As you might have guessed, this has become the (new) theme for my web site and, indeed, myself. "When did I become normal?" is a question that I started consciously asking myself yesterday. In reality, I think I've been asking it for about a year or so without realizing it, but that's part of the story. I'm going to be jumping around time-wise in here and you may get lost. I'd apologise, but this is my story, not yours. :-)
About a year ago, I was working for Sapient Corp as an Architect. I was at a client's site with a fairly large team (at that point, it was the biggest team that Sapient had put together for an individual client engagement). While I was there, a couple of strange things happened that led me to being temporarily insane. [In case you're wondering, my wife will be more than happy to tell you what she thinks about my "crazy time". This was not something that passed un-noticed or un-noted.]
I used to be an ultra-ueber-geek. I entered college at age 16, 2 years ahead of everyone else. To say that I was poorly socialized then (and even now to a large extent) would be like saying that Monty Python is mildly amusing. If you looked at me in the wrong light, I could put on a very good front of being a human being. In just about any other light, I was an incredibly intelligent 16-year-old kid hanging out with the semi-adults. So, of course, I gravitated towards the computer center.
My college, St. Peter's College, was two blocks away from my home. It was (relatively) cheap, it was close by, I could live at home and I could be in class <5 minutes after I rolled out of bed. [Brushing my teeth was much more optional back then.] The computer center wasn't much to talk about, but I learned a lot there. It's also where my proto-geek emerged into full blossom. I became a hardware-geek, a software-geek, a networking-geek. You name it, I inhaled it. Heck, I even managed to keep up good grades (which was mandatory since I was taking a triple (yes, *3*) major at the time). [The triple major is another story that I may, or may not, tell at another time.]
Somewhere along the way, though, I lost the desire to code. Actually, that's not quite true. I still like to code, but I lost the desire to do it at someone else's behest. I was much more interested in figuring out how to solve problems. [This largely explains why I'm now an Architect, not a Programmer.] As some people who've seen me code, I'm still a pretty good coder. These days, that's largely because I can get my head around the problem rather than just cranking code.
However, in many other respects, back then, I was a hacker/geek. I stayed up late nights working in the computer center, etc. However, towards the end of my college time, I also was working at a real (albeit part-time) job for a bank in New York City. "Real" as in "wear a suit and tie" real. In retrospect, I probably should have tried harder to land elsewhere, but that's very much water under the bridge. The good news about that job was that it got me a bunch of world travel to Frankfurt, London, and Tokyo.
Fast forward quite a few years to working for AT&T and the outward manifestations of my geek-dom were falling away from me. I stopped wearing a suit, but I entered management anyway. I still did technical stuff but I was definitely in "big picture" mode now. I still sort of felt a little geek-ish at heart, but I liked telling people what to do and convincing them that it was the right answer. [I never liked them not understanding or not believing, but that's also another story.]
This brings us back to about a year ago. I was leading a couple of teams and also doing some Java coding - mostly building the base classes to tie everything together since, once again, I was working on the big picture. And then a couple of strange, and probably serendipitous, things happened and I went crazy for a short period of time. In searching around for some documentation, I discovered that some of the employees at this client had links in their personal descriptions to the current version of Eric Raymond's New Hackers' Dictionary. I followed that link and lost myself in rediscovering the geek nature that I'd left behind.
The other thing that happened was that I tried to save someone I thought could be a proto-geek. To this day, I'm still not sure if he was just an unemerged proto-geek or just clueless... All I know is that my attempt at saving him didn't work. I tried to get him to recognize the geek / hacker nature and use it creatively instead of just pissing off the people around him. As I say, ultimately it didn't work.
But that attempt wound up completely (for a short period of time, at least) reawakening the geek inside of me. I have always been a bit of a manic-depressive, with tendencies towards the depressive side. For about 3-4 weeks, I went into full-fledged mania. I slept about 4 hours a night (and that was plenty); I was so high-strung, I was practically vibrating. I was thinking big thoughts and having ideas that could change the world.
In retrospect, the only major plus that came out of that episode was that I got to be a lot more comfortable inside my own skin, even as I was driving everyone else out of theirs. I also wound up doing my own bit to piss off people as I told them things that they didn't want to hear and wanted to pretend didn't exist. So be it...
That engagement and that job passed by the way-side. And that brings me to yesterday. I happened to be reading Usenet news again and noticed a poster in rec.arts.sf.written who had a link in her signature that took me back to college and the Trenton Computer Fest and "The Button Lady".
As I read through the catalog of buttons, I was mentally drawn to examining all of the ways in which my life no longer resembles any of the buttons. I think I've been to a total of 1/2 of a science fiction convention; I don't really do that much hacking these days; I don't stay up half the night and sleep until noon. These days, I'm concerned about my cholesterol and making sure I go to the gym and not thinking that "Vegatables are what food eats".
Somewhere along the way, in my life, I joined the mainstream. I've got a lovely, beautiful wife, who I absolutely adore. [If you don't believe me, you can ask her or go see us when we got married.] I've got a nice brand-new townhouse and the mortgage that goes along with it. I've got two cats and we're thinking about having kids. I've got a job that I dislike but the economy is awful and there aren't really that many others out there for people like me.
What does all this mean? To be honest, I'm still not sure. I'm sort of vaguely uncomfortable with the concept of being "normal", yet, at the same time, I'm definitely not uncomfortable with the trappings of normalcy. I have this half-formed thought to try and find where I can go for some of the crazy stuff that I never really did and drag my wife along so she can gain an insight into what kind of person I really am. At the same time, I know that either: 1) she'll hate it and I'll feel bad about dragging her to it; or, 2) she'll love it and I'll hate it and I'll be left wondering what was so great about it anyway.
So, I'm going to go contemplate this some more, being normal or just faking it real well...
Author: ben@tmk.com