It's Never Gonna Be Equal

Pencils, Paper, and Depression. The Soul-Crushing Kind.

Do you see this pencil? This pencil is special to me. I don't use it much, but I need to know where it is at all times. If it ever breaks, I might have a hard time throwing it away. Anyway, on to the topic at hand.

I've written more than once about my compulsions. Generally, I know where I got them and now I find them more of a side interest to who I am. This is about my writing obsession, or rather, my need to have writing utensils and paper with me. I've always had a thing with paper and pencil. In high school, I once put a whole year's notes of one of my classes on one narrow-ruled piece of paper. I always used narrow rule because I thought wider rules were a waste, and I didn't want to waste anything. Because of the narrow rule, I had to write small. That led me to mechanical pencils because they had narrow lead. Mind you, at the time, mechanical pencils weren't cheap and weren't nearly as ubiquitous as they are now.

When I went to college, my office-supply obsession switched to high gear. I didn't have the funds to really let it fly, but I never realized there were so many ways to write things, so many different papers to write upon. My engineering classes used a type of green graph paper that was easy on the eyes yet the quad lines on the back bled through enough for me to write away on "blank" paper and have the lines guide the writing. It was also a fine paper, using a finer pulp. My writing could be nice and tight and I fell in love with the stuff. I had a dopamine rush every time I filled a page and tore it off the pad. It brought such a sense of satisfaction.

Because I was a mormon at BYU, I had felt the pressure to go on a mission. It wasn't exactly overt. My closest friends had all gone on missions. I was told that to be a good person, I needed to go on a mission. Mostly, I felt gratitude for being able to find such good friends and while college was difficult, I completely enjoyed it. I was learning so much. I also had a girlfriend, and my gratitude to God extended to meeting her and I wanted to be a good person because she deserved to have a good person for a boyfriend. That isn't to say I didn't have issues. I wasn't fond of LDS culture. While I had my reasons to believe in the Book of Mormon, I wasn't exactly proud of the writing style or even some of the narrative. I won't go into the difficulties I had in school and other personal matters. They factored in greatly to what the next year was to unleash on me.

To prepare for my mission, I bought a new engineering pad. I was going to write half a page a day to my girlfriend, send two pages per week to her and that would be my mission journal. I had it all planned out. I wanted to become good at writing about what I was experiencing and share that with her.

When I entered the Missionary Training Center, the depression hit. It hit hard. I didn't know that it was depression at the time, but I started to become someone I wasn't. The indoctrination at the MTC was strong. I didn't have any real knowledge of the culture or really participate in it at BYU and I grew up outside of the Mormon Corridor so I didn't know what people were talking about half the time. I lost weight. I hated the isolation I felt, as well as the forced companionship the job entailed. I guess I felt dishonest about everything. Don't get me wrong, I was a believer. I didn't understand what was happening to me though. I didn't understand why or how I could share my faith effectively with anyone when my defining relationships were being severed. The church was taking away from me some of the greatest things about my life. In those few moments when I shared what I was honestly feeling, I was sent to counseling. I was told that I should go home as I was clearly emotionally unstable. Then the panic that set in. My friends would reject me. My school would reject me. My girlfriend would reject me and I'd have to live my life as a failure amongst those that believed like I did. I knew damn well how accepting the culture was to missionaries that left (it has since improved, I'm told).

Did I tell my friends how I felt in my letters, in my writing? No. I lied. I lied because I thought that it was expected of me. This was supposed to be the best time of my life, and I was beginning to resent every waking moment. During my time in Switzerland, the depression never left. I didn't get money from the bank. I was still losing weight to the point that none of the clothes I had fit me. A member of the church there took in my pants about 6-7 inches. My belt had long since run out of notches and I had to have one hand in my pocket at all times to hold up my pants. It got to the point where I couldn't function and it was determined that I should be sent state-side if for nothing else but to eat. I don't know what I wrote at the time. When I spoke to my then girlfriend many years later about it, I found out how much I had lied about it then. I was becoming all that I didn't like. I wasn't honest with the people I cared the most about. Yeah, I made some excuses about why I was sent stateside, the big reality being that I was starving to death, but I never phrased it that way.

