What I've learned so far from 6 months of marriage

Those who have been married for seven months or longer should close their browsers right now, as it will spare you a lot of the silent eye rolling that is the natural response to the "wisdom" of the ignorant. This entire blog is attached with the very real disclaimer that I'm an idiot who unfortunately enjoys blogging my thoughts.

But for all my to-be-married friends, I thought I'd compile a list of pragmatic things that would have been helpful for me to know, despite all the great advice we were given. I'm sure this post will also serve as a marker for me to look back in ten years and laugh uproariously.

Anyway, in tribute to our recent six-month anniversary, here are the top things I've learned about marriage so far, from the wife's perspective:

#1. Crying to signal to your husband that you are upset has diminishing marginal returns. I don't know what happened when we got married, but I suddenly became more emotional than when we were dating. Unexpected tears would spring to my eyes and down my face whenever anything upset me, and I felt helpless about it...but I noticed that every time this happened, my credibility as a human was increasingly undermined by about ten percent. M's response began to evolve from one of grave concern, to normal concern, to patient resignation, to a strategic decision to ignore me, and hope that whatever upset me would resolve itself. In response to his response, I have been forced to practice putting my emotions in a kind of holding pattern while I mentally figure out what my problem really is and actually communicate what I think viable solutions might be. To be honest, crying was a lot easier, but I guess the latter way is more helpful long-term.

#2. Small things will suddenly seem a bigger deal than they are. And it is my job to mentally battle them back down to size. Every dissatisfied thought, no matter how innocuous, is magnified by the "and this is for forever" afterthought. I'm talking about small, offhand comments that M makes, that I decide over the course of a day have besmirched my character, and therefore my soul, and therefore his love for me. And meanwhile, this is what M is thinking to himself: "You know what would make this day better? Spicy mustard to go with my sandwich. I love mustard."

#3. Comparing who does more for the other is a pointless game. The division of labor in our household has been a lot more clear since, you know, I quit my job and stay at home and everything, but in general, I was surprised by how easy it is to mentally compare who loves the other person more by what they do for the other person. Before marriage, I, like yourself maybe, thought that we would just co-exist, hippie-like, in a sea of love with all its easy ebb and flow. No. It turns out that I am terrible at being a hippie, and I make mental lists. I have quickly learned, however, that there is no winner of this game, only losers. The one who feels they do more will only have resentment as a prize. It's easier to just trust that M wants me to be happy and vice versa, and if I really need something, to just say it. And the more I do for him, astonishingly, the more he is naturally willing to do for me. Like shaking the spiders out of the paint tarp that I should have put away weeks ago, and left sitting on the patio, even though M hates spiders as much as I do.

#4. Introverts need a lot of space to themselves. And I mean a lot. It's not that I'm not allowed to interact with M, but he is noticeably happier if I don't try to engage him in substantive conversation during the following times: before or during his morning cup of coffee, for the first twenty to forty-five minutes after he comes home from work, immediately before bed, while he's trying to watch anything he's interested in, while he's working on a coding problem and has earphones in, while he's reading, while he's focused on taking care of a task, or when he's about to leave the house to go surf. Other than those times, I have his full attention and can chat away happily.

I've also learned M's favorite new phrase with me: "My queue is full." This means he has five problems he's working on solving, most likely related to software, and I can't give him anything new to take care of, because his memory and stress levels are stretched to capacity. I come from a very "everything requires immediate action" sales-and-recruiting background, so I view this as a learning experience in dealing with engineers.

Our carefree engagement days, before we were hardened veterans of marriage.
(Photo courtesy of Lauren Alisse Photography)

#5. It's ok to enjoy being married. I don't know why, but when M and I were first engaged, only two or so people ever actually uttered the sentence, "You will LOVE being married!" Don't get me wrong, a lot of people were happy for us and expressed a lot of warmth and love toward us. But much of the actual advice about marriage we heard and read was about how much we'd learn and grow from the pain we'd cause each other, from the horrible emotional trauma that would go toward the ripping of the romantic veil in two and really being exposed to someone who saw all our flaws; how we would be refined in the fire of marriage and rise from the ashes through Christ-like (read: superhuman levels of) forgiveness. All during engagement, I braced myself for the horrors of marriage. I prepared myself to wake up one day in a sudden vise-like grip of depression and bewilderment, to question myself and M and all of our individual and collective decisions.

Maybe it's because we aren't exactly the most super romantic supercouple in the world ("It's ok for you guys to touch each other," is something we hear a lot at social gatherings), but so far, there has been no cliff-drop of expectations. I mean, yes, we are learning how to deal with accidentally offending one another, and it's unpleasant. But so far, and I mean every day, I have enjoyed being married. I look forward to the time when M gets home from work and walks through the front door, even though I can't talk to him for another twenty to forty-five minutes. I like how obliging he is in giving me random hugs. I enjoy watching him problem-solve with a beautiful economy of deliberate decisions, and how tolerant he is of my gleeful trial-and-error methodology. He enjoys that I remove all the small annoyances from his life, like oil changes for his car, dinner, laundry, stocking toiletries. We enjoy being in the same room together, either doing our own thing, or me forcing him to watch a documentary on Steve Jobs, and then engaging in a post-documentary discussion on product innovation and patent-based lawsuits (I can't stomach violent movies, so this is the remaining option for entertainment). I like that M saves his tender looks and affectionate gestures for when we are behind closed doors.

