Tech Talk, Part II

As you may remember from Part I of our saga, I obtained a Blackberry earlier this year, and used it successfully (if not quite with a full sense of satisfaction) for many months. But a couple of months ago, the touch pad started acting a little funny; it seemed a bit hypersensitive, and would occasionally select things at the slightest touch. Sometimes it was annoying, but it didn't seem like a big deal.

Fast forward a few more weeks, and we had a major problem. Suddenly, a brief tap on my touch pad opened a variety of random programs; attempting to select anything on my phone was like using Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" function. After a while, it became difficult not only to use the touch pad, but also the buttons to the side of the touch pad, as they would set it off. My Blackberry became a very expensive phone-only handset.

At the same time, a second crisis loomed: the impending demise of my laptop. My laptop was purchased in 2003, and it has served my incredibly well for the past several years. However, it has become sluggish as computers do over time, and I've been considering a laptop replacement for about 2 years. Unfortunately, life transitions - like, you know, quitting my job and going to grad school - required my funds to be expended elsewhere, and so I've been putting off my purchase again and again.

My computer, though, was longing to be released to the great computer recycling center in the sky (not China!). The early warning signals came about a year ago, when in the middle of the fall semester my laptop screen just went black. I had a massive freak-out, followed by desperately trying to peer into the barely visible image of my screen so I could log in and backup all my files. Thankfully, another reboot made my baby feel better, and I made a backup promptly thereafter (not to mention, a couple of times since). But I knew my time was running out.

As I put off the purchase again this spring, I think my laptop decided it was losing patience with me. So it gave me a second crisis warning, this time by refusing to recognize that it was plugged into its power supply. This is actually the culmination of a long-standing battery/power supply issue, where my laptop battery no longer holds any charge and the power supply cord sometimes had to be positioned in just certain ways in order for the laptop to acknowledge its existence. (I never bought a new battery, BTW, because I kept thinking I'd be replacing my laptop in just a couple months anyway.) Change that "sometimes" to "always" and the "just certain ways" to "just one very specific way" and you arrive at our current situation: my power cord ghetto-taped to the back of my laptop with the screen at the exact right angle to serve as the anchor for the adhesive bundle, and me afraid to even shift my laptop a few inches on the table lest it bug out for good.

Suffice it to say, I'd reached a critical point for both of my primary devices, and something had to be done tout de suite.

The penultimate chapter: Part III - Why I Should Never Second Guess Myself When I Already Know What I Want, and What Really Drives My Computing Choices

Reflective practice

One of the things I often say to people who ask how I like graduate school is how much I appreciate the time to think, especially the time to reflect on past experiences and understand what I can learn from them. In my first semester, one of the things that struck me about my classes was how relevant they were to both my current and previous nonprofit management experience. One of my first classes even triggered a PTSD-like emotional response to an exchange with a professor that felt a little too much like certain unhappy conversations with my old board of directors; and while that doesn't sound like a good thing, it actually gave me a chance very early on to recognize feelings and defensive strategies that I was still carrying from my past position and to make a conscious decision to adopt some new ways of responding. (The class ultimately turned out just fine, BTW.)

As the year went on, it seemed like reflection on my past job moved into the background, and the focus shifted to my current organizational involvements in the real-world challenges I would bring to my class discussions and assignments. It was a shift that made sense, of course, and allowed me to become a reflective practitioner in real time as well as after the fact. The trend seemed like it would continue into this year; but as I realized that in planning some of my topics for course projects and papers, I noticed an unexpected sense of regret that I wouldn't be able to process more of that past experience through my current work.

Turns out, I'm not quite done with studying my past job, and I'm very glad for it. I'm taking a course on adaptive leadership this semester; and as I tried to figure out which organization to use as a basis for the papers I have to write, I realized that none of the present situations fit so well as the situation I found myself in just before I left my old job. There are some difficulties in trying to use that position and organization as the basis for my work: both I and the organization have moved on since then, and I've deliberately limited my contact with my past colleagues to provide some emotional space for all of us. I'm not at the point where I want to discuss the events surrounding my departure with most of the people directly involved in the conflict, because even a year and a half later there are still things that make me upset when I think about them.