When I was stateside, the depression continued. I don't remember what I wrote about at the time, but I did write. I never gave up writing during that first year. Still, it was probably becoming more and more feverish as my mental state kept going bad. In my first summer there, I had transformed into a person I hated the most in my life. I lashed out in my writing. I let the missionary culture into me and I became an ass. Deep down, I hated myself to an extent that I can't fathom even now. My girlfriend, if that word could even qualify at that time, had enough and told me to get lost. So I did. It was the wake up that I needed. I stopped being the person I had become and I tried to find myself in all that rubble. I stopped writing for the most part. I'm not sure where along this path I equated writing with honesty, other than my sheer desire. At this point, I had betrayed any sense of honesty that I had. I had slipped into survival mode. I didn't write because I couldn't be honest. I didn't write because I didn't want to remember any of this. I didn't want to put any more brain cells to what I was and who I was.

As a side note, I never blamed or accused my then girlfriend of anything. Yeah, I hurt, but I was also a jerk. I never wished her ill or spoke poorly of her. At the time, I never wished her anything but the best and all the love this world or the next could give her and that goes for today as well. My wanting to forget never involved the time with her, but my reaction to my mission as a whole.

So I came back to BYU, having behaved myself to the point where they couldn't send me home. I had been accepted into my degree program and I also took a custodial job in the early mornings. The difficulties that I had before my mission with school persisted to a point, but getting into my program completely had turned all of that around. I was dating like crazy. When I became more involved with Tracy, she never pressed me about my mission and I wasn't volunteering any info. I simply wanted to forget all of the pain and anguish I felt during those years. They didn't define me and they weren't who I was.

One of my custodial jobs was cleaning out the auditoriums in the business school. In my first pass, I would pick up trash and junk before my next pass with the vacuum or sweeper. Business students use almost nothing but mechanical pencils and the lost a lot of them. The most common were those Bic things but every once in a while, the better ones. I kept all the incidental pencils and pens. The expensive ones I put in the lost and found if I felt the person could be attached to them. I soon had a collection that I couldn't manage, so realizing that the only real value to them was the lead, I collected the lead and threw away the rest, except for the good pencils and pens, that is. That is where I picked up the above pencil. It was a Pilot brand. I loved their pens. This pencil was special though. For whatever reason, mechanical pencils have a little nib at the end where the lead comes out. It is only about 2mm long, but with someone as obsessive as I was, that was 2mm of wasted lead. This pencil was different. That little nib was pushed back into the pencil. I could get more use out of the leads that I had. It had a nice click. It had a good feel. I went through the rest of my college career, even my masters, with that pencil.

I kept the leads and better pencils after I graduated. Every time I went to BYU to visit, I would buy another engineering pad, even though I didn't write to anyone. I would occasionally go to the office supply stores just to handle some of their goods, but I didn't buy anything. That is, until I became acutely aware of Back-To-School sales. I put a limit on what I could spend, but I did spend and now I have more paper / pads / pencils than a sane person could use. I think I have a handle on it though.

When it comes back to my frustrations with my honesty, 2011-12 loomed large in that respect. Just like a coiled spring, I couldn't keep it all in anymore. It started to all unravel and scatter all over the place. I tried to keep it to myself, but it soon spilled over into conversation. I found people on-line and I began to finally be honest in my writings. I began to be honest about the things in my life, my feelings, wants, and desires. One particular morning is quite memorable. I sat at my computer and started writing about all those things that I was afraid to write about before. It was truly the culmination of what I felt about writing and actually doing it. It transformed me, but first it kicked the s*** out of me. It led to discussions, arguments with Tracy and with myself. It tore down all the walls I had built up. It almost took away all that I had done, the relationships that I treasured, but I had to be honest. I couldn't put that genie back in the bottle. After a lot of soul-searching, Tracy and I came out of it okay. I'm still probably more deferential that I should be, but I'm honest about it at least.

