Wantution

I keep hearing myself and other senior (women?) engineers say 'I don't know what I want' - not in as many words of course. I think this comes with the territory of architecting a lot of solutions and there is no one right answer - there are only tradeoffs and you get to decide for the situation at hand which ones you're willing to make. So now I can hear myself talking about tradeoffs ALL. THE. TIME. I must be so tedious to talk to. "I mean I love renting because I hated having to handle all the maintenance on a house - things happen right when you don't have time for them or the mental bandwidth to accept paying someone else. renting is great. Fire off an email and when you get home from work it's fixed!" (that seems decisive! Stop there, Alexandra.) "But, you know. I did get to put in a kitchen and floorplan that worked for me and I miss that - no apartment is quite what I would have done with the space - you know? So I think about buying just for that aspect. But the rest of it? yeek." See. Can't just have a one-sided opinion. Gotta go on and on about tradeoffs. And maybe that's not the worst conversation faux pas in the world - but it's pretty awful inside your head. Because it convinces you that you really can't make a decision and whether you acknowledge it or not you now have this clutter of unmade decisions hanging over your head, taking up cognitive overhead every fucking day.

A senior engineer asked me in our meeting last week what to do about being told she needed to 'set the agenda' for her team - local and wider. And I asked her if she had nobody telling her what to do what she would do. And she told me she'd do the thing that's been on their roadmap for years that just got deprioritized. And I tried to be nice but my brain was screaming 'you have seen countless incidents and have your ear to the ground in this group and all you can think of is the thing other people decided was important 3 years ago? After some prodding in that direction she mentioned another path. I wrote them both in out notes doc but left feeling unsatisfied and kinda like I had looked in a mirror and not liked what I saw. Luckily I'd find out this week she had presented this other idea she had in the forward looking meeting and everybody loved it and wanted her to lead it up....so she is good at setting an agenda with prodding and permission. And we all know those two things are like training wheels - you ditch them pretty quick and stay upright on that bike.

The next day I decided last minute to join a course on financial moxie. In it I heard a bunch of women say 'I know my vision and my goals but I don't have the discipline.' and I thought - I'm exactly the inverse! I know where every cent is and how it got there and all my predictions based on past averages....but I have no idea what I want for my future besides... this? but more?

Luckily the coach made us write down intentions and mine was to add a new piece to my morning routine. I didn't know what to add yet but I wanted something.

On Sunday night I decided to finish the sentence "I want..." as many times as I like (but at least once!) every morning. On Monday I started and it was rocky. I felt weird and awkward. But I was trying.

Also on Monday I hosted a little get unstuck session for the women engineers on the East Coast. We talked about burnout in the senior engineers. And we were so lucky one of the junior engineers felt comfortable sharing her struggle around moving up the ladder. She said 'In order to get promoted I feel like I can't work on what I want to work on and there's this hustle to get to the next level and then I feel like once I do that I then have to hustle to the next level and then maybe I can do things I want to do?" We of course consoled her that she can push back against the rush - with examples of those who have and the timelines, etc. But it rang the bell in my head. I had just heard senior engineers complain of burnout - of not really being interested in their work anymore, in losing the joy and curiosity and intrinsic motivation in their jobs. And now I was almost pushing the rewind button and this junior engineer was playing the ghost of engineer's past. Her exact plight was one we had gone through - despite us assuring her she didn't have to feel that way. We had felt that way. We had tamped down our intuitions and our desires to do certain kinds of work or take chances/ opportunities in order to move through the ladder. And now here we are with our bright shiny promotions behind us and feeling like husks that don't what we want. But we're senior so we must know what we want and it must be the thing we're doing....so why does that thing make us unhappy? ah because we're 'burned out'. So I advised all of the junior engineers: Stop putting down your own intuition of what you want. Bring those things to your manager - try to get them scheduled! If nothing else write them down so you can remember. Don't do what we did.

And so I continued on my journey to writing what I wanted.

And unexpected things came out of me. I had recently been thinking about how timesaving it was that I'd traded my hour long pilates classes for 15 minute morning routines. But when 'I want' was on the page my fingers typed out 'to keep doing hour long workouts'. 

And conflicting things came out of me. One morning I was feeling frustrated with my partner and I wrote 'I want to tell him what to do' and then the next line I immediately wrote 'I want to not tell him what to do." - internal struggle was afoot. But I let go of my frustration - it obviously wasn't bringing me peace or clarity. And 4 days later I don't even remember what it was about. Phew - glad I avoided that relationship quicksand.

That wasn't the only change I made from the list. One day I wrote that I wanted to read more again (over the weekend I went to NJ and got through 2 full books on the train. Damn it felt good). So one night I was settling into the couch and grabbed the remote, bracing myself to do the Netflix infinite scroll. And suddenly I was like wait...why am I going to scroll for 20 minutes then reluctantly watch a shitty show? I'll just go read. This week I have finished another 2 books and I don't miss the unwatched streaming at all.

Plus, it reminded me to celebrate. One day a consultant I had booked texted to say she could move my appointment up a month. I was excited! The next day as I went to write my wants I saw that the last entry from the previous day said I wanted to have that appointment sooner. Maybe the law of attraction really is a thing!...Or at least I took a moment to be extra grateful that I was getting what I wanted.

Anyway - I don't think this just happens to women senior engineers. We all can get a bit lost. And especially in covid when we may have finally had enough boredom to get to the top of that 'someday' list only to find checking off the someday ideals we made decades ago leaves us with the 'is this it?' feeling. We need to reconnect with what we want. I believe  all skills and traits are practiceable - even things like creativity. So why would wanting be any different? I want to want things again. I want to know what I want. So every day I try to let the little wants bubble to the surface, hoping soon I'll want bigger and bigger things. But in the meantime, just 6 days had proved this habit worth keeping for at least a bit longer!

