Long Distance == Distant Hope?

There’s this dood. I’ve known him since March of this year – met him through my best friend at SXSW (I’m sure you’ve heard this story before).

We chatted – he showed me how to eat a banana “properly”, I told him that he scared the shit out of me when he was yielding a big knife at a party and it wasn’t a good way to meet girls, and other normal stuff like that.  Ultimately we bonded over failed marriages as our divorces were within a month of each other and we were married for about the same amount of time and are the same age if you can believe it. (Well I can now after discovering that it’s pretty common to date fellow divorcees).  We were really just friends to begin with because I was actually at South By with someone else but that’s a whole other post and a half.

Anyway, we IM’d, texted, ate drank, the usual. After May when we did a roadtrip together we decided to make things a bit more official.  Neither of us like labels but it seemed that we didn’t want to be dating anyone else so what the heck.  I think that the nomenclature was “more than like.” And yes, because I know you are wondering, we are out of high school.

So here we are 4 months later and I still dig him. Last text message from him indicates he feels the same.  Problem is that we don’t live in the same city.  He’s in LA and I’m in SF.  I thought it would be perfect because LA and SF aren’t very far apart and I would have lots of time to do my own thing and not feel all clausterphobic.  The problem is that when we are together it’s 24×7 and I’m terrible at doing “that” (hence my divorce?) and when we are apart I feel very disconnected despite being tethered virtually so to speak.  I have no intention of moving to LA, I just moved to SF and LOVE IT and think LA is nice to visit but not to live.  He is super in love with LA and has publicy despised SF.  Not great combos.

Over this past week I have had a similar conversation with three other people  and not one person has said it’s easy to do the long distance thing and even gave me a big sigh and look of sadness.  One couple is separated by an ocean and have been doing it for over a year. One guy just met a girl in Las Vegas and isn’t sure what to do next because he’s in SF.  And another gal told me that the limit on LD relationships is 4 months max.  I do know of a great story of friends that dated for a long time between Seattle and Los Angeles and she made the big move up to Seattle.  I haven’t checked in on them lately but I am sure it is bliss.

I should mention that me and my dood see each other at least once per month.  He does more of the traveling to see me because his schedule is more flexible. In fact we did the math to determine the max time apart and it came out to 12 days and we’ve been sticking to that give or take a few days.

I can’t complain about the effort that he is putting in, just the opposite, but I can’t say I don’t get frustrated when I’m out with other couples and am the odd wheel, or I want to go to a movie and would love to just call my dood and hang out.  Heck – just cuddling on the couch.

We decided to see where we are at in December when we take a trip together.  I’m pretty bad though, I have big moments of angst and impatience so it is going to be a real trial for me to go 4 more months without complaining or throwing my hands up.  I mean, there are lots of “fish in the sea” right?  How do I know that I should stick it out?

Now I’m at the point where I want to hear some good stories about it actually working out and the happily ever afters and all that.  My roommate told me to stop thinking about it so much but that’s just not me. I’m a thinker, and a doer and right now I can think a lot but not a lot I can do.

So, is there hope for a long distance relationship?

Filed under: life , dating, long distance relationship

Is Divorce to be Expected in your 30s?

I’m not part of any divorce groups or really advertise that I myself am divorced, but for some reason around 30% of the people I interact with lately – both new and old – are divorced within the last year or in the process of .  All of them are in my age group – 30s, and most were with their spouse for more than 5 years. I have found this to be almost unbelievable at times and I’m wondering what the deal is.

These fellow divorcees aren’t acquaintenances either, some include my roommate, the dood I’m dating, close friends in Seattle, San Francisco, Vancouver.  It’s gotten to the point that I’m surprised when someone that I haven’t seen for a long time tells me they are still with their spouse as opposed to not.

It’s both good and bad to be surrounded by people with similar circumstances to me.  Good in that I can talk to others about what I’m going through and they are a wonderful, empathetic support system.  Bad in that I am constantly reminded of my situation because the topic of conversation typically shifts to the latest drama with the ex.

What I really want to touch on here is this – if 30% of my friends are separated or divorced and in their 30s, what is the total number of people in the US or beyond?  It has to be staggering.  Is this a case of getting married too early…ie in our 20s?  Is it a case of independence and liberation and more options because of the Internet?  Are people less willing to “settle” these days?

I don’t have the answers but I am definitely going to explore this topic more and would love to get any feedback.

Namaste

Filed under: life , 30 something, divorce, epidemic

Post Mortem: SF Week Two, Topspin Week One

I just finished week two in San Francisco and week one at Topspin Media and and I thought I would summarize what went down.

This is round two for me living in San Francisco and things are a tad easier this time. Granted the first time I was also moving from a far-away country (Canadia) and there was a lot of process involved – thankfully this time I got to skip all the red tape.  Also lucky for me I have friends in SF like Angela Baxley that took me in so that I had plenty of time to find a place to live.