I wouldn't say marriage has been easy, but we recognize that we don't have kids, crushing debt, health issues, or other factors contributing to real tests of relationships, and I think we have a deeper appreciation for the strength of other, much longer-married couples. I'm mostly thankful that we have had the first six months for us to get used to each other and for me to learn to buy the right mustard.

Random library book about drawing leads to subpar drawings of surfers

Now that I work from home and am able to hear my thoughts, and the echoes reverberating around my thoughts, I spend a lot of time these days at the library trying to find ways to fill the quiet with ideas. A recent choice was a book on sketching, called Drawing From Within: Unleashing Your Creative Potential. I hadn't drawn since high school, since I haven't needed homemade posters since then.

Why did I check out this thing out? I cannot explain the random decisions I make when faced with a shelf of books. I've checked out books about child psychology (not pregnant), why women in their thirties are disenchanted with the goals of feminism, the shorting of subprime mortgage loans eight years ago, life advice from Katie Couric...If I were ever arrested and my library records subpoenaed, the FBI would be quickly thrown off the trail. But I am drawn (pun intended) to something in this latest art book. Maybe it is the fluid lines of the examples. Maybe it is the way the author dismisses frustrating rules that formal art education sets, and mandates the reader to only "have fun and draw." I like simple instruction. And I like disregarding rules I'm not talented enough to follow.

I call this one, "Mick Fanning gets barreled by wave, does not fall"

So, I did as the author advised and bought a sketch pad and some pencils, with erasers. It struck me immediately as a very odd thing to do. Think about it: when was the last time you bought a pencil? And these pencils still needed to be manually sharpened, which blew my mind. Anyway, then I got to drawing one evening, while M needed alone time to watch Battlestar Galactica (I don't mean to turn him into a geek caricature, but it is just so effortless).

"Thomas Woods enjoys pleasant outing"

But since my creative vision stops at checking out library books about art, I decided to just copy things out of the Surfing Magazine that M had left lying around on the coffee table. It was quite peaceful and cathartic, and for a moment, I imagined myself indulging in the path that so many take, the one of self-discovery and non-capitalism and diving into activities purely for the sake of nurturing my inner child.

"Kolohe Andino catches air, hides face behind his arm because it is so scary"

Although now that I'm done with the sketches, I don't really know what to do with them. It's obvious they have zero commercial value, even in that least regulated of marketplaces, Etsy. My dismay at the final, non-mortgage-paying product far outweighs my enjoyment in the activity. I guess my temporary Degas has vanished in the wake of my self-discovery: you can take the girl out of capitalism, but you can't take the capitalism out of the girl.

"Balaram Stack does something weird with his legs, stays on board"

"Ozzie Wright gets vertical, realizes the wave is down there"

"Duncan Macfarlane gets barreled, presumably likes that a wall of water is about to crash over him"

Date Night with a Developer

M has a very concise and clear list of things that make him happy: family and friends, food, surfing, games, solving problems, and being right. The End.

The things that make me happy are dependent on variables that change with other variables (for example, I paddled out with M the other day, and had a lot of fun despite being eaten by the waves. Will I do it again anytime soon? Probably not). So, for the sake of not spending hours in discussion, our date nights are usually centered on things that M has thought up, and hopefully my mood cooperates.

For the record, M is really good at taking me out on dates. He finds good restaurants, he holds the car door open, he grabs the check, he makes conversation by telling me about all the interesting things that happened during his day, he asks about my day, and then he is somehow both supportive and snarky (supportively snarky?) in his commentary. He is also touchingly offended when I forget about Date Night.

A recent restaurant pick. My husband looks kind of creepy.

But if we're all being honest, I'm asking a lot for you to be happy about how fantastic another couple's dates are. So below, I give you examples of our other date nights that might make you privately glad that you are not a part of this relationship:

One day, M came home with a raging headache, but this didn't stop him from letting me read aloud Slate Magazine's fictional war of attrition between Google and Apple. Despite being curled up in pain next to me, he still laughed at Google's Operation Ghostfruit to make Apple disappear from search results and the Apple Army made up of loyalists wearing bright t-shirts in primary colors. I got to share something I thought was entertaining for both of us, and he got to lay down and not have to talk.

I don't know who is responsible for this, but M heard about a cyberpunk-themed asymmetrical two-player card game called Netrunner and bought it immediately on Amazon. And then he made me play it. One player is the Corporation and the other is the Hacker. The Corporation protects its servers with "ice" and tries to advance its agendas. The Hacker tries to break the ice and steal the Corporation's agendas or deplete the Corporation's resources. M usually wins this game because it is hard for me to think while I'm also sulking. The one time I've won, I had to "kill" the Hacker by snaring him with a faux agenda, and I find killing my husband to be an unpleasant task. It's ok around this point to feel sorry for me.

