I’ve been thinking throughout the month that it’s taken me a long time to get here. I mean “here” in many ways. The only part of my life that is sub-optimal is the low morale at work, and despite that, everything apart from this one very broad issue is fine.
Everything is good. Really good. I am absorbing books and courses. This summer’s dinnerplate dahlias are sprouting outside. I’ve spent a lot of quality time with many of my friends lately, and I will see more of them very soon. I had a hard landing back here from Uzbekistan, to the news I am now the only not-new manager in my peer group and am back on double duty, but I’ve streamlined both teams and everyone is organized. I’ve burned off all of my stress and the marginal amount of resentment I had been feeling about the fact that no one in my group knows me well enough to know that one of them should have sent me a text, because blindsiding me never ends well.
I’ve been to Atlanta twice since I returned, the most recent being earlier this week. 
The first trip down I linked up with Juan and we hit up the tiny German-themed town of Helen and hiked up Blood Mountain the weekend prior; he accepted one of the offers on his house at the top of the mountain, so that was pretty cool. Colorado is nice but I honestly prefer the landscape along the Eastern Seaboard; I miss the lush greenery and the leaves even if the mountains aren’t as dramatic. 
Alaska is also much more lush than here (and the most beautiful of them all). Alaska has always felt wild to me instead of desolate; Colorado is desolate in its typical bleak way. It is brown as hell here, it gets old. We’ve had weeks of unprecedented rain in Denver these past few weeks, and now even the plains you fly over when you take off and land are green, which is pretty interesting. It won’t last… it’ll be 100 degrees every day soon enough, and the sun will feel like a nuclear blast.
Monthly trips to ATL are more logistically challenging than the ones to Texas due to the distance and timezones, but it will be fine. I will head back down there in a month. What motivates me at home is that my primary team is excellent and I genuinely like each person that reports to me; they are all doing well. We are still the best. I wish I heard more from my boss about what is going well within our group, but I shared that feedback this week and hope he can adjust. I shared last week within my manager group that I need everyone else to step up: I did not come here to be a slave and have such a heavy lift compared to the others: I came here so my life could improve holistically. That was a very hard conversation for me to have, but they were receptive and we have a plan. This company used to be an awesome one to work for; there is a huge disconnect between the top and the rest of the company presently. Most people leaders are burned out. Virtually everyone across my org has expressed frustration, fatigue and disappointment. It pretty much sucks. I still want to get the fresh hell out of this division. Some days I want to run screaming into the woods and never return. Other days, I want to run straight into 6 lanes of I-25.
Fergana is home to the original capital of Central Asia before the region was chopped up by numerous conquerors. Once we picked up our small group, we continued onto Urgench, Khiva, Bukhara, Samarkand and returned to Tashkent. On the final full day (I decided to stay an extra day), we flew out to Nukus in Karakalpakstan to see the Savitsky Art Museum and the Muynak ship cemetery on the Aral Sea. I was highly skeptical about going on this Gate 1 group tour, but our group was very small and the people were not bad, although they were much older than I was. I am mostly thrilled I got into Fergana and managed to see the second largest collection of Russian avant-garde art, all the way out in bumfuck nowhere, autonomous province UZB. I had extremely good fortune: I booked this trek into Fergana 12 hours before we departed (it was a 14+ hour day) and that same operator arranged the trip out to Nukus. Uzbekistan is developed for tourism, but not so much so that it’s easy to get to places like these (there are no tourists in Fergana, and it has at times been hot-spot for conservative and militant Islamists and extremists); Nukus is so remote and so bleak that we had to take a flight.
I secured some contacts for my eventual return to Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan & Kazakhstan (Turkmenistan scares me and is on my wait list with Belarus). I somehow managed to load up my luggage with tapestries, silk clothing, fur, leather, ceramics and saffron without having to part with any of the clothes I brought along. The food was excellent — more salads and vegetables than I expected, and more beef than lamb — and despite not feeling particularly rested, I can’t believe how much I was able to see in 2 weeks. I managed to make it home safely without incident or delay, miraculously making it through customs, bag re-check and terminal transfer in Chicago in under an hour, which is definitely a new record.
Bourdain cut pretty deep, not only because he took his own life, but because he contributed so much to the modern world, especially around truly experiencing other places through food and conversation. Life has changed so much since he began, and we now live in a world where people travel to places and order food just to post on IG: Bourdain, Michael Pollan and others have pushed a different agenda. I remember reading An Omnivore’s Dilemma years ago and loving Pollan’s emphasis on preparing food together, on sitting down to eat together, and the ancient origins of sharing food out of love and closeness. In a world where people eat fast food in their cars and order ready-made dinners in the mail, we’ve lost a lot of that, and with it, a lot of human connection. Bourdain’s curiosity about culture and his habit of reading and researching the places he was going to be able to understand the people and the food and how everything came to be was another rare trait. For a guy who smoked packs of cigarettes a day, drank a ton and had an on again, off again drug problem, he was extremely thorough and intellectually curious. I really admired him, and I think the world lost something irreplaceable when he died.
