just thinking out loud – Page 15 – onvural.net – melih

Learning to succeed

I think that one thing that I do very poorly is succeed. Succeed in the sense that I dream it, I build it, and execute it successfully. This idea goes much deeper than the lunch table “state school” jokes. Instead, it’s something that I’ve really been thinking about lately.

As an example, I went to a soccer tryout today. I think I did really well. I played smart; I wasn’t in as great a shape as I would like, but I was fit; and I think that I showed my strengths. My goal for the last year or so has been to get into good enough shape to be a contributor for a team at a higher division than the one in which I’ve been playing. I think that tonight I pulled that off, but it’s really the first time in a long time where I’ve had that sense of really accomplishing something long term. I played soccer my whole life, and I never felt as if I made a team on which there was competition for my position. Doing well tonight was a big mental milestone to overcome. Nothing is set in stone yet, but regardless of the end result, I really feel like I came out of the experience better. If not because I made the team, then because I’m in a much better state of mind about my health and form.

I’m not sure where the inability to, or general lack in confidence in my ability to, succeed comes from. It may be the last bits of looking back over the last five years, and trying to figure out where I got better and at what.When I look back now, it’s such a blur that I really don’t know how to consume it all. I have one particular program I wrote that I’m still in love with to this day. I had 2 internships that I absolutely loved. I have a group of friends who have stayed with me through thick and thin. Those are all good things, but it’s hard to label them as successes as I see success now.

All of that said, I definitely find myself tackling the issue head on. I’ve got the 10 resolutions for 2010, which are so far going quite well. I’ve got 2 or 3 projects at work against which I track daily progress against a larger goal. One is nearly finished. A second is dreadfully far behind, while a third is just getting started. This idea of doing things in a public eye as a form of public pressure to commit and delivery has been good for me. As an example, I gave up soda today to make sure that I reach my 25 lbs. lost by June 1st deadline. Both the deadline itself, and this new goal, are really tough challenges where I’d really like to succeed, and placing them out for public consumption makes it easier for me.

Nonetheless, I’m still interested in why I have to be so strong handed about this. I guess in my gut I know that everyone works hard for success, but every now and then I convince myself that it just comes easier for others. It’s pretty late, and this feels really incomplete, but I think I’m going to publish it anyway. I think the underlying issue I’m facing here is finding the balance between my personal bar for success, my desire to never disappoint people and the reality that both of the previous items are both probably unattainable.

Won’t stop me from trying though.

Dawning instead of morning

It’s been a really tough week for me. I feel as if I laid myself on the line on a couple of different matters, and got burnt pretty badly as a result. I don’t handle those situations very well. Maybe it’s because I wear my heart on my sleeve to too much of an extent. A lot of it is because I saw how my father operated. It was always personal even if it was business, and that’s how I feel I approach life as well. Some of us learn from our parents mistakes, while most of us are doomed to repeat them.

And so as I was laying in bed before starting my day today, I got to thinking about how to change something without losing myself. I don’t want to lose my passion, but I need to channel my energy better when I feel as if I’ve been cut down. In my mind I realized the biggest problem that I face is that I constantly mourn the inability to succeed in the given situation which leaves me in a funk. I just don’t accept the mantra that you can’t win them all because I think I can.

My mind really started to wander, and I got to looking out through our new curtains. I could see the day starting; hear the sounds of the construction crews working outside at the Mint. The sun was fighting through what was left of a cloudy cover. And I really saw the dawn of a new day for the first time in a long, long time. I felt a real joy in being embraced by the sun as it reached out over the City. And I realized that what I need to change about my life is to quit worrying about the mourning, and start focusing on the dawn.

What then is the actual change? My challenge to myself, the path that I must walk down to grow as an individual, an engineer, a friend, a brother, a son, is to take on each day a new dawn. It’s a Sisyphian feat for sure in that while everyone else takes on another morning, I’m hoping to experience a new dawn. In the cliche sense, it could be as simple as a new street that I’ve never visited before, or an old challenge that I’ve been avoiding. But in the short term, for me, it’s going to be simply meeting the sun to make a more complete, full day of each day.

In the end of this experiment, I want to understand one simple construct. Why is it that we begin each day with a morning as opposed to a dawning, and how can I improve myself by just switching that simple bit?

Let the fun begin.

just thinking out loud, Uncategorized 2

Find the silver lining… of Texas?