EncRoaching Doom

 So - the unthinkable has happened.

I live with roaches. If I had one aim in keeping a steady job it was to never have to live with these horrid things.

Today's conversation:

Boyfriend: Well the cat swatted at a moth last night.

Me: Great. We just have to wait for it to be 85º out for them to start flying for the cats to care. Have you ever seen a roach fly?

Boyfriend: yeah

Me: No. Have you ever SEEN a roach fly?

Boyfriend: I've heard about it.

Me: well let me tell you about it. It's trauma. Just trauma. I hope we're dead by then.

Boyfriend: ....I don't.

And he says that like I'm the crazy one for wanting my life to end before another roach can fly in my general direction. I have memories from growing up in Texas of roaches - big ass roaches- flying around me. This is how I know I couldn't join the armed services. I remember two roaches flying as my death being imminent, as my body being dive bombed. You'd think since I grew up with roaches this wouldn't be an issue but that somehow has made it worse. [scary voice] here little girl. this is what you shall fear for your whole life. It's gross but all things considered only wants to eat the crumbs you leave behind. Fear it as if it has a gun. Run screaming from rooms; pull your legs in and cry in front of colleagues; scream "don't touch me" at your partner as you rock yourself. it's all a rational response..... I'm considering EMDR.

Let's take it back. Since I left my lonely glass box in the sky and returned from following my manifest destiny with my big G last year I've hunkered down with my boyfriend in sublet after sublet. At first it was those 'first time living together' jitters. Short term meant we wouldn't be saddled with a lease. But then it was kinda fun and we wanted to experiment with neighborhoods in NYC. We tried LES then Williamsburg and now we're in Park Slope. It's beautiful and the neighborhood feel is unbeatable and we've got such a deal from the family we're renting from that has two cats. We're looking after them - you know putting out food and water, trapping them and unceremoniously cutting off any hair smeared in liquid shit, laughing at them when they do dumb stuff. normal cat-owner stuff.

But this is my first time living on the first floor. In a building that's so old the pipes make noises. So I did not anticipate what came next. I was innocently reclining on the couch when my boyfriend ever so softly goes uh oh as he opens the dishwasher. I'm instantly up - my friends a soft uh oh from a man is far worse than a "OH FUCK BABE THIS IS BAD". A soft uh oh is him knowing the illusion of a safe world is crashing down and not wanting his partner to know because the panic will commence. To my credit I did not let all of my shit hit the fan at once when he responded to my 'What!?" with "I think there was a roach in the dishwasher." (let's take a second: EW. just EW.) I said "you THINK? what does that mean?" "there was a roach in the dishwasher."

For fuck's sake. Have I not suffered enough in life? But no. fresh hell hath come and it was just getting started. Over the next few days I saw a small running mustache (that's a centipede) in the sink. Then there was a roach exoskeleton in the dishwasher then another dishwasher roach. At this point I wasn't going near the dishwasher - they seemed to be contained to that box. As long as I didn't open it I'd be okay. Right? RIGHT??

Then one night I was done with my shower and styling my hair and realized I needed more leave in than I had put in. I returned to the fridge (I buy some curl products that are amazing but they need to be refrigerated) where I had put back the products when I thought I was done. I opened the door and leaned inside, my holding the end of my hair in my left hand, reaching my right hand to the product in the door to get a pump. Once the pump of product was in my hand I started to lean right and up, out of the way of the fridge door to swing back into place and so my head was closer to the sink. There was a roach skittering (that's the only word to describe what was happening) - he was running along the edge of the countertop precariously looking like he might fall off the edge at any moment and he was running directly at my face.

I attempted to turn the other way (narrowly avoiding the swinging fridge door) and run but there was a couch in my way. So in a fit of athleticism* I vaulted over the couch. Note that at this point I'm still naked - my body is towel dry but my hair is somewhere between damp and wet. Also at this point my left hand still is holding the ends of my hair (in a twist) and my right hand now has a pump of product - expensive product- in it. So this vault is as follows: I take a step to the back of the couch, place my right elbow on it and use that as my lever to vault my body up and onto the couch. I then assemble myself in the fetal position with my wrists wrapped around my shins, hair in one hand (it's like really long) and product in the other hand.

*I say a fit of athleticism like it's a super human feat...I'm actually quite strong and I work out every day and can do some cool stuff with my body but I wasn't a jock in high school so I have this persistent view of myself as a couch potato? When will I re-identify? nobody knows.

My boyfriend runs in and yells 'what?' and in my brain I'm like 'obviously there's a bug; do you have a brain?!' He apparently thought from my scream I had cut myself or something? Even though just to be clear I had apparently screamed 'WHY IS IT SO HUGE?'....I guess that could have been about a cut? I really wonder what our neighbors think happened. 

And no matter how racked with fear I was I heard him say 'do you want me to kill it?' and my brain fired up anger on several cylinders. Of course I want you to kill it. What are we, gonna make it into another pet and teach it fetch? NO. that thing tried to assault me (I think. I'm fairly sure it was going to end my life.) KILL IT. Fear still had my facial muscles though so I squeaked out some kind of affirmative mix of yes and uh huh.

I would find out later that he asked because he grew up in a catch and release type household. He wanted my preference. He asked for the preference of a woman who was rocking in the fetal position crying tears of fear. But my veganism ain't based on a belief in the sanctity of bug life. Murder that thing that dares come for me. Murder its whole family.

