I had a great day yesterday. I worked with my hands. I drove a truck around. I did some lab work. I took a shower and wore a blazer. I met new people. I sang Karoake. I had great conversations. I went to bed.

In my quest of self discovery, I realized a few things. In terms of productivity, I am good at getting things started but terrible at completing them. Thinking back, the few times i did well, I had to use a particle method. I started projects with  a flurry of planning, setting up and selling the plan. I then automated everything that followed by delegating all the tasks to others. I then spent the rest of the time building relationships while doing general oversight, fixing any problems that arose.

I also realized that when people interfere with my plans, i get quite frustrated and lose motivation. The rule for me is if you interfere with my plans, be ready to do most of the work in fulfilling that plan. Maybe, if someone is trying to poke into my business, i should ask the person if they are willing to carry most if not all the burden. If the answer is yes, then I will listen to them. If no, then I will tell them to run as fast as they can from me 'cos I am about to do something terrible to them. The problem is that I can't do this with my boss 'cos I am afraid that he will view me as a bad worker. However though, I must be real with him and forget about societal rules. I must level with him as he is about to interfere that unless he is willing to carry out everything himself then he should leave me alone. Tell him to just encourage me and make sure i have everything I need to succeed. No wonder some folk see me as lazy. The have just been killing my motivation.

I also discovered yesterday that being organized was boring. When things go smoothly and like clockwork, all the little fires go out. This leaves me with nothing to entertain myself with. I therefore seems that I must really be interested in the end goal to be able to enjoy something. Either that, or make it so disorganized and spend my time putting out fires (problem solving) to entertain myself. Too much of this though and I get overly stressed.

The question now is how do i automate my work. It means i must always have some other intelligence next to me; be it human or computerised. Automate everything right from the beginning. The question then is what do i do with the rest of my time without looking lazy. Oh, i know it, Learn! I must think about this somemore. Maybe i will spend the rest of the day thinking about it.

Work now is super boring. I have 3 interesting projects, but i am not really interested in any of them. I dont feel in charge of any of them and I dont think any of my good ideas will or even can be implemented. I guess I will just look for things to be automated. Keep coming up with good ideas and chill the rest of the day since I dont really care for the end result.

Kwasi
2013

After staying up till wee hours of the morning on Tuesday/Wednesday, I went to bed early last night. By early, I mean 2:30am. I was working till 1:30am. Sucks. As such, I woke up earlyish and gave a nod to Benjamin Franklin. He coined the phrase "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise". Because I went to bed earlyish and woke up earlyish, I definitely felt healthy, wise and somewhat wealthy :).

I picked up my swim stuff and jumped into the pool in my apartment complex. Afterwards I soaked myself in the hot-tub for a while to let the stress of work ease away. Looking around I observed the trees around me. One of them had a rich variation of vividly green leaves mixed with deep brown ones. The tree next to it had bright green leaves intershot with golden colored ones. All around me, the trees were changing colors. Looked like death to me. huh! But no, the trees weren't dying. Fall has arrived early. Too early, you say, I agree. We are still a month away from fall season and I am not quite ready to end my endless summer days. I am not ready. Unquestionably not ready. I love summer and I am not ready for fall.

As I dealt with my issue of not being ready to start checking out the fall fashions, I started thinking about the problem of not being ready. I realized that a I missed out on a lot of good things in life simply because I was not ready. For instance, I have been blessed with good girlfriends over the past few years. However, I am still not married. My first relationship did not work out because I was dating a girl 3 years older who was looking for someone to take care of her. She quickly realized that a boy that just graduated from a nice sheltered university has no idea of how to take care of himself more or less take care of someone else. Yep, you guessed it, I dated her because I might have been looking for someone to be my mum. Haha! Nevertheless, she was a great girl and I would have been lucky to marry her. My second girlfriend as much better at taking care of me. It was perfect except she wanted to get married quickly and yours truly was operating on a 10 year plan. Sigh, she would have made a great wife. My third relationship was longer and harder. We got along great and undoubtedly had a connection. I am not quite sure what happened there. Thinking back, I believe she was in a place where she need a lot of love and support to help her discover herself. Having very little experience in helping others emotionally, i failed to recognize this did my best to help her with career and other non-emotional stuff. She was a great gal and would have been a fun wife. But alas, I was not ready. 

