99 things

It would have been wise to simply write a post a day, see how long that goes, and maybe mention something at the end. Unfortunately I started at 100, and when I called my dad the next day my mom chimed in that she had read my writing, and asked if I would do it 100 times.

I hadn't even planned to do it 2 times, but here I am. It feels like an eternity since the last time I wrote, because I did it Wednesday morning and now it's Thursday evening almost Friday.

I have two full days of experience at my disposal, which include attending the last Tango practica for the year, going to an event where I learned about how to use LLMs to be more human, and last minute catching a friends stand up set as part of his standup class graduation.

At the LLM to be more human meeting we were told to fill out details about ourselves, and then tell the LLM to generate advisors. From these advisors we would then narrow it down to a set of 3 advisors, and generate advisor profiles from them. Finally we would take the advisor in a separate prompt and use it to answer questions.

I think an interesting thing of writing down experiences is that it is easy to forget what your impression of something was. Since, AI is changing so fast it'll be interesting to look back at some point and think yeah that's what happened. I would really appreciate having a catalogue of things I've done at work and people I've talked to. When I first started I had the aspiration of writing daily updates, then I changed that to weekly. It has been 6 weeks basically and I don't have any updates. I did start writing summary notes for the one on ones that I am having with my manager, and that's helpful.

Today I was coming more to the realization that I have conditioned myself to respond to one on ones with a manager in a combative way. I by no means was combative, but since I had so many of those experiences previously (admittedly led by me) those ideas float into my head when I encounter the meetings.

An interesting work story that I saw develop from the sidelines was a colleague walking in with a box of frozen snickers lamenting that it was terrible that someone shipped her ice cream and that it was likely melted, so she placed the box in the freezer. At the end of the day she pulled out the ice cream box from the freezer and unopened it only to find a backpack in there. I didn't get the back story of who sent her this backpack, and maybe it's better to not be nosy. Nonetheless, I should probably be more curious / social because that's just a hilarious experience to partake in. She froze her backpack! Plus, what's the relationship of the person sending her random gifts?

Yesterday it was the Survivor finale. One of my favorite shows that I've been watching since at least middle school, but possibly earlier. It's on its 47th season which is pretty wild. There are two seasons a year. I've been kind of close to getting spoiled on the show so what I plan to do even though it's pretty late is watch some survivor before bed.

The past two days I've had a lot of serendipitous moments or witnessed some. At tango I managed to convince a friend to go and it turns out that she knew someone from the tango class. When I walked into the LLM class today I ran into someone I met at a Hyyge Hike, and then when I went to watch my friend perform stand up his teacher was a comic that I had seen perform at Q.E.D. the past weekend. It's a small world.

One takeaway in talking to my friend about the stand up comedy routines is that it's better when the stand up has a through line. That's something I'd like to do a better job fostering in my writing. I'd like to have a good connective thread that goes through my ideas. Just because it feels good to rattle the ideas off while writing doesn't mean they are received well.

This reminds me of when I first enrolled in the poetry class. I faced the existential question of what even is poetry how do I know I am writing poetry, and as a big nerd I turned to chatGPT and asked it questions. I even asked it to analyze my poetry. As class went on though I felt more comfortable. It's always weird to know how comfortable to feel in your own skin, and in your abilities, and how far you are from everyone else's abilities.

The poetry groups I was in were very supportive. Maybe they truly liked my writing, or maybe they didn't. In one really cool session we learned about getting into the physicality of poetry and that involved at one point staring into each other's eyes. An older women at the event talked about how she faced such fears of rejection in that exercise. How she didn't feel comfortable being stared at. She mentioned when we partnered up she didn't know if anyone would partner up with her. She didn't have her youth to offer anyone. This was a very eye opening experience. I should've said something to her afterwards. For me I never once considered or was concerned with beauty, nor did it ever cross my mind that I would care who I was staring into. In fact I don't really remember whose eyes I stared into which is maybe a mean thing to say. In any case I think this reveals that sometimes what we worry about is not even a concern to other people. Even further this might mean that our concerns are in our own head, and not occurring elsewhere.

When I first joined tango I didn't place any expectation on myself. We would have a lesson in the class. I would largely remember the moves, and if I didn't the teacher could come over and help. We would switch between leading, and following and everyone would provide help. Recently I've gotten a lot of praise over how much I improved in the class, and I am sure that I have after all I went from knowing 0 tango to something. At the same time the high praise concerns me, because it opens up introspection about me maybe not realizing how bad I was.

I recently wrapped up a Klezmer concert. It's funny that I have an unreasonable double standard here. I find the over the top praise really annoying, and yet I feel like I didn't get a lot of praise, and so I feel that I performed badly. I remember when I performed in a company band, and I messed up in one song. As I messed up I looked up and saw a colleague that was on his phone. I thought to myself that he wasn't paying attention and he wouldn't know that I messed up. After all that's what they tell you people won't know that you messed up, but after the show this friend did confirm that he heard me mess up.

I definitely messed up in the Klezmer concert, and that's fine. The teacher said that we were very brave. I felt that this was code for you all weren't ready to perform but you did anyway, or you messed up but that's okay. The truth is it is okay, because when you do a hobby and you mess up nothing happens. In fact often times when you do a job, and you mess up it's fine. You just have to figure out how to do a better job at it. I also have to mention the positive when I did the work performance the bass's mom was in the audience. Throughout the whole show she had a super stern look, and I was told beforehand that she was a piano teacher. As I looked out into the crowed I definitely felt that she was not enjoying our performance. Except after the concert I heard she had liked my playing.

Anyway I'm off to watch Survivor and maybe I'll be back tomorrow morning with only a nights sleep of info to share, plus all my past life experience and thoughts!