But that is one of the advantages to studying the situation as a school project: I think it will help me to move past the old tensions and hurts and make the experience as productive as possible for my future development (as a person as well as a manager/leader). The reading material raises probing questions not only about what I thought was going on with other actors in the organization, but also about my own assumptions, values and behaviors. I need to be able to take a closer look at what I did as the situation progressed, because the fact of the matter is that many of my own strategies were just as maladaptive and unfruitful as those applied by my colleagues. In order to become a better colleague, manager and leader in my current and future roles, I have to recognize my own weaknesses as well as strengths and try to develop new ways of addressing change and conflict.

I'm hopeful about what will emerge from my writing, because I feel like I have many opportunities in the present to test out new methods for handling organizational situations. In particular, my challenge areas are dealing with politics, with personality conflicts, with my own tendency to inflexibility in how I want things done and a lack of openness to the suggestions of others, and with trying out new skills or activities that I haven't already mastered. I'd like my work to give me some additional layers of analytical process that can provide a buffer between what's happening around me and a my very sensitive emotional core; I don't want to become emotionless, but I want to get better at managing how my emotions are expressed and how I can use them to better advantage in my dealings with other people.

I think there's a lot of this that will be fun as well as deep and difficult. Case in point, the following excerpt from today's reading (The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, p. 94):

One way to understand the challenges raised by external loyalties is to use the metaphor of a vegetable stew. To make a good vegetable stew, you have to cook the ingredients just enough that they give up some of their original color and taste; otherwise, you'd have a pot of crunchy vegetables, not a stew. But if you cook the vegetables too much, each of them will lose so much of its distinctive qualities that you will end up with a pot of undifferentiated mush.

Imagine these vegetables as stakeholders, and suppose you get the stew just right. When those carrots and onions go back to carrot-land and onion-land, having sacrificed some of their distinctiveness in the interests of contributing to the stew, their old friends and family at home will noticed they have changed. "You ... smell like an onion," the carrots will say. "You're not one of us anymore. You've sold out. We sent you there to represent us and champion our views to the others, not to come back contaminated with their juices on you. What did they do to you there?"

Note to everybody: in no professional conversation anywhere does anyone want to hear about who did what with their juices. It's like my professor who said on the first day of class that he "gets off" on people writing down what he says when he lectures. Even if he didn't mean it literally, it is still just so gross.

But also, very funny!

Help! 'Cause I need somebody.

I know, it's way too early in the semester, but I am already a) super-tired and b) a little behind on my assignments. D'oh!

This last week has clearly been the Week of Adjusting to Reality, following the first Week of Naive Optimism About the Year Ahead. The adjustment started when I was trying to figure out why the heck I was so tired all the time; and then I remembered that going to work and going to school at the same time is kind of insane. Clearly, my experience at my alma mater was like childbirth: a very painful experience that your body and mind promptly forgets in the bliss of your ultimate accomplishment ... which is what allows people to keep having children, and me to embark on my second year of grad school after taking on a new job.

Of course, I loved my undergrad institution and was one of its biggest fans, before as well as after I graduated. Similarly, I still adore my job and I am really glad to be back in school. I appreciate the good feelings that helped me take on the upcoming year; and I also appreciate that I'm getting my reality-check now, so I can prepare myself for the hard work ahead.

I did get a little extra fright from my boss this past week, as he mentioned that he was concerned about how well I would perform in the spring, which is both the busiest period in my job cycle and my final semester. He was suggesting that perhaps I should take the semester off, and come back to school in the fall, as there wasn't any real rush to get my degree by May (from his point of view). I initially balked inside, feeling like if I took a leave, all of a sudden school would dragon forever and I'd never get finished. Then I remembered that, if I had to do my second summer fellowship during the academic year, I'd been planning to take a semester off and come back in the fall anyway - so honestly, if I had to do it for work, what's the big deal? It just illustrates one of my primary personality failings that I'm working on, which is that I tend to reject ideas that don't match with my initial conception of what should go on, without giving them proper consideration before reacting. The good news is that, after a couple of minutes, hours or days, I'm generally able to stop being so stubborn and consider alternatives. :-)

Things I have to remember as I get into the rest of the semester:

• NO GRAD SCHOOL DIETS. My body gave me heck this past week for my indulgence in carbs and candy on Monday and Tuesday. Big no-no; regardless of how crazy my schedule gets, I have to keep on my good food regimen, because it keeps me happy and healthy.
• I am not a socialite. I'm giving myself a couple of additional weeks of being a social butterfly (mostly because of things I already committed to doing), but starting in October, I am shutting down my social scene. I have a job, a graduate fellowship, and 4 different boards to serve on in addition to school; there's no time for partying.
• TV will wait. It's why I have a DVR, so that I don't have to watch everything at once. And I know full well that I get half as much done in twice the time if I put on the boob-tube for "background noise."
• Don't procrastinate. Procrastination may be my number one bad habit, but I have to get it under control and bring out the time-management superstar I know I have within me.

There's probably some other stuff, but I'm due back in class. Cheerio!

Professionalism vs. participation

So, I had my first class of the year tonight - hooray! It is quite nice to be back in school. I think that it's a good sign of how much I really like my program that I haven't been dreading coming back, but actually looking forward to it.

I have to say that I was worried about the class as it got started this evening; the professor has a speaking pace that is very ... slow. He's not monotone, and he's not boring; but after 5 minutes I had a real fear that class was going to feel excruciatingly long. I did feel kind of long, but in the end I felt like he'd presented some interesting topics, and he had an amusing sense of humor (of the dry wit variety, to which I can relate very well as a speaker).

One of the interesting topics he brought up was the conflict between a society built on democratic (and sometimes radically anti-government) ideals and the whole concept of professional public administration. He mention that as a country and a profession we've never quite come to terms with the fact that public administrators, who are not elected or even in most cases appointed officials, are the biggest class of policy-makers we have - far more influential than our elected leaders (not to mention generally more focused on managing the country than political posturing to retain their position). This topic has come up in a couple of classes before, as has the idea of a "politics-administration" dichotomy that is supposed to keep public administrators focused on implementing the policies decided in the political process. But the reality of the complex systems we've set up to govern and manage our society is that our elected leaders don't end up having the time or the knowledge to work out all the details of how our public systems work, and they leave that to the staff of administrative agencies - who become policy-makers every time they create and administrative rule and decide how it should be applied.

On the one hand, there's the argument that we need administrative staff with professional training who can use their discretion based on specialized expertise to determine the minute details that bring vague and far-reaching policies into daily practice. On the other hand, there's an argument that administrators with no direct accountability to the people over whom they exercise power should not have power to make such important decisions about where public resources go and what happens to them when they get there. For the past year, I've kind of thought of this as an academic discussion; but I realized today that it is incredibly personal, and a tension I've been wrestling with for years.

So much of my vocational and avocational philosophy is about community and citizen empowerment, and recognizing the right and the ability of regular people to play a meaningful, dominant role in the decision-making that affects their lives. But at the same time, I'm in the middle of my second degree program that trains people to be professionals in their field - presumably based on the assumption that to do architecture or to manage organizations well, you generally need significant training in the tools and techniques of the trade. The very idea behind these schools is that, excepting the rare geniuses among us, the untrained individual will design or plan or manage or administer very poorly; and in practice, rare genius is rarely recognized unless you've gone to the trouble of getting the credentials to prove what you know.

This is a potentially serious philosophical conflict. How do I argue for open access to governance and decision-making on the principle that we all can participate without the need to be specialists - and then at the same time, defend the value of specialized training in making sure that people are well-prepared to be good decision-makers? If enough of this kind of training can be given to the general public in a simple, inexpensive way that allows them to participate fully, then why do we have all of these specialized schools (and more importantly, why am I spending my money on them)? And if this kind of training can't be gotten expect with specialized study, then doesn't that imply that there is a limit to how much or how well our citizenry will actually be able to self-govern?

Folks will probably argue that it doesn't need to be either-or, there's a balance, different roles for different times, etc., etc. But I feel like there's a little bit of a cop-out there, and a refusal to recognize that the conflict, while negotiable, is still real and sometimes very, very challenging. This is a question that gets played out over and over again, as public agencies are asked both to do their jobs efficiently and professionally and to be accessible and responsive to the demands of the public. It may be almost impossible to satisfy both of those requirements.

