Events over the last few months, and other thoughts

Once I miss one event, I feel like I can’t blog before I catch up.

Blizzcon 2011: October 21-22! I’ve been to 6/6 Blizzcons now. (The others were in 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010.) I watched esports. Lots of esports. GSL finals on Friday night, Blizzard Invitational on Saturday night. On Friday, Jaedong, Fantasy, and Bisu sat near us briefly. So did Mike Morhaime and Dustin Browder. Haha. On Friday, I played a tiny tiny bit of heart of the swarm. On Saturday, I ran around a tiny bit as a Pandaren when I saw Rokysopp working the Mists of Pandaria section. I didn’t know the singer of Foo Fighters guy was such a huge goofball (it was also a genuinely good concert. Easily the best Blizzcon concert ever). Oct. 22 was my birthday, so we went to Joe’s Crab Shack, and then to the Hilton for the bar. On Sunday, we went to koreatown on the way home and had korean bbq and bingsu.

On my sister’s birthday in early November, my family came up to visit (from the south bay) and we ate dinner together and Skyped our birthday wishes to my sister together, since she’s on the other coast. At that time, we still had the kittens, and I watched my dad pick up one of the kittens using the Cat Pacifier technique. Turns out his family had a cat when he was little, in Taiwan.

I went to my first Railsbridge in September, at Pivotal Labs. I had also started going to Women Who Code meetups. The people that do these events are really amazing. I started a small Rails study group, and we have a core of about 8 people that have gone through the Ruby Koans and the beginning of Hartl’s Rails Tutorial in the past two months.

Then there was Startup Weekend, organized in SF by Women2.0. I pitched a language-learning Kinect game and my team won! We got $1000 in amex gift cards, which we’ve already spent a majority of on buying Kinects and Xboxes for members of our team. I wrote a blog post for Women2.0 here: http://www.women2.org/words-with-bears-wins-women-2-0-startup-weekend-2011/, and you can see it through Women2.0’s portal at forbes too.

I’m definitely at a crossroads. There are lots of great ideas out there. How do you turn them into a product? Is this what I want to do? I’m excited and terrified, maybe more than I’ve ever been. I’ve run away from opportunity so long that I don’t know what to do with it when it’s here. I need help.

I read about Ilya. I never knew him, but I really look up to some people that work on Diaspora and stuff, and I know they were hit really hard by his death. 22 is too young. So now is as good a time to talk about the process of going to get professional health, right?

I have spent a lot of time being scared. It would be great if I could do things. So there’s working on being okay with failing more (via the twitter of one of our mentors at StartupWeekend who was really awesome), and there’s working on being able to do stuff despite feeling really, really sad all the time. How can anyone do stuff when you have a mysteriously low white blood cell count and you don’t know what’s going on and you’re vaguely worried, but there’s nothing to go on and maybe there isn’t even anything to worry about? and you’re watching videos and reading articles about policemen beating students and one of your favorite professors? and you don’t understand business and you think you probably belong in a commune, because you don’t want to be aggressive or have to fight for things? and the world is unfair? and how can we eat? and everything is a fight for resources? and you can’t relax and all of your dreams are nightmares about everything being ruined?

This sounds like whining. So, what is the correct course of action? Disregard distractions, acquire grounding? Acquire confidence? How? I’ll break the things I have to do into smaller chunks, to be able to do them. But I have to decide on what I want to do at all.