He would later describe what happened next as "I felt its body break" which I find comforting and revolting. I'm passing the gratuitous visual onto you. Congratulations.

As any normal person would I then decided it was time for 2 things

1) I would no longer go into the kitchen. It was a crime scene. So now my boyfriend had to bring me 3 meals a day and 4 water bottles a day - and clean all the dishes. We would also cook with me giving instructions from afar and him doing the work. It's actually kinda great and he feels like he's taking care of me. At least he liked it when it first started. Ah, novelty.

2) We needed roach poison. I contacted the people who really live here and they had seen roaches but been too afraid for the cats to put poison in the house. I knew I could put it out of reach of the cats (in/under cabinets). So off I went.

I immediately purchased the squeezey tube of delicious poison they eat and then they wait to die until they are back at the nest and then the other roaches eat the dead body and they all die. heh heh heh. When we're at the store the guy recommends the little square puck things that have the poison in them. I prefer the tube because it's so much more poison and I want alllll the bodies to hit the floor. But I also read online that cleaning this stuff up is gross so I decide we're going to put it on slips of paper for easy cleanup once the infestation is gone (keep dreaming naive one).

Okay we need to pause here to talk about how great my boyfriend is. This is a man with a tremendous tolerance of trash/dirt in his space but right after the roach sightings he decided to start washing dishes before the dishwasher and cleaning the sink out frequently. Something about a man cleaning is very sexy. So we have the squeezey tube and he comes up with the idea to use receipts to put the poison on - that way the poison can go deep between cabinet cracks. So smart. Then he executed this like a pro while I watched/ cowered from the couch. Also the receipts are great for this because as far as headlines tell me they may be covered with a toxic substance. So EAT THAT roaches. No seriously - eat it. And put your way too many and too gross feet all over that toxic paper.

After the day of poisoning there is one more roach in the dishwasher sighting the next day. Then.... nothing. After 2 weeks I occasionally open the fridge door (from a safe distance). After another week I venture deeper into the kitchen to get myself dishes and utensils. I cook my first meal, then another on the stove. Things are good.

Until one morning I come out from the bathroom and see one of those wretched vermin just lounging in front of the fridge. I scream, waking my still slumbering boyfriend. In his haze he stumbles over I point and scream fridge (from the safety of the couch). Unfortunately it gets away as my boyfriend tries to smash it. He diligently gets another receipt, poisons it, and sticks it under the fridge. Even in half sleep! No 'I'll deal with it later' - what a man!

So now we're back to him delivering all my food and water. Ugh. And this morning I screamed to wake him up again as I saw a roach running on the floor between the stationary bike and the weight bench - that's a whole different room from the kitchen!! Again he finds it but it gets away into cracks between walls. diabolical.  Dia-fucking-bolical I say. So now I oscillate between 'omg they're everywhere and spreading' and the story I've come up with which is that this roach is the same one - having escaped twice. He's the last egg that hatched after everybody else was dead from eating each other. Once he hatched he somehow didn't eat the poisoned bodies and is now on a journey to find sustenance and a new family of roaches. It's a nice story, right? Almost certainly a impossible and definitely a delusion but it helps me not freak out and hope for my own death. So there's that.

We have a little over 2 more months in this apartment and the roaches are taking one room at a time from me. It's the end. Send reinforcements before I'm devoured.

Tinkering, metaphorically

 My physically inventive mind has been on for a while so I've like to get some stuff off of it.

The hand held scale - sexy name pending

This lovely vehicle comes out of making huge 'salads' from a buffet and wanting to know my macros as I'm going....or at least know them in general?

Okay so part 1: a glove or something that weighs the bowl I'm holding onto. The way you usually hold bowls as you fill them - with your thumb holding the top inner edge into your palm/fingers to grip it.

part 2 is a system by which I can tell the contraption that I'm changing the type of thing going into the bowl. Perhaps by voice? Probably by voice. but also a dope scanner would be amazing if the Google salad bars would deign to install scanners. I feel like they have the calorie info somewhere...

So it works like this. I hold the bowl and I tell the input what item I'm about to put in. then as I drop it into my bowl it associates the new weight (until the next item or I mark it complete) with that item. repeat until my salad is a masterpiece. Then I can get a readout (or I can see the progress on a little screen - maybe on my phone or my watch -my watch also has a microphone so it might work well for that as well) of the calories and macros - maybe even micros that I can keep for myself or enter in an app.

I've considered how to put a scale in a glove - maybe the tab wearable keyboard would work?

Another thing I've been thinking about for years:

The extensions maker.

Okay hear me out - tons of "real human hair" is brush hair. AKA very poor women sell the hair on their brush for pennies. (at least this is how it's been told to me) Now the reason that's usually considered low quality hair is not because it fell out of its own accord. It's because the cuticle is no longer all going the same way - thus the hairs will grab each other like velcro and tangle mercilessly - not something you want for hair additions. So what they do is take these hairs and run them through harsh chemicals that strip the cuticle off completely. Now the cuticle gives you the shine so then they run these naked hairs through a thick silicone coating bath to plate them with shiny plastic. The reason the hair is human but cheap is that that coating will wear off after several washings and you'll be left with dull, thin, not great feeling hair. They really should just sell special conditioners for it that rebuild the silicone coating but alas.

It seems that all we have to do to make brush hair into remy hair (hair that all goes the same direction) is to make a machine that could line them all up the same way. sidebar: I thought I could manually do this - just find the root and align the hairs. It took me an hour for 2 days worth of hairfall....so obviously not the best expenditure of time.