My good friend Matt Davis who had a starring role in my Goodbye Old Friend blog post two months back, hates Texas. But that’s because he was born in Oklahoma, and has been a lifelong Sooners fan. You can’t blame the guy. In fact, we can all probably laud him for being such a soothsayer of things to come.

The news that Texas will single handedly rewrite the history of the United States for school children could be viewed as the most asinine thing to come out of the Lone Star state in a long, long time. Some highlights include:

Deflecting Thomas Jefferson’s role as a Founding Father to de-emphasize the role that Deists played in building this nation
Making sure that the “great” speeches of Jefferson Davis are taught beside the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s inaugural speech
Adding the rise of conservatism, the NRA, evangelicalism and other extreme right (but not Neo-Con which is different) to the curriculum when teaching about the 1990s and the 2000s.
Making sure that country music is listed as a key cultural contribution of the United States to the world, and making sure that hip-hop, R&B and rap don’t appear on the list

I have no verification that this was in the draft resolution which was passed, but I’m pretty sure that the 44th President of the United States will be re-drawn as a Southern, white protestant male so that the minorities across Texas don’t think they could do something as prestigious as run for President.

What makes the situation much, much worse is that 80% of the country’s school systems use the same textbooks which are published for Texas. Texas has one state curriculum for a state which contributes 34 electoral votes to the presidential election. The massive purchasing power that this one state wields means that many others are forced to swallow the decisions that the Texas Board of Education makes, which as an example includes teaching creationism beside evolution in science class. This centralization of education is both awe-inspiring (that Texas understands their position, and their conservative bloc is arrogant enough to use it), and simultaneously demotivating.

When I read about this issue, I came to the conclusion that the only solution was to home school my children or make sure that I live somewhere outside of the 80% who are using Texas textbooks. Both of these options have their drawbacks, namely in terms of matching careers, lifestyles, family and everything else that goes into where you live and how you live with the the time investment of home schooling or the moving investment of finding a non-Texas textbook school district. I really got to thinking that there had to be a better solution… and I think I may have discovered it.

I think that the Obama administration should take this opportunity to empower local school districts with the technology and resources necessary to move away from physical textbooks and towards using virtual education resources. We need more students who learn how to learn from a young age, and less of the rote memorization and recitation which is our current education curriculum. I don’t care if it means we have a nation of Bohemians as a result because at least we’re building thinkers and leaders as opposed to cogs in a national factory which no longer exists.

I know school districts hate the Internet for what it is, but imagine how much it could enhance a student’s experience to have a textbook which while you’re learning about Egypt has three-dimensional renderings of the pyramids through which the student could walk, or to watch Churchill speak instead of reading about how inspirational he was. What the Internet could be, and what virtual textbooks could be, for K-12 education isn’t something that I think we should toss aside lightly, and now we really have an impetuous to act. We don’t want our children to learn from Texas textbooks.

Let me back up for 2 sentences and say that I was never a fan of a big healthcare bill, but that’s a discussion for another day. I was really hoping that immigration reform, infrastructure investment and government transparency were going to be the hallmarks of Obama’s first term. Given that two out of three of those are a lost cause at this point (who the hell thought that mid-term elections were ever going to be a good idea?), this is something that I could really rally behind.

It creates opportunity in two areas that sorely need help:

Bringing more meritocracy to education at all levels of the socioeconomic ladder
- There’s no reason to believe that a program like this doesn’t bring a sense of meritocracy to public education. Everyone know of the woes of inner-city schools, but reducing operating costs of everyone involved is one good way to allow all schools, but especially schools where budget is an impeding factor, to invest in teachers, facilities and opportunities
Create jobs for this new wave of educators
- We need a new technological revolution in the US. I don’t for a second believe that building more Internet applications will help the US maintain its role as a thought leader in the global economy. In that sense, I’m not delusional enough to think that the Facebooks and the Twitters of the world create value, but I also believe that where research is, as far as I know, and where arenas such as bio-medical engineering and clean-tech are, as far as I know, we are still at least a half-generation away from that technological revolution. In the meantime, I assumed that the nation’s infrastructure was the proper investment, but I’m not convinced that our education system is the proper investment. This will, of course, create jobs for all of the individuals involved in this new age of education.