I have to head off to class now - but this is an item for further discussion! Heck, I may even turn it into my paper topic; isn't that clever of me?

A weekend of walks

This weekend, Hurricane Earl huffed, and puffed - and decided he didn't feel like vacationing in the Cape and Islands. Thus, after a rainstorm of normal heaviness on Friday, the Greater Boston area was blessed with an absolutely gorgeous weekend.

So, back about two years ago, I wanted to start increasing my daily walking as my exercise, rather than working out. My adherence to this principle was pretty spotty, up until this summer, when the location of my fellowship placement allowed me to walk to and from work every day. As noted yesterday, a similar location is one of the awesome things about my job, so I get to keep up the regular walking for the foreseeable future. But this weekend I got an extra walking bonus, as two friends accompanied me on long-awaited wanders.

For many years since I have lived in Boston, I've been an admirer of the Southwest Corridor Park. You can read a bit about the park's origins here; suffice it to say that any park that results from a successful community battle against a highway is a must-see in my book. I've been on portions of the Southwest Corridor, but I have wanted for ages to walk the whole 4-1/2 miles. Finally, I was inspired by the unexpected good weather yesterday, and found a ready companion for a spur-of-the-moment excursion.

One of the reasons I hadn't walked the corridor before is that I was afraid I would tire out before the end. Four-plus miles seemed daunting, and it just wouldn't be the same to do it in bits and pieces. But Saturday my friend and I set out to go as far as we felt comfortable; it turned out to be a nice and easy stroll over a couple of hours, with just two brief breaks in the second half of the journey for rest and water. The park is fun and gorgeous, dotted with community gardens, athletic fields and playgrounds all along the way. Some of the Orange Line stations also have beautiful entrances facing the park; I think Ruggles Station was my favorite.

I was tired after a few hours in the sun, and slept well when I got home. Today, I woke up rested and ready for walk #2, a shorter stroll through the Wellington-Harrington and East Cambridge neighborhoods. With pup in tow (or more often, doing the towing!) a second friend and I spent a good hour catching up and gossiping along the streets of Cambridge, glorying in another sunny day and perfect temperatures. Both of us are more sedentary by nature; my top pastimes are reading books, watching TV and movies, and playing board games, and it's not until you get to bowling or salsa dancing that I get off the couch to entertain myself. But we decided that social walking is a good, natural and fun way to keep our activity levels high and our lives up-to-date. We walked a little over 2 miles, I think, and it was a lovely start to the day.

I feel pretty happy with myself this weekend. I know that weight and clothing size can be useful health indicators, but they're not the only ones, and I feel like these last two days were symbolic of the way I want to keep track of my health going forward. For me, it is more about making sure that the way I eat, the way I sleep, and other aspects of taking care of myself don't prohibit me from doing the things that I want to do. As long as I can take myself on a good long walk at a moment's notice, I figure things for my body are going reasonably well.

Tech Talk, Part I

I haven't done a good gadget post in a long time, but it's not because I haven't had gadget news to tell. It seems like a good time to revive my consumer electronics musings, given new promptings on both the home and work fronts.

As you all know, I have a deep love of HTC phones; my last phone posting in December 2008 was a rave about the AT&T FUZE. I couldn't bring myself to indulge in the crazy purchase price, and after trying out multiple unsatisfactory phones during the previous month, I found myself an HTC 8525 on eBay to provide me some comfort. It should be noted that, immediately after this debacle, my blogging frequency declined precipitously. Coincidence? I think not. I still mourn the 8125 days, when my phone was happy and blogging was easy.

Fast-forward to a year later; my 8525, at the end of a couple of months of weird sluggish performance, dies an untimely death just before I'm set to travel home for Christmas. (As a bonus, my cordless phone battery died at the same time, so for a solid day I was without any phone at all.) I felt nervous about traveling without a cell (how quickly our technology aid becomes a technology crutch), so I headed into the T-Mobile store to convince them to show me the good handset love. In the intervening year, both the HTC craze and the Android craze had swept the nation. Somehow, I allowed myself to be talked into a Motorola CLIQ, in the belief that T-Mobile's online backup features would make up for the contact sync failings of the G1.