So now my idea comes in. I want a machine that can take hairs and align them in the same direction.

baseline: can take clean and separated hairs

step up: can take tangled brush hair or shower wall hair and align it

best: can align the hair and then sort it by length - now we're cooking with gas!

I really don't know how to do this tbh. It would need to detangle without harming the hair. Now note - I don't have time limits. I don't care if it takes a few days to detangle! So maybe there's a rubik's cube type answer where if you have robot phalanges that just keep doing the same movements eventually all tangles are worked out? some of those vibrate-y brushes seem to be well liked but they are on hair that's already align and not in a big ball. hmm

this probably takes experimenting. and a machine learning algorithm.

then once hairs are untangled the machine needs to align them - it needs to either detect where the root is (some hairs won't have this but I think most that are of any good length will) or detect the direction of the cuticle. Then it needs to have a way to move the hair into the right direction

another nice to have is to recognize the point near the end at which the hair has too much damage to survive well and chop it off before that point - also detecting single strand knots.

organize the hair by length - this is probably pretty simple for straight hair with lasers but for curly hair we may need to quickly wrap the hair around 2 pages to measure the distance.

lastly - storing the hair - it should all be stored one direction and bunched with hairs of similar length.

at the end you can take away a tress of hair to have made into extensions or a wig or sold.

while I'm at it I'd also like a contraption to braid my hair but that may need a whole robotics lab.

She works hard for the money

 Yes, Donna. My thoughts exactly.

I have a fear of spending - or really the thought of having spent money on something that didn't actually make me happy - the opportunity cost wounds me. Just cuts me to my quick.

Opportunity cost is the operative word (phrase?) there. What if I do it wrong? What if I don't maximize my earnings? I'll feel like I failed myself!

What's maximizing? It's not being a maxinista (yes, tj maxx - of course I am a maxinista and sometimes I guess that plays into the feeling of having maxinized). It's having gotten the best of something - usually in my case involving the least cost for the best combination of maxed out requirements.

But as I've aged (to the ancient 32) I've realized that maximizing is not something you can actually do. There's always a better option that you just didn't know about and worse - the other options start to decay the moment you don't take them so if you decide to wait and look for a while and then decide to go back - you've gotten a worse deal than if you'd just grabbed that one earlier. It's really a trap. Not to mention maximizing takes a fuck ton of time. The best you can do is to feel like you've maximized. I guess even better would be to just turn yourself into a satisfiser but even the thought of just taking the first option that meets enough of your desires hurts me.

SO how do you feel like you've maximized? Beats me, kid. I mean - I rarely buy anything and then look lovingly at my 6 figure savings account....and then feel bad because why the hell am I only earning a couple bucks a month in interest when I should be inflating with our out of control stock market?! So do I feel like I'm winning? errrrr. At least I do feel good about my income. I feel like I'm pretty much comfortable there....I mean if I 20x my income maybe I could buy a huge skyline penthouse and stop caring about money. But the investing side. bad, alexandra; bad!

And here we are - we're going to talk through my inability to invest properly. Because I make lists and I berate myself but when I finally get to it there's like an internal ripcord that parachutes me outta there.

Let's take for instance that I have a very weird mixture of monies. 1/3 diversified portfolios (mainly stocks not bonds), 1/3 previous current employer stock, 1/3 cash. This should probably be different?

You're thinking of diversifying your account? NEVAAAAAAR screams the ripcord....well it really just bombards me with all kinds of confusing thoughts. Like maybe every financial planner ever is wrong because having a third of your income in your current/past employers has actually been your greatest ROI - way better than your diversified portfolios! So why sell the best ROIs? also selling is weird and incurs fees (yeah - that's a big one for my brain. we'll come back to it.)

wait why isn't there a thing that you put in your portfolio and it tells you how much tax you'd pay to sell it all off.....that's like legit a great service. I can only assume the costs outweigh the benefits.

Maybe you should move out most of that cash into investments? GOD FORBID!! What if there's a crash tomorrow and you lose it all?! ignore the fact that you lose every year to inflation. that's not important. and ignore that we've been saying the same thing for 5+ years now. Both times you've moved out 20k you've lost over 10% of it in the 3 months after you did that so cash it is! Better yet just buy some gold bricks and build them into a remote property's foundation to keep them safe. yes. my precious.

Okay... maybe we should learn about the megabackdoorroth again (I'm not sure where the spaces go in those words so I'm making it one word). we have to read AGAIN?! But once I though it wasn't for me....then I thought it was. I've done so much learning already - why don't I have a strong opinion? must not be important. won't have a huge impact on my retirement. and why do I tie so much up in retirement anyway? who knows if the world will be a swirling pile of dung on fire by then. Let's just continue to pile up money for things I never buy.

Let's just buy one stock. Just one! okay...I think I can do that. seems fine. how much harm could it do?

Great! Ok you like buying your principles - let's find some stocks that will give you peace of mind. Oh there's that VEGN one! but....is amazon on there? I don't like that. it's not necessarily not vegan so like...that'd be bad. And technically google serves meat in the cafes....maybe I shouldn't feel good about having my own company's stock. AM I A HYPOCRITE?! is there something I could buy and feel good about?!?! it's too much.

And buying one company's stock seems like a big hassle. I want to buy and hold and indexes are better for that. But like....which company do I totally jive with and think will be a good ROI?

Dude - maybe we could get more young people and more young women to invest if they could see celebrity stock accounts. Like that social holdings app. wonder why that hasn't blown up.

