Monthly Archives: January 2017

Who do I want to be?

27 Friday Jan 2017

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I read this post about “the Deadly Sin that makes life awesome.” Spoiler: It’s Pride. But not Hubristic Pride, when you think you’re better than other people. The author describes the benefit of Authentic Pride, where you are proud of the work you’ve done.

One of the recommendations the author makes is to ask yourself, “Who do I want to be” rather than “What do I want?” or “What will impress other people?”

I love that approach.

So, who do I want to be?

A writer.
An artist.
A mom with a great relationship with her kids.
A partner to someone I love and respect.
A great friend.
Fearless.
Creative.
Free.
Loved.

 

The mathz

16 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by in Art, Flying, love, Math

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goldenratio

I’m on a long flight from LHR-SFO, reading a great book called The Divine Proportion, by H.E. Huntley, published in 1970. It’s about the relationship of aesthetics and mathematics, so of course if focuses a lot on the Golden Ratio.

In the first chapter, the author describes how he fell in love with mathematics. It was at a lecture, during his freshman year at Bristol University and the lecturer, Peter Frazer, wrote a theorem on the chalkboard and became enamored by the simple elegance of the set he had drawn. He paused, then proclaimed how exquisite it was, becoming animated in his exaltations of the theorem’s beauty. The class laughed, but the author was moved.

I get it. I had a similar experience in my freshman calculus class, when Professor Zukowski, who most mornings reeked of alcohol, wrote on the board the first differential equation I’d ever seen, and proceeded to explain how calculus could explain so many parts of our world…it was like I had received a decoder ring for the universe. I had loved trigonometry in high school, mostly the graphing of the curves, but this was adding a new dimension, literally.

In the book, Professor Huntley gives advice to those who might be reading it and thinking of pursuing mathematics as a career. One bit of advice struck me as sad, yet true. He writes, “You may be lonely. Scarcely anyone will understand your work because few will be capable of understanding it.”

I feel that deeply. Perhaps my greatest failure as a parent has been my inability to stir in my children the same love I had for math. Granted, I didn’t fall in love with math until I was in college. And friends will tell you that it wasn’t math I fell in love with, but David Carpenter.

I’ll explain… I was in NROTC, so I had to take calculus. And in my calculus class was a cute, suntanned, shaggy-haired boy with awesome dimples, named Dave Carpenter. He kept to himself, which added to his mystique. One day, he came to class in an Air Force ROTC uniform and I about died…my secret crush was also in ROTC! I finally mustered the courage to ask him about it, and we struck up a conversation. He had dreams of becoming an astronaut, so he was enrolled in AFROTC. I started researching the space program. Most astronauts were former military test pilots who had technical degrees. So I switched my major from art to mathematics. My friends accused me of wanting to become an astronaut so I could have sex with David Carpenter in space.

After the second month of school, I didn’t see him in class. I never saw him in a uniform on campus again. His enthusiasm for the space program had apparently dissipated, or maybe it transferred over to me. I went on a field trip to a few naval air stations over the holiday break and fell in love with flying, too. David Carpenter had been replaced.

It’s funny, I was reading this book about numbers, and then the in-flight TV show I was most drawn to was a show about online dating and algorithms. I took a few notes; my next exercise after writing this blog post is updating my dating profile. On the show, the host mentioned the mathematical formula about rejecting 37% of options and then dating the next suitable person (also detailed in this article). I’ve been keeping a list of the dates I’ve been on; I think I’m around 28, so I feel like I have extra incentive to hop to it and get out on some more dates.

I was also super inspired by the images and figures in the book. I cannot wait to get my art studio in order so I can start a mathematically-inspired series of paintings. I want to do a bunch that are inspired by the golden ratio, and also a series of chessboards. I love that math continues to inspire me in so many ways, which gives me hope that maybe my kids will also eventually learn to appreciate it.

When I look in the mirror…

05 Thursday Jan 2017

Posted by in Art

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This is from a writing prompt I did in a writing workshop a few months ago. The prompt was, “When I look in the mirror…”

When I look in the mirror I see an artist. Those are ten simple words but it’s taken me over 40 years to write them and feel confident that they’re true.

When I was a child, I loved to draw and make up jokes to make my parents laugh. We moved around a lot because my dad was in the military and when we were finally a big enough family to merit housing with a garage, we were in Southern California, where thankfully no one uses garages for cars and I would delight in recruiting my brothers and our friends to perform plays and reenactments using the garage as our makeshift theater. I would write and direct the plays, create the playbills, act in the plays, even make snacks for the “concession stand.”