I bought some books about writing, let my interest in poetry out, and even received a few books as gifts to help me along. Reading a book of love letters was a revelation, in that I found people could express such deep emotion on a page. I even bought a book on how to write them, as it affected me so deeply.

So here I sit, with a bunch of paper and pencils. My brain tickles me into wanting to write all the things down, but reality is such that if I do write, it will be on the computer. Just handling the pads will calm my mind from a lot of anxiety, because I found myself in them. In the end, it might be all that survives me, other than a landfill full of computer cables. I doubt it though. Who wants to read the rambling of a millennial survivor tilting at his own windmills?

I'm not sure I'll ever revisit that period of insanity again in my writing. I'm finally getting over it and have accepted what it did to me. (I'm now 50. I process things slowly, I guess.) Well, I've always accepted it to some degree, but in a person's early 20s, a person can change so much and so many things can get established. I acknowledge that I was dumber than a rock and immature in a great many things. I still have issues with those that should have known better, but what can ya do? My life has been uneventful for the most part, just one of gradual self-improvement. I'm in a pretty good place overall. My wife still loves me. My family is doing okay. I'm pleased with my uneventful career. My friends, for reasons unknown, still tolerate me. Yeah, I collect paper, soap and various cologne and candles but I'm mostly harmless. I'm trying to minimize and refocus and I hope my last few years on this planet will be worth my while. I hope yours are too.

Robots, Cornhuskers, and Parking Meters - Part Two

Continued from http://www.groesser.com/2017/01/robots-cornhuskers-and-parking-meters.html

So Bennet and I made a trip to the University of Nebraska, Lincoln campus. We went through the student union. Not much happening on a Saturday Morning.
I happened to remember that there was a tower that I've always associated with the university and I tried an online search and I found that there was a tower called Mueller Tower. Hey, I know someone named Mueller. Got to visit that. We also found another sculpture.

On the other side, there was the stadium and the gym

Then we noticed off the right, there was a mastodon. I took the first picture and I wanted to know what he was doing. He mentioned that he wanted a pic to show he was holding it up. I came close.

Then, when walking back to the car, just past the bookstore, I saw the tower I was really looking for. Then the realization hit me that that was the state capitol. Of course it was. I felt kind of stupid for thinking it was part of the university. I must be slipping.

We had to make a quick run back to the motel and I noticed just to the side of the motel was a sculpture of a paper airplane. Notice the last photo that the paper folds are present. You may need to click on it to expand it.

OK. Off to the robotics competition.

Setup.

I don't have a video of the first competition but there are some good facebook videos that I will link to. Let me tell you about how the competition works. The first 30 seconds are devoted to autonomous action from the robot. It can do a few things in this stage, I think. It can shoot the two given balls into the basket. It can push off the large ball off the pedestal and park there. It can move to the wall and hit a beacon to change the color. After the autonomous time, the teams can drive the robots and points are established. Each color has two teams that are to work together. Also, the actions are similar but the robots can lift the large balls and put them in the basket.

Match 1 for Team 5037:
Facebook Video
My Video

Match 2 for Team 5037:
Facebook Video
My Video

Match 3 for Team 5037:

Facebook Video

My Video

Match 4 for Team 5037:
Facebook Video
My Video

Match 5 for Team 5037"
Facebook Video
My Video

Semifinal Round 1 (They were ranked #2 from 24 teams!!):
Facebook Video
My Video

Semifinal Round 2:
Facebook Video
My Video

OK. They didn't win. They did very well though.

Robots, Cornhuskers, and Parking Meters - Part One

So this past weekend I took a trip with Madsen and Bennet to the magical land of Nebraska for Madsen's robotics competition. I actually have an affinity to the Omaha/Lincoln area because the Union Pacific Railroad has such a strong presence there and it was the starting point of the Transcontinental Railroad. I like railroads. :)

So picking up the rental car was uneventful and it took me some time to understand how to get the bluetooth to understand my phone. I've had bluetooth in a few of my rental cars but this is the first one that could connect to the extremely popular Samsung phone that I own. Go fig. I have saved up my bandwidth and I planned on using my Google Play account to enjoy tunes all across the rolling hills of Iowa. We then packed up the car and loaded the pool toys that Ellie filled with air for Bennet. When we would actually have time to use the pool, I didn't know, but I checked on the website and the motel had a pool, so we took stuff for it.