Alright - well maybe you could give stock to charity? you already give to charities each year and giving stock means selling it with fewer tax implications.....I think? but I don't know and it seems difficult to even figure out how to do so! do I pay an acat fee? I think my 401k account allows it but I'm obviously not taking it from my 401k! so that doesn't help.

WHAT IF I GET TAXED WEIRD?! the only strategy is buy and hold forever - or at least until I understand the implications of selling....yeah I mean forever.

FINE - how about we just paper trade? yeah!....now what's the best app for that. Which features do I need in order to make it feel real so I don't have a bad transition to the real world? Well now this is an ordeal of research I can put off forever.

And that is how you maximize investing! Did I say maximize? I meant put yourself at a disadvantage and ruin your feelings of self-worth. Yay!....At least I do my taxes on time usually.

Kinda Sorta Cooking...but mostly deals and winging it

 So over the years I have slowly realized I don't make food the way other people do.

Apparently most people learn how to make several recipes and then that's it. They know the stuff to buy and they are comfortable with it. They use a cookbook for other things and make it once - maybe twice. At least this is what I've gleaned by shopping with people and watching them cook with a book open.

But my cooking style has been informed greatly by two pervasive parts of my personality: the love of winging it and the love of things on sale.

Now the sale part my grandmother has the audacity to be angry about. She's always like "Alexandra! You are so cheap! You've got money! Spend it!" But I learned my love of sales from that woman. Like damn. Does she not remember my childhood? She shopped at the super rich people thrift stores so I could look like an expensive toddler (a strange oxymoron that people for some reason aspire to) for the price of 'we think we're rich'. I mean some of my earliest memories are of my mom and aunts chorusing "SALE!!" as they run into stores - which she molded them to do! So yeah. How dare she get pissy with me about my frugality. 

....But ok. I do have a minor variant on the sale gene. Theirs is more like Oooo a TEN THOUSAND dollar coat is marked down to thirty five hundred dollars. It'd be absurd not to get it. That's $6500 in savings (yes shopping math is not just a joke in my family). Mine is more like anything that costs over $2.50 is a rip off and it wounds me. Yes, NYC Subway - I'm looking at you. It's only worth $2.75 if i'm on the train for more than 45 minutes. When you get me to my destination in just a few minutes exactly how I want, it isn't worth full price! (yeah, I see the cognitive dissonance but I've been trying to get rid of it for a while. It has roots right in the middle of my life. I ground the stump down as best I could but I still trip over it a lot.)

My mother once tried to make me see the light. You see she sells kitchens - a notoriously spendy thing already - and high end ones at that. So she thinks she can amortize her way out of a paper bag (yes a miele dishwasher is 8 million dollars but if you run it nightly for the next 5 years it'll only cost you a cent a day to never have to do dishes again). Well not this paper bag, lady! I was talking about shoes - something I always think I'm willing to pay more for because I love them - but turns out that's a lie the stump has propagated so I'll trip over it more. Dick stump. Anyway back to the story. She realizes I only buy $40 shoes and this outrages my mother who drops $100 on shoes she will literally never wear every week. So she tries the amortization trick when I'm viscerally horrified by the prospect of spending $300 on ONE PAIR of shoes. Allow me to paraphrase:

You know, your aunt has a pair of magnificent Givenchy* knee high boots she bought like 8 years ago. She wears them at least 3x a week in the winter and they are still in good condition because they're such high quality. You should invest in a pair like that.

* I really don't remember the brand - maybe it was Gucci or Prada or whatever. I don't even know if Givenchy makes boots but I know they make perfume. But Ji-vaghn-schay is super fun to say so you're welcome.

Now in my mother's head she's like an Olympic gymnast having just stuck the landing with both feet. Little does she know much as I would like to engage with her nicely (you know listen enthusiastically, affirmingly and then conveniently forget she said anything) that tree I cut down and ground into a stump - well the trunk got made into a baseball bat and the voice in my head only has it and a desire to never let my mother get on the uneven bars again.

So it comes out that these shoes are the unacceptable price of like 5k. First of all - fuck's sake. Second, I'm like a shark in the water now. Oh yeah. So mom. Okay. Let's say the shoes last 15 years and that they somehow never need maintenance. Okay. Now the cost of the boots is like $333 a year. (5k/15 for those of you amateur mathematicians following along). Now let's say boot weather in Chicago is just under 2/3 of the year or roughly 33 weeks. So that's $10 a week. So about $3 a wear. (At this point she's like SEEE NOT BAD ALEXANDRA!! INVESTMENTS AMORTIZE).

Now you can imagine that voice in my head - let's call him frigal because he's both frigid and frugal - is making that grinchy smile where his whole face sinks into the grin in the ugliest way. This is too easy.

So I say uh-huh. uh-huh. $3 a wear. impressive. yeah. Well my favorite pair of beige heels - I bought them 5 years ago and I wear them probably 2x a week every week over 50 degrees in NYC. Let's say that's May to October for argument's sake - or like 30 weeks a year. They're not too much longer for this world and I did have them resoled a couple years back. So $40 to buy and $40 for a resole. So $80 for 300 wears if I tossed them tomorrow. That's 27 cents a wear. Kinda feels like the shoes pay me at this point, huh?

Mmm. Victory is so sweet that frigal doesn't even mind when she furiously tells me I'm the worst and invents a reason to get off the phone. I ignore the voice that says what about the other $40 pair you bought that fell apart the first time you wore them so much that you just threw them away.

Okay you get the picture on my strange form of frugality (we don't have time to go into its intersection with my conservationism/sustainability. Quite complicated really).