I had big plans to relax and take things easy during my first week in the City by the Bay because I needed to mentally disengage from the Borg and get prepared for switching gears to a totally different environment.  That was the plan but I hate feeling unsettled so I went gang bangers trying to find an apartment and a roommate.  At first I wanted 1 bedroom and live solo, but the pocketbook didn’t agree.  I still own a house in Seattle that I pay a mortgage on and the idea of living paycheck to paycheck didn’t excite me too much so the logical conclusion was to pool my money with some poor sap and get a two bedroom.

After posting an ad on Craigslist and  using my friend network, I came up with quite a few roomie options.  BTW: I highly recommend casting a wide net when looking for a roommate and/or an apartment. Add a status on Facebook, Tweet a couple of times, send emails to friends, post an ad on CL, and attend a Roommate meetup.  I met up with two different girls that already had apartments, but I felt uncomfortable moving into someone else’s place because I would always feel like a guest, so I decided to find a roomie with a similar budget and requirements and then look for a place together.  I found my new roomie, Eva through Craigslist, or rather she found me through my ad that she responded to.  We decided to meet while looking at a couple of apartments so we could get a feel for what the other likes and chat at the same time.  We pretty much instantly had a connection and lots of similarities including age, the love for the outdoors, and exes.

Our criteria included a budget of $1600/each, near enough so I could walk to work in Potrero, parking for Eva’s car, and would accept Funston and her cat.  We looked at some amazing places and then came across a place in the Mission that we both fell in love with right away.  It’s the upper floor of a house that is fully gated and has both a frontyard, backyard, and a driveway.  It is amazing.  We didn’t think we had a chance in hell of getting it because there were a lot of applicants, so we decided to keep looking.  At one of the places we looked at we met a guy named Dave that was looking for a roommate so we decided to try and look for a 3 bedroom place with him   The three of us looked at some places together but while out viewing, Eva and I found out we got our dream place in the Mission and we just had to accept it.

As of the 15th of August I will be a resident of the Mission.  I have lived in the Haight and Potrero Hill previously so this is a great new experience.  I can’t wait to move all of my belongings from Seattle and settle in.  I know that Funston really needs to have a home because he has been quite stressed with all the traveling and living in strange places.

It was a huge relief to get an apartment the day before I started at Topspin Media and I think it made it a heck of a lot easier to focus right away.  My first day started exceptionally well because I walked to work in the sunshine.  I had my iPod blaring a hip hop mix, my sneakers on and pretty much beamed from ear to ear for the entire 15 minute walk.  When I arrived at the Topspin office my desk was ready for me and I already had my Macbook Pro because I had picked it up a week earlier.  I met a couple peeps that were already in the office and did some more setup on my laptop.  I navigated around the web centric document management system (very cool that everything is in a wiki) and tried to setup Entourage against Gmail.  (If anyone knows a good way of getting the Calendar to sync, please let me know).  I participated in a video teleconference (VTC) with the peeps in Santa Monica and was comforted when I found out other companies besides Microsoft have a crappy VTC experience – is there any reliable hardware/software out there????

After I spent a couple of days getting a lay for the land, I felt comfortable enough to start putting a program management plan together.  The good news about working in software, specifically the web since ‘95, is that its very easy to get up to speed with any sort of software being being built and recommend a process to manage the resources and get things shipped.

Some of the differences that aren’t good or bad, just different from working at Microsoft and my other previous jobs include:  working together in a big open workspace and hearing everything that is going on which can lead to getting involved in everything and anything that may or may not be work related.  The flipside of that is knowing pretty much everything going on and not having to repeat conversations.  I like it better than being closed up in my office at Microsoft as I like the collaborative feel of an open floor plan.  For real-time communication between San Francisco and Santa Monica, Topspin uses IRC and I can’t believe how much better it is to communicate than e-mail or even IM.  I was planning on writing a post about Chatterous because I was using it almost the same way for BarCampSeattle and with my Social Productivity team at Microsoft and I highly recommend both it and IRC for collaborating with remote associates.  The Colloquy client is really easy to use and you can also have private conversations if need be.  The last thing would be working with way less resources than I’m used to for building similar services but for some reason the same work gets cranked out in less time.  This is a mystery to me that I’m baffled by and will definitely get to the bottom of.  I know that large organizations like Microsoft have overhead and more dependencies between software components, but it is quite staggering.

I’m really excited about all the musicians that are already using Topspin including David Byrne and Brian Eno’s new “Everything That Happens Today” release and all the others in the pipeline.  I really look forward to meeting some of the artists because it was obviously a motivator for me to take the job.

To sum things up, I can’t be happier about moving to San Francisco and I’m ecstatic about working at Topspin.

Namaste

Filed under: life , first week on the job, life, postmortem, San Francisco, summary, topspin