Madsen rode in the van with his team all the way to Lincoln. Aside from an accident that backed up traffic for several tens of miles around Iowa City, the trip was uneventful. I'd taken it several times before so it was well remembered.

When we arrived, I couldn't remember the name of the motel and with a check of my email, I eventually found it on my map. It was just across the road from where I stopped to check. We met Madsen in the lobby as they had just arrived a few minutes before we did. The room was nice and clean. It had a fridge that I promptly plugged in and put in my diet Dr. Pepper for later. I planned out the next day on my computer to make sure I knew where things were. Madsen was leaving at 6:30am but the competition didn't really start until around 11:30am. I wanted to stop at the University of Nebraska to just check out the campus that I had seen so many times on televised football games. The bookstore opened at 10am so I had plenty of time to find a parking spot. The map mentioned that there were metered stalls all around the place so I shouldn't have a problem.

Morning went off without a hitch. Madsen went with his team. Bennet and I ate breakfast and I even made a marvelous waffle for Bennet. We packed up the car for the day and off we went. Finding the university wasn't hard at all. The stadium was huge and stood out on the skyline. It didn't hurt that it was only a few miles from where we were staying. We also found out that there wasn't an indoor pool. The other motel in Lincoln for this brand did, but not this one. Bennet was greatly disappointed.

Here is the problem. There was parking everywhere. All meters. The thing is, on the way there, I realized I didn't have any change. I figured that I would need at least a dollar for an hour, and all I had was some dimes and pennies. Still, I found a parking spot right behind the bookstore and went out to see what the meter had written on it so I could pay for parking. Hmmm. it seemed I had to load an app on my phone in order to park. I don't want to load an app on my phone. This is stupid. The meters stopped being needed at noon and it was close to that. Did I take a chance of getting a ticket? I'm in a rental car and I know they don't take too kindly to getting tickets on their cars. Grrr. Ok, maybe there's some parking. a little south of here. I just needed an hour.

So I drove around town, expressing my frustration to Bennet about how I couldn't find a place to park yet there were spaces everywhere. I eventually found myself on the other side of the stadium, having come full circle around the campus. I pulled in to a vacant lot and got out to re-read the meter to see if I could do this without giving my life history on an app just to park in a strange town for an hour. I noticed that I could go to a website and do this. Perhaps that was less intrusive. So I stood out in the wind going through a setup process. Ok. login...choose password....who am I....choose a pin...get a text....put in the code...THIS IS FREAKING RIDICULOUS!....I'll just park and get a ticket. This is maddening.

I made our way back to the bookstore, trying to avoid a bunch of high school students carrying pro-life protest signs. Hmmm. Well, I'm in the bible belt so I guess that fits. I once again faced my nemesis parking meter....OK fine!! I don't want to cheat the residents of Nebraska from their dollar. SHEESH! So I took my phone out and looked at the web page again. It wanted my credit card. I don't want to give you my credit card. I really don't. I know you are safe but....Let me just look at the other side of this meter....Oh. What's this? What appeared to me is what you see in the photo above. There was slot for coins. "Insert coins at anytime" OK. I didn't have any, but cool. What really captured my attention was that thing on the left....it was a credit card slot. In Chicago, there are stations on every block where you pay and you then put the stub in your window. I was hoping that is what I was to find in Lincoln. Instead, if I had just taken the time to walk around the stupid meter, I would have found this on every meter. I checked the other meters and sure enough, each one had one. So I fished out my visa card and slipped it in. $1.25 for an hour. Ok. Credit or Debit. Credit.  Done. Thank you. What a way to waste time. I felt so stupid. Of course the engineer in me immediately wanted to know how they were connected to the central office but I pushed those thoughts down as I took Bennet on campus.