Now onto my perverse love of winging it. I do a fair amount of public speaking and I gotta tell you preparing a speech feels great but actually giving a speech is the pits - why? because in your head (okay maybe just my head) it's like this defining moment where the world realizes your glory and they cheer and body surf you to supreme ruler of the universe. This is never what happens. Even if people are nice after you severely fuck up or tell you this is exactly what they needed and you changed their life - you still feel like IF I COULD JUST HAVE GOTTEN EVERY WORD IN ORDER. Thus - I prefer panels. On a panel I can shine - be funny and charismatic and have no expectations of what I'll say - and there are 4 other people who will be talking and giving me the space between jokes to think of more stuff. YES. Oh winging it how I love you so. It doesn't just apply to extempore speaking. - everything feels like you nailed it (or did at least better than could have been expected given you made that shit up on the spot). And people awe over it. Great feeling. Highly suggest. Winging it is my form of spontaneity - and what other people might call 'creativity'. We'll come back to this.

Meanwhile back at the grocery store - I'm the absolute worst shopper. I walk along most aisles (okay I don't need to go into the soda, chips, and candy aisle. Those are not my preferred way to waste calories). I inspect every price tag and deeply consider what is a good deal. Not what I need - what is a good deal. Do you see that gene coming back? If I have to spend more than 2.50 for it then it has to be a deal.

tangent: last week I saw bags of onions were on sale 2 for $3. So I grabbed 2 bags and handed them to my lovely assistant to stow properly before something in my brain was like "THIS ISN'T RIGHT" and sure enough it was a trick. The tiny bagged onions were $1.50 per pound and the big old monstrosities I love were $1/lb. I properly snatched the bags back and loaded up so I could live that #bigonionlife. Oh, yeah.

So as I shop I see things and I'm like these two things can go together! I think? probably. I'll find a way. My surefire thing is to buy a bunch of fake meats then think about what starches go with those fake meats then work in a ton of veggies. Honestly though since stores aren't laid out this way it means I get a lot of cardio when I grocery shop. I know all the list makers are horrified. Especially since they're like lists make you stay on budget! and I'm like my frugality is not budget based - it's about feeling like I got a win. Budgeting is the long game. This is about going to the cash register with a bursting cart and having it be under $100. HA take that, suckers!

So I get home with this random mishmash of things. And I'm tired. But I've learned this lesson in the past. shopping day and cooking days don't align. So I usually buy myself something pre-made and heat that up after I put everything away.

Now we have all the foods and the next day the cooking is ON. So my personal philosophy is that if I have to cook for 30 mins to make a meal or 2 I may as well cook for 2 hours and make 18 portions. Other people call this meal prepping. I have been calling this consolidating the pain of cooking for over a decade.

Remember that 'creativity' I mentioned before? It's just taking inspiration and combining it into something kinda new. Basically what I'm saying is I don't follow recipes - I look up a ton of different recipes by googling random ingredients together then looking at the images tab. If it looks delicious then I open the recipe and try to gauge how many of the necessary ingredients I have or could figure a way around. I skim it through to understand the order that things go into pots then find the next interesting picture and do the same thing. I do this until my brain says "I've had enough of looking at food" or "Oh I got this." You'd think the latter bodes better but winging it is winging it. The chance it will be good is pretty much the same.

I should also mention that I'm usually just cooking for myself so the stakes are low. And one pot meals are everything to me

Here are some of the things that have come out of my brain recently...I'd give you the stuff from the past but I honestly can't remember all the things I've randomly cooked. Easy come, easy go. Also most things I make are somewhere between a slop and a mush. But they do taste good. Feel free to add nooch to any of these. Hell yeah.

Vaguely Irish, mostly potatoes - some interesting (read: lazy) mixture of colcannon and coddle:

Take a 5lb bag of potatoes and a 2 lb bag of carrots. wash and cut them into 1.5 inch chunks (leave as much skin as you like). Also rough chop a very big yellow onion. 1 pack of tofurky sausage, half coined. and the leaves of probably 2 bunches of kale - any one will do.

now I've done this two ways:

A) sautee the onions in a deep pot and then pile in the starches and cover with water, boil and keep doing so until most water is gone/absorbed, add in the sausage and keep cooking until it starts to loose its shape a bit

B) dump starches into boiling water and let get fork tender. meanwhile saute the onions and sausage separately and add them in to the starches once they are in that waterlogged but not swimming state. The water should be cooking off

Now either way: the kale. you'll want to make into quite small pieces - like 1/3 of an oreo. and quickly pan fry it so it wilts. then dump it into the big pot and stir for your life.

You can add in some vegan butter while the starches are hot if you like - and of course salt/pepper to taste.

makes like 6 servings

The next one is minorly mexican mush.

I sauteed a chopped onion with the thinly chopped kale stems leftover from another meal. Simultaneously I was boiling up some red/yellow lentils. Then I took my cauliflower and thin sliced the florets (I eat the stems while cooking since they're so sweet - or I store them to make some crunch in salads/ as snacks). saute the cauli and add in some TJ's soyrizo (completely unwrapped so it crumbles). Add it all together and, season with cumin/ paprika/ chili and top it with sour cream, maybe serve it over lettuce or as a taco filling. makes about 5 servings

Bigass Bean stew:

saute a big onion then add (previously soaked) mixed bean soup - 2 packs and cover with water. while it's boiling small chop your veggies - really anything but your starches should go in first (carrots, potatoes, sweet potatoes, rutabaga, rice, quinoa) then fresh non-leafy veggies (squashes, brocc, cauli, brussels) then frozen veggies then (5 mins to the end) leafy veggies (kale, spinach). really just cook until desired result is achieved. and lastly - vinegar! It makes every bean or lentil stew better. Trust me. If you're new to it try seasoned rice vinegar, else balsamic will do. I even tried the balsamic mustard once - really complemented the flavor profile. (I'm not sure people who make slop are allowed to say flavor profile but nobody's arrested me yet) Servings will change drastically depending on what you add - but last time I made it like 10 servings came out.

