Relationship Tip #937

If your partner is being a drip, he is (most probably) fully aware of it already, and already feels bad about it. He's trying to improve his mood and be less of a drip. He doesn't need you reminding him that he is being a drip. He knows. He ALSO knows that you are well within your rights to point it out, and he won't be mad about the fact that you DID, in fact, point it out, but neither does he need you to do so. He knows he's not being 100% awesome right now, and he's trying to fix it, okay? You won't make any friends by going on about it.

Remember: the point of a relationship is to NOT make your partner feel like a jerk. If you find yourself deriving some pleasure from making your partner feel like a jerk, something is wrong.

Most Importantly:

NEVER, EVER, EVER, TAKE YOUR EYE OFF THE GOAL.

This would be fine advice if I only had ONE goal. Alas, I have about fifteen, all colliding in my brain at any given moment, shouting to me and making little "umph" noises as they grab, dejectedly, yet animatedly, at my neurons. Greedy little grabby things, I already TOLD you, I have ONE neuron available at any given moment and it has about the availability of the the phones at the New York Stock Exchange, and there is some guy in a green visor and a serious mouth expression and ink-stained figures with his hand firmly on this neuron and he is not going to just let go.

Goal Setting

The thing about working for yourself, as E would say, is that your boss always knows when you aren't working.

I'd add: And you keep seeing what you haven't done, or what you've done completely wrong.

The first month, printing out business cards takes all of your resources, because you have to keep printing them on your inkjet printer. You know this is a bad use of your time, but then you can't get ahead enough to take the two hours to design business cards to send to a printer. And on top of that you want them to be perfect, so you keep trying things, and you want the flexibility of printing off a small run.

And THEN you realize you need a real damn logo, so you have to take the time for THAT. (Tip to small business owners: Hatchwise is thebomb.com.). In between those things is trying to design adwork, trying to run a storefront, and trying to, you know, actually build a product. Several of them. And, like, sleep.

Because in a startup, you do EVERYTHING. Everything from designing ads to writing the business plan to taking out the trash. Meetings with government and venture capitalists and project planners. Loan paperwork.

Send coffee.

I also have no idea what, if anything, this post has to do with goal setting. I think I was going to make some point that setting goals and achieving them--meeting with X, business cards sent--seems like it would help, seems like it would give you some sense of accomplishment, but it totally doesn't because those things aren't goals at all; they are steps to achieving your goals, or more like steps to Being A Business Professional.

Sending off a business card design won't net you a purchase the next day, but it DOES allow you to hand them out at cocktail parties, which is really the same thing.

Oh, wait, it's not?

The problem is that customers won't come in and say, "Oh, I saw your ad in The Stranger/picked up one of your business cards at Vivace/saw your Facebook page in a friend's feed." (Actually, that last one HAS happened to us, so...win?) The lack of transparency makes every decision, especially when on a budget, fraught with anxiety, with the fear of spending money on garbage and creating excess waste. "Those postcards have to be perfect, they cost us $458!" "Could the business cards POP a little more? I mean, we ARE going to have 250 of them." Etc.

Why should I get business cards at all? How can I tell that they will help me get customers? Will the bank magically loan me more money?

Just Another Day

Bad: We have had no business cards for two days.

Good: Because we have a new logo and we want to get it on the cards!

Normally we'd print cards on our own printer in the office. But,

Bad: Our printer broke late last night. Like, at midnight.

Good: Therefore, we placed an emergency order for "real" business cards, which we've only needed for a month or so.

I was planning on going to FedEx or similar this morning for an emergency stash to hold us over. Then today happened.

Bad: E woke up late for his 9:15 meeting. An angry New Yorker is not a pleasant sight to wake up to.

Good: Once he was out the door, his mother (oh, did I mention she was staying with us?) and I had a lovely morning.

Really Good: I have a meeting with Seattle government next week; they want to get more involved, officially, with our pedicabs!

Really, Really, Good: I also have a meeting with a venture capitalist next week.

Related, Really, Really, Good: When a venture capitalist asks for your investor pitch AND YOU HAVE ONE ALREADY PREPARED. That you can just send off like it ain't no thing.

