Diary of a Mad Scientist

Its 2:30 am. I’m sitting in my room with one of my wonderful roommates, with laptops and the space heater on. There’s a raging Pacific storm lashing the city outside. We’re working on our websites and listening to vintage rockabilly and eating cake and being extremely productive. No, life doesnt’ suck.

It’s actually mid-day for me- my sleep schedule got quite thrown off today after pulling an all-nighter at my metal shop yesterday, and taking a couple of long naps to compensate this afternoon. I had coffee at 8 pm and started my writing workday in earnest. It’s good to have other night owls to work with though. Days like that are surreal. Last night ended with a phone call from Graydon who was up and checking email at 7 am his time and noticed that I was posting. He’s a normal person and was quite shocked to hear that I was ’still up’ from the night before.

Oh, but here in San Francisco we are far from normal, and it’s quite easy to find others as abnormal as oneself. On the other side of town, Tom’s busy at his job, a contract position involving circuit design. He chooses to do it at night quite often. His Tribe profile includes ‘avoiding an office’ as one of his goals in life (important if your career is normally done in offices). He’ll probably be working till 5 or 6 am, as will I if I don’t watch out. Exchanging emails at 4 am is amusing. Tom sets his computer’s clock ‘forward’ a few hours when mailing out work emails at that hour so they dont’ look so strange to his boss.

I’m a 24 hour person these days- the awake hours, and the work hours, can fall at any point of day or night. I don’t have a set schedule so the last few days this week i"d been at the metal shop in the morning welding, and now I’m up all night, all in the same week. But after 10 pm it obviously becomes a lot more solitary. When Tom and I started dating it was such a novelty for both of us to find another night owl to be ’social’ with. Yes, the having of no life and the having of no sleep is one of the central tenets of our nerdy relationship. Im really happy to find that there’s another productive night person at my house, too, and more importantly, to be able to do ‘work social’ gettogethers, nocturnal or daytime. I’m not much of a partier or social person these days, and the ‘work social’ is a way of getting my ‘people’ kick without having the nagging feeling like there’s something else I should be doing because the To-Do List is whipping me.

My house is an owner-builder renovation. We’ve got one room with gas heat, and it’s been really cold for the area, at least for a house with no central heating (yet). It makes me feel good to walk into the dining room (where the heat is) and see someone hard at work at the ‘home office’. Sitting around and being productive with others participating (but not interfering), is really important to me. Being around self-directed people is important to me. It all started when I started working on biodiesel projects about 6 years ago- I had a girlfriend at the time whom I absolutely adored because she was extremely focused and self-directed and could take care of herself and half the world too (she’s now a medic, which is great for the community she’s in…) We got into this great pattern one winter called ‘work date’- where a date consisted of me coming over, cooking up some sort of obscenely rich dessert, and then us spending a few hours in her room, writing or doing research or something equally productive. It was during a few weeks of extreme blizzard weather in our town, and I’ve got some fond memories of being snowed-in and emerging with some tangible work to point to, both of us…

I’ve been trying to rediscover the same dynamic in my other friendships ever since. Being around all these computer programmer geeks who work at home has made that more possible than it was when everyone I knew worked in construction and socializing pretty much meant drinking. Last year, me and Tom and another couple of guys were doing ‘Mobile Office’ social get-togethers, whereby several folks who telecommuted, headed to one nice warm room with laptops (and McMaster-Carr and Cole-Parmer, in my case) and worked ‘together’ for the afternoon. It’s almost like a social life, at least for us nerds.