In elementary school I lived for the annual school play. I was crushed when I didn’t get the lead in the fourth grade play – a spaghetti western about a cowboy named Jones. I still remember the theme song, “Along Came Jones.” Because I knew how to play piano, I was cast in a small role as Miss Kitty, the owner of the local Saloon, and when Jones said “Hit it, Miss Kitty” I had to play the Scott Joplin rag, “The Entertainer.” I don’t even think I had a line; I just winked back at him and played the piano.

I exacted my revenge for this crushing miscasting by spending the next summer writing a play to be performed for our 5th grade year. It was a study in what aliens would think about Earth if they landed in Camp Pendleton, CA and only learned about our society from watching television commercials. I guess it was actually funny because my teacher, Miss Bobo, agreed to let us perform it. 

I had to write out the script because I didn’t know how to type, and then make copies using that carbon copy paper and I can’t remember what it’s called now because it was 1977 and we’re so beyond that archaic method of copying. I loved every minute of putting on this production – the staging, the directing, the coaching, wondering which jokes would land and which needed to be juiced up a bit.

My parents were lukewarm about my enthusiasm for art and performing. I could sense their disapproval in the way that they talked about famous actors…”Oh, he was so entertaining in that movie, too bad he’s as queer as a three-dollar bill.” Wanting to please my parents, I started thinking about other careers. I loved animals, so one night at a family dinner I announced (to my parents’ delight) that I was thinking about becoming a veterinarian, which meant I would need to go to medical school (much better than scandalizing the family by becoming an actress).

Within a week, my parents bought me a copy of Grey’s Anatomy. I think they were so thankful that I had apparently moved on from the ridiculous idea of becoming an actress that they neglected to actually look in the book and realize that the huge tome of medical information also included diagrams of reproductive organs, a verboten topic in our catholic family. This was a major score for an 11 year old. Finally, I got to see a decent drawing of a penis. And a vagina, for that matter. I so had the fear of God drilled into me about sex that I had never looked at my own genitalia in a mirror because I couldn’t bear the thought of telling a priest about it in confession. It never occurred to me to just not say anything.

High School came and my main activity, other than school work, was drama. I was drawn to the theater. I felt at home on stage and behind it. I loved the teamwork involved in putting on the show and the creativity and the service to the audience. My parents and I had some tense conversations about my college and career choices. I wanted to study acting and art, but my parents pressured me to study something else, anything else. I had grown up hearing about how artists were weird, were perverts, were people who weren’t skilled at anything else useful to society and so they do art. Don’t think you’ll ever get rich by being an actress, my parents constantly reminded me. All my childhood I heard that being an artist would set me up for failure in life. When I went to college, I took the road my parents wanted me to travel because they convinced me that the path I wanted with lead to sadness and poverty and nude photos that would destroy any artistic career I could cobble together in the first place. I had been told my whole childhood that being an artist was bad, so when I looked in the mirror, I told myself you’re too good of a person to be an artist.

And yet the artist inside me wouldn’t go away. I did some community theater after college. In the navy I made music videos for my squadron. I started painting 7 years ago and I make time to write. I started accepting that just because my path created a successful business career, it doesn’t mean I can’t create, in bits and pieces. I look forward to the future, in a few years, when my kids are grown up and I can move someplace less expensive and take a lower-paying job, and I’ll change my LinkedIn profile to only say “Artist.”

Life lessons from yoga

04 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by in Inspiration, Yoga

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One of my goals for 2017 is to establish a more regular yoga practice (along with a more regular writing practice – so far, so good!).

I’ve been practicing yoga regularly for six years. My first yoga class was in grad school, 15 years ago. I had held the typical military sterotype of yoga that it was too “soft and squishy” of a workout, and I thought I’d be chanting instead of working up a sweat (which is my qualification of a good workout). But a friend of mine convinced me to go to a yoga class he had taken and he promised it would be a great workout.

He was right; it was an ashtanga class. For the unfamiliar, ashtanga is hindi for “ass kicking.” Just kidding, but I loved that it was a serious workout. I wasn’t intimidated by the super yogis in the class who could bend themselves in ways I didn’t think possible. Instead, I focused on what I could do that day. I began going to the ashtanga class fairly regularly, as many times as I could on my grad student budget.I loved the muscles I was starting to feel on my shoulders and abs.

Then I moved to California, got pregnant, and stopped practicing yoga. The demands of raising two small children, running a house and managing full-time jobs in tech took up all of my time and fitness fell to the side.

