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