Kirk Kittell

A few weeks ago, I discovered an archaeological relic while I was wandering in the wilderness. It was quite an expected sight. I had to stop and think a while to understand what its purpose was, to consider the role that it must have played in the lives of these ancient people. What were they doing? What were they thinking? Can we recreate these primitive folks from these few snatches of their lives? I respect the slow, steady work of archaeologists, and the challenges that they face in recreating historic puzzles with missing pieces and uncertain end states.

Less abstractly: while doing some maintenance a few weeks ago, I had to go to wordpress.com to acquire my API key in order to use the comment spam protection on this blog. I started to register an account on wordpress.com, then rememembered, “Hey, I already have an account here.” I logged in and unexpectedly found my blog from my summer in Europe at the International Space University: Road Trip to Space. (It’s empty there, but keep reading…)

I’ve spent a fair amount of time already in 2008 archiving bits and pieces of the past. I’m not stuck there, unwilling to move on. I welcome the future. I want the past to be the past. I’m filing things away so that the past can be a story shared with the characters who were a part of it instead of a private clutter in boxes and folders — the past as a trail that can be followed instead of the past as a jungle that grasps, impedes.

Here are the posts from that old blog in their new home on this site: tag: SSP 2006. It’s all the same, except that instead of hosting the photos on site, I’ve added them to Flickr and linked to them there. This is not groundbreaking stuff by any means, just a piece of the Kittell Legend. Sure, sure, it’s not as interesting as any Duluoz Legend, but it’s close to my heart nonetheless.

I’ve posted three sets of photos to Flickr from summer 2006. There are more — quite a lot more, actually, and I’ll get to them in due time. It takes some time to properly archive them due to my obsession with mundane details like tags, latitude and longitude, etc.

Tour de France 2006, Strasbourg, France

Martigny - Chamonix, July 2006

Nürnberg - Plzen - Praha, August 2006

I’m still in College Station, staying here a little longer than expected. In Nassau Bay, according to the city’s web site, the sewer system is still down after Hurricane Ike. I don’t mind the electricity and water being out, but the sewer is another story. In the interim, I have plenty of downtime. I should use it to my advantage. It’s difficult. They have television and cable at Jackie’s place. It’s amazing. But I need to get things in order.

* * *

Here’s the deal. I’m in a rut. I want out. And I want to get moving. Now.

I want to understand how I got into this mess, then how to get into something that I like. That’s a vague order, sure. I think I could be something great, but since coming to Texas in March, I’m losing my confidence that this is possible. I hate that loss of confidence. It is difficult to get out of bed thinking like that.

I came to Houston because my girlfriend lived in San Antonio. Houston is a center of the space industry in the US, and I knew I could get a job here quickly, which I did. I’m money in the bank when it comes to a job interview. I’m not scared of them. I love talking in front of people, or in formal situations. I’m a performer. I can see the conversation as it happens from the other side of the table. As I’ve said before to people, if I can sing the “Banana Song” in front of 250 strangers at Boy Scout camp, making a real presentation is easy.

There’s a downside to “as soon as possible:” I didn’t put enough effort into thinking about life on the job. I thought of how great it would be so close in San Antonio and extrapolated that feeling. It was true during the first two months when she was here. I didn’t notice any potholes at work when I knew I’d be in San Antonio again by Friday. I was working so I could live there on the weekend, so work was good. Work only existed at work.

Fast forward a few months, and she’s in Canada. Work life starts to sneak out of its box, seeping into the hours outside of work. Work became the only thing, drafted into supporting the hours outside of work instead of the other way around. 

Now I notice that my position is intellectually underwhelming. I wish I was getting pummeled by work, struggling to keep up instead of struggling to stay interested. I’m worried about the effect that having little to do now will affect the height that I can reach later. I have very high aspirations. I want to work on difficult technical programs now, when I’m young and indestructible and can invest my freetime to get ahead, and then move into management — not just mid-level management, but way up the chain. Lead a division. Lead a company. I prefer difficult challenges. It’s just like basketball for me. When I play against inferior or equal players, I play down to their level; there is no challenge. When I play against superior players, I play up to their level; these are my best games.

Job criterion number one: My position must be challenging, difficult.

I love to organize complex situations. It fits into the way I see things spatially. This is difficult to explain because it is innate. I can organize pieces of an environment, of a situation, of a problem, by seeing the different components in my head and how they fit together. Time, relationships, components of a problem, they all have a three-dimensional quality in my imagination. It’s not multitasking, working on the different pieces at once. It’s being able to see the relationships between them. Without many pieces this is a useless trait.

Job criterion number two: My position must be complex, multifaceted.

The greatest quality I have as an engineer — or at least most unique quality — is my ability to communicate, to talk, to write, to turn complex issues into linear, understandable pieces. I’m not getting that now, either. I used to be able to do that at my previous position. Meetings or documents for our customers were natural for me. I think this is a remnant of working in student organizations at the University of Illinois. Having seen the tendency for people to bandy words and obfuscate problems — intentionally or not — I don’t have as much tolerance for it. It’s easier to cut the bull when you’ve seen it before. In my short experience in the workforce, this is a rare skill for engineers. And now I’m sitting at a desk where I don’t get to do any of that.

Job criterion number three: My position must require me to speak and write regularly.