Here we are, learning about the latest start-up, Vinely, which held a wine tasting at Mogl's offices. M isn't normally much interested in wine tastings, but this one was kind of geeky. They have you rate each wine according to sweetness, texture, etc. then figure out your wine "personality" based on an algorithm and assign you a wine of the month they think you'd like, based on your personality (not surprisingly, my preferred wine is something like "Welch's Grape Juice."). M also loves Mogl's concept and talking to other developers, and I got to see my other friends from the tech/ recruiting community, so the night worked out pretty well for both of us.

What's next on the table for us? Thanks to our friend Deron, who spent half an hour selling the merits of "Sharknado" to us ("You guys, at first the movie dips way below equilibrium satisfaction, and you want to die inside, and then it takes you through a roller coaster of emotions, but then the end comes and you're like 'Whatttt!!' and it is totally worth it. Trust me."), it might be this. Let me know if you want to join us, but I won't be offended, or surprised, if you don't.

A long overdue tribute

I think it should be pretty clear by now that I have no business writing a blog on marriage, seeing as I actually have no idea what I'm talking about. To be honest, I started out writing this thing as a public way to show developers that I was married to one of them and they could therefore take their suspicion level toward me, a technical recruiter, down a notch. The blog touches occasionally on my recruiting world in technology, but mostly, like me, is off-topic and rambling. Maybe in ten years, it will be a way for me to look back and be astounded at how little I knew about marriage at the time.

ANYWAY, to get to the point: M and I owe any real past and future success of our relationship to our parents. I am not just talking about being a bratty Asian kid--which I am--with parents who offer endless and arguably enabling support. I am talking about both M and I having examples, in our parents, of people who have chosen to stay happily married through decades, through living abroad, through the ups and downs of raising a family. We are talking about embarking on life together with no internet, no Pinterest for recipes, no cellphones at the time, no LinkedIn for job hunting and professional networking, no Facebook and Instagram for vague but continuous upkeep of friendships, no automated bill payments with online accounts, no WebMD to look up medical issues. Hardships, people.

My parents didn't even know English that well when they courted in Taiwan and made their way shortly thereafter to America. Somehow they have managed to both work full-time, raise three children, put us through college, and have a thriving and loving relationship with all their grandchildren. The fact that my mother was a Chinese Literature major and managed to become a computer engineer, then work on the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas before ending up in the Silicon Valley is mind-boggling to me. She is a woman who uses her smartphone and iPad to take pictures on her business trip...of flowers ("This is outside of Madison Square Garden!"). My dad is an electrical engineer who has served in the church pretty much his whole life. He was always our steady rock of cheer and wisdom, even when I backed the car out of the driveway and smashed a side mirror, even when my brother totaled his first car (we're Asian drivers), even when I told him I was going to move to New York and work in minor league baseball. I can never catch my parents on the phone because they are always in a prayer meeting, or visiting someone from the church in the hospital, or serving someone in some capacity. Our parents have shown tremendous and unconditional love to all of us over the years, and it's not like we were awesome and easy-going kids. There must have been plenty of junctures in the road when they considered disowning us or giving us away to the Korean family down the street, and yet they are still here, willing to pick us up from the airport. They have not had an easy time of marriage and family-raising,  and yet they have always chosen us as a family over any life they may have imagined for themselves.

Both sets of parents. Guess which ones are mine, and which ones are M's!

M's parents also spent some time in Germany living on a military base, as well as experienced moves from Florida to Atlanta. Like my parents, they had to adjust to new environments and learn the ropes as they went. When I first met M's family, I was immediately struck by how loving and respectful everyone in his family is. Everyone is soft-spoken and laughs a lot, and even the smallest grandchild, who is two, has better etiquette than some people I've met. One gets the feeling, this is just how things are in their household. It is also incredible to me that M's mother is able to juggle a dozen house guests, clean sheets, rides, mealtimes with endless permutations of casseroles, gift buying and wrapping, and entertainment during the holidays, all without the help of a smartphone app (or a clueless new daughter-in-law). M's dad, as my husband tells me, held a lifelong career as an executive with Coca Cola, and it had its share of headaches. I doubt he afforded himself the luxuries of Generation X/Y'ers' complaining ways, constantly asking himself, "But is this my passion? Am I happy? Am I changing the world?" (As for me, guilty as charged). He simply saw his growing family and shouldered the responsibility of supporting them, while M's mom was both a teacher and at home to raise M and his sister. I can see M in the way his parents treat each other: I've never heard a voice raised, and M's dad still opens the car door for his mom. They are also both very resourceful and will systematically go over their options, choose the best path, and figure out a way to take care of everyone - their family, their neighbors, their church daycare, whoever. Now I know where M gets it from.

