 When I first heard about this book, I
thought it was yet another in the line of chick-lit like the Devil
Wears Prada or the Shopaholic series. There’s nothing wrong with
those books but I haven’t been able to enjoy them, so I steered clear
of Prep. The book kept coming back into my life. I
read about it everywhere and it was recommended by AskMe. After a few
months, when I ran into it at Costco, I figured maybe it was time to
buy it and read it.
So I did.
Prep was a relatively quick read though it actually took longer than
I thought, especially towards the end. I found the story less and
less interesting as it went along. I related less to the character
than I thought. To be fair, I didn’t go to a prep school. Or maybe I
did but it was in Turkey and it wasn’t boarding and it was all-women.
So I don’t even know why I thought I would relate to it. Having said
that, this book made me feel glad I hadn’t gone to a prep school and
sealed the already-determined fate of my son.
I thought the writing was good. It didn’t get in the way of the
story, which is one of my pet peeves. When the story stopped being
interesting and I stopped caring about the character, I just kept
reading for the momentum of it. Overall, I’d have to say it was okay.
But not fantastic.
David has a little, yellow fabric cube that we bought when he was
born. It came in a set of four and this yellow one has a duck on one
of its faces. If you press hard on this face, it makes the duck quack
three times. No matter what kind of mood he’s in, this sound makes
David laugh out loud.
We should all have such a thing.
Barclay and I went to Windansea Beach last night to do some night
photography. I took most of my photos before or around sunset but got
a few ok ones in the dark. Of the bunch, this is one of my favorites.
To me, it has the magical feel of night photography. ISO: 100.
Aperture: 22. Shutter Speed:28sec.(bulb)
LifeHacker linked to an
article about motivation and highlighted one particular one.
#3 Socialize with others of similar interest. Mutual support
is motivating. We will develop the attitudes of our five best
friends. If they are losers, we will be a looser. If they are
winners, we will be a winner. To be a cowboy we must associate with
cowboys. Despite the glaring and very annoying
grammatical error, I must say I generally agree with the sentiment.
I’ve noticed that who you associate with has a lot to do with who you
become, what you wish for, what your goals are, and how you spend
your days. Being surrounded by your kind of people is crucial. More
so than you might imagine. And I mean physically surrounded by.
People you go out to lunch with. People you see relatively regularly.
When I lived in New York, the people I saw on a day-to-day basis were
very different from each other. The people I worked with at TFA would
never categorize themselves with the investment bankers or the
bookstore people I regularly saw. Despite being so different, every
single person I was around was interesting, intellectually
stimulating and offered a lot to learn from. I loved that. I soaked
up everything around me. Everyone’s knowledge. Everyone’s excitement.
In my environment, it was rare to run into someone who wasn’t someone
you’d want to know.
That environment made me want to become a more interesting person.
It challenged me. It motivated me. And I didn’t realize how much
until I left it. I didn’t understand how much of it I was taking for
granted. I do now. I think I did realize it relatively quickly after
we moved to San Diego, but I didn’t understand the depth of the
difference until recently.
The people around you, the place where you work, the friends you have
can electrify you. They can make you feel that you can change the
world. Move mountains. They can make you feel like you’re excellent,
deserving, inspiring. They can bring out the very best in you and
help you reach all your unrealized potential.
People around you can also bring out the worst in you. They can make you
petty, jealous, shallow. Lazy. They can make you scared of yourself
and unsure of your abilities.
Next time you pick a new friend, a new job, a new surrounding, remember this: whom you associate with determines the person you become.
It’s been a rough few weeks in the karenika household. First came
some unexpected news that really threw a wrench in the comfort of the
household, then came a death, and then came another death. All these
events meant that we made four trips across the country in the last
two weeks. David, who had never been on a plane prior to April,
didn’t take well to the redeye but was a champ on all the other
flights. He loved the Florida sunshine. He cheered everyone up at
both of the funerals and reminded people that there’s an order to
life and that the most important things is for people to come and go
in order. He also added some much-needed humor to the very sad
occasions we’ve been a part of.