I went to the bookstore and found the pens that Tracy wanted and I fought back the urge to buy an engineering pad. I had enough paper, but I did have to handle them a bit, to get my fix. I walked back to the T-shirts to find an affordable shirt, red, with "Nebraska" on it. I had to look a bit but I found one. I purchased it and walked out to check the rest of the place.

-To be continued.

It Seems I Need a Goal

The picture above is the cycle room at my gym. It will be my new home for the next few months. You see, a couple years ago I had the goal to ride the length of the Hennepin Canal. I did that. It consisted of 3 days riding about 30 miles per day. I could have done more per day but there were extenuating circumstances. Well since I did that and a few other rides, I haven't gone to a gym for no-reason no-how. I felt guilty, but I really didn't want to move much.

So I was playing with google maps or something, perhaps it was a railroad group on Facebook, and I read about a rail-to-trail in Southern Illinois that has some interesting railroad bridges. I check it out and I am interested. I had a goal last summer to head down there with a motorcycle and check it out. That didn't happen. So, I'm thinking that the kids are old enough now and maybe I can take Tracy down there and I can do the ride. She and I did one leg of the Hennepin Canal alone and it was a nice time. I really do enjoy time with her one to one. Perhaps we can take some time off to do that?

So, along with that ride, I want to ride up to the Wisconsin border on the Fox Trail. I can do that. For whatever reason, it helped me commit to getting to the gym to get the body ready for the trips.

Another downside of my self-imposed inactivity has been my sugar levels. I can feel it when I eat any significant amount. I need to exercise to feel better and burn it up. I need to lose weight as that is also key to bringing it down.

Kind of a boring post, but that is what my life is like at the moment. I want my summer to be better than it was last year.

Raspberry Pi

Do you mind if I geek out for a bit? Thank you.

During my mission, you know, that two years where I had all the time in the world to think about all the things that I had done wrong, listen to leaders that told me what I was doing wrong at the time, and then have random strangers reject and tell me how wrong my most personal beliefs were, (sorry. I digress) I looked forward to getting back to school and finish my engineering degree. I loved the idea of understanding the world, building and using tools, and all kinds of engineer stuff. I was getting tired of looking at something and guessing what made it work because I didn't have that information available. 

One of the joys of engineering classes, over, say, technology classes, is that you go into the why and how, not just the application. Over the process of my 5 years for my B.S., I learned how to build a computer from sand. We made the wafers, we made the circuits, we built the state machines, CPUs and memory and we learned how and why to program them. There was little that we didn't investigate. That isn't to say we completely understood. Each of these areas had sub areas and people had devoted their lives to particular aspects of everything we studied. That wasn't lost on me, so please don't think I'm arrogant in what education I have. I am acutely aware of my own ignorance.

So, one class I had was machine level programming. We had a board that was about a foot square. It had a small keyboard for Hex input 0-9 A-F, an LED display (Red LEDs, not LCDs), and bare chips. It was an 8086 processor on board with a whopping 16K of memory. With this, we had to build programs and become familiar with how data was stored and processed with the lowest level of programming. We had to be aware of each bit and where it was and where it flowed. It was a chore to work on. Plus, Intel chips did everything backward so we had to take that into account. Bytes were hard to read. It made me really dislike Intel's chips.

In keeping with my program's "make them suffer and then show them an easier way" paradigm, we were moved to a lab with Apple computers. Apple used Motorola's chips, the 64K series. There were emulators that allowed us to create low-level programs on the machine and we could see where the data was in memory, in the registers and all the other places data moved around. It was so much easier to understand than Intel's chipset that I fell in love with the stupid thing. It eventually landed me a job with Motorola, where I work to this day. My interview there consisted of "Can you read assembly on the 64k?" and my response was probably along the lines of <pupils dialated> " I LOVE the 64k! What a terrific instruction set!" My main accomplishment during that period was solving a memory leak in low-level code that plagued a product for over a decade. The product used a Real-Time Operating System that passed messages back and forth to the processes via a queue and occasionally, it forgot a message and the memory never cleared. That was the "memory leak."

