Author Archives: Jonathan

Weeknotes S06E03

not talking about work

I am struggling with this blog and work. I think making things open makes them better, but I’ve also been aware that sharing early can have unintended consequences. If you don’t believe me, then I know you’ve never had a doctor wonder aloud whether the shadow on a scan could be cancer.

I think that working in the open when you’ve not formed a minimum viable idea is dangerous, because there will be gaps, and people will fill those gaps by themselves.

I’m also the semi-public face of someone else, and that means that this communication channel becomes a semi-official public face of that person. I don’t want them to have sign off on everything I write, not least because then they’d have to suffer through my poetry, but I’m also very aware that I’m caught in the awkward position of consequently not writing about work.

And my work takes up a lot of my time and my brain at the moment.

There is definitely an element of laziness and bad faith to this, because if I really wanted to I’d write everything and then edit it, reflecting carefully on inferences that could be drawn and whether what I’d written could be shared.

That would be extra cognitive load, and honestly I don’t write to give myself extra cognitive load. I write mostly to get stuff out of my head. It is one of the reasons that my blender barely goes past two. I don’t want to spend the brain energy world-building beyond that which already exists.

Consequently writing and speaking honestly about what is happening is very easy and very practiced, and the few times I’ve branched into surreal stuff it’s been very short. I’ve never expanded on the consequences of cannibalistic giants or demonic cuties serving coffee.

Perhaps I should, but I’ve never truly been able to shake the imperative to write only what I know. And my knowledge of Hellspawn trapped in a corporate gig is – I mean it’s not zero, but it’s not as much as I’d like to have if I’m going to write about it, you know?

Anyway. This has been a long excuse for why I’m still not able to talk about what I’m doing, and probably won’t in the future.

Sorry, but also not sorry.

some other small things

a work thing

A presentation I was planning to give to a small group of colleagues internally has been selected for a conference. At the moment apparently more than 300 people have expressed an interest in seeing it.

That is a lot of people.

I have a week to be so comfortable with the material that I can do it twice. Luckily I have a nice, easy, low-stress job which gives me plenty of time in the evenings to practice it oh wait no I don’t. I’m absurdly excited about this opportunity, but so nervous that I won’t get the message across. It is also, boringly, something else that I can’t yet talk about.

My life is not nearly as mysterious and exciting as it comes across here, I promise.

a date thing

there is no feeling more sublime than when you pay for dinner and they say “are you sure?” and you say “yeah, you can get the next one” and they do a little smile and say “sure, I’ll get the next one” because that means there’ll be a next one.

a meta thing

I’m not happy with these at all. I’ve not said much, and what I have said has obscured the truth rather than revealing it. I’m going to think more about what I do with this time and medium.

Weeknotes S06E02: Getting into the swing of things

we play with live ammo here

I had the gentlest of slap-downs today from someone with more experience than me, and it was deserved, so I’m going to talk about what happened. This is almost certainly the first time I’ve talked directly about something happening on this blog ever, so forgive any rough edges.

I was rewriting a presentation for my boss, taking on board some feedback we’d had about it. I was footling about in the speaker notes, writing in my usual overly flamboyant style and exaggerating the message. It was purely for my own workings – if I explode all of the words I can around a topic I can pick out the ones that actually matter. I’ve got a slide that’s six words long, and it took me one hundred words to get there. If I’d had time to write more, I could have written less.

Anyway. The gentle slap down was a colleague reading it and saying, dryly, “You have captured the direction but directed the style.”

Or, as I took it, “The idea is great. The execution is dumb.”

The reason I’m talking about this is because in the space that I work I’m so close to the centre. I am writing this as a reminder that working in a high trust environment means not letting playfulness be the enemy of good work: that despite my mother’s insistence I still sometimes forget to tidy my toys away after playing. And I can’t forget that now.

It’s a minor blip and the rest of the presentation is really excellent, and I’m so excited to watch her present it. This time just with the direction.

pity the addict

I took the smallest sip
A little lip-full 
of coffee

it was wicked
and sweet
and strong

and the memory of it makes me tremble

Weeknotes S06: Trailer

A new season already?

Yes. I was offered a new role and it seemed like way too good an opportunity to pass up.

I’ve noticed in my weeknotes that I’ve not been talking about what I do day-to-day. Instead I’ve been focussing more about how I feel, and talking around what’s happening rather than addressing it directly.

I’m think I’m doing it because weeknoting about what I’m doing would confer the awesome power of communicating it publicly. With that power comes the great responsibility of doing it thoughtfully, with consideration to all of the other moving parts that rotate around my corner of the world. Working in teams where those moving parts are complex galaxies of their own gives me pause. Now as an existentialist[mfn]I see you roll your eyes[/mfn] this feels like living in bad faith. Do I truly think everyone should act in this way? Don’t I believe in openness?

The standard answer, of course, is that things are complicated. And this might be true, but it might also be a way of escaping the responsibility of making a decision.

Nonetheless, at least for the next season, there’s not a lot of work stuff that I’m going to be able to talk about. I’m going to try other things, including some creative bits and pieces, but I suspect there will be less blogging from me in these coming months – or, if I keep it up, it’ll be unfocussed writing.