Bad: Still riding high on all the goods, you return from your 11:00 meeting to discover that a pipe has burst. Let me say that again: A PIPE HAS BURST. Above, say, a lot of electric motors, batteries, and other assorted electronic equipment. Did I mention our store is supposed to open five minutes ago?

COMMENCE EMERGENCY PROCEDURE #15, which would be so much more believable if we actually HAD emergency procedures, or worse, we were able to determine what, exactly, qualifies as an actual emergency. Opposed to, say, a normal day in the life of a startup.

I had a point here, but tequila and red wine have, blessedly, thankfully, erased it.

Is there a patron saint of startups?

Survived to Friday!

I have been to Auburn three times since Tuesday, which in itself should be enough to qualify me for sainthood, as if cutting out all carbs and losing a whole pants size within two weeks wasn't enough.

BUT. When the product that you're trying to launch falls apart two days before launch, you decide that you'd better become capable of almost anything, because what the hell else are you going to do? Not launch the product? Unacceptable. Did I mention that dry shampoo is Your Friend during Weeks Like This?

And so, if failure is not an option, you learn how to bend physics. But GODS does that take it out of you. I am a lump.

A lump that has eaten delicious eggplant parmesan, drank a glass of red wine, and indulged in chocolate frozen custard with a shot of espresso poured over it. I have eaten rice crackers and fruit juice and drank hard apple cider. Tonight I may have a lemon bar. I'm not gonna make a habit of this, but today? Worth every calorie.

My parents came to our launch party (shoutout!) and brought a flag, and my father, bless him, watched me lay it out on the floor with puzzlement.

"What are you doing?" he asked me.

"I'm going to learn how to grommet," I said, as if that was a perfectly normal thing to do at 8 pm on a Thursday night while wearing heels.

Wow, Writing Is Hard Work

Wow, you guys! Writing is, like, HARD.

Coming up with new things to say every day is...daunting. Beyond daunting. It's blackout hard/As in, the mind just looks at the enormity of the task and blacks out.

When I think of finishing my novel, I tend to think of it all at once--which is absolutely preposterous. Because no one has ever sat down and written 250 pages in one sitting, and I'm not likely to become the first person to do so.

My novel being finished won't happen all at once--so why do I think of it like it will?

Bad form, really.

It's the same with organizing. It just seems like such a massive undertaking. But once I start--it doesn't seem so bad.

Austerity Measures

Are, in fact, No Damned Fun At All.

E and I stick to them occasionally, like any couple does, I think--reminding Oneself, or possibly, if in a crabby mood, Ones Partner, when One of us has just looked at the bank statements--that we are, in fact, broke.

And Ones who are broke have no call or reason to be out buying dinner in restaurants when we could be eating at home, on beans and rice and cheap wine studded with fruit-fly carcasses, which we should be damn grateful about getting for free because they have protein in them.

The OTHER thing about eating at home, as everyone knows, is that it's a lot better for you. E and I have both been slowly gaining weight over time, and although we both started this gain so underweight that our various friends and parental units were genuinely concerned about us, it turns out extra fat WILL make its presence known even if it grows on you so slowly that you have to take stats every four months or so, (because every the change every two months will be still unnoticeable) and eventually you have to do something to reverse the trend. The FASCINATING thing about the timing here is that E and I are suddenly seeing ourselves On Camera a lot, not because we've suddenly become movie stars (I wish) but because we are Doing Social media, i.e. Generating Content for our social media pages, and a lot of that ends up with One being, as it were, On Camera.

I saw myself on camera four weeks ago, wearing stretchy clothes (I had just come from the gym) and thought to myself, "Who's that fat girl? ...OH SHIT."

And E, bless him, had the same reaction to his OWN image, captured on camera just a few days ago. He watched some recently taken footage with me, and somewhere in the middle of watching himself load a bike onto a display he said, "I need to start losing weight."

I think an important distinction might be addressed at this time: that, as athletes, both he and I are acutely aware of our body shapes and conditions. It's not that I think I'm FAT, necessarily, ignoring my comment above. It's that I know I'm carrying weight that isn't making itself useful. My body is not performing up to Standards. And it Should.