I know a lot of people who were raised in less "traditional" family structures, or whose family life was a lot less stable than it could have been. Thanks to our parents' decisions to support their families, we're aware that we've been spared a lot of heartache and hard life lessons. M and I are very new at being a married couple, and our biggest challenge so far was probably the day we couldn't agree on the layout of our new couch. We are grateful for this, but we owe our biggest gratitude for the day the hardships come, because we have in our parents a compass for which road to take.

I choose my marriage

M's birthday happened recently, and to my relief, he finally entered my decade (good-bye, cradle robbing jokes! Until I hit forty...). To celebrate, we spent the weekend in San Clemente, where he got to surf Trestles and Cottons, and many of our friends joined us to either surf or help me watch car keys on the beach. We then walked around San Clemente (the whole main street of it) with frozen drinks, before settling in for our reservations at Hapa J's, a restaurant with amazing Hawaiian food. Seriously. Amazing. I ordered poke, spam masubi, AND short ribs, and if you think that was shared with a group of others, you would be mistaken. M ordered some appropriate portion of food, which I only vaguely remember through the haze of my food coma.  We spent the night in San Clemente, had breakfast at Honey's on our way back, and continued the celebration on his actual birthday at Brett's Barbecue.

M and the boys watching Trestles and sharing a Folgers moment.
(Photo credit: Allison Rudd and her iPhone)

Some might think the weekend staycation of food and surf was my birthday gift. My real gift, however, was quitting my job this past Monday; my last day at the office was yesterday. Since we've moved to Encinitas, my commute to work has been forty minutes to an hour each way. I leave before M gets out of bed. We eat dinner after 8. The house remains largely unpacked and disorganized, because neither of us has energy to do what needs to be done. We spend less quality time together, not only due to physical time contraints but because the time I spend with M is often spent in complaining about my new commute, typical workplace pressures and aggravations that get compounded by annoyance with the commute, and then the commute again.

I love recruiting, most days. It is not only fun for me to talk to smart people who make cool things, it is extremely satisfying to put deserving people in good jobs, where they're still happy a year later when I check in on them. I've made great friends at Outsource, and I'm grateful that my boss took a chance on me and let me leverage the sales training I learned in sports over to recruiting. I've had the opportunity to learn a lot about staffing from my co-workers, to train with the incomparably knowledgeable Stacy Zapar (the Most Connected Woman on LinkedIn) on social media recruiting, and to attend cool networking events.

But...our marriage has been suffering. I miss my husband. He misses the more enjoyable, less-complaining version of me, assuming there ever was one. So my birthday gift to him was to choose him over my current job, and to have my next job allow me to work from home, to have flexibility in organizing our household, to learn how to cook for real instead of looking into EZ Bake Ovens, and, above all, to be both available to and happy with my husband (because what good is one without the other?).

His gift to me has been to be loving and supportive unconditionally, to shoulder the mortgage and bills, and to allow me to pursue something with complete freedom and flexibility. Many people never receive a gift of this magnitude, and it's not even my birthday.

I'm consciously choosing a next adventure that I'm excited about, and that allows me to continue in the skills and knowledge I've garnered as a technical recruiter. I have an idea of where this next adventure is coming from, and there are wheels in motion, but nothing is on paper yet. Until then, I'm excited to simply see M while there's still daylight and everything.

Good-bye Point Loma, hello Encinitas!

The agile life continues. Two months ago, we went to New Zealand for a week. During that week, we listed our two-bedroom townhouse for sale. When we came back, some people wanted to buy our house. Then we picked an offer, went into escrow, and spent a day shopping for three-bedroom houses in North County, closer to M's work. Then we made an offer on one of those houses. Then escrow closed on our house in Point Loma, and we moved out. Two days later, escrow closed on our North County house, and we moved in. Just like an episode of House Hunters on HGTV, but 900 hours longer. 

If this sounds very simple, it is because our realtor--and good friend--Jared Kelley of Mission Realty Group was busy negotiating with all parties behind the scenes. We were only told to keep our house clean (and even then, Jared's wife Holly came and cleaned up everything we missed when we left for NZ) and respond to our e-mails. That was pretty much all we did. Jared & Co. did literally everything else. Obviously, I'm a big fan of him, not only because he originally helped me buy my townhouse in Point Loma (and helped me mentally reject other, less re-sellable properties), sell it for more than I paid for it, then miraculously helped M and me buy the only three-bedroom property in Encinitas that we could afford, but because it is really hard to find a trustworthy person who is good at negotiating AND knows the market AND has your best interests in mind while handling your hundreds of thousands of dollars AND will sit with you at Chipotle for two hours listing all the pros and cons of what you're looking for and what you can afford.

In addition, we wanted to reiterate a big THANK YOU to the thirty or so people who unexpectedly said yes to moving our furniture and a thousand boxes out of our old house (including Jared and Holly!), and to our friend Callie for driving the U-Haul truck with the agility of a race car driver, and to our friends Mark and Russell who moved all our furniture into the new house. We are immensely grateful to know such good people with hearts of gold.