So here we are 22 years later and I order the computer above. Yes, it is a full blown computer. $50 on Amazon. The drive is 16G, not out of line with the servers you can get from Amazon or Azure for VMs. The OS is a version of Linux. You simply connect a keyboard, mouse and monitor and boom. you have a computer. When the first version came out, I had read about it and thought that it would change the world. It is that accessible. Now we can buy cell phones with the same specs, but they aren't completely accessible in that it isn't fully interactive. Still, this thing is amazing. It is essentially that foot square board I worked on but it has a quad-core ARM chip with 1G onboard and whatever SD card I can put in. I can access the internet and program the board to run peripherals. For me, it is an amazing tool. 

I hope I never get tired of being amazed by what mankind can do with what we have learned over the millennia. It keeps me from being depressed by the stupidity that mankind is still capable of.

Alma 32

Alma 32:33 And now, behold, because ye have tried the experiment, and planted the seed, and it swelleth and sprouteth, and beginneth to grow, ye must needs know that the seed is good.

This is a verse in the Book of Mormon about faith, and trying out a new way of thinking, of viewing the world. In context, it is one of faith. It was a section that I knew well as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints back in my early 20's. It is the foundational book of the church and one that we hawked non-stop for my two years in the service. While I personally was embarrassed by some of the story contained in the book, I wasn't ashamed of this chapter in particular. It was one that I used in my own life. I was indeed happier by associating with the church before and after my mission. During, not so much, but I've written enough about that.

Since that time, I've used this verse differently. My faith has faltered as I studied Christianity and my church in particular. Now, before anyone gets all judgemental here, this is MY story. I don't speak to anyone's experience but my own.

Still, coming to terms with this new information wasn't comforting. I found it difficult to operate in my old paradigm. I wrote new friends and old trying to make sense of what I was reading and learning. I wrote blog posts on other blogs to document what I felt and when. When I confided with Tracy about what I was going through, I was beside myself because unbelief is the worst thing a man can do to anyone, and I was expressing my unbelief to the person that meant the most to me. That it didn't go over well is an understatement.

After a hard year of endless discussion, I/we decided that we would try Alma's experiment in reverse. We stopped going to church as our nerves for both of us were on edge.

It worked. I had such deep-seated self-loathing because of who I was and how I felt and that it was wrong in the eyes of the church and ultimately, the Lord, that it affected most of my world-view. I began to look at things entirely differently. My political leanings became more centered. My feelings of empathy became so much stronger. I forgave myself of what I had done in the past and realized that I was a pretty decent person and that if God couldn't accept me as I was, then he/she had issues, not me. I honestly and visibly became happier outside of the church instead of in it. I think the same could be said of the rest of my family. In many ways, we have flourished in just being ourselves without fear of judgment.

Yes, in many respects, the church made me happy at one time. I became more social than I would have been otherwise. I met some of the greatest people in my life. I had a great education. My family, in many respects, is here because of the church.

I listened to others. I read books by members of the church that brought into question the foundational claims of Christianity and the church in particular. I started, I feel, to honestly evaluate all the history that I knew and ask myself if I wanted this in my life especially since I couldn't give it my ringing endorsement any longer. I didn't believe in magic, and that is where the Book of Mormon came from. I couldn't believe in the Restoration of the Priesthood, because that seemed to be a later fabrication. Everything that I read talked about how the scriptures changed with time, why members left when they did (and it seemed like the reasonable thing to do if I was in the same position). Indeed, as a father, if Joseph Smith asked of me what he asked of his followers, I would have asked for his arrest. Since that time, these "anti-mormon lies" have been admitted to by the church essays, if you care to read the footnotes and make fairly logical conclusions, you might think the same.

But I'm happier outside of it. I put the experiment to the test in reverse, and I'm happier without it in my life. Who knew?