Advice to my former self

I don’t do resolutions because I don’t really have a sense of time that’s as long as years – my understanding of the future is “forever” or “next week”, so the closing of one year and the opening of the new one seems to me as perplexing a thing to mark as the end of the week. It just passes. The past, though, is an interesting place. I’ve lived there and although my memories are rose-tinted I nonetheless have learned some things. Since in the next 12 months I’m turning 30 – a phrase that is deliberately vague – I am writing these things now because they will inevitably cause amusement for my future self.

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Christmas story time

Love at a distance

It is quite hard to love someone who gives you practical presents. Bad presents are actually slightly easier, because it means they’ve gone and thought about you. In fact, if you love them very much – or have known them a long time, which is sort of the same thing – you can see the space between their intention and the outcome. You can love that space. That space is where the hoped-for meets the real; where you are reminded that the person looking eagerly at you while you unwrap a book about stars (because you mentioned that you like to lie under them and wonder what their names are) is a person who is real and distinct from you. Their internal world is not the same as yours, and they probably don’t intersect in the same plane.

And yet they have thought hard about you, albeit at a different angle, and from that same starting place have come to this conclusion. It’s the same reason that the door that used to only have one cat flap has had two ever since you brought home a stray, because if one cat needs one catflap then two cats is simply a case of multiplying the solution to a previously solved problem.

Even a practical present isn’t terrible, although sometimes the problem you want solving is the problem underneath the problem you’re expressing. Almost nobody wants a new iron for their birthday: almost everybody wants to not have to do ironing. But maybe they do want a fancy drinking bottle, because drinking water is fantastic and keeping tea warm is universally recognised as a Good Thing. Practical, sure. But it solves a problem they have perhaps expressed.

Perhaps the gravest error, and the sentiment I’m growing out of, is that presents are not – fundamentally – for me. You can overthink a gift and imbue it with the spirit of a relationship, turning it into a Christmas tree on which you hang every bauble of emotion you wish you’d expressed throughout the year. Such an approach is surely doomed to fail. No mere object can bear the weight of all that you’ve left unsaid.

So finding the gift becomes impossible, because it stands in for all the times you wish you’d said “I love you” and “I’m sorry” and “I am grateful for you” and “I’m proud of you” and “Sometimes when I kiss you I feel sad, and I don’t know why” and “I’m upset that you ignored me”. And I hate to bring work into this but, well, I’m a one-trick pony and this is my show so this is how it goes. In my line of work, you de-risk things by doing them more often.

You can make your gift-giving less risky, less fraught, if you do it more often.

And we know that the gift isn’t really about the material thing but the sentiment it means so start there. Deploy love to production as frequently as you can. It means you can course-correct. It means you can identify where you’re going wrong and it signals that you’re willing to fail and still try again.

And having the security of frequent communication, frequent love, means that when it comes to big set pieces you have a better sense of what this person likes and, even better, you’re not balancing your whole relationship on it. You’re not spending huge amounts of cash on something you’re not sure they’ll like, which is better for you because now you’re less anxious about dropping that much cash on a guess and advice from a couple of lads from your Wednesday 5-a-side.

And when you’re secure, you can start having fun. And realising that giving gifts can be fun changes the game, my friends, because having fun by yourself isn’t nearly as good as having fun with other people.

Inspired by a friend who throws out gorgeous prose like this without thinking about it twice:

They symbolise that he tries. And that even though he gets it wrong every year and she laughs at him every year, he’s never frustrated he just tries again. and she sees where he’s coming from, so where he falls short she feels love for the space in between because she loves how he thinks.

one of my splendid friends

the talisman

for my mother

“So proud of you” it reads. It’s stamped in metal and has a note that suggests I keep it in my pocket so that I’m always aware of it. I wonder over it. It’s solid and irresistible. The metal is dirty and pitted. When I put it in my pocket it jabs me and reminds me that it’s there.

At first I hate it. When I feel proud of people I tell them. It only takes a moment, a little bit of energy, to fire off a text or give someone a call and say hey, I saw this thing you did. I’m proud of you. This is just a cold piece of metal. It doesn’t notice when I do something good. It doesn’t shine more when I’m successful. I put it in a box and I put it on my desk and I went to bed.

The next morning, when I wake up, it’s still there. It’s still proud of me.

When I struggle through half an hour of exercise – more injurious to my ego than my body, thanks to the sprightly seventy year old doing multiples of whatever number of push-ups I can do – it’s still proud of me.

I wonder about this.

I think about the friend whom I rarely see because she’s working every hour possible to achieve her dream. I think about the friend who left his toxic boss and now gets to work on something he really enjoys in a healthy environment. I think about my family: difficult and frustrating and brilliant.

I know that if someone asked me if I were proud of any one of them I’d say yes in a heartbeat.

I wouldn’t know what they were doing at that moment in time, but nonetheless I’m proud of my friends and my family. So – so then maybe being proud of someone includes highs and lows, except the lows are always pretty high. Maybe the lowest level of pride is so sure, so steadfast, that the only way to express it is to do so continuously.

And perhaps, so that we don’t spend every waking minute talking to each other, a shorthand for this truth – that you are always proud of me – is to stamp it on metal with points so that I feel it whenever I move.

Love is the emotion that gets all the attention, and we’ve got gorgeous symbols for its everlasting nature. But pride is rightfully spiky; it tickles the throat and prickles the eyes and stings the feet so they dance.

And still it’s there, whenever you need it.