By now, you get the picture. If you don't, then I guess you are not ready :). The issue of readiness is not something I have really considered deeply. Being the explorer type, I am always willing the jump into something and figure things out. But one thing i admire about the manager types, is how much effort they put into getting ready for a project. A lot of times, they come across and stodgy, slow and boring. But they tend not to start things unless they are ready. My coworker, Shaibu is like that. He is slow to warmup but he is a good person to have around when he is ready. One talent he has, is the ability to resist being pressured. I, on the otherhand, will give you a quick yes or no answer. Its very efficient and straightforward being a quick decider. Life is way more fun that way. 

Belatedly, I am realizing that at times, I have been to hasty in saying no. Sometimes the best answer is "give me a while to consider it", "I am not ready to start yet" or even just "maybe". This  gives you the time to prepare and consider pros and cons and alternatives. I have said no to several things instead of saying "I am not ready, but please give me sometime and I soon will be. The people who love me would have been happy to give me the time i needed to prepare. 

A lot of times, people pressure you because of the selfishness that exists in all of us. Once we are ready to do something, we assume the other person should be ready too. Neglecting the fact we have had time to consider the issue, we push other people to embark on a grand adventure with us. Its actually a great way to maintain control over a situation. If you are the only one ready in a certain situation, its very easy to have the upper-hand. I bet bosses use this to their advantage (mine surely does). In our need to feel selfish and superior, we rush people around and keep them off balance. I am certainly guilty. I am blessed with the ability to think and analyze things quickly. I use this on my boss all the time. He then pays me back by withholding information from me so I can't out analyze him.  I love my relationship with my boss :), well at least the conflict loving part of me does.

 For people I am not in conflict with, one way i show love to them is give them what they want even when I am not ready to do that. This tends to have some unintended consequences. For instance, because of my lack of preparation, I am not able to give 100% of what they expected. Also, I slowly grow resentful because i feel they don't appreciate the valuable gift that I sacrificed for them. Because I never had the EQ to understand this, many a burgeoning relationship or opportunity has met an early death. I will obviously be considering the issue of readiness closely the next few days and will share what I learn. Enjoy the last days of summer, I know I will :). I love summer. Autumn, please stay away.  At least until I am ready for you.

august 22, 2013

August, 2013
Playing tourist


Last week, I got to play tourist. Where did I go, you ask. Nowhere, I mean right here. I toured the bay area. And I am happy to report that it never gets old. Even though I have been here for 12 years the sights always seem fresh to me

I played tourist with Ezra and Chuks. Chuks was visiting from Ethiopia and Ezra was getting ready to go back home to Ethiopia as well. Since it was Ezra's last week, we decided to make this week a full one.

Our whirlwind week started on Saturday, when we went to Santa Cruz beach. We took a grill and made some hotdogs on the beach. Jennifer Lin and her friend brought awesome salad which really went well with hotdogs. After dinner, we enjoyed some drinks and setup a bonfire. Because of the scarcity of fire rings, we shared our bonfire with a bunch of kids from Iran and Germany. It was mad fun. Despite the fire, Chuks got cold and went to the car. After 30 minutes, Ezra and I joined him and went home.

On Monday, we went to Monterey. We checked out the 17 mile drive and downtown monterey. The natural beauty of Monterey area stunned me. Combined with the joy that comes from hanging out with old friends, it made the trip awesome. It reminded me of the time that I came here with Anne, Wibka and Melissa. That was a really fun time too. We had originally planned to have dinner in there at a restaurant I love called Il vecchio. However, because I had to go into work later that evening we decided to cut our trip short and return to mountain view.

The next day, we drove around stanford and walked through the quad. Chuks and Ezra were inspired. Chuks tried his hardest to appear uninterested but I could tell he wanted to come here for school. It will be great if he came here for post grad. There is no place like stanford. Visiting stanford inspired me. I immediately went to work where all my inspiration was killed. Sigh! I think I am going to need a new job soon.