I have been showing up to lift at 7am, coming home to shower and get ready and bomb out of my house in 25 minutes to get to the office. On days I don’t do that, I do UX coursework.
It’s often been a hard road, but it’s given me bottomless mettle and self-confidence in my ability to weather any storm. I’ve also thought a lot about how the people I encounter at this gym are the kinds of people I want in my life: people who push themselves constantly, and challenge themselves to be better, who are willing to face the music. People who are never finished becoming the best version(s) of themselves. How can I use this to further improve my quality of life, and that of others? A girl on my team recently told me that me being open about everything I’m doing has inspired her to rejoin Crossfit, as she couldn’t get started. That off-hand comment really meant a lot to me, that is the kind of shit I want more of in my life. I think it took me a long time to get into a good clip here in Denver, but I am definitely there now after a gradual upswing.
close friends here in Colorado, and that’s fine with me, but I am really pleased that I’ve had so much time with my out of state friends. I am really looking forward to getting back to AK for a few days as well: I expect to propose to Di we go on at least two soul-crushing hikes, 
one being Bird Ridge, which I absolutely hate, because there are hours of false peaks along the way. I may also opt to re-do the Alyeska Flake, though it’s unlikely we’ll be able to get up that high with so much spring snow; we’ll see what we can do. The last time I did that hike, I did it in a fasted state and my quads gave out on the way down which was a total pain in the ass and delayed us significantly. The prospect of having a few days with two of my favorite people back in AK is really exciting. Toward the end of June, another friend is coming down from Juneau to hit the Emperor show with me in Dallas and hang for a few days. Feeling pretty grateful.
but it proved to be ridiculous: only in the last week or so do I feel I have returned mostly to myself: biologically, mentally, intellectually, emotionally, philosophically… existentially. 2023 has been really fucking annoying so far.
I also resumed my very high intensity gym routine, so that’s been great: I’ve clocked over 600 active minutes a week for the past month or so, and that is bad ass. I decided to step up my bio-hacking and have folded more adaptogens and two different probiotics into my diet: one is 
I would not have seen myself, ten years ago, as someone who occasionally splurges on Korean beauty products, or puts carrot oil under my eyes, or uses a facial exfoliator in the shower, or puts a frozen eye mask on at 6am before my alarm goes off 18min later, but apparently I am one of those people now.
I booked all of my stuff for Dallas and am meeting some friends down there (and perhaps bringing one of the metalheads from here with me). I considered hitting up the Chicago show for my birthday as well (they are playing Jun 23) but I think I will do something else.
Given my severe lack of sleep and puffy, greying raccoon eyes at that point, I was persuaded to give beta blockers a try, and they have helped a lot. I have always been afraid of this stuff, despite it being one of the most commonly prescribed drugs in the Western world. 20mg of propanolol with 2mg of melatonin at bedtime has at least has allowed me to sleep over the past few weeks… and as of a few days ago, I am off both.
I update my annual good/bad/fail/goal summary tab, which has been helpful in giving me a more quantitative look at what I’ve accomplished in the previous year. I realized a long time ago I tend to look at my accomplishments very cynically, and kick myself for being a disappointment and waste of potential — a worthless meat popsicle — and I need to be able to look at what actually happened to alleviate this sense of utter failure. This feeling has always been with me, I am extremely hard on myself and my absolute worst critic 100% of the time, and living with this perception of my life day in and day out is a nightmare. 
On the plus side, it sounds like the rescheduled event will happen here in Denver, which will make for a less insane January since I’ll already be spending the second week of the year back in Texas to hang over this team to their new manager (finally). My team also deserves the attention: I have the highest concentration of high performers of anyone in my group. In fact, I don’t spend enough time really taking in how insane it is that my team is so bad ass. We are actually beating most of North America in terms of key performance indicators. I hope I can promote at least 1/3 of my team in 2023: ideally half or more. They deserve it. They are not only good at their jobs, but they’ve become better-rounded, more cooperative, assertive but thoughtful people and I am proud AF.
In the past few weeks, my parents visited, I went to Dallas, I had an uncharacteristically festive Thanksgiving and decorated for Christmas (this is the first tree of my adult life, and it’s quite nice, actually). We also watched Dahmer during the long weekend, which was surprisingly revolting but very good. High recommend if you like to watch serial killer docs on your holiday break.
Soon enough, things will gradually calm down and I will spend the second half of December relaxing(ish) and, knowing myself, reflecting on a quite eventful year of change. It’s still mind-blowing to me that I’ve been here for nearly a year; I can’t believe how fast it has blown by, and I suppose at least part of it is that I have been too busy to be bored. Life is good, though, and while I am constantly grappling with what’s next, I have not ever felt I chose this step incorrectly. My father asked me if I still miss Alaska, and the answer is always yes, and will likely always be yes, but it was a good call to take a break and do something else. I also do not (yet) regret holding onto my house up there; I would be struggling a lot more emotionally if I had left nothing there to go back to.