Finally, here is where I learned something new about marriage: I didn't realize when M first moved into my townhouse after we were married that he felt out-of-place. Only once we'd moved to our new home did he confess that he felt like he had moved into MY place (...but with HIS couch. Ahem.). Now, he's on Cloud 9 and actually has an opinion about furniture and layout and where to put things. This is new and obviously a lot less convenient for me, but I enjoy seeing him so happy and proud. It's one of those things that didn't seem like a big deal on paper (because marrying me is like increasing his assets! Right?!). But it was, because my home wasn't OUR home, psychologically, and I had no idea.

When we finally had everything packed up from my old townhouse, though, I felt a real sense of mourning. This was my first foray into true adulthood and responsibility, and I still felt a need to say good-bye...unlike M, whose only parting words for the place were, "Good-bye. Thank you for appreciating in value." The following are pictures from the original listing in Point Loma, as the people who first sold the home to me three years ago had much better taste in decor:

Good-bye,  living room with beautiful cherry hardwood floors and recessed tray lighting. I hope your new owner remembers to put those little cardboard thingies under her furniture legs, or else she is in for a rude awakening about the scratchability of cherry floors. 

Good-bye, beautiful dark wood cabinets, stainless steel appliances and farmhouse sink. I hope your new owner, unlike your old owner, actually knows how to use you. 

Good-bye entryway with vaulted ceilings and custom beam. I enjoyed looking at the full moon through  your skylights and pretending I was camping, instead of actually having to go camping.

Good-bye master bedroom with peek view of the bay. Thank you for letting me open your curtains every morning, observe the expanse of harbor and yachts, and remind myself why I was paying a mortgage every month. Also, thank you for your giant walk-in closet.

Good-bye, beautiful bathrooms with skylights and modern finishes. Thank you for actually outnumbering the number of bedrooms we had, so that guests could also stay over and shower comfortably.

Good-bye patio. You were gorgeous and comfortable and my favorite spot in the house. I'm sorry I forgot about you and only used you five times in almost three years. You know how busy life gets, and how annoying patio furniture is to clean.

Finally, good-bye to the best neighbors a single, scared-to-own-her-first-place girl could hope for. Thank you for letting me be Vice President of the HOA and send mass e-mails about termite inspections and addendums to the CC 'n R's. Thank you for helping me feel a part of a community of people getting stuff done for the sake of our property value. Thank you for letting me add you all on Facebook so I can keep in touch through liking your statuses.

And, for the curious, here are a few pictures of our new townhouse (also from the original listing, as we currently have no furniture, having given away all our valuable, valuable IKEA wares to a charity yard sale):

This is what M is most excited about. A garage to store his surfboards and our soon-to-be-purchased ping pong table, with which he is already challenging other players (co-workers, friends, his father-in-law, whoever). In M's mind, the ping pong table has actually been prioritized over things like a dining room table and a washer and dryer. Le sigh.

Even though the bright green was unsettling in photographs, in real life, it is actually a very cheerful and appropriate color for this house. Also, I'm lazy and don't feel like changing it.

This living room has a more spacious layout than our old living room and has led to many discussions about what formation of couch we should get. In our discussions, I also mentioned wanting to go rustic coastal with the decor, but that only seemed to bewilder M, whose main concern was the sprawlability of the would-be couch. (The old couch did come with us. It is in the garage/ man cave, and staying there). 

This patio will likely be used a lot more often than our old one, not least because it is actually downstairs and not off a second bedroom. It also has a small fountain with a stone frog in it, which I felt was important to mention.

This master bedroom is huge. M is happy to no longer be tripping on furniture in the middle of the night. I get kind of tired from walking the fifty yards between the master bath and our bed everyday (my life is so hard). It also has a balcony, which I've already designated as M's alone time space, so that I can stay downstairs and be on Pinterest uninterrupted.

Life in California, let's face it, is expensive, and we know we are very, very blessed to be able to afford a home. We are thankful to our parents for everything we've been given in life (as well as for raising us with conservative spending habits), and we hope that we will welcome our family and friends soon into our little Encinitas beach pad. Maybe to sip drinks on our patio. Maybe to play ping pong. And maybe someone can teach me how to use our new kitchen.

The Truth About Weddings

As the well-known and oft-mangled quote by Kierkegaard goes, "Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards." Or something like that. This resonates with me most when I reflect back on our wedding day.

I want the truth to be known about weddings. For those hoping to get married or planning a wedding, try to ignore the magazines, the stars in your head, your rustic-lantern-and-flower-filled-mason-jar-riddled boards. These aren't important, and the day itself is nothing like you think, as far as floating serenely around in a cloud of whimsical perfection. It is exhausting and stressful for you, and your family, and bridal party and friends who are assisting you. It's best to just accept this. What is important to pay attention to is the astonishing amount of love and support that surrounds you everyday, which is made apparent by the occasion of a wedding. It is an opportunity to thank your family and friends for being in your life. This is also good practice for showing appreciation and love for the person you will be committing yourself to for the rest of your life.