I woke up at 12:35pm feeling very tired and sleepy. Working the evening shift is definetely wrecking havoc on me for sure. Moving lethargically, I got ready for work. I grabbed a quick lunch while listening to Ezra go on and on about the similarities between the ethiopian government and the Chinese one. Sometimes I think this guy is communist. (j/k).

Work was largely uneventful except when I told Chuck (my boss) and Senyo that I could solve a problem they were having. I said that I could make two small marks that were extremely close to each other.  To be specific, i had to make two marks that were separated by 1/5 of a millimeter in order to find a 2 micron line that was supposed to run through them. Looking back, that was a very bold thing to say considering how difficult it is to make marks that were so close to each other without using a microscope. Chuck and Senyo were pretty sure that I was going to be fail the challenge. I could tell that they couldn't wait to test my results. Luckily, my eyes stayed faithful and lo and behold we saw the seam line running through the two marks after we examined it through our ultra-powerful microscope. I  noticed that Senyo and my boss both wanted me to succeed and also wanted me to fail. People are so competitive. It doesn't makes sense to me. If only they realized that all I wanted to do was to impress them since I consider them to much more experienced engineers, I hope they are happy and feel honored.

I slipped out of work early and got home around 9:00pm. I went swimming which was great. Slipping through the water in near darkness felt surreal, strange and exhilarating. Since it was so late, the pool area was largely deserted. By 9:45pm, I was alone. I spent 15 minutes enjoying the solitude. I slipped into my soul self and tried to enjoy the privacy and silence. Surprisingly, it proved difficult to empty my mind and be at peace. However, I succeeded after 10 minutes. I have to say that solitude is great for relaxing my mind and softening my heart. I will try it more sometime. I will end my post with an african proverb.

"Though I am not edible," says the vulture, "yet I nurse my eggs in the branches of a high tree because man is hard to be trusted."
-A Ghanaian proverb

Yesterday, while clearing files off my old computer, I came across a poem I wrote. It is a love poem and I feel like I am destroying my reputation. But alas, got to keep it real. Enjoy and tell me what you think about it.

To me

To me
You are a little bird singing in the morning
That awakens the heart with purpose
And enjoins with my soul in praising its maker

To me
You are the desert flower in heat of day
That calls the passing traveler
To pause and say a prayer for his beloved

Aye, that you might see your own beauty
Reflected in the oasis pond
Dressed in the finest of garments

-Kwasi
2007

This week has been awesome. I am smoothly settling into my new place. I am getting along well with my roomies though I barely see them at home. For instance, I see Cory more often elsewhere than at home. I had coffee with Soji again but this time my car didn't get stolen. Instead, we discussed his Phd research with is very similar to a project I am working on. Praise God for dropping him into my lap. In the midst of our technical talks, he told me about a sermon he heard at MPPC about Ash wednesday, which is today by the way. Ash wednesday is especially celebrated in the catholic church as a day of atonement. It also coincides with the first day Jesus went into the desert for 40 days to be tempted by the Devil. When the priest uses the ashes to make a cross on your head, he intones "From dust you were made, from dust you will return". As I was telling Leah T. the other day, in a 100 years from now, or for sure a 1000 years, everything we do or accomplish will have turned to dust. Very little we do on earth is really more than ashes in the long run. Even our righteousness (if its self-righteousness) will be worth nothing. Ash wednesday reminds me not to take my life too seriously because all turns to dust at the end. But it does remind me to take God very seriously. This is why the day is set aside for atonement. As I get older, I see more and more how messed up I really am. Even worse, I realise that due to the selfishness in this world, Its hard to be truly loving without being prepared to lose everything. He is showing me that without Him, I really don't have any hope. I thought I was a good person because I didn't chase money, women or drugs. I thought I was good because I didnt cheat (except in games ;), steal or intentionally harm others. I thought my good church boy behavior will get me into heaven. But now I realise just how bad I am. The things I used to look up to; education, church community (I thought the world of church people), people's approval, my sense of righteousness, were all idols and are now ashes in my mouth. All of them have brought me so much pain and trouble because they blocked me from the true source of all happiness which is God. My trust in Education lead me to become prideful and a workaholic and made me feel like a failure when i burnt out. My belief in the lie that church people were or should be perfect prevented me from truly connecting with people at point of their need. My need to make others happy lead me to me neglecting to take care of myself. And my pursuit of righteousness led to self righteousness which made it difficult for me to authentic and to forgive others.
In short, I aspired to good things and those good things became bad. All I really have left is my relationship with God. Everything else I have is suspect. I have no idea whether it will turn to good or bad. But this i know for sure, it will turn into ashes. Oh Lord, I give you my everything, please ransform it for eternal purposes. Happy Ash wednesday everyone!