We spent one of our nights in Florida in a hotel. Since David’s
bedtime is 6pm, and we had a regular hotel room, Jake and I spent
6-11pm in the very tiny bathroom floor of the Holiday Inn. Like the
time we were in San Francisco, the very close quarters of the
bathroom, coupled with the whispering not to wake the boy up, makes
for some intimate conversation. We ended up chatting a lot about
life, our goals, our dreams and all the things we were thankful for.
When we’re home, Jake and I always have an unending to-do list. There
is work to be done, books/websites to read, email, cleaning, cooking,
David, laundry, are just a few things that get in the way of us-time.
When we’re away, we know we’re not going to get anything done and we
end up having the best conversations of our marriage.
Times like these make me really glad to have David around. I tend to
get lost in the little things when I’m in a bad place and forget that
the world is great. Our lives are great. David’s the best reminder of
that. His laughs, his hugs. His beautiful face. His mere existence is
a daily reminder that we’ve already achieved one of the biggest
successes of our lives.
Anyhow, this was meant to be an apology for the lack of posts. I’ve
been making an effort to post more, partly for the few who still read
me consistently (thank you), and partly for my own sanity. The last
few weeks have been hard and thus ended up with no posts. Things are
going back to normal (I hope) and such, I am hoping to be around a
bunch more.
 There are a few writers whose
books I anxiously await. As soon as they hit the shelf, I buy and
devour them instantly. Anne Tyler is one of those. Digging to
America is about two families who each adopt babies from Korea.
One family is “typical” American and the other is an immigrant family
from Iran. The parents of the adopted child are American (or
Americanized at least) whereas the grandmother, who is one of the
integral characters, is the one who came to the US from Iran. The
novel explores many of the complicated issues around what it means to
be American.
As always, it’s a fantastic read and a wonderful snippet of the
ordinary and yet incredibly complicated lives of people who live in
the United States. It made me think a lot about the life my son’s
going to have. How he will forever be half-Turkish. How that might be
interesting/exotic for him or it might be alienating/weird. How the
way he feels about himself and his place in the world/country will
say so much about what his place ends up being. That goes for all of
us: we’re so much of what we say we are. The way we see ourselves,
defines the way we become. Defines the way others see us. Defines
many of our shortcomings and strengths. The image you exude is the
image others start getting to know you with.
Before I get too off topic, Anne Tyler has written another terrific
novel and made me wish she was much more prolific.
 When I asked AskMe what books to read this
year, Kafka on the Shore was the most widely
recommended book. I figured one way I could guarantee that I would
read it was to pick it for our book club. I rallied the other women
around the idea and we picked it as our June book. So, of course, as
soon as I was done with Glass Castle, I picked it up. For some
reason, I was worried I wasn’t going to like it. I thought it would
be dense and hard to read. I thought it might tire me out. It came at
a time when other not-so-great things happened to me so I sort of
didn’t want to read it, if it was going to be hard.
But I was wrong. I was so wrong. I should have known to trust those
AskMe people, they haven’t strayed me wrong yet. I loved every minute
of Kafka on the Shore. When I read the blurb, it sounded like it was
going to be mystical and weird and not good and it was anything but.
It was weird and it was mystical, but it was a breeze to read and it
was interesting to the very last page. It did get predictable towards
the end but I loved the predictability. I loved the ideas, the
essence of the book. I couldn’t wait for the stories to intertwine. I
normally hate open-ended books but in this case, I didn’t mind it one
bit.
And I think it was a perfect pick for the book club, it will lead to
a very interesting discussion. Now that I’ve discovered him, I’m
going to have to read Murakami’s other works. I hear Hard-Boiled
Wonderland is fantastic, too.