So: more roast chicken and salad. Less happy hour fried food at Stadium Lodge. Yay.

Talking About: Surviving the EVIL Frat House

aka "Out of the frying pan and into the fire", only with correct Title Capitalization, which I leave as an exercise for the reader.

For seven months in 2012, I lived with a very hostile environment. The weirdest part was that I lived in TWO SEPARATE very hostile environments, so moving out of one fixed the problem temporarily, and then it got much, much worse. So in a way I sort of...moved backwards? I'm still not sure. I would certainly rate the entire experience 0 stars on Amazon, if that was possible, but we all know it's not so I suppose I'll have to rate it 1 star, which is perhaps appropriate in spite of itself because I certainly did learn something, so perhaps there was some value after all.

Note: when someone uses the word "perhaps" twice in the same sentence, they are not ready to...

You know what? Fuck that. I'm not really ready to talk about that yet. (And I didn't even realize it until I wrote "perhaps" twice.) Everything is fine now, and that's...well, maybe not the important part, although it certainly is A, or maybe AN, important part. That's not the ending. There's a lot of mini-endings, or arc endings, that are wrapped up in that story--how E and I met, and how we merged our lives in a crucible, forged them together because we had nowhere else to go, how we therefore ended a lot of other people's stories, or at least killed the bonds connecting THEIR stories to OURS.

It's hard for me, in my lesser moments, not to hold that against him. To not imagine how awful those months were and then, if I'm angry at him for some small reason (see "microwave door", below) to try to push all my decisions off on him. To avoid taking responsibility for the choices I made. To decide, as I think many people do, that my life sucks, and it's my PARTNER'S fault for taking that job/moving us here/buying this house that I hate.

(E and I have started referring to this unfortunate avoidance shortcut in the human mind as the "microwave door" shortcut, after my own desire to have him close the microwave door when he's done with it, and deciding that his tendency to do so, after I've specifically asked him not to, is OBVIOUSLY proof that HE DOESN'T CARE ABOUT MY NEEDS AND HAS PROBABLY NEVER LOVED ME AT ALL. Many couples have "the toothpaste cap" shortcut, or possibly the "left out the cheese again" shortcut.)

Because the long and short of it is that E and I have decided to be partners, both now and (we plan) forever, and so I HAVE to accept my partner just as he is with all their faults or else drive myself crazy, because he probably won't change and doing anything else is completely illogical. Yes, that DOES sound rather sanctimonious, doesn't it? I'm sorry. It seems accurate, although maybe not phrased very well. The point is, I'm learning that the human mind has all these shortcuts that try to FORCE you to be unhappy, and part of being an evolved human is to spot those and avoid sliding down them like Life has suddenly become some sadistic version of Chutes and Ladders, where the Chutes are lined with razor blades and the rungs of the Ladders melt into gooey drips as you attempt to climb them.

Did I mention I have vivid nightmares? I drink to avoid them. Sometimes it works.

ANYWAY.

I fell in love with E on the night we met, and there has never been another option for me, realistically speaking, but that in itself is a kind of weight that he gave me to carry around. And another thing that I can hold against him, if I choose to. Sometimes it's hard not to. I didn't want to be in love and I hadn't planned on it, and now I AM and maybe the whole thing would be easier if I just ran away, moved out, got my own apartment, suddenly pulled the trigger on a whole different life and exploded my current one to shreds so small that they couldn't be pieced back together with an electron scanning microscope (ESM) and several hours of an extremely sharp-sighted grad student and a pair of minute tweezers.

No end to this one.

Well, Hello!

Hello there! Yes, it HAS been a long time, hasn't it? How have you been? Yes, I've been doing well too. You look smashing. Oh, yes, I know I do, too. Oh, you. Oh, you're making me blush. No, really, stop, so I can please get a word in edgewise?

WELL. Now that we've gotten that out of the way. It HAS, in fact, been some time. Only three months since I last posted, but really, more like a year since I posted with any sort of regularity at all, and before that I'm scared to look at my record, and I pray that you are, too.