This week was crazy hectic, fun and challenging. I do not remember a more seesaw week in my life. The trip to Tahoe last week was off the hook. It was incredible getting to know YAF people better. It was awesome getting to spend time with loving people. I also went downhill skiing for the first time in my life. It was a blast. I definitely plan on skiing on the regular. If only Tahoe wasn't so far away. Sigh. After averaging 5 hours of sleep a night, I was very tired during the week. I barely did any work on the color filter project. However, I found out that Soji did is thesis on EM waves and has the expertise I need to pull of the project. Praise God, I am so glad I met him. I moved in with Cory and co. on wednesday. As much I liked living in sunnyvale, it feels good to move. I feel much freer now. We also had incredible developments at work. While not everything is official, I believe we are much closer to our goal of fully developing our technology. I then spent this past weekend in Monterey with Cory, Kristen, Hung-Tzu, Alex, Annie and Kim. We had a great time celebrating Kristen's birthday. We ate great food and had a great dance party and explored tide pools.

So one might wonder, why was this such a seesaw week? I think its probably due to the lingering effects of Asemia's death. It has made me extra sensitive to people. I feel my emotions much more strongly. My empathetic ability has also shot through the roof. I almost literally feel the emotion others are feeling when I am talking to them. This leads to being either super elated or downright negative depending on the person I am talking to. For instance, the ski trip was intense because everyone was excited and that excitment almost wiped me out. Cory and Kristen were very happy and I couldnt help but share in their joy. Chuck and Keith were quite relieved by the good news and again it calmed me down. However I also felt a negative aspect of human behavior - competition. Competion is the desire to beat someone else in one aspect or the other. This can be great in games and things that dont matter. On the hand, it can pretty destructive when applied in daily life. People tend two have these two views in life. One view holds that we are here on earth to succeed together in life. Our goal is to all defeat the challenges that the world presents. People who hold this view love to help others achieve their goals and defeat life's obstacles. The second view measures success by how much better one is, compared to their peers. Everyone sort of falls between these two schools of thought. When Asemia died, I lost my desire to compare myself to others. I asked myself; when I die, how will it matter whether I was better or worse than anyone? When I leave, I will leave alone. How much wealth or knowledge I gained wont matter. What others thought of me wont matter. The only thing that will matter is what God thinks of me. This leads me to truly focus on enjoying life. And the way I do this is by overcoming my challenges and helping others overcome theirs. Its by encouraging others when they falter and letting God's love to humanity flow through me, knowing that I will be refreshed by that love as it makes its way through and out of me. To bring home the point, God open my eyes to see how competitive or cooperative others were. The insecurity I saw in competitive people was sad. The joy I saw in cooperative folks was awesome.

I am competitive. I definitely want to succeed in life. But my opponents are not my fellow humans. My fight is against systems of sin and oppression in our world. My fight is against injustice, disease and hatred. These are much worthier opponents and together we can take them down. But if we compete with each other, we will all lose to these forces. As it is said, united we stand, divided we fall.

Visions of Mortality

I am grieving. Two days ago, my Dad sent me a text. My cousin Asemia had just died, in his sleep. He was only 24 years old. My heart broke. How could he die so young? My mind started wandering; no more playdates with Asemia; no more will I hear his laughter and see his ridiculous antics; no more will I be able to guide, love and cherish him. Arghh!
I am so sad. My heart is so sorrowful. I spent the last few days in denial but I anger is setting in. I dont believe in fairness in life so I doubt I will remain angry for long.

However, there is beauty in grieving. I find myself cherishing people more. Moving ahead in life is no longer as important as cherishing the people that I have. I called all my siblings the morning i heard the news. I believe I have treated everyone I met with more attention and love than usual.