To this end, I've created another photo journal. I would have included all 100+ photos if I could be reassured that you wouldn't fall asleep, but I do want to make it clear that we appreciate every member of the family, and every friend there, and everyone who travelled from New Zealand, Germany, the Philippines, the East Coast, the South, the Bay Area...or fought the traffic coming from LA/ Orange County...just to see us get married and spend a few minutes of face time with us. We also appreciate the warm wishes and generosity of everyone who couldn't come, and the bridal shower that M's family threw from across the country, without even knowing me. 

Most of the photos below are courtesy of Lauren Alisse Photography, but the truth-telling captions are mine:

This dress cost $500 at a trunk sale. I think it was still too much money for a dress that constantly threatened to fall down around my ankles on my wedding day, even with alterations.

My sister Joanna is responsible for the way I looked that day.  I chose to eschew mascara and eye makeup, and wore my usual Walgreens-purchased Neutrogena foundation and powder. She took out her makeup bag and quietly--and heroically--reversed my decisions for me. She also helped me change out of my wedding gown at the reception, and made numerous trips back and forth to the car for miscellaneous reasons, because that's what happens during weddings.

This is Heather Molchanoff of Hot Seat Salon, styling  my sister's hair. I did not know her before my wedding day, but she must be an engineer, because she made me look like I had a ton of hair without using any fake strands (thank you to my co-worker JoAnna Hyma, for this awesome wedding gift!). Also, Heather's husband and my sister's husband have, in their early twenties, gone naked surfing with a group of mutual guy friends from East County San Diego, and this photo is the moment where we figured out how we were all connected. Yes, you read that correctly.

I like the way M's dad is looking at M's mom in this picture, even after forty years of marriage

Moms being walked down the aisle by their sons. My mom's outfit may have taken 17 question-filled e-mails with attached photos, but I'm glad she finally picked one. I think she looks beautiful. 

I'm not going to pretend to be demure: walking down the aisle (confident that your appearance has been fixed by other people) while everyone is looking at you is freaking awesome. I know it will never happen again.

I spent a lot of time smiling at everyone who was smiling at me, until I realized M was at the end of the aisle, and then I spent the rest of the time smiling at him.

Pastor Adam Wright doing an amazing job. I mean that. It's not easy to intimately portray a couple's relationship in a wedding ceremony if you haven't spent a lot of time witnessing that relationship firsthand. I have no idea what I'd say about us as a couple if I didn't know us. "They look like they pay their bills on time"? "They'll probably make cute babies"? Adam seemed to have a spooky understanding of our love for one another and our faith in God. I also felt the gravitas of our commitment to one another. Adam is really good at his job.

I didn't know at the time, but in this picture, M is both pleased that we're married, as well as close to passing out from the fever he'd been harboring since five a.m. that morning.

Combined families! Everyone was so generous and understanding and supportive, it's hard to express in one photo caption. 

This one was actually swiped from my brother's Facebook. These are his little girls, who, like all the kids in attendance, were so cute and patient during all the boring wedding stuff. 

Ditto (M's nieces and the best flower girls ever.)

This is my sister's baby. He is both adorable, and, as a carrier of the norovirus, not to be trifled with. It's ok though. We still love you very much.

This is my dad. He and my mom, as he likes to tell me, spent every day praying that I would no longer be single.  I am thirty-two. That is a lot of praying.

Russell and Casey, two of M's best friends. Without them, we'd have had no audio at the ceremony, no one to pray for and take care of M when he couldn't move from fever and coughing, and no one to act as hilarious emcees, on last-minute request. These guys are not amateurs when it comes to weddings or brotherhood. 

Every wedding needs a GoPro. Thanks, Jeremy, for your assistant photography and your GoPro handling!

Aren't my girlfriends adorbs? I stole this picture from Facebook (thanks Nicolle!). The third girl from the left is Shannon, who generously volunteered to put table numbers on birch tree slices, even as she was recovering from the norovirus that my nephew gave her two weeks prior.  The third girl from the right is Brooke, who definitely got the wool pulled over her eyes when she agreed to be my day-of coordinator and became responsible for, like, everything that happened that day. All she got in return was a lousy REI card and my eternal love and gratitude.

This is our photographer friend Lauren (picture taken from her website). I know everyone promotes their own wedding photographer, but THIS girl was not forewarned that, at a wedding with many Chinese family members, she would be competing with many Chinese family member photographers. We got to benefit from that many more pictures from everyone, while she just had the job of adapting and moving around with utmost grace and professionalism, without complaining once. Oh, and we got our pictures back in, like, a week.

Instead of speeches, we asked for marital advice from our guests, which was read aloud during the reception. Thank you to everyone who contributed. We are keeping it all in a rustic vintage box, and in case you were wondering, yes, we are holding the advice entirely responsible for keeping our marriage intact. 

We were told repeatedly that no one dances at daytime weddings. Let the record show that San Diego hippies and surfers dance anywhere, anytime.

