So, what is it that you do, exactly?

Today I:
* Moved a few dishes that were left over from yesterdays conference to my office and sent an e-mail to the caterers about it
* Comforted one of the tutors, who is having trouble deciding what to do for her bachelors thesis
* Sent an e-mail to the first year students with links and recommendations from yesterday
* Scheduled two lecturers for my "Introduction to informatics" course.
* Spoke with one of the professors about a possible curriculum change
* Had a talk with the vice dean about how best to accomodate the change.
* Counseled three masters level statistics students about organizational matters
* Found a cardboard box for the caterers so they could take the dishes away.
* Spoke with another professor about the curriculum change
* Talked with the head of the institute about an idea to teach high-school students a programming course with the same materials as we have for our first years.
* Uploaded new course plans to the institute website, which I had technical problems with and in the end the institute IT person had to do it for me.
* Helped a first year student figure out what extra courses to take for this and the next semester
* Supervised one of my to-be bachelors students
* Re-scheduled the time when I was going to start helping students with course content.
* Turned out that the uploaded files still didn't go up correctly, so I had to exchange a few more e-mails.
* Had a talk with study systems specialists to resolve the fact I had still not been made the program manager.
* Had a brief discussion with the program manager for mathematics courses and sent an e-mail to the statistics one - both about a single EAP.
* Spoke with the lecturer holding the upcoming course about the said curriculum change
* Patched the curriculum documents to reflect the change.
* Stopped by the defense session for the internships of masters students
* Given a 15-minute interview
* Spent an hour with the vice dean discussing the curriculum change
* Spent half an hour on marketing ideas for UT Science school.
* Reviewed a homework statement sent to me by a guest lecturer in one of my courses.

The game is called hot potato. If you're lucky, it is the game you will be playing for the rest of your life

The better you can motivate others to do important things, the less you have to do yourself. Or rather, the more you free yourself up to do other important things. Simple, at least in theory.

Trouble is, it gets a while to get the hang of it.

In any case - it has been a hard week. 7 days straight with 8-12 very intense working hrs, mostly with people.

And, although exhausting, I have enjoyed most of it. Three reasons:
a) Flow - I usually look at the clock only to realize 2-6 hrs have passed without me having time to notice them do so.
b) Anxiety relief - I had a fairly strong anxiety of not being able to cope with all the responsibilities I have newly received. Well, now I have evidence showing I can, and am actually doing fairly well, all things considered. It is natural to fear the unknown future, but once it actually arrives, the fear is often unfounded. This has been the case.
c) I'm actually fairly good at what I do. Or at least I do not think my time would be better spent doing something else. Not at this point in time, at least. After all, I am doing something I like doing, that also seems to be worthwhile in the long run, and also provides immediate gratification on occasion. Hard to ask for something more.

All that being said, it is very exhausting. At home, the only thing I want to do is to just collapse onto the bed and sleep. Thankfully, on most days, I can. :)

Black, and white are, all I see, ...

Black and white are, all I see,
In my infancy,
Red and yellow then came to be,
Reaching out to me, lets me see.

- Tool, "Lateralus"

I think I finally figured out the deal with Zen teachers. The students go to them always seeking approval... and the goal of the teachers is to teach the poor bastards to stop wanting to do so.

Poor Zen masters...

Also: if you have had a nail recently pulled from your eye, everything else around you suddenly starts looking like it is also in need of a hammer.

And the shadow of the day ...

I spent most of the week at a mentoring seminar, learning how to support the development of young teachers.

The key point of the seminar was to support their development into an independent person who can self-reflect and rely on his/her own assessments without relying on external self-validation. And the way you do that is by not giving them feedback, or validation for that matter, but slowly guiding them to rely on their own best judgement, just helping them see the whole picture, if they are missing some pieces. A lot like cognitive therapy, actually.