Amidst a funeral and two coast to coast red-eyes, I attended Y Combinator‘s startup school last weekend. Stanford’s
Kresge Auditorium was packed to the brim. Every seat was filled and
the back was full of people sitting on the floor with laptops. I was
originally supposed to attend the previous evening’s event as well
but we had to fly to New York on the red eye on Thursday and flew
back Friday evening and didn’t make it into San Francisco until 9pm,
so when I showed up at Kresge, I didn’t know a soul.
Having worked as a programmer on Wall Street, I imagined the male/
female ratio would be skewed. I attended Carnegie Mellon. I worked at
an Investment Bank and I am a programmer. Being a minority as a woman
isn’t new to me. I had, however, assumed the percentage of women in
the room would be something around 10-12%. I was way off.
It was relatively hard to count because the room was so packed and
because some male hackers have long hair, making them
indistinguishable from women when you can only see them from the
back. My best count was eight. Excluding the speakers and organizers,
I counted eight women in a room of over 400 men. That’s around
2%. I’ve never been a huge women’s rights activist or even a feminist
to be honest, but this depressed me. For the last few weeks, I’ve
been asking many of my entrepreneurial friends if they knew of
technical companies started by women (where the women were the
technical individuals as well as the founder and when I mean
technical, I mean more than HTML or CSS). Some were able to name
maybe one or two and many couldn’t even think of a single one.
There are many cases where established companies are led by women.
When I was at Goldman Sachs, our CIO was a woman. I know some
fantastic women coders. There are also cases of companies started by
women. Women who are in advertising, marketing, design, fashion and
tons of other non-technical fields. But there seem to be very few
cases of technical women entrepreneurs.
Women and men are different. They live differently. They work
differently. They manage differently. They lead companies
differently. This is not to imply that all men are the same but just
to point out that there are fundamental differences in the genders
that makes their styles of starting and running companies varied. One
of the greatest things about America is that we have a lot of choices
here. Anyone can start their own company. Anyone can do anything they
truly want. This means that if I want to be an employee, I have a
large number of companies to choose from. I think having more
technical female entrepreneurs would give me, and others like me,
more options. I feel that not having those options is depressing and
unfortunate.
I don’t know what stops technical women from wanting to start their
own thing. Maybe it’s the kids (I have a lot to say on this and I’ll
save it for my next post) or the fear of instability. Or maybe it’s
the lack of balls. When Chris Sacca from Google gave his speech, he said
he’d take two questions but one had to be from a woman. The woman he
picked asked for suggestions on helping women make more effective/
forceful pitches. Hearing the question made me even more upset. There
is no inherent reason for a woman to be more unsure of herself than a
man. When I believe an idea, I am so forceful and passionate that
it’s scary. That’s how I talked my way into my graduate degree and
that’s how I was able to accomplish most of the biggest achievements
in my life. I just felt like if this is the best question this girl
can come up with, it says a lot about why women don’t do startups.
 Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle is our bookclub’s pick for May. I had already finished out April
selection (Lolita) so I figured I might as well get started on it.
The book took me three days to read. It’s the memoir of Jeannette’s
unbelievable childhood. Parts of it made me want to cry, parts of it
made me cringe. I was amazed at how intelligent both her parents
seemed and yet how little they cared about the welfare and health of
their children. The obviously did love their kids but it’s amazing
that children can be brought up this way in the US and nothing is
done about it. It’s a well-written memoir and will make you thankful
for your childhood and family.
It’s a good read for when you need to keep your life in perspective.
When I got my passport last year, Jake and I had planned to drive to
Mexico right away so I could get to use my brand new American
passport. As things turned out, we never got to go. This weekend,
looking for something to do, we decided to drive to Ensenada, The
drive from San Diego is around an hour and a half. We got on the road
as soon as David woke up (5am!) and got there early enough to get
some fantastic weather before it came pouring down.
