• The Australian crawl
• The backstroke
• The Four-in-Hand
• The half-Windsor
• The non-necessity of training wheels
• If you’re bored, read a book
• Shake hands firmly and make eye contact
• It’s who you know not what you know
• Grill a steak less than 1 minute/inch on each side, on a very hot pan
• Build a fire from the bottom up, inside out
• Treat every gun like it’s loaded
• Chew with your mouth shut
• If you don’t know which utensil to use, look at what everyone else is doing
• “Righty tighty, lefty loosey”
• Hitting never solved anything
• That said, if a bully is picking on you, hit him first and hit him hard
• Your hick second cousins on the farm are worth millions but those kids at school with the fancy cars and plastic houses whose clothes you admire so much — their parents are bankrupt
• Your parents had interesting, fulfilling lives before you were even imagined
• Every human being has dignity and is worthy of respect
• It’s OK to ask questions
• Lots of questions don’t have answers
• Don’t ride the clutch

As I was typing this I thought, “if someone ever asks me to give a commencement address, I will know exactly what to say.”

On today’s Dilbert Blog, Scott Adams hypothesizes that:

“A person’s need for social interaction is inversely related to the quality of his or her imagination. In other words, if you have an excellent imagination, you might enjoy people, but you’re equally happy to be alone with your thoughts for large stretches. To put it bluntly, you fascinate yourself.”

I totally buy this, and then some. What’s going on in my head might not be Citizen Kane, but it certainly keeps me entertained. I commented:

“I haven’t been bored since I was a teenager. Most of the time I prefer to be alone, but I get a big recharge from social interaction. It’s like: solitude fills the tank, socialization turns the key.”

So now I’m asking YOU (yes, YOU in the back there, the one who never raises her hand):

Do you have an unusually good imagination? If so, do you enjoy being alone more than most people?

And I want to see some comments here, people. Just click the little “comments” linky thing.

I stumbled upon a sport today that I had no idea even existed: randonneuring. What it is, briefly:

• kind of like bike racing
• but over longer distances
• without the mass start and finish
• and not actually competitive

Apparently it has a storied history in Europe. I can’t begin to describe how appealing this is to me. I have no hand/eye coordination (or indeed any coordination of any kind whatsoever), so grownup-sports like softball and billiards are pretty much beyond my ability. Three years ago, I tried my hand (foot?) at bicycle racing, only to discover that I also have no sprint in me. I discovered this, by the way, by losing the Mt. Tabor series dead last three weeks in a row.

So all my athletic endeavours have emphasized the one thing my body is apparently good for: suffering. I loves me a good long bike ride, and like them better when I’m riding a little too fast. About five years ago I figured out the secret to sustained effort and that is: never cross the redline. In other words, every minute you spend in anaerobic effort (e.g. sprinting), will add ten minutes to your finish time. If you finish at all.

So while I have many many things about which to be excited regarding our imminent return to Oregon, randonneuring gives me something new to be excited about. I was reading through the ride descriptions on the Oregon randonneurs website and it literally brought a tear to my eye. Seeing so many familiar rides was a little like getting an unexpected email from an old friend.

In collecting links for this post I learned several of these cycling-related websites are inexplicably blocked by the Great Firewall, including those of the Mt. Tabor Series and the official club that sponsors the Paris-Brest-Paris randonnee. The gummint has been monkeying with the firewall a lot lately; blogging sites, in particular, have been up-and-down. MySpace, Typepad, Blogspot, and so forth. Some that have been black for a long time, like the New York Times, are (at the moment) white. I have said more than once that government action in China is like the weather but I am still occasionally dumbstruck by the pointlessness of much that happens here. Seriously: a website for a bicycle race in Portland, Oregon is a political hazard? Oh man.

I, like most people living here (including locals) know how to get around the firewall, by the way. It’s not hard. You can do it through a web anonymizer (like Anonymouse), or using a network proxy like Tor. The fact that these loopholes are a) widely known, b) potentially easy to close, and yet c) still in use says volumes about the government’s actual intentions. (The Cliff’s Notes version of those volumes reads like this: appearances are far more important than effects. If you make a big show of, for example, pumping your arms very hard while jogging, I will make of big show of how hard you’re exercising, despite the fact that your wife is ambling alongside pushing a stroller bearing your granddaughter at exactly the same speed.)

Working with a Chinese team (OK, my particular Chinese team) makes me long for a collaborative work environment like you wouldn’t believe. All my attempts to enliven the office environment have launched like lead balloons. Exhortations to share music, make lunch dates, meet daily: tried them all, but none of it sticks. We sit, all six of us, in stony silence except when some work-related action is required. Is this just my particular failing as a boss-man? I know I’m not the best at it, but I don’t remember being this bad at the rah-rah boss-stuff when I was an Art Director.

Today it hit a horrible nadir. I’m laboring mightily to rebuild PortsInternational.com, the website for the China-only brand. Unlike the nascent redesign for PCDStores.com (AKA “Printemps China Department Stores”), I want to involve my team in the effort. (With PCDStores.com I got greedy and am simply doing the entire thing myself, with a little translation help from the content manager.) Moreover, we want to add online shopping to the site, and as we already have some shopping code for Ports 1961, I figured we should build ports-intl.com with the same technology and leverage a little of that past work. So that means working in JSP/JavaBeans/Struts, stuff I’ve never done before.

