaNoWriMo for the 13th year, because I enjoy it. I'm trying something new this year:

I'm not worried about publishing.

I'm just writing because I want to. This is a character I wanted to explore. I'm playing a fair amount of D&D these days and this is one of my characters I'm playing. I guess you could call this an obscenely over-done backstory for a character sheet.

And being me, and being the kind of person who just dumps thoughts out there in the world, I'm publishing my writing in more-or-less real time.

So anyway, if you want to read some real-time nonsense noveling, feel free to check out The Trials of Osmorn.

I'm using WorldAnvil for this because I like the idea of building the world and then letting the characters and story arise from the world instead of creating a plot and building a world around that plot.

One of my friends asked what WorldAnvil offers to make writing better, why it's better than, say, Obsidian, for keeping track of characters. Why does using WorldAnvil make me more likely to have character birthdays and eye color and what not?

And my answer is “it asks the questions.” Of course I could write all these details, but having a place where I can put these notes and see how they show up, how they connect.

So I'm trying to build characters that only interact with my “main” characters in passing.

Here's something I've learned recently. If you're in a position where you end up scheduling a lot of meetings, and attending a lot of meetings, you can protect your calendar in a very simple way:

Schedule “jagged” meetings.

By which I mean meetings that start at fifteen minutes before or after the hour. Most people tend to schedule meetings on the hour or on the half hour, and will naturally leave the fifteen minutes before your “jagged” meeting alone. Occasionally they'll leave you a full 45 minutes before a meeting.

This gives everyone who is attending your meeting time to prepare, and gives you a little breathing room in your schedule as well.

It works on the other end as well. You don't usually need hour-long meetings, schedule them for 45 minutes, and everyone has a few minutes of breathing space at the end.