I loved Ensenada. In so many ways, it reminded me of being home. The
dirt, the poverty, the small streets, the sweet, kind people, the
tiny candy stores. I felt completely at ease and loved every moment
of being there. I felt more at ease there then I do here in San
Diego. The one thing Ensenada had that Istanbul doesn’t was color.
The magnificent color in all the buildings delighted me and is
something we don’t really have in most of Turkey (except Bodrum,
which is all white and blue – not so colorful as Ensenada but still
gives me the same sense of loveliness). I couldn’t get enough of the
color.
Since I haven’t taken any photos (that aren’t portraits of some kind)
in such a long time, I didn’t even know where to begin. I took a
whole bunch of photos before rain came pouring down. I am not sure I
am thrilled with any of them but I still like them because theu are
my memories of the wonderful trip. I’ll post some of them over the
next few weeks.
Of course, on the way back, they didn’t ask me for anything but my
driver’s license so I didn’t get to use my spankin’ new passport. Oh
well.
When he wakes up from his morning nap, David gets a piece of string
cheese. I take the cheese out of its wrapper and he holds the cheese
in one hand and the wrapper in the other. It’s one of his favorite
foods. At least for now.
Just for the fun of it, I removed a lot of the noise from this image.
Since our house doesn’t have perfect lighting, I take most of my
indoor photos at 800ISO, thus get a lot of noise.
As promised, I will start to write about some of the points “How to
be an Adult” brings up that interested me. Here’s the first one I
want to write about:
Relationships between adults work best when each partner knows
his or her specific ways of feeling loved and tells the other about
it.
This has been one of my pet peeves for a long time. I believe that
different people have different ways of feeling loved. Some people
like jewelry or flowers, others want hugs, and others just want to be
listened to. I don’t think there’s a right way to love someone.
Similarly, there are no wrong ways to feel loved (we’re ignoring
extreme cases of abuse etc here). For a multitude of reasons, we all
develop our own definitions of love and our own ways of looking at a
relationship and feeling loved.
I think our first instinct is to love someone the way we like to be
loved. If we like attention, then we give the other person attention.
If we like flowers, then we buy presents, etc. I don’t think there’s
any harm in this, initially when we don’t know someone very well,
it’s the best option we have. But once we’ve gotten to know our
partner somewhat. loving them the way they like to be loved gives us
two major advantages. One, it shows the other person that we’re
paying attention to their wants and needs. Two, it makes it easier
since it focuses our efforts to please that person and makes them
more effective each time.
Of course, I think there’s value in recognizing when your partner is
trying to show you how much they love you, in their own way as well.
If your partner is the kind of person who never buys flowers and he
comes home with flowers one day, this shows a significant effort and
should, of course, make you happy (unless the flowers are due to some
guilt.) But knowing the ways the other person feels loved saves so
much time and effort in a relationship. It may be hard in the
beginning to make enough attention to find the ways, but you can also
ask. I think, in an honest relationship, there’s no reason to play
guessing games. If I care about you, and about making our
relationship last, I have no trouble telling you what actions or
things make me feel loved. This way you’re not wasting your time
trying things that work on you, on me. I am happy and loved and so
are you. Why would people prefer to play guessing games instead?
There’s no award for getting there on your own. The award is for
knowing and for doing the actions that make the other person feel
loved. Sure it’s nice to know that you paid attention but it’s much
nicer to know that you’re going out of your way and your personal
understanding of how to show love, just for me. Just to make sure I
am feeling loved by you. That’s all that matters. Imagine how much
smoother a relationship would be if both parties were honest about
what would make them feel loved and if both partners actually did
these? There would be no need for guessing, assuming and worrying.
I think part of being an adult is knowing yourself and not being
afraid to share that with the people you love. Knowing what you need
and asking for it. Knowing that those who really care for you will do
their best to show it, in a way you understand.
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projects for twenty twenty-six
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projects for twenty nineteen
projects for twenty eighteen
projects from twenty seventeen
monthly projects from previous years
some of my previous projects
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