Because I don’t know a JavaBean from a cockroach, I’m really dependent on the team, and thus my frustration. In other (i.e. “collaborative”) situations this is where you rely on your team. “Hey guys, what do you think is the best way to do this?” Such an attitude does not fly here. Around here, Laoban is supposed to have all the answers. After all, he’s the boss. If he didn’t know how to, for example, internationalize an e-commerce website using JSP/JavaBeans/Struts, well then obviously no one knows how to do it and it is ipso facto impossible. I probably don’t need to describe how this might not be a particularly productive or speedy development environment.

All of which would be less of an issue if I had a coworker who both a) knew something about building websites and b) was willing to have a conversation about how to do it. My designers and developers all, to varying degrees, have (a), but precious few of them have (b). This is where working in a First World context has spoiled me, obviously. In a North American office, a collective knowledge gap becomes an opportunity (“Great! We get to learn something new!”). In China (at least the 30 square meters of China in my immediate vicinity), it’s an immovable barrier.

On my best days Art Directing at Curiosity or User Experience Designing Seniorly at ID, I felt sometimes like I was designing by proxy using the minds of my colleagues. Riffing, I suppose. This flowed in no small measure from a tacit assumption I have always had: that everyone I work with is at least as smart, and capable, and motivated as I am. It is soooo tempting to turn that assumption backwards when working with my team here at Ports. I have the uncomfortable suspicion that therein lies the key to business success in China.

Apropos of nothing, I made a chart that shows, for any given year since I graduated from college, the number of W-2s I filed, and the number of addresses I called “home.” Of course, these are incomplete metrics of how often I hop jobs or shift house. The job metric omits freelance jobs that don’t provide W-2s, but over-represents temp agency jobs that no one would consider terribly permanent. And how I define “home” is notoriously vague. Do I count places at which I’ve received mail? This would include, for example, several “c/o General Delivery” addresses I had while doing fieldwork. For the purposes of this exercise, I decided to define “home” as any address at which I received a bank statement. So most of my abodes while performing fieldwork are not represented. On the other hand, this metric over-represents my parents’ addresses, where I had my bank statements forwarded during periods of high mobility (e.g. while living out of my backpack or moving to China).

Plotting a trend — even an exercise as simple as this — reveals patterns. Overall, I average about 2.4 jobs and 2.3 addresses per year. The inverse of the mean (1/µ) suggests a periodicity of about 0.4 for both metrics — in other words, I change jobs or addresses every 0.4 years (or 5 months). The logarithmic trend lines reveal a clear pattern to hold jobs longer as I age, and a less-clear pattern to shift addresses less frequently. In other words, my early job-hopping skews the job-hopping metric, but I can reliably be counted upon to shift addresses every five months.

The archaeologist in me sees three discontinuities. In particular, I notice two “stable years” (1996 and 2004) in which I had only one job and lived in only one address. I also have one “ultra-unstable” year (1999) where I top out both metrics. If this chart were a seriation of pottery shards from an archaeological site, I would expect that those three sample units are providing especially unusual information. So what happened in 1996, 1999, and 2004?

In 1996, I was in the second year of grad school. I had a fellowship that I carried for both years of school, and which grew out of and back into my job as a Collections Assistant at the Oregon State Museum of Anthropology. It was a great job and I was good at it. I also had an affordable, nice-enough apartment close to campus. So 1996 actually represents two years of stability: from the time I moved to Oregon (August, 1995) to start school, until I left school and moved to Montana for my first field directorship (August, 1997). The stability here was real: my life was mostly unchanged during the period beginning in 1995 and ending in 1997.

In 1999, I left my last archaeology job in Southern California and changed careers into web design. This was also the height of the DotCom boom. The job-hopping represents my gaining traction in my new career: two of my W-2 were for temp agencies that year. The address-shifting represents both the move from SoCal (back) to Oregon, as well as an abortive move to Seattle. There were also intra-city moves in Redlands and Portland.

2004 was the first year after I met Jenny (my favorite person). We were living in a rented house in Multnomah Village (my favorite home of my adult life), and I was working as an Art Director at Curiosity (my favorite job ever). We lived in that house for two years (July, 2003 to June, 2005). I had the Curiosity job for almost three (July, 2002 to April, 2005).

All this seems like a lot of change. But the apparent job-hopping, and to a lesser extent the house-shifting, are artifacts of my chosen careers. Both archaeology and web design are project-based work. Moreover archaeology is seasonal and site-dependent. When the project ends, everyone gets laid off, and you move (geographically) to the next available project. This happened to me with five archaeology jobs (one in 1993, three in 1994, and one in 1999). I kind of developed a nose for impending layoffs, and managed to duck out of some of my design jobs just before the company declared bankruptcy (which happened once in 1999, and three times in 2001).

After 1999, however, my profession doesn’t explain my address changes, because I pretty much lived entirely in Oregon. From 1999 to 2002, however, I was living through my unhappy first marriage, which produced a lot of moving-in and moving-out. I can attribute three address changes in that period to two separations and a divorce.

2007 looks to be an on-trend year. Jenny and I will be back in Oregon soon and I’ll be looking to add another job to my resumé. Frankly, though, I’m getting sorely tired of these shenanigans. My life has suffered from a surfeit of adventure, professional and personal. Despite which, as I’ve come to realize this past year, I am not a particularly adventurous person. If pressed, I’d say my favorite years (in the past fourteen) were, unsurprisingly, 1996 and 2004. (Although 1994 might rate as well, for very different reasons.) My least favorite would certainly be 2002, which was kind of the karmic hangover for 1999–2000.

I sometimes liken myself to a hobbit. I really long for the comforts of familiarity and the dignity of labor. I don’t care much for fancy trinkets or fast living. In another age I’d have made a pretty good farmer. But every so often I get an itch, and I tear my life apart scratching it. Today I’m hoping our adventure in China proves to be the last.