One unmoving pot pasta:

I hate when they say one pot but you boil the pasta first then put it the side and make the dish. I'm not moving a pot filled with boiling water. No. I reject your loophole.

This is a favorite easy crowd pleaser. decide which veggies and protein you want. Make that. For this we'll assume I'm using tj's meatballs (2 packs) and frozen veggie foursome (3 packs) - I'd saute a big onion then toss in the balls - let them sear a bit then toss in the veggies. cook for a bit then toss in the canned (bpa-free!) tomatoes (one large crushed with basil and another chunky tomato sauce) and 1.5-2 of those cans of water. let it boil then toss in 24 oz of pasta - I like brown rice or veggie pasta as it takes overcooking better and this process is finicky. stir it under the water as best you can and close the lid. halfway through stir again to make sure all of them are submerged and the stuff at the bottom isn't sticking. top with a packet of your favorite vegan cheese and close the lid again. once done open the lid and stir the cheese in. makes like 11 servings.

Poshmark

 Hello Poshmark!

I noticed you have openings for product in core experience. And I thought that was fitting because core experience is killing me as a user. It is actively dissuading me from buying things.

So I decided to write this little thing about low hanging fruit. To be clear - I don't fancy myself a PM. I even oppose this kind of let's build every feature that falls out of my brain mentality I'm about to espouse here. But your product has SO much opportunity that I think you can afford to hold off on digging into metrics until a few of these are implemented - since they will make your customers lives so much easier.

Who am I? I love clothing. I especially love shoes. Unfortunately as a vegan who doesn't use Amazon and used to buy her 5" stilettos there exclusively I was scared every time I got a scuff....until I signed up for Poshmark. Now I'm swimming in people's cast offs. This is especially good since I try to keep my purchases of first-hand (non-consumptive) items to under $300 a year.

Kinds of purchases I want to make:

1. Clothes that wear out but I know I want more of/ basics I'll always be looking for. (I know the size, brand. When something fitting hits my threshold I buy. sometimes I like things in advance if they aren't low enough to hit my trigger but if need arises I could go for. If there were a way to know similar items from other brands it'd be helpful.)
2. Interesting pieces (think a great thrifting find, a unique piece, aspirational ward-robing)
3. Things from ads I saw (the same as number one applies here)
4. Non- clothes products (gifts, etc that I may need spur of moment and decide to check craigslist/ fb marketplace for)

I should be a fish in a barrel. So why haven't I bought more?

Shipping. It grinds my gears to pay $7 every time. And only pay less if it comes out of the pocket of the seller. I get it. USPS ain't free. But it still irks me. I know you can't make shipping free....but what if you could ease the burden? You could...

1. Have a PoshPrem member ship where like Prime the buyers can pay a yearly fee to get free (or reduced priced) shipping on all orders. I would pay $100 yearly to get $1 shipping.
2. Make it easier for me to find bundles!! How?
1. In my likes - have a tab for proposed bundles. That's all the items by one seller. So I can see where I could get a bunch of items with combined shipping.
2. Have a symbol on item cards on the search page of sellers that I have liked other items of (this is a harder engineering challenge for performance).
3. Allow me to search for multiples by one seller because sometimes I'm looking for a bunch of basics at the lowest cost.
1. ie a listing for 3 express camisoles at $6 is better for me than a listing for one cami at $4. Allowing sellers to list that it's more than one item in a listing is useful
2. Finding a seller that has 6 listings for old navy soft v-necks - that way I can bundle and get lower shipping plus a bulk discount.
4. Show me sellers that have listings for items on more than one of my saved searches - maybe in my proposed bundles? (saved searches shown below)
1. also if this could work across likes + saved search items that'd be cool
3. Allow me to search for members in a certain radius of me that allow pickup. This may be trickier for privacy and pickup coordination.

Finding and Cataloging the options. I'm a maximizer not a satisficer. I want to find the things I want - and I want to monitor for them incoming. Because I want the very best option.

1. Boolean Search: people use all kinds of words to describe similar things. Let's say I want a shimmery skirt. Well of course I nav to women's skirts and my size. But then I have so many words: Shimmery, Sparkly, Metallic, Sequin, Glitter, Foil, Silver, Gold, Beaded. So now I have to make 9 searches which may have a lot of overlap. It's exhausting. the OR would make this easy. I do still need the AND to work at the same time (ex: I want a shimmery tulle skirt)
2. Saved searches that show me new results (see streeteasy) - so I can see what's new since I was last looking for this item. How? I make a search (enter parameters, sort doesn't matter so much) and then label it. How would I interact with it?
1. I could subscribe to emails daily or weekly about new items in this search.
2. I could navigate back to Poshmark and select my saved search to see what has been added since I was looking. I only want to see the delta (or at least have a demarcation of new since last time)
3. Sift through my likes better. I need to be able to compare similar items I've liked when I want to decide to purchase
1. The regular search bar available on my likes page
2.  Folders for grouping of items
1. Some kind of linking of items that are the same item (usually I'd buy the cheaper one but what if the more expensive one can be bundled thus bringing down the cost or the seller offers me a private discount?)
2. Also allow my saved searches to be linked to the likes folders. IE: if I like something from saved search A it goes into the like folder attached to that saved search. I'd like to have multiple searches attached to a like folder (see the example from boolean search)

Fit - if it's not something I already own how do I know it'll fit? I think the thing to do here is socialization - help poshers from both sides to understand how to measure. I know measuring my body doesn't work for me; I lay out clothing I already like the fit of and measure that. That's worked well for me. Also having pictures of the clothing on a real person has helped me know if it'll fit me.