Not so fast, sister. Attempting to sync my contacts through T-Mobile Backup was as aggravating as any other Outlook-to-Android solution previously tried; plus I discovered that T-Mobile had somehow creepily kept copies of test pictures I took when I was trying out my Blackberry Curve (I didn't even know they'd been synced online in any way). But the true deal-breaker was the fact that the CLIQ with its MOTOBLUR functions was like a hyperactive child that drains all your energy - literally, all my battery power was out within 8 hours. Yes, I was charging up the battery properly, and yes, I tried turning off all the social networking features; despite all that, and despite turning my phone off for much of my train ride home, I had so little battery power that I had to borrow a stranger's phone to call my sister to pick me up from the station, instead of using the brand-new phone I'd purchased days earlier.

In a white rage, I returned to the T-Mobile store when I got back to Boston, and convinced the store manager that they'd darn well better give me a new smartphone for the sale price at which I had bought the CLIQ, regardless of whether their holiday sale was over. (I think he may have been afraid that I was about to go all Mad Black Woman on him.) Irritated and exhausted, I took the manager's recommendation for time-tested reliability over flash and fun, and I finally boarded the Blackberry bus, with a Bold 9700. Pros: email setup is the easiest thing in the world, and syncing with Outlook is the second easiest. Cons: small keyboard (but thankfully QWERTY), small screen, no stylus, no touch screen.

I've had a love/hate relationship with my Blackberry since I bought it. It does my PDA stuff pretty well - certainly much better than any Android phone - but there are little features of its PIM applications, its phone options, and how screen selection works that just drive me batty. There are a number of useful and entertaining applications from Blackberry App World; but I always feel cramped by the small screen I have to work on. The keyboard also cramps my style, because as much as I have developed my skill at Blackberry typing, writing anything longer than a couple paragraphs is very uncomfortable. (Also, see aforementioned screen issue for trying to read what you just typed.)

So I've been struggling since January with the fact that I have a basically functional phone, but I just don't like it very much. Or, at least, I had a basically functional phone for a while ...

Up next: Part II - The Phone That Didn't Love Me, and Why No Laptop Lives Forever

In preparation

I'm currently celebrating the end of a very busy, very productive and very positive summer. There's been travel, good food, exercise, family time, friend time, career development, and a good bit of R&R. Honestly, I long for the days of my phone that made my want to blog all the time (HTC, I miss you!) ... somehow, my Blackberry seems all business and not quite enough play. Well, that's not quite true; I play XXL Gems and Facebook all the time, but the urge to write out my thoughts at length feels incompatible with my current keyboard.

Digression. The real point I was ambling toward is that there's so much I want to write about, because the summer has been amazing. But the thing that struck me most today is how clearly I can see the path that has been leading up to this really cool point in my life. That's not always the case with me; there are many things that God has worked on in my life that I didn't understand until much, much later, and quite a few that I don't yet get. But at this moment, all these threads are coming together in a pattern that is crystal clear - and very beautiful.

It hit home this afternoon in the bathroom (where I do all my best thinking, of course). I'd just taken a break from the mind-numbing task of starting to clean up a mailing list database at my new job. The task made me want to scratch my eyes out a little; but then I thought how cool it is to have this job that makes such full use of all my skills - from the big ones like strategic thinking to the seemingly little ones like database design and management. As much as the thought of sifting through those 6,000 records was daunting, I appreciated being able to do it, and being able to plan for how to improve our database design to help make these tasks easier in the future.

I can't describe how much I love my new job; it's like a puzzle piece that exactly fits to make the picture complete, only I didn't even realize it was missing until it came along. The story of my hire is definitely one of those you-find-it-when-you're-not-looking events (as much as I hate that phrase in other contexts): a connection from my summer fellowship gave my name to the organization, as did another person within the organization; I got an email about coming in for an interview the morning after I'd even heard that I'd been suggested for the position; and within the month, I was hired. I hadn't been planning on looking for a job until next year, I hadn't thought that I wanted to work in nonprofit management again for a while ... and I even realized, after looking back through some emails in the spring, that I'd ignored an earlier heads up from a friend about the fact that the position was opening up, because I didn't think I wanted a job like this at the moment. But when the opportunity came back around again - thank God! - it was so obvious how perfect a fit it is for me right now, that I can still hardly believe I've been so blessed.