The nerd in me wants to label this Education2.0, but really it’s the hundredth or thousandth iteration of what education could be from when we started to teach until today. Thank you Texas for kicking us in the ass, and showing us that we need to take back control of something as sacred as our own history, and we have the tools ready to do it now.

And while you’re at it, please take your governor seriously and consider secession. It would do the rest of us a huge favor.

Texas Messes With History (scienceblog.com)
Texas Board of Education cuts Thomas Jefferson out of its textbooks. (thinkprogress.org)

just thinking out loud, Technology, Uncategorized 2

Building a community by selling to communities

I had a phenomenal discussion with Bartosz Solowiej, formerly of TokBox and currently of Gigs.ly, about many a thing, but specifically about the community problem that I am having. Not a problem in the sense that something is wrong, but rather a problem in bringing horses to water. It really helped me realize that the problem isn’t about convincing the horse, but about finding the water.

Just to give a quick overview of the previous post, the goal was to bring the TokBox Platform to more developers in the hopes that it will bring video chat as a service to more people. I’ve been working on this problem for two years now, and have always focused on building out a developer ecosystem which is strong enough to both want to build video chat into whatever services they build, and welcoming enough to make developers want to be a part of the ecosystem.

After having a really amazing talk with Bartosz about connections, communities and their natural growth, I realized that the best approach may be to flip the whole problem onto its head. Returning to the horse to water analogy, I need to find pools of water, and convince them that they need video chat as a service.

Let me back up a bit. My big ah-hah moment this weekend was realizing that I made a big mistake in thinking that one could manually grow a community. Communities don’t have foundations of hard work, or aren’t a set of people just brought together. This approach to building community is very water/oil in nature. When you shake it just right, you’ll convince yourself that the different parts have mixed, but in the end the two parts end up separate. Realizing that I was doing just that, I stopped to think about a different approach. Taking two giant steps back, I came to realize that communities grow organically. People find a common interest, and from that common interest they build a foundation of mutual understanding from a set of beliefs. This, and not the actual work to maintain and grow the community, is the foundation. On top of this foundation, and here is where the hard work and luck comes into play, is where communities are acted out.

My efforts, so far, have been focused on setting in motion the actions of the community. What I have not realized is the fact that there isn’t a foundation. I haven’t found the mutual interest. I’m trying to get people to build a community without understanding what the common thread is. I assumed that having developers building video chat into their applications was the common thread. It’s not.

What then is the common thread? I’m glad you asked. It’s communities who can grow stronger because video chat, or video messaging, is a fundamental part of their genome. Behind the scenes are those will see that a better community will grow because of the services we can provide, and they will find a way to make it happen. From there, video chat will become something that is part of the toolkit of community builders, who can then continue to spread the technology.

Find the water, and when the horses see something they like, they will continue to come back. The next step is figuring out how to make them come back.

just thinking out loud, Technology, Uncategorized 1

Building a community

I was talking to someone today about the TokBox Platform that we’re building. It’s been something that I’ve been working on since I joined the Box, and something about which I’m very passionate. I was discussing with them my three goals for the Platform from a developer point of view over the next six months. The three goals are:

Build out a second layer of abstraction into all of the SDKs as has been done for the PHP SDK, and continue to improve the widgets to make them as customizable and flexible as possible
Write tutorials, blog posts and show off use cases on a weekly basis on the TokBox blog
Have a large, involved community on the developer mailing list who answer questions for each other

I think the second task is really the easiest one to do. Why? It comes down to organization and discipline. I’m going to spend some time this weekend working through six weeks worth of blog posts (at one per week, that isn’t too hard), and start outlining the content. I want to start with what a user can do with the basic embed, both the call widget and the recorder/player combination, and then work my way into some use cases and sample applications. Hopefully there will be some readership at that point which will allow me to understand what new posts the readers want.

That’s a weekend’s worth of work, and then of course somewhere between one- to two-hours of writing per week. I think the big win there will be driving traffic to our blog, and getting more exposure for how simple the Platform really is to use. I also hope that personally it will help me improve how I communicate technical concepts to a broader audience.

The SDK work, in my opinion, is just a labor of love that is necessary to improve the Platform, and to march towards my goal of doing everything in ten lines of code or less. Even if those ten lines of code come from layers of abstraction, I think simplifying the underlying actions of the Platform will make it much more attractive to potential developers, and that leads me to my final goal…

Building a strong community around the TokBox Platform. I’ve been working in the developer list and with partners for two years now. It’s a very humbling experience. I’m totally convinced that adding video chat, or video messaging, capabilities really adds a lot of value to a whole laundry list of services that are already out there. The amazing bit is that most of the individuals with whom I’ve spoken in those industries agree. They just don’t have time, money or a compelling use case to make it happen.