Fast forward eight years to 2010. I was super stressed out at work and my marriage was falling apart. I needed to do something, anything to find some inner peace. I remembered a few co-workers from a previous job who were really into bikram yoga and had recommended it. “Bikram” is hindi for “hot and smelly feet.” Just kidding, but it is conducted in a heated room, which, if not cleaned properly, can get pretty darn stinky. It’s a series of 26 poses, each done twice, first for a minute and then for 30 seconds. The whole series takes 90 minutes, and by the end, you are drenched in sweat and feeling pretty wiped. My kind of workout.

Over the past six years, I’ve improved my flexibility and strength. I progressed to power yoga, which involves inversions and balances – a new challenge for me. One pose in particular had been my nemesis for a long time: bakasana, or crow pose. It’s a balance on ones’ arms, using arm and core strength. I could put my knees on the backs of my upper arms, lean forward and lift one foot off the ground, but I was afraid to lift the other foot because I was sure I would fall forward on my face.

I spent months in class balancing on one toe, so afraid to let that toe leave the ground. See, I’ve never been able to do a pull up. I’ve never had great upper-body strength, so I kept telling myself that I shouldn’t be able to do anything that requires it. But bakasana requires not just physical strength, but mental power.

I finally got tired of not trying and one day, decided to lift up that toe. I balanced for two seconds and then my toes came back down. It was super short, but it was air time and I held the balance for those two seconds.  I was elated; in all those years I’d always leave that one big toe on the floor to balance and support myself. I’d never trusted myself enough to do the full pose. I’d always think, “What if I fall on my face?” and finally I thought, “What if I DON’T fall? What if I can rock this pose and I’ve been wasting all this time doubting myself?” So I did it.

 

The lesson for me? I’m stronger than I realize. And who cares if I fall? I will keep trying, and get stronger, and balance longer.

Yes, sometimes I wipe out:

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but I just don’t GAF about that anymore. Because I’ll get back up and try again. I know I can do it now.

Amélie

02 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by in Inspiration, Movies, Relationships, Travel

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amelie

Yesterday, for New Years, the Facebook page for the movie Amélie posted a video of the scene where Amélie anonymously reconnects Bretodeau with his childhood treasure box. Upon seeing his emotional reaction, she decides to devote her life to helping the people around her. The quote with the post was, “New Year’s Resolution Amélie style – change the lives of those around you for the better.”

It’s one of my favorite scenes from the movie, and Amélie is one of my all-time favorite movies. It brings me to tears every time I watch it. I love the beautiful piano soundtrack, the scenery (Paris-sigh!), the characters’ quirkiness, the editing, the cinematography…I could go on and on.

My favorite scene is towards the end, when she’s in the kitchen, fantasizing that her love is about to surprise her. She imagines him sneaking in, and gently rustling the beaded entrance to her kitchen, when suddenly, she actually hears the beads rustle, so she turns around but it’s only the cat. She begins to cry, feeling devastated and sad, thinking that love is just a fantasy for her and it won’t happen. And then she hears her door buzzer – her love really has come for her.

I adore that scene because it reminds me to not give up on finding love. I am hopeful that my love will gently rustle those beads and my dream of finding my partner will come true. Until then, I’ll be baking in the kitchen, singing along to my Awesome 80s Songs playlist on Spotify.

 

Choose wisely in 2017

01 Sunday Jan 2017

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choosewisely
I’m reading a book called Presence, by Amy Cuddy – a gift from my manager (thanks, Giselle!). I was inspired by reading about Cuddy’s discussion of power. I used to think of power in the same way I thought about sales…in a negative way. I felt that power was only sought by those who wanted it in order to dominate or take advantage of others. Her book helped me realize that what I used to think of as power is social power, but there’s an inner version, called personal power, that is about self-confidence. Personal power is limitless, unlike social power, which is gained at the expense of others.

If you think of power as being binary, then not feeling powerful means you feel powerless. Cuddy discusses how the feeling of powerlessness causes people to physically withdraw. She cites several studies about subjects who physically collapse into themselves when they don’t feel like they have any power, vs. powerful people, who stand tall, with their chins lifted and chests puffed out.

amycuddy

I’ve had too many moments this past year of feeling powerless. I’ve felt socially withdrawn. I was often quieter than I should be at work and chalked it up to being new in my role. I know that powerlessness is not doing me any favors.