Let's just get the stats out of the way in a fairly boring manner so we can swallow them all at once like a mouthful of broccoli we never intended to eat:

1. I live with my boyfriend!
2. In a warehouse!
2a. Not the lofty sort, either, but a real warehouse with NO light and, worse, NO EXPOSED BRICK. I know. I had the vapors.
3. I left the Lazy B!
4. So I could work for my boyfriend's business!

And with that, I really WILL have the vapors now. WHEEZE. WHEEZE.

Still with me? Not passed out in front of the mirror? (Is that just me?) Whew. I'm glad we all survived, and to that end, I'm going to have another glass of wine.

*swallows*

That's better. Writing always makes me so THIRSTY.

And it's to this end (not the wine drinking, because I can do that with no excuse at all, but the writing habit) that I'm starting (I hope, no promises whatsoever) to blog again, at least with some kind of regularity. To be honest (which I hate doing, much like sucking in my stomach to look skinnier, but I do that with EVERY KIND OF REGULARITY and so why not attempt honesty while I'm at it?)...where was I?

Oh, yes: I am attempting to write regularly again.

Writing has always been my therapy. And for some years there, more than I like to admit now because I feel completely stupid for not realizing this earlier, say, TWO! YEARS! AGO! that a lifetime of typing at the computer has taken its toll on my nervous system, I created less and less and I listlessly scrolled through the internet more and more.

Call it nerves (which I have--and so do you, for that matter) or call it Drift or call it whatever you want, but I had starting creating less and less and drifting through life more and more. There was a time...in which I decorated my apartment enough to be featured in Apartment Therapy's Small Cool Contest and had a piece published in the Seattle PI's blog. (Which I will have now linked.) But. That was a long time ago. But! I can reacquaint myself with the medium!

Because writing is important to me, and I miss it. And sometimes it hurts me, now, but really...I'm living with my boyfriend in a WAREHOUSE and trying to RUN A STARTUP! If there was EVER a time to blog, it is now. I will not piss away these years of my life. I will focus.

And writing = focus.

Want to know how to survive without a shower? In the middle of a frat house? In the middle of an EVIL frat house? Want to know what it's like to live with your boyfriend for the first time? To think, for the first time, that you'd ever have a long term relationship again?

Stay tuned, my lovelies. And get yourself a refreshing beverage while you're at it.

Mind Reading

E and I have been on the computer, doing some work, as you do, when "you" is "an entrepreneur that never stops working". He has gone into the other room, and calls out to me:

E: "I have a song from THE JUNGLE BOOK in my head."

The lightbulb flashes on for me, and I cackle. I know which one, too.

E: "What? No. You couldn't possibly know."

But I do. I can guess it.

E: "There's only a limited number of songs in The Jungle Book. You could nail it by guessing enough times."

Okay, one guess then.

E: "Okay, I will give you one guess. Shoot."

Bare Necessities.

E: "YES! THAT'S IT! HOW DID YOU KNOW THAT?"

You've just been over my shoulder at the computer, looking at my email. On the top of my email account is an advertisement email from a bra company called..."Bare Necessities". 

E: "Holy shit, I didn't even see that email. Or at least I don't remember seeing it."

You didn't notice it consciously, but clearly it attached itself to your subconcious. Because then you said "Jungle Book" and I put two and two together.

E: "I love you so much."

Your god is not my god.

A conversation with a team mate, who is an avid cyclist:

“Bikes are awesome, man. Everyone should bike!”

What about an ebike?

“A what?”

You know, an electric bike.

“WHAT? No. No electric bikes. That’s against my religion, man.”

Does your god HATE PROGRESS?

Jealousy.

The dude whose office I am sitting in has a most superior chair.

Family Biz

Working for the same company as my cousin—especially at the same site—is a little strange. For example, I can chat to him over company IM, on company time. I’D LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT WE RARELY DO THIS. But. All the same, it’s a possibility. He and his wife just had a baby, so occasionally, news needs to be passed, and it’s odd, but handy, to be able to discuss things while at work, and just by typing.