It did drive a few points home regarding my personal life - as there, I often tend to try to affirm and help my friends as best I can - often to very bad effect, as people prefer to be able to do things independently, and feel this help is constraining them. I had realized this was the case a few weeks ago, but the seminar helped me understand the mechanics better.

The restlessness discussed in the last post still follows me. I went to the seminar with barely 4 hrs of sleep at night - and still had trouble getting to bed in the evening, managing it only after a walk along the deserted night beach. The seminar was held in Narva-Jõesuu, which has 12 km of truly amazing shoreline, about 2 of which I walked that night.

The next day when I woke up, my roommate (who had missed the first day) had arrived in the night, and as he turned out to be from the IT college, the next night was spent with him discussing different aspects of CS education and how our institutions differ. It went til 4 a clock, again giving us just 4 and a half hours of sleep.

Next night I left so I could be in Tallinn to see the Dalai Lama talk in front of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. As I had to meet two of my friends in the morning before the talk, the night was again pretty short - 6 hrs, maybe. The 4 hr bus ride was unforgettable, as the sun was slowly setting across the picturesque landscape of North-East Estonia.

The talk itself was somewhat dissapointing. After the troubles of getting my friends in (their names had not been passed along), we got a back row seat and got only a fleeting glimpse of the spirutal leader. The talk was on buddhisms connection with sciences, and the questions were pretty standard and seemed mainly meant just to show off the intelligence of the asker. And in the end, the man was just escorted away, without the informal questions part we initially thought would follow.

The main thing I will remmember from the day is meeting Nirti, a young blogger and writer who I had actually invited myself via a proxy, but whom I had only exchanged a short e-mail with before. Me, Mart and Kristiina went to lunch with her, and the four of us clicked pretty well. Kristiina left at some point, then Mart had to go to the train and in the end it was just the two of us walking towards the bus station, sharing stories from our youth.

After yet another 4 hrs in the bus, I was back at the Spa with my Seminar group - who had postponed dinner for an hour so that I arrived just in time. We then convened in the Piano bar downstairs, when one of the group started playing Valgre on the piano, while the others just sat and listened in awe - later joining in to sing the more famous songs.

Not a day I will forget any time soon - and I dare say not because but rather in spite of the Lama.

Saturday was also fairly interesting, as a physicist friend of mine invited me along with his family to what (to both of our surprise) turned out to be the birthday party of two people - one a car salesman and another a photographer. There was a very nice russian girl with very well-cared dreadlocks, who took it upon herself to fix my hair up as well - and spent quite a few hours at it. This gave us ample time to talk. She had done many different things - acting, project writing, playing keyboards in a heavy metal group, fire shows (one of which she performed later in the evening, with Poi and fans) etc. Im only a bit sad I did not get to repay her the favor for fixing my hair. I also had quite a long discussion with the physicist friend about the meaning of a good life, and how to get there.

And now - I am at a CS summer school with my colleagues. Tired from the week behind me, and with quite a bit on my mind that just needs quiet contemplation. I hope they will understand me staying a bit more quiet and reserved than usual.
Then again - I have no clue what my usual really is anymore. There are months where I can't stand to be alone, and now it seems there seem to be weeks where I need to. Only time will tell what the equilibrium will look like or rather, whether it will actually settle down at all.

Restlessness

For the third day in a row, I am struck with a strange restlessness. A feeling of needing to do something, but being unable to figure out what.

So I go. Outside. Staff-twirling, reading, biking, walking the streets. None of them works.

Everything is so, so wrong. And yet, the most right it has ever been. In its proper place, yet so out of it.

Again, I guess this is what it feels to be too much ahead of yourself.

One nation under CCTV

Ahh, London. The city famous for its... rain?

And then there is the Buckingham palace, Picadilly circus and Trafalgar square - all of which I saw in passing the first day, when Aleksei and Kati met me at Victoria and took me to dinner in Soho and then to the river to catch a ferry to Greenwich, where they lived.

