Send My Conscience Home in a Taxi

Even before my breakup with Эрика was official, I'd been scanning the dating site trying to find new people.

Oh, don’t act so offended! I’d known it was going to end, and I knew she knew. Browsing the profiles was part of how I gauged whether I really wanted to be single.

Once the separation was declared, I felt free to write all the messages I'd been considering, and the most interesting one was Аннет. Her dating site alias was a reference to a fictional character I knew well, and so I wrote my letter in the form of a short story where I approached that character's father, and asked him for permission to date his daughter. I was very proud of the writing, completely independent of whether it impressed Аннет. But I definitely did want to impress her, because we had both answered over a thousand match questions on the dating site, which was rare, and sported a 98 percent match rate even with that high count, which was crazy.

It caught her attention instantly, and we began talking in-depth over email. She described herself as dedicatedly polyamorous, and I was a bit wary of her declarative tone, but I didn't feel like the arrangement was an instant "no." She mentioned a man she'd been involved with back in Maryland, and said she was still seeing him occasionally, and in fact he was visiting her during the weekend she received my first message. I told her to have a good time, and meant it.

We chatted back-and-forth for days, and when we weren't doing that we traded big emails full of lively discussion. I told her all about my polyamory experimentation from a few years ago, and she asked a lot of curious questions about how I compared it with monogamy. The emotional mechanics of it; the way it forced a person to confront ideas about communication and jealousy. I was happy to share it all with someone who didn't just see it as a disaster. She said there had been rough times for her, too, but she'd learned a lot. I said that was reassuring. She said it was all a matter of integrity and respect, and she knew how to manage both, so we should set up a time to meet and see if there was chemistry.

Our first date was on a weekday. I sat at my desk and tried to put in a solid chunk of work so I could enjoy the evening without guilt, but my head wouldn't cooperate. It wasn't Аннет, it was dating and romance in general. Where was I truly headed? Would I ever actually find a "purpose", as my recent ex had so precisely defined it a few months back, when we were comparing notes on our post-breakup lives? I really needed to just relax and let this be a date. Having things be so high-stakes all the time was exhausting.

5:00pm dragged slowly up and then pounced on me, leaving me just enough time to pedal home, shower, change clothes, grab the folding bike, and cycle to MacArthur Bart. I boarded the train for Fruitvale, clattering and lurching under the weight of a thousand commute passengers, and walked down from the platform with only a minute to spare. Аннет's train was late however. She would be arriving straight from work, and since the Bart was part of her regular commute, we could hang out for a while and then she could continue to her house.

I waited, standing tall in my striped shirt, reading articles on my phone. A few thoughts rolled around to the front of my brain.

"She seems great but we've only traded words over the internet. Some people need a slow start in the physical world even if they've welcomed me into their mental one. If I'm too eager, I might overwhelm her."

"The thing that brought us together was mutual love for an author. It might be fun to think of us as characters meeting inside one of those novels. Hmm, no, that's too distracting. I'll just be myself."

I thought I saw her approaching from the corner of my eye, so I made sure to put away my phone slowly, giving her time to get close without feeling embarrassed. As soon as I looked up she grinned and gave me a little wave. I took a step towards her, took her offered hand, and gave it a single firm handshake, like we were two guests at a fancy party. Then I said hello to her little dog: A remarkably intelligent and self-assured creature. Watching Аннет play with him - frolic even - as we locked my bike and walked through the mall to a sunny bench, was very entertaining, and made me feel happy.

That was the first thing I found interesting: She was broadcasting an energy that made me happy.

Аннет was a short, pale-skinned woman with soft but muscular limbs and a wide, smiling face, with a spray of wavy reddish-brown hair bursting out behind her head. This much I knew from photos, but what I really liked was the way she moved as I watched her talk. High, melodic voice, easy laugh, very expressive hands, her head in constant motion, tilting and swaying to add meaning to her words. There was an enthusiasm beaming out her like sunshine, and it felt familiar. I had a feeling like I was already used to it. From previous romantic experience maybe, but maybe from something deeper.

The presence of that energy made many things about our previous conversation click into place. Suddenly I understood the intent and the force behind a tone that had seemed confusing before, in the emails and chat sessions. Even the driven, voracious way she'd dug into the discussion about monogamy now made sense. It was clearly that mind animating this body.

As we sat, the clouds split briefly overhead, and a sunbeam drifted across her eyes. Time stopped as I looked into them. Yellow-green and jewel-like, with a feral wideness, like some creature that belonged in a mythical forest had snuck into the modern world, and I had just accidentally seen through her disguise. I struggled with a compulsion to just stop moving, and thinking, completely.

"Don't turn into a slack-jawed idiot," I thought. "That would bore her, and you'd regret it."

I pushed past the moment and we kept talking, telling stories back and forth and enjoying each others' enthusiasm, both of us laughing. At one point she laughed at a joke and I said "Mission Accomplished!", referring to a joke from a few days ago, and she got so flustered trying to come up with a funny retort, with her face all screwed up and her head sideways, that I burst out laughing, feeling overjoyed, and she gave up and joined in with me. It was a lovely moment. This was the infectious feeling of instant chemistry.

We kept talking, and she missed her bus. I immediately proposed a solution where we would ride Bart for a while and then I would bicycle to my van and drive her home. She accepted it without hesitation. Then we got so busy talking - again - that we left my bicycle behind at Fruitvale station. I only remembered it as the train pulled in at MacArthur. I slapped my forehead. I would have to get to my house on foot, which meant a much longer wait for Аннет.

