Sipping a Tincture of Saudade

In which our Hero considers ordering the head of a mannikin, to find some comfort against the long nerdy night

I was looking up mobile phone plans this morning and feeling more lonely than I have in a very long time. In a month and a half, my phone company tells me, they’re going to kill the phone service that has been the heart of my network. Subtract four weeks for any installation or setup lead times, and that gives me about a week to figure out what I’m going to do and pull the trigger on rebuilding my network.

I’m angry, of course. I’m angry because I’ve got a good thing and as much grief as it’s caused me, it’s also been like having a superpower to have the feature set that I have. It’s how I was able to rewire my phone system to find me in Australia, from Australia. It is how I was able to make my phone service reach me even when the physical wires to my house had been broken. I’m not pleased to be losing this.

Then again… I’ve been wanting to redo my telephony for years. The technology that I’m playing with is a shiny new iteration of something that I’ve been trying to find time to do more than dabble in for decades. It’s cool and exciting and I’ve got a lot ahead of me to learn. But as I was puzzling over the questions that arose, I realized that I don’t have much of a community to share the experience with.

Hollywood is a great guy and a solid friend who has had my back for a long time. He is technically inclined. He is also intellectually lazy, which I’ve complained about before; I’ve noticed that at least some of my frustration comes from him asking questions that I feel are ineffective. Questions that are either inevitable consequences if only he’d actually think it through. Or they are questions that immediately and obviously are past the understanding I’ve worked to reach thus far. I also get frustrated because he’ll come by my desk and see me researching a topic that may interest him and suddenly he is deeply interested in understanding everything about the tool that can be understood short of actually putting in effort to find the answer himself.

I’m working on my own ego. If I’m going to be a know-it-all, it’s not reasonable to be frustrated when someone assumes I know about a topic. (Also, in defence of Hollywood, he’s not at all a stupid man, and brings insights into problems that we work on that I’d just never think to apply. My strength is thinking outside the box. His strength is in building better boxes) Still, in Hollywood and in other colleagues I’m noticing that I am less willing to present them with my ideas in development. Which in turn means that I’m losing some of the refinery capability that makes *me* more effective.

I used to have a tribe. Sure I was the weird outsider even back in grade school, but I was the outsider in a very bright group of children. Which meant that the other freaks and geeks like me were a tribe all out own but in that community the jocks and the popoular kids were also bright and curious, able to step into our ultra nerdy conversations to deliver mockery that wasn’t just disdaining but also relevant, topical and clever.

University concentrated the community effect, taking away the geographic selection criteria that had thrown us together and replacing it with a much more personal investment in a subject that was important to us. People (mostly) don’t just show up and want to be engineers, so I was in a community of people with at least a little bit of a like minded personal investment in our common metier. I was surrounded by friends and acquaintances where now the dumb jocks could be counted on to understand quantum physics and the right calculus joke could kill. (I think back to the things we would do just for the curiosity and I realize that we were brilliant in a way that I can’t match now. It almost makes me want to leap back to academia but I know that kind of focus needed not just the environment but also the population. Graduate students are a different mix and breed.)

My friend, the Admiral, has always been a little clingy since we worked together a decade ago. I used to joke about how often he’d call but I understood that it was driven in part by the fact that he didn’t many truly geeky friends. I thought I did, and to some degree I do. But to some degree, I’m arriving where he was, at the realization that not many people share my spectrum of interest. Now I can find someone who is interested in media centers, and someone else who is interested in telephony, a little. Someone else is interested in virtualization, and someone else is interested in programming. But I don’t get it all in one person, unless I’m looking in the mirror. And too often the others are looking at their own need don’t have the spare time to really help me work with my need or just talk out the general space.

It’s lonely to have “That’s so cool!” moments and not really have anyone to share it with. I work on internalizing that reward, so that I don’t need the feedback. Talking out problems has always been more about ordering and organizing thoughts on a situation into a line then about getting actual help from the person I’m talking to.

I’m not unhappy. It’s just that I used to have a tribe.

And now I feel alone.