And so, humbled, I’ve focused on the little things, and making the little things count. Respond on the developer list as quickly as possible. Listen to feedback. Maintain good documentation. Build sample applications. All with the hopes of building a community that then starts to do these things for the Platform because the community has also discovered the potential of video chat and messaging. We still need to better address some of these issues, especially documentation, but we’re slowly starting to get to a place where I think the foundation is really well developed.

What then needs to happen to reach the tipping point, and go over it? I don’t know. I want to spend some time thinking about this over the weekend. I think the obvious first step is patience. I’m not good at that, but I’m learning. I think step one-a is luck. Sometimes you just need the ball to bounce your way, and of course laying a good foundation makes it more likely that when the time comes that lady luck will favor the solution we’ve built.

I’ll do a follow up to all of this at the end of the weekend, but would love to hear about any opinions or thoughts about the building of a community or the goals I’ve laid out. At the very least, let me know where you think video chat should be, and maybe that will be the idea that makes it all happen.

just thinking out loud, Uncategorized 2

Building fences makes us better

We had a really intense week this past week at the office. It was a really good week for me, but definitely one that we will all need to reflect on, and improve upon if things are going to get better.

One issue that really stands out to me, and I’ve been spending a few days thinking about it, and trying to make sense of, is the idea of being really good at one’s job. A lot of buzz was made about the CEO of Zynga giving ownership of one thing to each employee when the NYTimes article detailing his leadership approach came out. I found a lot of gems in the article such that I really do think I’ll come back to it one or two more times before all is said and done. I wanted to start by taking his notion of owning your own role, and taking it back one step to the notion of roles in a company to begin with.

In the fantasy that I arrived with when I came to the Valley, I imagined a start-up world where everyone was responsible for doing everything, and it was the organized chaos that somehow led to a successful company. Of course there are buckets within that chaos. There are those that have to ultimately make and be responsible for the decisions. There are those who are the flag bearers of the common goal to which the team is marching. Finally, there are those who are the foot soldiers of the charge who are, at the end of the day, responsible for execution. Here’s the amazing bit of those buckets though… at any given moment a person can be in all three buckets or any combination of them (of course being in none is a bad idea, as it means you’re about to get fired).

As it turns out, this is one of those thin lines between which organized and chaos must tread carefully. When the buckets overflow, there are lots of hurt feelings and bruised egos. On the flip side, empty buckets mean there are important roles that are going unfulfilled, and empty buckets lead to a chaos which hurts execution and drags on success.

This past week has shown that balancing the two is very difficult, and I think it starts with defining both buckets and what an individual’s role is in that given bucket.

That’s where I think building fences comes into play. Fences do prevent whatever is inside from getting out, but at the same time they can play the role of keeping out what isn’t supposed to get in as well. If fences aren’t defined, then people have a tendency to run into each other, and given that a start up is a herd of bulls running wild in a field, this can only lead to problems. So clearly, there can be a positive purpose for a fence. That said, I’ve never thought that fences were part of a conducive environment for progress or development, and so it’s an awkward bit of advice to tell people to build a fence to make things work better.

Why then do I think that we need the fences? Fences aren’t necessary when all three buckets are filled or where there’s a level of maturity and understanding to perform without boundaries. I’m worried that our middle bucket is either not filled, or isn’t filled properly. I think this is a historical issue, and stems from having too many chefs and, in general, lacking a kitchen. I think we’ve started resolving that issue, but I think building fences will make us better in the short term so that in the long term we won’t need the fences in place.

Empowering Your Team (avc.com)
Zynga’s Pincus Says Teamwork Trumps Talent In Business (readwriteweb.com)

just thinking out loud, Uncategorized 3

Reflecting on a good week

I had a really good week this week.

That’s a very rare statement for me over the last two years. The general problem has been me. Sometimes the problem has just been the uncontrollable set of circumstances which life delivers on us. With all of that though, I had a really good week.