It feels weird to insert a bulleted list in the middle of a rapturous story, but it's the clearest way I can think of to illustrate all the large and small ways that this job is so just-right:

• My last experience with nonprofit management was stressful to say the least, and I really didn't want to go back to the nonprofit world for a while. Or so I thought; it turns out that what I didn't want was not to have to deal with the crazy stressful aspects of my former job. My new job is everything I loved about my old job (working on design and planning, social responsibility, travel, collaboration, public speaking, writing, graphic design, organizing panels and forums, having autonomy and flexibility), minus the things I didn't (board management, finance and accounting, fundraising), plus the supportive work environment I really needed.
• My first interview was like the best first date ever. :D Example: as my new boss explained all the reasons why he had started the award program in the first place, I was thinking in my head, "I don't have to give you my rant on architecture awards, because you just gave it for me!" And then my fabulous predecessor began explaining all the people they'd been partnering with over the years and the new relationships they hoped to build; it was a list of all the people I either already loved working with from my last job or was already dying to partner with sometime soon. When I was finally hired, I had to remind myself to stay on vacation for the couple of weeks between the end of my fellowship and my start date, because I was so eager to get into my new role.
• One of the things I loved about my summer fellowship was the fact that I could walk to work every day; it was so much fun, and I loved getting in that extra bit of exercise. I kept thinking about how wonderful it would be to have my permanent job within walking distance, but I thought I couldn't possibly restrict my job search to within a mile of my house. Lo and behold: my new job is exactly a mile from my house, and a mere two blocks from where I was working all summer. I still love the walk just as much as ever!
• Speaking of my summer fellowship, I was actually awarded two this summer, and when I first started interviewing for the job, I was trying to figure out when to schedule the second one sometime during the upcoming year. It was my one hesitation about taking the job; how could I start a new job, and then tell them that I needed three months off within my first year to go work in Washington, DC for a bit? And alternately, how could I go back to my school and tell them that I had to turn down the prestigious fellowship they'd awarded me? My new boss answered the question for me in my second interview, when discussing my part-time status: "The hours vary throughout the year, and things get pretty quiet in the summer, so you can use that time if you want to make some extra money." Me: "Well, there is this thing I'm supposed to do next summer ..."
• And as it turns out, the part-time hours are one of the things I love about my job. In the immediate term, it means I can finish my final year of grad school and my second fellowship as planned. In the longer term, it means I have more time for all the volunteer things that I love to do, but that are so hard to squeeze in around a full-time schedule. But it's about more than just scheduling. As I have already discovered in my first week, the flexibility of my hours relieves a tremendous amount of the stress of working every day, and helps me to find that elusive work-life balance: I go to work when I am awake and rested, I get judged based on what I accomplish rather than when I clock in and clock out, I come home with plenty of time to take care of things around the house, and I can make time for friends and family with much more ease. It's a big step for me towards a new kind of lifestyle; one that is not built on rushing from place to place, but rather on making time for what matters most to me.

So I feel like this job has been prepared just for me, at this exact moment in my life. And what's more, I feel like I've been preparing for it over the past several months and even years, although I didn't know it. Where I've gone to school and my last job are obvious tie-ins; but so is the fact that my tech training and gadget geekiness let me have intelligent conversations about the tools we use in our office, or that the hours I spent and the skills I built researching and writing for papers this spring and my project report this summer are perfect preparation for the site visit reports and case studies I'll be responsible for in my work. Even living on a student budget this past year has been a preparation for me, odd as that sounds. When I look back on the amount of income I had this year, and the fact that for most of the year I was paying for my apartment by myself, I realize that I've been learning what are luxuries and what are necessities in my budget, and learning that I can live very, very well on much less than I've been thinking I needed. My part-time salary is actually an abundant gift.

This is one of those mountaintop moments for me. God has been hard at work clearing my mind and heart over the past year to be able to receive this gift and appreciate it. My joy is very full right now, and I can see so many amazing things both in my past and my future. I know that the path ahead will contain stressors and challenges as well as delights; but I am so thankful for the restful space in which to celebrate all the goodness around me.