I’ve also had moments when I felt more powerful than I have ever felt before. I’m at a new company in a job that I absolutely love and that I’m great at. I love my team and they inspire me to be the best manager possible. My kids are healthy and happy. I bought a home all by myself thanks to years of working hard and saving money (and a fairy godmother of a real estate agent who found an awesome property off-market). I’m healthy. I am so fortunate and I fully appreciate that. Yet sometimes, I still let fear creep in. I don’t let it stay for long, and I am much better at recognizing it when it approaches. As much as I can, I choose to push past the fear.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about choices, especially the choices in how I live my life. Last month at work, I wrote a vision statement for 2017 to delineate what I want to accomplish over the next 12 months. It was helpful because it gave me a reality check about how much I can actually do in that time period, and I had to prioritize what was most important for me to accomplish in 2017. I’ve come to realize that I feel better and more productive, accomplished, etc. when I schedule my time and make a plan. And what better time to make a plan than on January 1st?

Many times last year, I’d think about getting up early and practicing yoga or going to the gym, but then I’d stay up too late, looking at social media or reading, and then when the alarm went off at 6am, it was too easy to hit snooze. This year, I’m going to get to bed by 10am so I have a little buffer for reading (but not online!) and I know (through months of sleep tracking) that I need 6.5-7.5 hours of sleep a night. So, if I can get to sleep by 10:30pm, I can get up at 5:30am and feel rested. My body naturally wakes early, often before my alarm goes off, so now I just need that impetus to get out of bed. I need to choose to get out of bed rather than going back to sleep. I will help myself make that choice by putting my alarm on the other side of my bedroom. 🙂

I feel motivated to get it right this year. I’m celebrating a milestone birthday and so I’m re-evaluating how I’m living my life.  I’m pretty happy overall, but I do feel like I could be doing more, especially more for others. Last year, I made too many excuses for myself, instead of realizing the power I have to make better choices. In 2017, I’m going to kick some vision statement ass.

Here’s what I’ll be writing on December 31, 2017:

Work
My team continued to have great impact. We ended the year with a new Help Center, where customers can go to easily get information about our products, find support and become more successful. Our new support experience has been recognized externally and the team has been invited to speak at industry conferences.
We deflected a record number of cases from 1:1 teams and are considered a strong partner to our sales and support teams. We’ve delivered many insights to our product and marketing partners, who also view us as a valuable feedback mechanism, and we’re included in more upstream conversations. The team is happy and feeling fulfilled.
I am leading leadership development training for women at our company and continue to coach co-workers.
I am considered a leader in our company and a valued contributor to my org’s leadership team.
I visited our remote teams once a quarter to help them feel supported and connected.

Family
My kids are now both teenagers! We took a fun family vacation together to Europe and a couple of long weekend trips to Carmel and Hawaii. During the weeks they’re with me, I am able to leave the office in time to pick them up from school and we cook dinner together a couple of times a week.
We welcomed a dog into our family.
I finally met the partner I’d hoped for and we are building a life together. He’s appreciative of all the thoughtful things I do for him, and he delights in and encourages my personal growth.

Friends
I’ve been able to finish furnishing and decorating my house and have hosted get-togethers for my friends.
We did a get-away together trip and celebrated our friendship. And of course, we went to several concerts together this summer. My friends helped me ring in my milestone birthday this year and I am grateful to have them in my life.

Community
I continued my involvement in veteran support groups and helped host a VetsinTech hackathon at my company.
I volunteered at my kids’ schools.

Me
I continued my hobbies in 2017 but stretched myself a little more this year.
Painting: I set up my art studio and completed 20 paintings, enough to sign up for Open Studios in 2018. I have posted my paintings to my art website, encaustech.com, and have sold a few. I’ve begun talking with my company about doing an encaustic installation on one of the walls at work.
Design: I completed a web development course and was able to use what I learned to redesign encaustech.com, which I am now using to both exhibit and sell my artwork.
Writing: Speaking of blogs, I am regularly posting on rendipi.com and stretching my writing muscles. I signed up for the 500words a day challenge and I finally completed the first draft of my first novel.
Music: I continued my guitar lessons and sang at an open mic night.
Fitness: I got serious about yoga and am practicing at least 3X a week. In 2018, I will get my 200-hour teaching certificate and will start volunteering to teach yoga at the VA (both are stretch goals for 2017).
Travel: I enjoyed a solo vacation and visited some places I’ve never been to (Montreal, Vancouver, Prague, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Costa Rica are candidates)
Half-year bonus goal: If I’m progressing well on my vision statement by the end of June, I will get current in a Cessna 172 so I can take my kids and friends flying.