I think the critical element has been doing a better job of externalizing the factors that have been holding me back. This was unusually hard for me to do. I’ve always thought that I did a good job of letting people know what I think or how I feel. I was at one point the kind of person who bottles it all up, and then has a serious nervous breakdown when it all becomes too much. When I realized how unsustainable that was, I quit doing it. I think the major issue this time around was the topic itself. I’ve never really broached concerns about myself over the team or about what I want in regards to what others have. That just isn’t my style mainly because it feels too selfish, but I think my concern was more about understanding where I’m going, and I thought that was a question that I wasn’t “supposed” to ask. Turns out just being honest about things is really the best policy. It isn’t selfish to understand or to know. In fact, it’s probably more selfish to just try to figure it all out yourself because you deprive others of their ability to help you and grow the {relationship, person, situation} in a forward direction. As I’m writing this, all of that just seems so obvious now, but man that took me a lot to figure out.

With that 10,000 lbs rock off of my back, I was able to reconnect with the things that matter the most to me. I think number one on that list is being excellent at what I do. I don’t want to aim for a round of golf in the 100s, I want to aim for a round of golf in the 80s. I’ve hit enough balls at a driving range to finally realize that that’s insane. Doesn’t matter. I will, in 2010, hit a round of 18 holes of golf in 89 strokes or less because for me that stands as a marker of excellence.

To drive for excellence one needs an immense amount of focus and support, and I made sure to reinvest in both of these areas. I’m not good at focusing on getting tasks done unless I do so actively. I’m not sure why focus is difficult for me. What I have learned though is that a pad of graph paper, a list of tasks, and a set of headphones goes a long way in making sure I get things done. I think a big part of being successful around this focus issue will be being more organized in general. What I’ve found is that organization in design, thought, goals, etc. allows me to quickly weed out what isn’t important, and lets me as a result get to the end goal more efficiently. Organization and focus are both areas where I’m not strong, but I’m re-investing in them because in the near future I want to be.

I think the topic of support deserves its own post, and I’ll put a lot of effort this weekend into really trying to understand where the dividends and investments are in that area. Some of it is a personal set of requirements aimed at supporting my own goals, while most of it is making sure to invest in supporting others as the equal and opposite force of them investing in me. I’m really fascinated about the idea of building successful teams and cultures, and have been thinking on that topic for a few day snow, and I’ll be sharing more over the weekend.

Finally, I’ve made a commitment to myself to invest in my own confidence. To make really good weeks the norm, and in an effort to have a great week every now and then, I need to be confident that this should be the standard quo, and that in fact I do deserve to succeed because I do work hard, and I have, in this small window of time, earned it. My goal here is to expand that window. I have confidence that I will lose 25 pounds by June. I have confidence that I’m a better engineer today than I was one week ago. I also have confidence that I’m making better decisions about me, and that’s a really encouraging sign. I don’t quite know where this road goes, but I guess we’ll all find out.

I don’t name names on this blog, as that’s a bit too gossipy, but I do think it’s fair to say that this week was a good week because of the people who are in my life. This is a very PBS/Sesame Street moment. Instead of the letter A is presented to you by, it’s this good week was brought to you by {insert a litany of friends, co-workers, and random people on the street}. I think the icing on the cake was finding a fantastic Middle Eastern restaurant down the street from the office where the hummus is quality.

I’d like a lot more weeks like this one.

just thinking out loud, Uncategorized 0

Ethics of Haitian Relief

My old friend Ashley sent a blog post detailing how the US Congress has passed a resolution fast tracking giving to Haiti onto people’s 2009 taxes such that they can maximize their deductions against the past year even though the tragedy happened this year. Here is a link to the post, and an excerpt:

Less than two weeks after the earthquake, on January 22, 2010, Congress pushed through a provision to benefit those that donate to Haiti relief efforts. The provision would allow taxpayers who itemize deductions to deduct charitable donations to qualified Haiti relief organizations on their 2009 tax returns. The donations must be in cash or cash equivalent. This means cash, check, credit card or debit card contributions â€“ as well as text message donations. In kind donations, such as donations of water or medical supplies, wonâ€™t count for purposes of the accelerated deduction; those deductions will have to be claimed as they normally would, on a taxpayerâ€™s 2010 return. To qualify, contributions must be made after January 11, 2010, and before March 1, 2010.