When you come face to face with mortality, you can't help but put more value on the important things in life; God, family and friends. Without them, life is empty.
Grief also leads me to reexamine my life and evaluate it according to what is truly important to me as opposed to what society expects. As I was crying out to God this morning, He showed me a number of things.

First, He showed me that by holding on to society's standards of love and righteousness, I was blocking His ability to pour out His Love and Righteousness to the world through me. Its not that I have to stop being loving and righteous. What He was saying was that I had to let go of my own standards of love and righteousness and trust that He will take over that area of responsibility and that He will do a better job than me.

He also showed me how due to my childhood upbringing, I had become a perfectionist. You see, my mum had an interesting technique of raising us. She never believed we, the children, had done enough unless we were the best. If I went to her and said "hey mom, check this out, I was second in my class", her response will be "why were you not first, you should study more". Tiger mom for sure. While this always made me strive for more, it had a very dark side to it. What my mom was projecting unto me, was the idea that if you weren't the best, then you wouldn't make it in life. She herself is trapped in that same mentality. A mentality that developed because she was raised by a mean stepmother who always tried to put her down and make her believe she was never good enough. So even though my mom loved us kids, she still made us believe we weren't good enough because she never believed she was good enough. My father did a much healthier job of encouraging us to do better but my mum always found it hard to consider our results as excellent. Looking back, our academic results where excellent. Our extra-curricular activities where stellar. Our behavior was exemplary but we never heard these words from our mother. Her response was, this isn't perfect. Hence I am now a perfectionist and God is trying to help me see that I can't be perfect. He is perfect. I can be below average, average, above average or excellent and He will still love me.
With an awareness of his love, I can dial down my personal expections from perfect to excellent. Then to good. Dial it down further to average. Continue to do this until it reaches zero, the perfect spot. Because, when I am nothing, then God is everything. Its going to be a long journey I definitely need His grace. By dying to myself everyday and taking up my cross, I can achieve this. Zero is perfection because in Zero, all that is left is God. Amen

My life is definitely getting more and more interesting by the day due to more car drama. I might be able to write a book about my car troubles if they continue at this rate. First of all though, let me recount the day's events.
I woke up way too early today at 7:45am with only 5.5 hrs of sleep. Conrad gave me a ride to work this morning. Liam woke up just before I left home and he looked so miserable, poor kid is in a lot of pain. Yay for vicodine though! I went into the cleanroom to assist the morning team but their work was so boring to me that I had to leave. I spent the rest of the morning looking up dance songs for a party I planning to throw. I really hope my boss doesn't read this blog. But just in case, "boss, I really had nothing else to do :p" Keith dropped me off at the Avis to pick up my rental car. Which I promptly crashed. Actually it was both I and the parking attendant that crashed it. It is really hard to say since noone was in the car when we released the brakes. Well since, the attendant released it, i will say that he crashed the car. Fortunately, the manager agreed with me and they gave me a chevy impala instead. God be praised! I met Paul Taylor for lunch and we had a great discussion about YAF. I found out that we have the same personality type ENFP as well as a strong T trait. No wonder I thought he was so cool :). I went back to work and came home and had dinner with Donna and Liam. Donna brought food for us since she heard Liam had accident and she is awesome like that. I went to a book discussion of Every man's battle at PBC. There was some really good sharing there. I learnt a lot. One thing in particular was that we men are always searching for intimacy. We tend to look to women and sex for it. However only God can provide that intimacy we need. That was profound. I always thought my wife will provide the intimacy that I needed but apparently not. I have therefore decided that I will look to God to provide me the most intimacy. Its kind of wierd for us men to think of Jesus as our bridegroom. May God help me with that. Afterwards, I, along with Ken and Andrea helped Jen assemble her Ikea furniture. I am so tired now. My bed calleth. I hope tomorrow is less adventurous :).
Kwasi

Yesterday was my first day at work after my vacation. Liam let me borrow his car since he was working from home today. He broke his collarbone and his on vicodine. As such he can't drive, so we are now both dependent on each other. I need a car and he needs a driver :). Nice how God works these things out. Anyways, I took his turbo-charged subaru to work and it was a fun drive.

