The Tea Lounge ran by La Quadrature Du Net at
the 32nd Chaos Communication Congress is being dismantled. 2015 is winding down,
with only 28 hours left.
I am beside myself with all of the wonderful things that have happened in the
last 364 days. 2015 was a bit of a rough year, yet I'm invigorated with renewed
energy going into 2016.
A list of milestones in no particular order:
- *Moved into a new apartment in downtown Oakland.* This one is bright and airy
and close to all the things that make up my world. It's cheaper than my old
place, has a noticable lack of cockroaches, and I've fallen madly in love with
it.
- *Visted Portland.* Thanks to an
internet avocado, I won free tickets
to Open Source Bridge in Portland, OR. Portland has long been a city I'd
wanted to visit, having heard Akron described for years as the Portland of the
midwest.
- `Left Ripple Labs
<https://hackerbots.net/leading-a-science-focused-team.html>`_ and `started
working at Other Machine Company
<https://hackerbots.net/another-othermachinist.html>`_. Ripple Labs was awful. After Open Source
Bridge's opening keynote, I learned that the only thing left for me to do to
change the culture was to remove myself from the system by quitting. I did,
and ended up at the most amazing place. I hope to never leave.
- *Started to build a hackerspace in Oakland.*
It's still getting started. Holiday time makes everything slow so not much has
developed yet.
- *My cat Boots finally passed away from lymphobma*. He was somewhere around 12
years old at the time. He is no longer suffering which brings me great peace.
- Developed a love of my own body. Body positivity has been a thing I've
struggled with for almost all my life. After a few years of transitioning, I
had an intense moment of self love: Visiting an old friend in Akron who has
known me for a few years by now, her first words were "You look beautiful!"
and I believed it. I've begun to further develop my own sort of queer hacker
aesthetic with the way I present myself that accentuate what I like about
myself.
- Begun some new intimate relationships. E and N are both friends of mine I've
known for some time by now. Days apart from each other, it was discussed that
the crushes I'd had on them were in fact mutual. I'm very excited to explore
where these new relationships will go in 2016.
- *Learned how to better set boundaries.*
Since I'd been involved at Noisebridge, P was a very important person in my
life. I'd had strong feelings for him, and the idea of dating had been
discussed between us many times. Each time the two of us had walked away
thinking that everything was alright and things were good. In reality, we
danced around the idea of setting hard boundaries within our friendship. This
came back to bite us later when it became too much for me to not be able to
express my feelings for him how I wanted and an extended separation occured.
Finally, this year I decided to canonicalize two more rules I live by. For a
long time I've been following a pattern of taking off a week every quarter of
the year at approximately three month intervals. I'm also not all that big on
major holidays of the year like Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, or even my own
birthday on December 24th. Sure I'll participate, but I won't go out of my way
to plan anything.
The exception to this is for New Year's. The transition between one year to the
next is an incredibly important thing for me to celebrate. What usually ends up
happening is I plan to have a two week long adventure of epic proportions. My
last two holidays have involved going to Hamburg, Germany for the annual Chaos
Communication Congress. It starts out with a quiet day entirely to myself on the
24th of December and ends with an intense celebration of the year's
accomplishments at midnight on the 31st.
Holiday is a time for me to get together with family, using the meaning of
Family that is my own. An opportunity
for me to spend time with the people that mean the most to me. The people that
know me as well as I know them. We've shared struggles and successes over our
time together which makes this all the much better.
2015 seems like the most intense year I've had yet. There is plenty reason to
celebrate.
I will kick 2016's ass.