We are so thankful for everyone in this picture (and everyone who couldn't make it). We hope you felt the expression of our profound love through eye contact and smiles and the unlimited Mai Tai's and short ribs and sincere thank you notes written without the help of that abhorrent Thank You Note Template floating around Pinterest. We don't deserve the amount of love and generosity we were shown, but we accept it gratefully.

On our way to embark on the adventure of married life. Right after this photo, we went to Walgreens to pick up more medication for M (thanks to my physician brother-in-law, who welcomed M to the family by compassionately calling in prescriptions, at the drop of a hat, on three separate occasions for M's various ailments). And that is what a true wedding is all about.

5 Ways to Keep a Software Engineer Happy

One evening, I attended a smaller Java user group. The topic, for once, was nothing technical. Instead, the group organizer stood and said, "Tonight I'd like to try something different. Tonight is going to be an open discussion about what makes us engineers feel happy and appreciated at work."

("Feed them and give them beer," I thought immediately. But as a recruiter, I've learned we're more welcome when we're quiet.)

My mental picture of a developer's ego.

Interestingly, the talk quickly turned to all the things that made the engineers in the group unhappy. One immediately mentioned clueless Project Managers who scheduled added features that were either impossible, or would take far longer than the week the development team was allotted. Another engineer talked about low-level QA work, and someone else one-upped him by mentioning data entry, at which point the entire room audibly gasped.

Even though I contributed nothing to the discussion at the time, I privately like to think I have an idea of how to make software engineers happy. My credibility is twofold: 1) I'm married to one with a pretty typical developer temperament, and I've had plenty of opportunities to make him both happy and unhappy, and 2) much of my job entails listening to the reasons good developers want to leave theirs.* Here, in my humble opinion, is my list of 5 things you can do to keep your most talented developers happy, in order of importance:

1. Make your developers feel valued. This doesn't always mean money, though a fair base salary helps (however, any engineers I've come across who ONLY value money tend to be subpar in either skills or personality. I do not know why this is.). Tell them you appreciate the work they do, sit down with them occasionally and have them explain what they're working on, show them in small ways that you care that they work for you. Maybe you think this is a blanket statement for all employees, and it probably is. But the developers I know tend to be extra-sensitive artistes who want and need to feel the love. Show it, and frequently. In their eyes, they deserve it, because they make all the stuff.

2. Give them a flexible work schedule/ let them work on interesting and challenging problems. It's well-documented that creative intellectuals who are given even a little freedom to experiment are better able to come up with useful solutions. More importantly, good developers become bored more easily. And bored developers leave.

3. When you come to a decision-making impasse, show some respect for logic and reasoning. Most good developers aren't sitting there, trying to figure out the best way to delay a release and undermine profits. They're trying to produce a solid solution as quickly as you are, but if your Lead tells you something (or someone) doesn't make sense, believe them. Or at least, listen. Or at the very least, act like you're listening. Just don't interrupt, and try not to say anything stupid in response--take it from me, the voice of experience.

4. Try to protect them from people of lesser intelligence. This goes hand-in-hand with #3, but if you hire people who aren't savvy enough to be the go-between for the dev team and the business side, you're asking for a lot of ill will in short shrift. Make sure said people are smart, that they have good mediating skills, and that they know how to communicate, because project specs will always be missing key information.

5. Feed them and give them beer. Seriously.




*For the record, my own husband is super happy with his current employer. I guess all it takes for him is working on an awesome product, in an office across the street from his favorite surf break, and a workplace kitchen stocked with bread, peanut butter, and jelly.

The Aftermath

In the wake of the Boston Marathon, as in the wake of Sandy Hook, as in the wake of 9/11, I experienced two unoriginal, knee-jerk reactions that have come to feel a little too familiar: 1) horror and disgust that so-called humans could do this to other humans and 2) gratitude for obvious and weird things.

Doesn't gratitude always feel like a requisite emotion after terrible things happen to other people? And yet, my list feels different, because it's defiant gratitude in the face of terrorists and their pressure cooker bombs. Here is the list of things I'm thankful for:

1. My family and friends, M's family and friends, M, and all of our working limbs and health and love for each other and being alive-ness.

2. That I live in America, and my fellow Americans and I are allowed to post about our outrage and grief, and we're not terrified to voice our opinions, nor too numb and weary from being oppressed.

3. My faith in Jesus.

4. My faith in heroes.

5. Coffee, sunshine, books, laughter, the smell of babies - all of the Chicken Soup for the Soul stuff. I appreciate all of it.

My nephew and niece, top of the list and symbols of humanity.

6. My job, and that I have one to go to everyday, and that I have the potential everyday to do it well.

7. QuestCrew, winners of the third season of MTV's America's Best Dance Crew, and my freedom to vote for them multiple times (some things can't be unsaid, but I'm not embarrassed).

8. My longboard, which hasn't moved from my stairwell since my third date with M. I don't enjoy surfing, but I like having the option.

9. Piers Morgan's face when Susan Boyle opens her mouth to sing for the first time. Pure, unadulterated shock never gets old.