My big question on this topic in general is a quandry as to whether it’s ethical to allow for donations that don’t support local communities to be used in tax deductions in the first place. From what I can tell, the deductions are meant to reward people for investing in their communities. Deductions come for houses, having children, giving to charity all of which allow a community to grow and thrive (which are not things government can do itself). When one donates in a way which is effectively foreign aid, what we’re saying is that $1 that should go to after-school programs now goes to Haiti, and the government still doesn’t have that $1 to put towards after-school programs. Seems like this skews both the intent of the law, and the government’s ability to provide a social safety net here in the United States.

What do you think?

Extreme Blue Internship, just thinking out loud, New Year Resolutions, Uncategorized 1

Good bye old friend

My best friend Matt D. and I have a tradition to which we’ve held since the summer of 2006. Whenever we go out to eat, to complain, to laugh, to cry, we always end up at Outback Steakhouse. There was one down the road from where we stayed during our IBM internship, and from there a tradition was born.

Since that summer the standard plate has been:

Outback Special ( size dependant on hunger )
Side of mashed potatoes
Bloomin’ Onion ( of which 90% is always finished )
Salad ( dressing is consumer dependant )
Coke to drink ( they never had sweet tea )

We went, and ordered the exact same thing, for the whole of the Summer of 2006. I came back out a few times for interviews or just to visit Matt, and we always went. I moved out to the Bay Area, and at our footsteps were all of the shops and restaurants of downtown Palo Alto and Mountain View, but we never broke. You can take a hick out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of a hick ( or so the saying goes ).

Alas, all good things must come to an end. And so it is for the Outback tradition. Tonight was the end of something truly special to us both. Yeah, it was just a restaurant, and not a great one at that, but we really grew up together in those oversized booths eating greasy fried onion strips, and mixing our mashed potatoes with steak. We escaped into our own world. Jobs, dreams, and heartbreaks were all up for discussion between courses. We genuinely fulfilled the Jimmy V legacy of laughing, crying, and spending time together thinking about how we were going to save the world.

So, what changed? It wasn’t the steak or the Bloomin’ Onion that’s for sure. It was us. In front of us is a brave new world filled with adventures and turns we’ve never imagined. And as we embark into this brave new world we bid our past good bye with the anticipation of building new, better and a bit healthier traditions. But at the same time we do so with a small tear in our eye.

I’m really optimistic about the future, having now looked back on where we came from. To this day, I’ve kept an e-mail I got from Matt in the Fall of 2006 after our paper was presented to a packed audience by our mentor, and friend, Eishay Smith. It’s a one liner:

Subject: Us
Body: Yeah, we kick ass!

And watch out because we’re going to do it again

just thinking out loud, Uncategorized 0

Freedom for $3 per gallon

My only sources of peace lately have come from two sources. The first is the feeling of a late night crawl into my side of a warm bed after a late night hacking session. The second is driving in a car along the Pacific Ocean.

I hate driving long distances, or at least I hated driving long distances. No further than Myrtle Beach was my general limit, self-imposed of course. I think the cross country road trip that I did summer of 2007 cured me of that antsiness and boredom. I really only fell in love with this country after I saw it from the the road. And now the road is my major source of peace…

Case in point. I drove down fo Monterey this past Wednesday, and experienced an entirely calm and relaxed day. In fact, we went to the CVS around midnight to get some bottled water, and I went by the pharmacy to check out my blood pressure. The reading was 117/67 with a heart beat of 65 bpm. In San Francisco, I’m a borderline hypertensive on my way to pill boxes with the days labeled to make sure I don’t miss my meds. After a day on the road I’m healthy, relaxed and, ultimately, at peace.

I’m really worried about this inability to find peace outside of the road. I can’t find a way to wind down, and it’s really leading to a situation where I’m fighting against everything just to get some breathing room. It doesn’t help that I live with someone with whom I work, but that would be an excuse, and entirely unfair to Micky. I had this problem when I lived alone, but was only two blocks away from work as well, and discovered that turning those two blocks into ten went a long way towards getting me straightened out this past spring.

Something about the mindlessness of getting home is what I’m missing now. I hypothesize that being more of a regular at the gym early in the mornings will help with this. The goal there is finding a better outlet for whatever angst I’m experiencing. So far, I think, so good. If that doesn’t help, I’ll need to find something else to replace the peace which is an open highway and the Pacific off to the side crashing against the cliffs and beaches of California’s awkward coast line.

Until then though I’ll keep getting my freedom for $3 per gallon over one windy stretch of CA-1 after another.

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