* * *

That’s my first go at this. I feel apprehensive about focusing on a specific point in the future. I like to adapt to new situations, to things I don’t know. I’ve always done that. I’ve played in a band, on club sports teams, traveled, studied aerospace engineering, worked in service groups. I’ve never wanted to focus on anything because I have broad skills and broader interests. Reading my three initial criteria, I haven’t pointed in any specific direction. These are raw qualities that should be refined, but I demand them nonetheless. It’s time, for the first time that I’ve known, to stop being afraid of ambitious goals and push for something great instead of just talking about it.

If you’re interested:

• my resume
• my LinkedIn profile

One of my most unreasonable traits is that I am apprehensive of staying in touch with people — friends and family, that is. Want me to fly across the world, meet people in a business setting, and follow-up? No problem. Easy. Want me to send an occasional email to folks I used to hang out with at university or camp? Freeze. It’s uncanny. I just can’t imagine a scenario in which anyone would want to hear from me. Why would they?

I’ve been trying to fix this for years, ever since promising to people — especially my cousin David, who still sends unrequited letters and birthday cards — I was going to change and keep in touch. That promise was an annual function in university: move to a new apartment, start a new academic year, and promise that this would be the year I’d stay in touch with everyone. Every year was the same.

I’m trying to hack my own brain to get over that apprehension. I can handle goals and lists, and I’m trying to put this bad habit of silence on that same plane.

Two weeks ago, I said: I’ll write an email to someone I haven’t talked to in a long time every day. I’ll send two postcards. I’ll send one letter. Buzz! Fail.

Last week I said: I’ll write an email to four people I haven’t talked to in a long time. I’ll send two postcards. I’ll send one letter. Buzz! Partial fail. I sent one email and the two postcards.

This week I said: I’ll write an email to two people I haven’t talked to in a long time. I’ll send two postcards and one letter. Ding ding ding. Success:

2/2/1 was apparently the right mix to get going.

Sure, this sounds like a minor thing. And you’re right. Normal people, I bet, don’t have a problem with things like this, but I do. It’s boggling — a clenching of the chest and brain, the desire to seek out anything else to do other than subject other people to hearing from me.

Ironically, one of my outlets for avoiding writing to people I know is to post to Twitter, hence the spate of posting there today while I was writing to others. I mean, the problem isn’t writing something to someone. With Twitter, I don’t feel the same obligation to connect to each person individually. I use Twitter recreationally, and most posts are meant for entertainment. That behavior mirrors my stage behavior: ask me to make a presentation in front of a group of people that I don’t know — whether it is 10 or 1000 — and I am unbeatable, entertaining, irreverent, unstoppable; ask me to hold a conversation with one person that I know and I get nervous, I melt.

I don’t know what causes the anxiety, but I’m aiming to beat it. If setting goals and hacking my weaknesses by using my strengths works — great. Smashing. I’ll try the same 2/2/1 distribution next week, and we’ll see what happens.

Besides, I’ve been here in Texas since March, and it’s about time that I let people know, eh?

Also: postcards are really, really fun to write and send. You should send me your address so I can send you one.

For approximately four years, I have been writing — frequently and infrequently — to http://beautyoflies.blogspot.com. It was a convenient place to post; I started it before I bought this domain name that matches my real name.

It was convenient… but it didn’t fit me anymore. The oldest posts were a published version of my journal from Mojave; then I switched it to my language learning blog (which subsequently changed to http://goragoragora.blogspot.com… and will be moved to this site in the future); then I switched it to my personal blog. If it’s a personal blog, it should be here, attached more obviously to my name.

Over the coming weeks — why hurry? — I’ll move the posts from there to here, and bring back the formatting and brief personal info from the old index page. In the meantime, the new posts will be happening here, so grab the feeds for the posts and comments.

About a week ago — while unintentionally backing up my SSP06 email to my Gmail account… — I discovered a long lost personality test that was given to us participants at the ISU Summer Session Program in Strasbourg, France. I was going to post it sometime anyway, for “fun,” but after giving someone a hard time and trying my best to ruin their Christmas yesterday, what the hell, I’ll post it today.

Maybe this makes sense to you — what do you think?

Link: Personality

Attached is your personality profile from the questionnaire you filled out at SSP06 this summer. Be sure to open the powerpoint file in the NOTES view (if it opens in the slideshow format, right click, choose EDIT and Notes) so that you can see the text explanations for the graphs.

There is no such thing as a ‘bad’ personality profile. Each profile identifies the characteristic way a person responds to the world if there are no strong situational constraints shaping our responses. For instance, we act very differently at a funeral than we do at a party. It is the situations that limit what behaviors and responses we choose to display. Your profile may have identified predispositions to deal with the world that present challenges to you or make things more difficult at times (e.g., if you were quick to anger). These should be considered to be elements of your personality that you can focus more attention on developing more positive ways of managing your response to the world. By adulthood, personality (the predisposition to react in certain ways) is fairly well set…it changes in mostly minor ways as we grow older. In rare situations, extreme experiences can bring about dramatic personality changes but for most of us, we must learn to emphasis our strengths and modify the impact of our less favorable traits. For example, people who are quick to anger may develop strategies to give them time to calm down before trying to interact with others or shy people will use a job role to help them initiate conversations with others. Once we know what our natural predispositions are, we can look for ways to enhance the best and buffer the rest…

Least surprising trait: I score high on the scale for neuroticism. Who would have thought that?

Thanks to Sheryl Bishop for providing this for us and for being a hell of a cool instructor at ISU. Now I have to ask your permission to post this…