Yea. I don't see anything wrong with being alone when the right person is not there. Settling is not better than being alone. What I did was worse than that. I had something great and turned my back on it.
I'm sorry for your pain about what you have done. I am not inclined to judge such things in terms of "good" or "bad". I'm sorry you seem to have so much difficulty accepting love. Given your history prior to your diagnosis -- of not dating in high school and then screwing around casually in college -- I am inclined to think that your medical condition is just another excuse for your inability to accept love and not the real reason. Inability to accept love seems to have preceded your diagnosis, not followed it.
I have a form of cystic fibrosis. On CF forums, people sometimes discuss being alone, feeling like no one would love them, feeling like they would be wrong to get involved because they could die on someone and so on. I got married at age 19 and wasn't diagnosed until I was 35. So I had no such excuses. My reasons for feeling unlovable when I was younger were rooted in sexual abuse. But an awful lot of people seem to have some reason or other for feeling unlovable -- even people who marry and may appear to the outside world like they have their act together. I was married for about 22 years. It was never a happy marriage and would have ended much sooner had I not turned up unexpectedly pregnant at age 21. We loved each other (ie were "in love" at one time and continued to sincerely care) but had terrible communication problems and other issues. We divorced as a final kindness, as the only nice thing we could still do for each other.
Something I always told my sons: No one can "deserve" unconditional love. If you could deserve it, it wouldn't be unconditional. We can only try to accept it should it come into our lives.
Nearly dying taught me to live. And getting a diagnosis empowered me to get myself healthier and finally start getting my life together after a lifetime of frustration and bafflement. For me, being celibate is a practical matter while I heal from decades of infection and inadequate care. Because that is my main reason for being alone, it has been experienced from very differently than what I expected/feared for most of my life. For me, it has been freeing, healing and empowering. If I could wave a magic wand and give you piece of that, I would.
This is my response to the blog post that I wrote, Mortality and Dating (http://pathdependent.com/articles/mortality-and-dating). It was oddly popular on HN, so I'm submitting the follow up. Although the situation is not very common, I think a lot of people on here make the same mistakes for different reasons.
I'm also at GMU in the CSS program. I skimmed the PDF after it was recommended by Max or Rob -- I can't remember. Now that I can just buy it in physical form, it's in my Amazon queue.
I enjoy when Zed is appropriately flippant (irony intended). While, I don't have experience working for any teams that consider "XP, Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall," etc, to be gospel, I can see that being more than "fucking" annoying.
That being said, I can see some people who haven't tried these methodologies as immediately devaluing them. Don't do that. As long as you don't view the methodologies as a silver bullet they can teach you a thing or two. Critically playing with something helps you think about why it works and where it doesn't.
(I'm not saying Zed is saying that they are not worth learning; in fact, I don't want to put any words in his mouth, especially because he's here and will probably weigh in, even though he's known for being so reserved and unopinionated.)
In all seriousness, all of the methodologies out there start out being used by some group of programmers. At this phase they're fairly successful since it's mostly programmers writing code and very little management overhead from non-programmers.
Eventually though, all of the advocates of these methodologies realize that it's management that buys what they're selling. Management buys the books, hires the consultants, pays the billable hours, and mostly in some desperate attempt to figure out what's going on despite their lack of knowledge.
In the end, all of these methodologies end up being more about management babysitting and less about actually writing the code necessary to get product out the door. In fact, I think even something like this, even though it's a joke, would end up with the same fate if it were taken seriously.
I had something along those lines happen at a company I worked at a few years ago, where the CEO was a notorious micro-manager. In desperation, I ordered him a copy of 37signals' Getting Real.
He apparently read it over the weekend, because the following Monday he announced at the managers' meeting that he was enlightened about project management now. Of course, he just latched on to one idea out of the whole book: that the ideal project team size was 3 people.
So what did he do? He drew up a list of 20 or so ongoing company projects on the whiteboard and assigned 3 managers to each project. Since there were around 12 managers, that meant that we ended up co-managing around 5 projects each.
Agreed. Furthermore, I would say that's true of most things requiring a lot of experience
The people who come up with the methodologies initially are probably the people who have needed them the most / longest. They had experience that informed the development of the methodologies not methodologies that substituted for experience. Therefore, these methodologies are more successful given people who could figure out a similar methodology independently and could conceivably be worse than nothing for people who couldn't.
I actually started working on something like this a week or two ago called falsifiable.org. My time is limited but I've thought about the project a lot. You seem to be doing what I want anyway, so please drop me an email for an exchange of ideas.
I think catastrophes demonstrate interesting properties of human communications. All of these reports on imminent meltdown are plausible to people ignorant of the plant's design and even those who are experts on nuclear energy . The levels of distrust and recognition that there is probably noisy communications increase simultaneously.
From a sensationalist viewpoint, the plausibility and terrifying nature of the consequences are seductive, so these stories are widely read; from the expert standpoint, seeing a system with so many redundancies in such a wounded state calls into question just how many things might be going wrong.
At this point, unless your dealing directly with the reactors, your really in the dark and if your one of these people, you're focused on preventing further degredation, not managing the message. Even for organisations that do manage the message based on a team of experts (e.g. nuclear regulatory agencies) things move at such a frantic pace, things are wrong by the time you say them.
Regardless, it really does show that people like watching car crashes.
Actually, I should clarify but I don't like editing titles. I wrote WeightNudge to relieve some personal stress; it does not help other people "destress". The project I've been working on full-time suddenly became depressing, as it forced me to remember some people who died. I dropped the project for a few days and wrote this as a temporary escape.