It was good to see my boss and coworkers again. Luckily, it was a nice relaxing day with little work so I spent most of the day chatting. On a high note, I had a faith conversation with my boss. I think his faith is growing. Its awesome since I have been praying for it on and off for so long. Hopefully he will become a great christian CEO. He did share on cool thing with me though. He told me the definition of great faith is to regard something as good as done. That really encouraged me hold on to certain promises of God better. I should not doubt, I should assume that those promises are as good as done and develop an attitude based on those beliefs. Keith, my coworker bought me both lunch and dinner. He is one of the most generous people I know. Its quite amazing how much he cares for people. On the flip side, he can passionately dislike you if you mistreat him. I think he might be an ESFJ personality type which is very rare in men.

I went to the foundation experiment afterwards and Pastor Danielle gave a great exposition on the diversity of the early church. It was made up of hebraic Jews, Greco-roman jews and gentiles from many nations. What a mess? I wonder how they stayed together. She also explain to me that while we can be assured that the only way to know God the Father was through Jesus Christ, we shouldnt assume that only Christians go to heaven. She said the text strongly implies that fact but it doesn't say it explicitly. For all we know, God gives every sinner a chance to join him in paradise after they die. I pray that God in His great mercy will give everyone a great chance to share in the awesomeness of His love. That said, there is nothing like the sweet fellowship of God in this earthly life. I won't trade anything for it as I am sure that nothing satisfies except for God.

This means that perhaps we could evangelise to non-christians by saying that "hey look, we dont know if you are going to heaven or hell, that is for God to decide. But if you want to have the abundant and fulfilling life on earth, Jesus Christ is the way." As the apostle Paul said "Nothing we obtain in this world compares to the surpassing value of knowing Jesus Christ".

After the study, I went to play basketball at 24 hr fitness. There was a team there that had 2 6-6 guys that could dunk like crazy. I couldn't wait for the opportunity to guard one of them in a game. When i got the opportunity, I was able to make his life quite difficult :). His team still won but I was quite happy i was able to take away a lot of his shots. He still got the dunks in though :(.

I am now trying very hard to sleep but I can't due to all the endorphins i got from basketball, and I have to wake up in 5 hours, sigh!

W00T!If feels good to write again. Life
got really busy the past few years so I stopped processing things in writing.
Anyways, yesterday was one of the most eventful days of my life! Whew, it was
quite epic! The day started normally. I woke up and first thing I did was
to check if City Team needed me to help wash their vans. While volunteer work is
not the first thing I think about when I wake up, it happened that my friends
were signed up to wash vans there that morning. Naturally, I wanted to join them
but alas, I wasn't needed. Cindy J then called me and told me she was going to
stop tutoring and become a full time interior designer. That totally made my day
since I am sure she will become quite wealthy knowing how good she is. If life
becomes hard one day, my plan is to move back in with Dan and Cindy J (fingers
crossed) :). After talking to Cindy for a while, I decided to drive over to her
house to hang out there. Mellissa joined us later and we started talking about
having boundaries and being able to take care of yourself. Cindy explained it to
me using an analogy. She said, your physical/emotional/spiritual self is like a
garden with a gate. You have to always tend your garden before you tend others
otherwise your garden will die. You also have to man your gate to a prevent
others from coming in to mess up your garden. You only allow good things in so
that your garden remains great. This is awesome because from now on i dont
plan on allowing anyone to mess with my garden. I am so excited about this.
Later that evening, Dan came home and we all went out for eat ethiopian food.
Yum yum! After dinner, I met up with Soji for coffee in East San Jose. I yelped
for a good coffee place and cafe 288 came out on top. We met up there only to
realise that it was not a typical cafe. Anyway it was still a lot of fun getting
to hear Soji's experiences in the US. I left the cafe close to midnight only to
realise that my car was gone. I was in total disbelief! I immediately called the
towing hotline to see if my car had been accidentally towed. Apparently not,
they told me it had been stolen. In fact, the even asked me if I had a 1993
honda accord before i told them the type of car I had. Apparently, thieves love
the 93 Accords :(. Soji and I waited till 1:00am before the cops showed up to
take a stolen car report. The cop was a fun guy though so it was easy to make
light of the situation and have a good conversation about stealing cars.
Apparently, you can use a fork to start my car. Go figure! Soji dropped me off
at home and I had a good night sleep.