more found poetry

This time from a different poster on the forum where I log my workouts. As with previous entries, I've only changed punctuation and line breaks:

I wish, I mean, I hope

no

those word is not strong enough.

I must regroup myself now, now 

that half of 2018 is gone. I must

pick up the pace and finish
2018 in a strong way.

This is a message to myself

on 180608, a Friday afternoon

where I slacking/recovering from

my exam 2 days after finishing it.

It will be raining for the next 7 days or so.

on failure and being bad at my job

I've known for some time that I am not a very good manager. Not awful but not good. Haven't got much training for it and almost no organizational support in the management skills side of things, but I also don't confront those weaknesses as much as I should. In the week since I got back from being away my boss has been expressing his displeasure with those aspects of my performance more openly than before. That is unpleasant on the one hand, especially when done in front of other people,* but on the other it's kind of a relief, and today he finally called me into his office to have a discussion in which he actually gave me some direction about how to manage my team and concrete suggestions for how to do that. He's a delegator, and in some ways a really good one. He empowers his senior staff to make decisions, improvise, do what they think is best, and only steps in when asked or when he sees an urgent need. In other ways not so good: He sometimes doesn't communicate as clearly as he thinks he has, and he probably waits to long to micromanage or offer advice or support when people aren't performing as well as they could or should (hello).

Now, there are other parts of my job that I am good at.* I am a good writer and editor. I'm confident and lead meetings well regardless of audience or purpose, I'm quick to grasp new concepts and read a room, I'm knowledgeable enough about a range of topics to be credible talking to different kinds of people. I can think through problems to solutions clearly a lot of the time, which helps when designing a project. All of those traits make me good at writing proposals. However, being good at writing proposals doesn't always translate to winning lots of proposals. Since I moved to Pakistan, my success rate has been very poor. I have led the development and submission of many proposals that I am proud of, that were worthy of funding, but that did not win. The latest blow came today, one that my colleagues in Canada and I all worked really hard on and felt good about. No dice.

What I'm saying is, when even the parts of my job that I like, that I feel good at, and that ultimately are the measure of my success, aren't panning out, then the parts of my job that I dislike and feel bad at just loom so much larger.

Rough week.

*This only happened during a meeting in which he was calling a bunch of people out.
**NB: There are other things I'm not great at, like event planning (in that case mostly because I fucking hate event planning). Asking for help when I need it, which is a serious flaw that I intermittently overcome. The list goes on.

anthony bourdain

I'm not going to write a full eulogy here or anything but I'm sad about Anthony Bourdain's suicide. Reading about it has made me reflect on a particular angle of Jack's: the impossibility of knowing someone else's internal life, even when they are in extremis. Apparently Bourdain was with a friend, working on an episode of his show, until evening, when he went back to his room and did whatever he did to kill himself. Similarly, Jack was in a supportive place, in the office of and talking with the staff at the program that he was part of in Manchester, until he just up and walked out to his death.

It's hard - not to say impossible - for me to imagine the degree of internal suffering that someone must feel who takes their own life. And not just the degree but the persistence, the unshakeableness of suffering. Surely there must be some acute surge at the end but of the suicides I'm familiar with the suffering was long-term. So it must have been with Bourdain. My heart aches for Eric Ripert, the friend he was with at the end, who could not have had any idea what his dear friend was about to do. Maybe Bourdain seemed a little down, or tired, but by the accounts I've read there was nothing out of the ordinary.

And that's the bit that's getting to me today. The obvious truth that we cannot ever really know what's going on inside someone else's head, that in some deep way we are only ourselves and can never be someone else. That the insight of the anonymous painter of "Landscape with Fall of Icarus," which Auden put so beautifully into words, applies to us all every second of every day. When Icarus is someone close to us, we may fly to the source of the splash, we may feel anguish at the boy falling out of the sky. But most of the time we are the ploughman, the sailors on the expensive delicate ship. And even when we're Daedalus, off-frame, we can't follow Icarus down. We have no choice but to keep flying, wishing we could have entered Icarus's mind and kept him steady but knowing that that was impossible, that we'd done our best and it was not enough.

This analogy may have gotten slightly tortured but I don't care.  

memorial

Here is the transcript of the remarks I gave at Jack's memorial service a month ago:

Freshman year of college I read a book called Word Freak, by a guy named Stefan Fatsis, and fell in love with the weird characters who make up the world elite of competitive Scrabble. I started playing the game almost every day, mainly with my friend Gabby. At Christmas, or maybe it was Thanksgiving, I brought my enthusiasm home. I don’t remember the first game I played against Jack but I know that he surprised me, and himself, with how well he did. By the following summer we were evenly matched, and pretty soon after that I could barely hold my own against him. He was a prodigy, and he was a hard worker. He started studying word lists, going to tournaments. He must have been no more than 15 when he scored 600 for the first time. Mom and Dad bought him a chess timer so we could play proper competitive games: 25 minutes total per person. He eventually met Stefan Fatsis at the Scrabble Club in Chevy Chase DC. It was humbling to go to the Club with him: I’m not a terrible player but the top players treated him differently from me. And when he was playing he was all-in, fully concentrated on the board, his letters, the possibilities and constraints of what was right in front of him. Wherever he lived, it was always news when he found someone who could play with him and keep up, because we knew that in those moments of playing he was at peace.

Wherever he lived. Jack lived, as you’ve heard and can see in the program, in many different places after he first left home. Looking at Mom’s records, I counted 56 moves in the 12.5 years between the end of eighth grade, when he went to his first wilderness program, and his death. Those moves happened for lots of different reasons, rarely happy ones: kicked out because he got in a fight; in the hospital for an extended stay because of an overdose or a terrible injury; a recovery program coming to its end with no clear plan for what would happen next.

Jack was like a glacial erratic, a rock dislodged from its native stratum and carried far away. Then carried again and again with the push and retreat of the crushing river of ice that ground him down: his mental illness, his drug abuse, the world to which he was both exquisitely sensitive and utterly blind. Jack, the glacial erratic, unable to control his course, worried and uncomfortable and angry and depressed about the forces pushing him around, and wishing all the time more than anything to be home.

His last move, to an apartment in Manchester, the first and last place he lived on his own, was the most hopeful move he ever made. But in the end it was a home for the same poisons, internal and external, that dogged him for much of his life. In that apartment for the first time, mere hours after we pushed his body into the cremation oven, I saw that he had the National Geographic map of Afghanistan and Pakistan on his wall; the same map that I have in my office in Islamabad. Looking at it, I wept, realizing in the way that’s only possible when we’re learning something about ourselves, that he had told other people about me, was proud of me. “My brother lives in Pakistan.” I wept because I also wander far from home, but by choice, deeply secure in the knowledge that home is a safe place for me to return to whenever I wish, and because wandering was something he hated and home a place where he longed to be but was not safe. And because I had dreamt of his visiting me in Pakistan, learning what the words on the map meant first-hand, laughing with me and Lincoln and Mom and Dad on the crazy mountain roads of Hunza, sharing a quiet moment of awe in the staggering presence of the Karakoram Mountains. And I wept because I was proud of him, too: proud of his talent at Scrabble; of his poetry; of his paintings and drawings; of his youthful athletic skill; of his struggle to keep it together underneath that river of ice.

He’ll never visit me in Pakistan. I’ll never hear him rap again, or finish the two open games we’ve still got going on the Scrabble app. I’ll never again be able to tell him how proud I am to have had him as a brother. But I’m glad, grateful, that I told him last summer, the last time I touched him alive, that I bragged about him, and that I loved him. I love him still.