Monica

Apropos of nothing: today was my 2500th day with my current employer. Wow. Well, what else are wiki calculator plug-ins for? :-)

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If you want a set of questions, leave a comment asking for some. (It may take me a few days to respond.)

I generally only do the memes that tell people something about me or that can spark discussion. I got this one from indigodove. I've removed questions for which I knew my answers would be boring or pointless. ( Read more... )

(The Yom Kippur stuff will probably come in dribs and drabs this year. Lots of stuff is still swirling around in my head.)

From the morning service:

For transgressions against God, the Day of Atonement atones; but for transgressions of one human being against another, the Day of Atonement does not atone until they have made peace with one another.

I hereby forgive all who have hurt me, all who have wronged me, whether deliberately or inadvertently, whether by word or by deed. May no one be punished on my account.

As I forgive and pardon those who have wronged me, may those whom I have wronged forgive and pardon me, whether whether I acted deliberately or inadvertently, whether by word or by deed.

The first time I was faced with those words I argued with them. Write a blank check? Are you kidding? It wasn't that I had a particular grievance in mind; it's just that it felt wrong somehow. After all, we're told that we have to ask forgiveness and make amends; just feeling sorry doesn't cut it.

The next time I reasoned that there was a quid pro quo involved, and I wanted to say "I forgive and pardon anyone else who is making this declaration today". I don't now remember if that's what I actually said. I know that for a while I've been mentally inserting "those Jews" rather than just anyone, because while not all Jews keep Yom Kippur, it seemed a reasonable compromise.

This year I was able to say it as written. I was able to realize that yeah, there are people who've wronged me who will never apologize (perhaps because they don't even realize it), and I've surely done such things to other people, and it's just not important enough to hang onto. For wrongs that are known and more serious, well, there's a difference between forgiveness and forgetfulness -- I might not rely on certain people in the future, but I don't have to carry the weight of their misdeeds around on a mental scorecard either. I can inform my future behavior without holding out on forgiveness.

This would be much harder, perhaps impossible, if there were a major outstanding wrong against me. I am blessed to not have suffered the kinds of wrongdoing (abuse, major betrayal, etc) that some people have. The small stuff just isn't worth getting worked up about.

As I said, it wasn't so much that I had specific grievances I wanted to hold onto; it was more that I had trouble making the blanket statement. I don't know what's changed, but I don't seem to have that trouble now. I'm happy about this.

I'm glad I'm a Jew -- the annual introspection and sanity check is helpful. And, quite demonstrably, when it wasn't required of me I didn't do it. (Maybe others are more dilligent in such things.) In all seriousness, I would recommend something like the high holy days to my thoughtful gentile friends.

The interview meme is making the rounds again. kitanzi asked me some questions:

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Here's the rules:

1. Leave me a comment saying "interview me".
2. I will respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.
3. You will update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview others in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

I am thankful for many things, including:

Family, most especially a loving husband, parents who are happily married and pretty healthy, and the cats.

A wonderful rabbi who teaches me, encourages me, shares with me, and gives me special opportunities not available to others.

A job where I am able to do what I'm good at and where I'm apparently well-respected by people above me (and at least some peers). There are certainly challenges when a small company is bought by a mega-corp, but we have also retained some of what made it good to be at that small company.

A passion, not related to my technical career, that challenges me, excites me, sometimes scares me, and forces me to really think and evaluate -- and that brings rewards for its own sake.

The opportunities available to me through LiveJournal: a place to share ideas and interact with interesting people I might not have met otherwise. Writing is important to me; the sheer act of writing something down helps me analyze it. I don't need LJ to write, but I find that having an interactive audience pushes me to write.

Comfort++ -- health (physical, mental, spiritual), financial grounding, and the ability to spend time doing things I enjoy.

I'm reading torah tonight (unusual) and tomorrow morning (not unusual). Part of the latter package is giving a short d'var torah (torah commentary), so for the last few days I kicked some ideas around in my brain and last night I wrote a draft. (I'm still on my written-text kick rather than speaking from notes.)