The apartment they lived in was very beautiful. A bit too hipster for my taste... and a bit too sterile, with a debilitating "everything has a right place" feeling. Thankfully, that faded after a few "How do you know a hippie is squatting your apartment?" jokes, when (I guess) they realized how much it was bothering me. By the end of my stay, it felt pretty nice and cozy.

From 2011 London

First evening was spent drinking Gin and playing the Settlers of Catan. Since Aleksei had work next day, we went to sleep pretty early. I was shown to my couch, which was a bit too short and soft for me but neither stopped me from getting a good nights sleep.

A word or two about my hosts would also be appropriate, I suppose. Aleksei I know from university, where he was about a year behind me, but also specialized in math and later cryptography. He is working as a security analyst in a large company where their division is mainly concerned about penetration testing of all kinds. Kati, his girlfriend, is a philosophy major going on to study linguistics for her masters degree. Both are extremely bright and good at what they do.

Next day, after our morning coffee, Kati took me out to the museums. First up was the British Museum - which really is HUGE, having everything from stone age to ancient egypt to medieval muslim world all the way to enlightenment clocks. Besides the longer break at medieval europe (where I put my re-enactor knowledge to good use), we mostly just walked through most of the halls, not really concentrating on anything in particular. The usual problem with places where there is way too much to see.

From 2011 London

We then visited a few more exhibitions - about Dirt, and then Hygene, followed by quite an interesting show about Science Fiction that the central library was hosting. Exhibit was small enough so that we could read through all of the descriptions, and most of them were well worth the read - I wrote down quite a few book names for my future reading.

From 2011 London

The day ended sitting outside an English pub in Greenwich, watching the sun set over London, and then making a quick trip to the supermarket - Pims (a form of punch they wanted to introduce to me) being the main reason to go.

From 2011 London

The next day was spent first walking from Greenwich to the Tower, then on to the Monument.

or, well,

From 2011 London

We then went on to St. Pauls, visiting a few street markets on the way. We ended the day in used books stores near Covent Garden, where we also had gelatos and where we returned later in the evening to see standup.

On Saturday, the three of us went to Cambridge, to visit two friends of mine who were doing their PhD-s there. I got to try Punting, and the others got to have a laugh watching me balance on the back of the boat and later collapse on the lawn when we got out.

From 2011 London

We then went back to their place, on Perse Way,

From 2011 London

and I got to play Duke Nukem Forever, and a game of even more mindless violence (the fact such a game exists shows just how big of a failure DNF is). The evening ended with a barbecue on their back porch, after which we got a taxi back to the station to catch the last train back to London.

Deep down inside I think you know - You are free!

For most of my life, I have had a nagging feeling at the back of my head that I am constantly doing something wrong. I was doubting myself at every step, always thinking if others would do it better than me.

And it turns out that it was right, kindof.

So what was it? Simple: Doubting myself! Or rather, my right to be myself.

Recent past has helped purge that doubt, one small step at a time.

Which, just to clarify, does not mean that I think I am infallible, but rather that I am entitled to my mistakes - as, after all, that is what being human means.

Daoism has made a comeback in my life, but I now interpret the teachings in a somewhat new key. Dalai Lamas "The Art of Happiness" also helped clarify a few points as did Richard Fromms "The Art of Loving" - which both preach the same message: you first need to learn to love yourself before you can love others. Most importantly, however, both stress that it is a skill - i.e. something that you not only can but must learn.

Quoting Eminem (because I just love obsucre and out of context pop music references):

But how the fuck you supposed to grow up when you weren't raised?

And indeed, looking back on my life, I haven't really had people in my life to teach me how to be fully human until just fairly recently. Most people around me have also had the same problem I was facing - so no wonder I inherited it from them, as I had no other examples to learn from. Which is not to say I blame anyone - rather, I feel a bit sad, for both them and myself in the past.

In any case, I am thankful for having had the opportunity to learn what I have, even if it has come as late as it has, for I fear most people never get the opportunity.

Not that I am at the end of my journey... for there is no such thing.