Socialization - Shopping is a social activity for so many people. I want to be able to find my IRL friends on Poshmark and see what they're looking at - talk to them about it, maybe even buy it for them. During the early pandemic I made a decision as Maid of Honor (when we couldn't go get fitted for bridesmaids' dresses but we thought the wedding would still happen) that all of us would buy a specific brand and color dress off Poshmark. It was such a hassle to send links to each other over email and text - if we could have been part of a Poshmark group and seen what each other were buying in advance that'd been nice.

Clutter - It's hard to sift through everything. But adding in clutter? That just makes me numb to the stuff I may actually want and be able to buy.

1. How do I unsubscribe from parties? It feels like one of my old acquaintances is selling me some pyramid scheme beauty thing. I tried to block the Poshmark editor. didn't work. It just adds clutter to my newsfeed. I don't care about some rando's opinion. If I can have a Poshmark party with my friends I'm into it.
2. Tabs in my likes of unavailable items vs available. This is pretty self explanatory - if you're using my likes to make a profile for me to be able to suggest what I like in the future then I want to keep it liked but if it's sold I don't want it to clutter my decision making space. Maybe this would be solved by having search function on my likes.
3. Lots of items are not really there - I try to look at the date last updated/ or comment dates by the OP but several times I've ordered and then radio silence from the seller until Poshmark refunds me. Do something to make sure the sellers are still monitoring and have the items they have for sale.

Lastly, here's pie in the sky what ifs:

Upload my Pinterest folders about clothes and see what pictures for items are similar on Poshmark - maybe my dream items are just waiting around the corner. (reverse image search)

The app sees what I liked prior and finds similar items over time using predictive analytics.

Also using those image processing to tell sellers when they've taken a bad photo of an item (or at least which photo should be the front image (a dating site did this at one point by swapping the default image and measuring the number of interactions)

Fusion Melted Plastic Chandelier P1

So for the third Chandelier in my room I have a conundrum. My other fixtures are so dark. The plastic, thought translucent, really mutes the light. And this third light is the main source of light in my room for getting dressed and seeing the room; I've gotten used to the absurd brightness of 3 bare bulbs. So it just cannot be so dark. Let's take a step back before we face that dilemma:

I was walking through Ikea's warehouse very shortly after Christmas of 2015 when I saw ornaments were marked down to almost nothing. I saw some ornaments that looks like crystal chandelier pieces that had been painted. I immediately wanted them. But I'd need so many for my project! Luckily they were marked from $7 for a pack of 8 kinds to 99 cents! So naturally I bought 32 packs of them in gold. I then took them all out of their plastic packaging, organized them by shape and shoved them into grocery bags for storage...18 months of storage.



Shopping list ($74):
32 packs of 8 Vintermys Gold ornaments in 7 shapes (see above)
3 large purple swirl bowls 9 small purple swirl bowls
6 tall purple flared bowls
9 small purple flared bowls
6 large purple flared bowls
Of course: a heat gun. Maybe a glue gun, too.


So going back to our light intensity conundrum. My other lamps are plastic almost all the way around the bulb. I decided maybe this time I could let more light through by making the chandelier only be melted plastic on certain sides, the lovely gold pieces hanging on the other sides, distracting from the bulbs within without blocking so much light. I also considered buying clear plastic and interspersing it with the purple - but I like the more saturated effect for my room's Arabian Nights theme.

So for months and months I've delayed the project because I wasn't sure how to design it. This is a big step up for me - utilizing the melted plastic AND the ornaments together - it's not something that's easy to find and duplicate from the internet. Chihuly seems never to have had a crystal phase. Gah!

I decided my design would be a circle (oval) or large open purple pieces at the top along the ceiling. A point of small bud-like pieces at the bottom would be connected to the top by multiple levels of hanging gold pieces on circles, cascading down from the top to the point.

First I started just melting as some of this plastic I've never melted before - I wanted to see how it'd behave under the heat.
 
Once I had melted down all the large pieces I made a lump (with old jeans) in my drop cloth to mold the top oval part around.

The overlap was difficult - these new blue purple pieces did NOT want to stick to each other or the other redder purple plastic. Ugh - it look forever and a lot of finger burns to make these pieces stick together.

I left it like that - still not sure how I wanted it to look. My Artist's block was stubborn and when I run at that wall, it has maybe shaken but never crumbled. So I left it for 2 months all over my bedroom floor to basically shame myself into finishing the art.

Then one night It was dim in my room and I missed my depth perception. And I kicked the piece. It cracked - leaving jagged edges. I felt something break inside of me. Dammit. It can't be fixed. and then the next day I hit it with my foot again - more damage. Eventually it all broke down and I felt like - ugh! I just need to put it all together and make an organic piece of my soul. Whatever comes out I'll cover it in the gold stuff and get it done. Somehow I'll make it work. I'll let it stream from my somewhere and allow it to be. Worst thing that happens? I throw it out and stay in my current situation. Or I just use the gold pieces. Whatever. It will work. Here goes nothing...