And it’s handy for me when I do things like miss a bus and need a ride to the express to Seattle, and my poor cousin gets called at home while he’s already in his pjs, and drives me to Everett Station.

And it’s ESPECIALLY handy when we want to go to lunch together and can easily plan it, and talk about who’s driving, which led to the following exchange.

Him: “Hey, do you have an elite parking pass?” (Parking at our site is notoriously, outrageously, difficult.)

Me: “HELL no.”

Him: “LOL okay. I thought, since you just changed jobs, you might get some kind of ‘relocation’ or ‘guest work’ type consideration.”

Me: “I WISH. Some members of my new team did, and I wish I could hate them, but they are very nice about it and carpool me around all over the place. This makes it impossible to hate them.”

Him: “It would.”

Me: “B*tches.”

Nothing Is Irreversible

Mighty Girl. "Decorating Your Home: 5 Tips On How To Get Started"

Turns out I have the Number 3 tip DOWN PAT. I am that girl who says, with an extremely outwardly-expressed form of long-suffering patience, "Look, let's just get paint on that wall/move the bookshelves from the warehouse to the kitchen/move your table into the living room so I can install MY table, because I'm tired of making decisions, and if you don't like it, we can always change it later. NOTHING IS IRREVERSIBLE." Many roommates have been very bothered by this. I still have trouble understanding them. 

Comes With The Territory

"Hi", I typed to AZ. "I'm tired and whiny."

"So you said hi just to whine?"


Me: "Yep!"


Him: "How did I get so lucky?"


Me: "...you dated me."

On Romantic Love and the Duration Thereof

From my hero, describing the start of her romance with her husband:

"...But that same afternoon after my break-up, he told me he was going to walk to Wawa’s (the New Haven version of QuikTrip) to get a Coke, and did I want to come? I did. We walked to Wawa’s, then back to the law school, and sat on a bench beneath some blooming magnolia trees. He said something completely incoherent, then took my hand; this was the first time we ever touched. At that moment, if he’d asked me to marry him, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised, and I might well have said “Yes.” (We did get engaged several months later.)

Now, so many years later, is it the same? Yes and no. Yes, because I still love him passionately, and more deeply, because I know him so much better. No, because he’s passed through my heart and into my soul, and he pervades my entire life, so now sometimes it’s hard to see him. Married people are so intertwined, so interdependent, so symbiotic, that it’s hard to maintain that sense of wonder and excitement..."

And this:

"When we first met, I honestly wondered whether it would ever be possible for me to read when we were sitting in a room together; I found it so hard to concentrate that I couldn’t make sense of anything more complicated than the newspaper. Now, I find it hard to tear myself away from my work and my email to hold up my end of a marital conversation."

She and her husband love each other very much, I've no doubt, but I believe (from what I can tell of it so far) her description of making an ongoing life with another person is dead on. As always, her writing style is so naked and unashamed that it's like reading my own thoughts, only edited by, say, Sylvia Plath. Or possibly Anais Nin.  There's a great passage describing a sympathetic listener in "My Old Man and The Sea": "It's like going out to dinner with yourself." That's what Ms. Rubin does for me; she takes me out to dinner with myself.

Should your partner be able to do that for you as well? I'm not sure. That seems like a special skill that really a very few people have in this world; which means it may not be a practical requirement that you should look for in a life partner. I do believe strongly that your life partner should make you a better VERSION of yourself, but that's not necessarily the same as being the kind of sympathetic listener that attracts people to them like moths to a flame.

And on Sunday, 12/2/2012, I Became Entrepreneur's Dream Girl

See this device?

(Picture of HP Touchpad)

This is a sweet, 0.7 inch, 32GB touchpad piece of hardware that I got off Ebay for $230 bucks with shipping, including a fancy stand and a few other accessories.

The only problem: it's an HP. It runs webOS, which is faintly related to Palm. No apps, no support, no updates. It's basically a mobile web browser, which is a damn waste of 32GB of memory.