10. The fact that someone, at some point, made Free Willy 1, 2, and 3, all of which I own, thanks to a loving father who wanted to foster my 8th grade career interest in marine biology, i.e. dolphin training.

11. Blake Shelton and Adam Levine's chemistry on The Voice.

12. Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon's myriad versions of The History of Rap.

13. The fact that someone set up a Twitter account for Sarah Vowell, and that she has 1,214 followers, without even putting up a profile picture, sending out one tweet, or following one person. True hipsters do exist.

14. My copy of American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham. I'm mostly thankful for Meacham's ability to make White House politics palatable for those of us with average IQ's. (P.S. Did you know Jackson challenged someone to a duel, and won? And lived the rest of his life with a bullet in his body? All because someone insulted his wife. Someone like that was bound to be responsible for things like the Trail of Tears. Anyway.)

15. That, when I was single, I stumbled across books on dating that made me feel better about my relatively mundane experiences. Specifically, People are Unappealing, I Don't Care about Your Band, and The Late Bloomer's Revolution.

16. That I am now married. To a man who will let me watch Wanda Sykes' stand-up comedy (because it's free on Amazon Prime) and suffer through an hour of it before realizing I fell asleep on his lap fifty minutes ago.

This list is proof to myself that humanity is capable of many things besides terror and hurting each other. Liberty, raw talent, humor, creative genius, courage, love...these things exist in abundance, and can be molded into many, many different permutations of people and things to be thankful for. And no act of terror can take that away.

-

Photo Journal of One Week in New Zealand

At the beginning of this month, we went to go visit my sister and her husband, the real, the ORIGINAL Agile couple. My sister's husband is a doctor who accepted a 12-month contract in rural Rawene, New Zealand (North Island) and my sister started her new career as a domestic engineer, looking after their one-year-old son, Donovan. Here is the family:

Baby shoes have become rather hipster and trendy.
(Photo courtesy of Lauren Alisse Photography)

This blog has gotten too wordy (I'm new at editing myself), so I'm just going to post a bunch of pictures with captions. I suppose I could have just posted an album on Facebook, but instead, we're going to be pretentious and call this a Photo Journal:

Donovan chasing bubbles on a deck in New Zealand.

View of the Hokianga Harbour from aforementioned deck (of Joanna and Dave's house).

On the ferry across the Hokianga Harbour to Ahipara. We were running late, and they had technically closed the gates on the dock already, but Joanna drove right up to the boat. Hard to deny passengers in a charging vehicle.  

View from the ferry. You can't tell, but I'm scanning for great white sharks.

Donovan safeguarding the surfboards while the rest of us wander around the ferry.

Newly brothers-in-law. Dave was an endless fount of knowledge on New Zealand's botany and could identify any species of plant around him, and don't think my husband didn't love every minute of it.

Donovan running along Shipwrecks Bay while the boys check out the surf. I drew a red circle around what's left of the ship, sticking out of the sand in the far background. You'd think a group of people would have dug the thing out with some shovels by now.

Room with a view at Ahipara.

Views from the front lawn of one of the houses we stayed at in Ahipara. How does one get one of these front lawns in San Diego?

Lobster, dropped off by the property manager of our guest house in Ahipara, a gift for no reason other than that New Zealanders are the friendliest people on earth.

My husband on sitter duty with Donovan. He's really natural with babies.

The thoroughbred farm where we stayed in Cambridge, just south of Auckland

When you get up close to the horses, you can tell they're not your usual placid trail ponies. They're super athletes behind fences who get fidgety, and if you make moves like you're gonna race them, they make moves like they'll smoke you. Well, just not this one in the picture. This one's just trying to drink her water.

Learning how to rappel underground into the Waitomo Caves. Just FYI, going down a gentle slope with a chainlink fence for footholds, in the sunshine, is not the most accurate simulation of descending 40 meters straight down into underground caverns. 

What the actual descent looks like. M had to shimmy through that hole, more or less. Highly recommended for anti-claustrophobia training.

Only my sister would be able to make a wetsuit and headlamp outfit look cute. 

After we rappelled down, we ziplined through pitch black onto a ledge, where we were asked to jump into the icy cold waters below. From our inner tubes, we floated along in the dark and gazed at glow worms along the ceilings. I'm really sad that we weren't allowed to wear GoPro's.

Me, in an accurately not-cute picture of the wetsuit and headlamp outfit.

M coming down the man-made slide in the river.

To get to this tranquil pond outside, we had to freeclimb waterfalls out through a small opening (Dave is not in this picture because he is watching his son. This particular tour discriminates against babies).

Our fearless group, just like Seal Team 6 (if Seal Team 6 shrieked at the sight of eels in cave rivers and complained about cold wetsuits and helmets ruining their hair).

It was an amazing week that we'll never forget, especially thanks to this photo journal (you're welcome, future me!). Thank you, thank you, Joanna and Dave for taking us all around and showing us a great time! We miss you already, and make sure Donovan practices saying our names when he gets around to talking. XO