He is more of a brother to me than a former roommate, or even friend, and conveniently one of his defense contractor buddies relocated to Denver at the same time I did, which meant he was visiting both of us here. Even more conveniently, we have become good friends in this past year, so we had a blast together. Matt (Anchorage) is in Djibouti now, and if I’m lucky I’ll see him again in the spring or summer.
We also drove up to Leadville, a little mining town that quite a few people have recommended to me, and it was an all around awesome day. Leadville is very Alaskan; remote and quite rough around the edges. There was a bar for sale on the main strip when we visited that the guys later chased as a lead for our imaginary future together, where we all live on a compound, they never have to grow up or assume any responsibility, and I run the business to keep us all afloat. If only. The bar sold before we could grab it, so I guess we’re all stuck in our present lives.
I have many unanswered emails and other things to do, but instead of knocking them out, I started cold-stratifying bonsai seeds as I think growing a few different bonsai trees (obviously a very long-term project) will be fun and low-investment. I’ve always been pretty interested in plants, this is the first time I have enough real sunlight to do so. When I was a kid, I had a hydroponic vegetable garden (before hydroponics were cool) and a terrarium full of venus flytraps and pitcher plants, which are not the easiest plants to sustain, especially in upstate New York.
my trip abroad began with (of course) a typical Turkish Airlines delay that forced me to run from one end of Istanbul airport to the other in 15 min to make my connection to Tbilisi (they literally closed the door behind me); my bag did not make it onto the plane, but showed up later in the evening. I was happy just to actually get there on time and feel like I was comfortably away from my life in what at this point is definitely my favorite foreign city (New York is still my favorite American city, sorry not sorry). I was slimy and exhausted by the time I got there, but I was over the moon to be there and we went straight to our standard breakfast spot to stuff our faces with khachapuri.
My sister and her husband finally moved out of their shithole garden level unit in Belleville and moved into a really beautiful, sunny apartment in Rahway. My sister and I are very different — she has very few hobbies, no college education and is mostly a homebody — but she got a second pug and has been showing her, so I’m pretty stoked she is busy and doing stuff she’s genuinely passionate about. I really wish they’d get the hell out of New Jersey, but as I said, we are very different people. I’d love for us to eventually live closer to one another: we hated each other when we were kids but we are very close now, and she continues to look creepily similar to me as she gets older.
I had hired a dog sitter off of Rover to drop in on Fuji 3-4 times a day and while he has the best reviews of anyone in the area on Rover, I was not impressed: he did not walk her once despite committing to do so, he failed to show up one night and never communicated that he was not coming (according to him, he was in a car accident, and yet showed up the next day in the same car which was unharmed), and he spent very little time with her. Thankfully my neighbors were around to pop in periodically and we’ve decided to just trade off on drop-ins for each other’s pets for the foreseeable future (I am taking care of their husky and cat now, and they’re on Fooj duty next week). This was an ambitious experiment to determine whether the dog was better off just staying home alone for 3 weeks, and despite my dog sitter not meeting my expectations, she was in a much better mental state than she would’ve been if I had kenneled her the entire time. I checked on her couch-lounging regularly and tossed her many Furbo treats, and she was just fine, so I will definitely opt for her staying here alone overnight versus worrying about putting her in a kennel or boarding facility. Fuji’s dog aggression is annoying AF but otherwise she’s pretty much perfectly behaved.
I decided I’m too old and impatient to spend 28h getting from Prague to JFK, so I coughed up another $1100 for a direct flight back to NY to catch my unlinked flight to Denver. I am never flying with Turkish Airlines again; while I still got a decent flight there, they’ve managed to pilfer enough money and time from me that I will avoid them in the future.
The running analogies in this book were not relatable to me, but this book really made me think about the checks and balances I have in my own life, and how to inspire people to move faster and embrace the suck. I’ve had to have a few tough conversations at work over the past few months, and this book will help me choose even more effective words. Both these books gave me some good ideas related to efficiencies and empowering people to do better. It also made me reflect on the things I do to help myself suffer, and why it works: the rules that unfold in my head when I am dying at the gym, and refuse to quit until I hit a ten minute interval, at which time I end up feeling fine, only to dip into misery halfway to the next ten minute interval. This is a great book for many reasons, not least because it puts forth plenty of research around the complete worthlessness of calling people pussies and berating them until they do a better job. There’s a lot around planning for contingencies, breaking things down into measurable pieces, controlling your reactions to externalities, being self-aware enough to know that things will be hard, and setting yourself up for success. I’ve learned to do a lot of these things by trial and error (ie, smuggling my Caucasian rug down here to Denver so my empty-ass house felt a little familiar for the month before my belongings showed up), but a lot of people could skip a lot of fuck-ups and fails by just reading this and taking the advice.
This is a lot of the same kind of material, around setting yourself up to actually change permanently. This one also gave me some good ideas for work, and can be credited for some of the leaning I’m doing on my own team while I’m away. For many years I’ve managed my personal goals via spreadsheet, and I credit this book for helping me realize I am not actually insane: that people actually do think of their lives in terms of chapters, and my milestone updates actually make sense. I thought this book was going to be super boring, actually… but it wasn’t. High recommend on both.
The Chaos Path 