Solution: I hacked it, of course! I followed the instructions in (insert link) this link to install Android's Ice Cream Sandwich over the top of the webOS, and et voila: I have a sweet Android touchpad with 32GB of memory and a damn nice processor for less than $200, if you look at just the price I paid for the device. It was so easy that I can't really even consider it hacking, although I will take every opportunity to use that word anyway. (For comparison: the cheapest 10 inch Android tablet on the market right now is $399, and it has HALF THE MEMORY.)

I was so happy.

AND THEN. And then. There we were, cuddling on the couch, watching about 15 NCIS episodes in a row, your generally awesome Sunday evening, and it got to be about that hour and Entrepreneur and I were hungry. And we didn't necessarily feel like cooking anything. And so I pulled out my Android touchpad, downloaded the EAT 24 app, and made food happen. Within thirty minutes we had hot Indian food show up at our door, and I hadn't moved more than a few finger taps.

IT WAS AWESOME.

From the Twitter Feed

"Made the big HOME DEPOT run with Entrepreneur last night. Then bison burgers to celebrate...w. cheese seared by blowtorch. As you do."

Tri-tip, as always, had the perfect response: "Your experience last night was so manly that my chest hair grew another inch just be reading it."

I would like to point out that my own chest hair has not grown one iota, which is a little disappointing, but more importantly, as it should be.

I'd also like to point out that my boyfriend HAND-SEARS my choice of cheese on my bison burger, because he loves me. 

I'm just sad I didn't get any pictures of it. OR of all the friends we made at Home Depot last night! But I think that might have struck them as weird. ("Thanks for getting that quote together! Hey, can you go stand oh-so-casually by your computer and smile pretty for my Instagram feed?")

In related news, I may soon be taking many pictures of my car, because I have goblins in my engine block and my fan belt has started a squealing argument with them, and if it lasts for just the next week I can take enough time to actually figure out what I want to do with it, whether that's sell it or have it fixed AGAIN, since I just spent $1000 on it over the summer, or if I can attempt to fix it myself--which worked so well last time. (This time, though, I have my own garage! Hi, mom.)

More Pictures

See that rain BOUNCING off the sidewalk? Yeah. Hello, winter.

Now THIS is a way to deal with winter. In the lodge on the mountain.

Recent Saturday after Pilates. I ran so many errands and got so much done, yay! I now have armwarmers and fuzzy socks. Crucial for this upcoming season.

Also crucial for this upcoming season. Hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps.

Yes.

Pictures! And Life.

It's important for me to remember that all the other blogs that I read--the ones that are updated daily and perfectly and are full of great content--are written by people who blog for a JOB. I have a day job, and it is NOT blogging. I'm lucky I can write and type so quickly in the first place, or else this blog would NEVER get updated! I can't decide which would worry my mother more: if this blog never got updated, or if it suddenly got updated ALL THE TIME.

Something to ponder.

Here are some pictures.

Did you know this? Me either! Hallelujah for the first vacation day I have had in months. Allows for all sorts of exploring.

I was shocked. SHOCKED I TELL YOU. Also: new hair color! AND new part. I switched sides for the first time in 31 years. (Almost 32!)

The Library. (Read: a delicious, and close, restaurant and bar.)

I wandered in there at 1:30 on a weekday and they made me breakfast ANYWAY.

I wish OUR warehouse looked this good.

Not so recent shot.

Titan was surprised by a bag of flour. He is unfazed, because the Boy is holding food in his hand. Also: the Boy needs new shoes.

Awww. Dawg.

Aren't these gorgeous?

Recent hiking trip with the Boy and his Mom.

Recent camping trip in which we ended up camping in the snow, not like I'm still bragging about that or anything.

 In other news, I'm trying to be patient as my cube mate is on the phone with the "Help" desk here at the Lazy B, because her email is "down". PEBKAC. But she is a very nice lady and I am trying to remember that.

In other OTHER news, the Boy and I got to go out to dinner (which we haven't done in awhile) with our friends Marisa and Brian (whom we ALSO haven't seen in awhile) and it was awesome. A grownup date, hooray, at one of our favorite local spots, hooray times two, for half price meals, AGAIN I SAY HOORAY!