October 22, 2007 at 9:03 am · Filed under abundance, minutiae
We went to the Maker Faire yesterday. After two years of being back in Austin, we are finally falling back in love with here, and all things here-ness. Our Austin weekend included:
- walking to an airstream to eat pink cupcakes
- buying sweets at 10:45pm at the Big Top Candy Shop while listening to fez donned shop owner discuss with the guitar player the true origins of the Transformers
- becoming part of a Montessori community that is some 40 years old while pouring bubble juice into trays and buying vegan pumpkin pies
- being serenaded on the Zilker Zephyr miniature train by a jogging musician while three women on horseback ride by
- kicking two very large bouncy balls and one mini official world cup soccer ball in the field by our house — every day
- eating thai take-out with friends and enjoying the first glimpses what it will be like for kids to play together while adults talk together
- listening to a fantastic jazz band while drinking beer, wandering in the park, feeding the turtles, ducks, and catfish, and watching the moon swell into the sky — just us and about 300 other parents of toddlers spending friday night at central market north
- petting a Uglobe Pleo under the chin and watching her eyes half close with pleasure at the Maker Faire
- paying $12 for breakfast taco lunch for four at Maria’s Taco Express
- playing ukulele on the front porch while evening meanders in all pink and orange
It is so nice to be here.
October 9, 2007 at 4:07 am · Filed under minutiae
When I stepped out of the shuttle from the airport, amusement.
In 2002, I was living in Seattle and had the opportunity to choose between a number of graduate schools, including one in Seattle and one near Palo Alto. We decided to spend a weekend checking out the PA option. My partner in crime and I used priceline to find ourselves what we thought might be a semi-swank place in the bay area. Instead, it was an eclectic Holiday Inn at the intersection of two highways. We were somewhat euphoric though, a direct result of a brightly shining sun, not often seen in the winter months of the Pacific Northwest.
We spent the weekend dazzled by sunlight and the final rationale for selecting my graduate school discarded all pro and con lists. A bright orb in the sky demanded our presence, and we acquiesced.
Yesterday morning, five years later, I arrived again at this most unusual of hotels. It is still sunny here, but the pro and con list has finally emerged victorious. I’m just visiting this time and will not stay.
Instead, I’m attending a conference about the social graph of Facebook and it is a microcosm of many of the things I love about the Valley and a somewhat painful reminder of why I don’t call it home. I’ve met many brilliant and lovely and courageous and enterprising people at the conference, with exciting ideas and a taste for going big or going home.
And that’s the deal breaker….big OR home. I don’t know if this is part of “big OR home”, but there were far fewer women at this conference than I expected, proportionally less than at E3 and GDC. I do wonder where they are.
As for me, I’ve moved to somewhere I hope I can find both big and home. I still need to be part of challenging work that invents and forms the future. But I also need the ability to move at the speed of my toddler…noticing every stone along a path, building block towers so tall that they collapse and must be built yet again, embracing a particular present that cares little for email, phone calls, and abstract opportunities but knows a whole lot about NOW! NOW! NOW! please, NOW!
It’s bitter-sweet, this stay at the holiday inn, for it really is such a lovely place.
October 1, 2007 at 8:08 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I’ve been intermittently following the story of the Star Simpson, a young woman who had a home-made flashing light on her sweatshirt and went to the airport to pick up her boyfriend. If you are not up on it, you can google it and find a number of versions of the story. Most of them will have the police saying we almost killed her and she was wearing a fake bomb. The most useful version of the story I’ve found is on salon.
There is something about becoming a parent that makes these events especially frightening and sad to me. I’ve passed the threshold beyond were someone who is 19 is a peer and instead I see them as what I hope my son might be like at 19….creative, unconventional, a bit quirky, and not quite aware of the hysteria and fear that has infected the people around him. I too see him passionately wearing silly inventions, and playing with friends who also love to make sometimes curious and sometimes brilliant bits of the future.
Reading blog postings about Star, I’ve read some of the most hateful and unkind words barfed in her direction. Words like cunt, bitch, twat, stupid, criminal, idiot. Some people saying she should be dead and others talking about how expensive it must have been to pay all those cops to pull guns on her.
I feel like they are talking about my child too. And there is a part of this hatred that is also about me and all women who make with technology. This is also so painful.
I want better for and of all of us. Please.
Meanwhile get a shirt and send some money to the Star legal defense fund to help our future be a little brighter.
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