This morning in the shower I made a structural change, jetisoning about a third of it. During the morning commute I composed the new part and figured out the transitions. I drive to work, so this was (obviously, I hope) a mental exercise. When I got to work I spent five minutes writing down the revisions.

For all that I seem to have the mental buffer space for this sort of exercise, and for all that I'm told this is unusual, I still sometimes marvel at my inability to remember less-complex information.

(I do sometimes think about getting a PDA so I can record things easily while not at my computer, though I note that that wouldn't have made a differnece in this particular case.)

When praying (which usually means when at services), I've noticed that there's a background thread that runs in my brain. While the foreground task is reciting the words in the siddur, the background thread is analyzing the words (ok, only some of the words) based on what I've learned so far of grammar. Sometimes I notice something new (oh, that's how that verb is put together!). This is good; direct application aids learning.

But... is there a way to prevent that thread from grabbing focus? Its job, most of the time, is to note things to come back to later, but sometimes it distracts me when I ought not be distracted. Like, say, when I'm leading services. I don't want to surpress it; I just want it to behave.

(Please tell me that other people's brains work this way too? Pretty much any time I'm doing something vaguely "intellectual", there are at least two things going on in my brain, the main activity and the "meta" level that's noticing how I'm processing that main activity.)

Nick asked me these questions a while back, but I never got the email notification and I didn't notice. If anyone else thinks I'm ignoring questions, please let me know.

1. How has the field of software documentation evolved during your career?

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2. How did growing up in the SCA community in particular influence who you are now? Would you have grown into more or less the same person in a different social environment, such as your current congregation?

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3. If you could become a pen pal of any person from any time, with whom would you correspond? (To avoid paradox, assume that the person exists in a parallel universe, so you could even correspond with yourself from the past without causing reality to implode.)

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4. Alternatively, what do you do if the genie allows you to undo after seeing the consequences? Specifically, you may once instantly revert reality to a backup copy of the moment before he would have contacted you. Does your answer change if you could remember your experiences from the forked reality?

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5. How would you characterize the stories that you most enjoy reading or watching? How have these desiderata changed over time?

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Here's how this works:

1. If you want to be interviewed, leave a comment saying so.
2. I will respond, asking you five questions.
3. You'll update your journal with my five questions and your five answers.
4. You'll include this explanation.
5. You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

From autographedcat and others:

So, say you were meeting a new person -- blind date, new friend, who knows. And you wanted them to have some idea of what kind of person you are, and who you are. But you can't actually tell them in so many words. Instead, you have to give them a box, with a dozen things in it for them to look at/read/listen to/taste/whatever. What would you put in the box? And a copy of your journal or a link to your LJ would be the same thing as just telling them directly, yourself, so that's not allowed.

1. An On the Mark CD.

2. A copy of Lapsing into a Comma: The Curmudgeon's Guide to the Many Things That Can Go Wrong in Print, and How to Avoid Them, with post-it notes recording my annotations and corrections. :-)

3. A siddur, probably Sim Shalom, maybe a marked-up leader's copy.

4. A catalog from URJ Press (that's the Reform movement within Judaism).

5. A photo album with pictures of me and my family, including pets.

6. My SCA Laurel scroll, or facsimile. (The SCA is a medieval/renaissance re-creation organization. The Laurel is the highest award they give for achievement in the arts and sciences. The scroll is a document -- really a work of art itself -- that comemorates this.)

7. A complete run of Babylon 5, augmented with the smuggled episodes from the UK.

8. A copy of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

9. A copy of Joy and Jealousy, a book on renaissance Italian dance that I co-wrote, with accompanying CD. (I arranged all the music.)

10. A bag of polyhedral dice.

11. A copy of my current software-documentation project. (Ok, technically this would require an NDA...)

12. A bowl of perfectly-cooked mattar paneer, somewhat spicier than usual.

And the final part of the meme:

What one thing would you add to the box to represent me or my tastes?