We emerged at MacArthur and found her a sunny patch of curb to wait with her dog, and before she turned away I placed my hand on her shoulder and looked right at her and said "be safe". She didn't just say "okay" or "I will", she brought her hand up so that it was covering mine, returning the eye contact, accepting the concern and showing that she valued it. I had made a little gesture of chivalry and she'd taken it gracefully. Often these things were hard to balance but I think I got it right.

I turned around and ran most of the way to the van. I didn't want to leave her alone for any longer than necessary. I knew she had her dog, and my reasoning mind told me she would be perfectly fine, but I wasn't acting for my reasoning mind; I was acting from instinct. A man just doesn't leave his date sitting somewhere.

Ten minutes later I rolled up in the van, and as we were loading up she thanked me again for my flexibility and apologized for being a few minutes late earlier in the day. I called up a map to her place on my phone, and handed it to her, and she guided us onto the freeway. I could tell she was subtly impressed by the fact that I already trusted her to just take my unlocked phone. As before, we talked nonstop, all the way up to an overlook of the city, where we parked the van for a while because we still didn't want the date to end yet. The dog seemed happy to hang out in the spacious back.

More storytelling, more laughter. We went a little meta, and I made a few observations about how I saw her mind working. She told me a few key stories that knit together pieces from our online conversation, filling me in, giving me time to tell stories of my own. We had an exchange about the mental faculties of programmers that was a nice back-and-forth, with a slow, thoughtful cadence, working towards shared understanding without the need to be "right". I liked that dynamic. In the middle of the conversation she pulled some knitting out of her purse and worked at it for a while, then stashed it away, keeping her hands occupied, which I found completely adorable. Much later I realized that she'd been giving her hands something to do because what she really wanted was to put them on me, and it wasn't appropriate yet. Eventually we drove the few remaining blocks to her house, and against her better judgement, she brought me inside, to her room, and we continued the conversation there.

Neither of us wanted to end it, but at the same time, we both knew we had real lives to maintain. She needed to eat and sleep, and I needed to eat and recover my bike. I said hello to a few of her housemates, and to another very old and adorable dog, and then goodbye to her dog, and then goodbye to her, standing outside the door, leaning in to hug her, enjoying her returned embrace.

"You're good at hugging!" she said.

"Well, you're the right shape for it!" I replied.

As we drew back from the hug she tilted her head up, and instead of moving my hands to my sides I raised them up and cupped the sides of her face. I had already decided it wasn't the right time to kiss her. I also knew I was taking a risk by even holding her in this possessive way, but I couldn't help myself. It seemed a natural enough gesture; a combination of a parting note, and a selfish chance to frame the source of that energy. Neither of us was making any predictions about the future, but we both acknowledged that we had very strong chemistry and wanted to hang out more.

She said I was interesting to her, and important, because she had thus far never met an adult man who could accept her high energy, and take real pleasure in doing so. That surprised me. Hadn't she met a lot of men? It couldn't be rare.

We tried to get together again soon, but it was a logistical nightmare. She lived way up in the Oakland hills, had no car, worked six days a week, had a two hour commute to San Francisco, and had a dog that was her constant companion because he provided medical support for a metabolic condition she'd had for most of her life. She also had to walk and feed the dog of course. And she lived with three housemates, in a cramped and cluttered room, making privacy difficult.

I worked with it gamely for a while. She was fantastic conversation, very energetic and upbeat, and I loved the dog too. But after two or three more outings I began to see a clearer picture of her mind and how it operated, and realized there was a downside to the energy that drove her. She had a tendency to flit from place to place inside her head, and often missed social and emotional cues, and had an unassailably high self-confidence, which in itself was not a problem, but combined with the previous two attributes caused an ongoing cascade of small misunderstandings that were time-consuming to sort out.

She had even alluded to these character flaws in the online profile I read a month before, and I didn't feel like they were deal-breakers. Eventually people learn emotional signals just from pure exposure to a partner, even if it doesn't come to them naturally. Or they accept their limitation, and learn to welcome the corrections people offer them without rancor. "Oh, sorry, I'm bad at signals sometimes." With Аннет, there was something else in play: When she missed a cue and made a wrong assumption, she would fight against appearing wrong, as though that was what was at stake, even if the correction was put very gently, with carefully chosen words to try and keep ego out of the picture. If you didn't have a deft skill at de-escalating, an argument was guaranteed.

Another thing also became clear, and it was surprising to me. Аннет never, ever talked about her emotions. She would talk about her philosophy, her ethics, her work, her ambitions ... but never about how something made her feel. She had well-examined opinions about everything, and would defend or debate them ferociously, but I never got the sense that she was saying anything that felt like a risk -- that felt like she was making herself vulnerable. She claimed - with great pride - that she was an open book, but the last few chapters had obviously been torn out and locked in a desk somewhere, and I was apparently not supposed to notice, or mind. She was holding herself in reserve and I knew it.

I could even sense it in our kissing. Only a few days after the first date, we became physically involved, and her kissing was very practiced and enthusiastic but there was a measure of passion being held in check. Even when she had sex she turned inward, focusing mostly on enjoying her own body and the sensations that her partner was inspiring inside it. That was probably enough for most men - at least, for a while - because her body was a curvy work of art. But it felt strange to me. She didn't feel a need to reciprocate the attention or share the focus. In fact, after four of five rounds of sex, I began to feel as though she was barely in the room with me.

One week, after she'd been entirely out of contact for about five days, she announced that if I wanted to meet her other boyfriend, he would be in town for a pinball tournament. I told her I was hesitant, but willing. Then she described how it would work: She would be spending the weekend with him, in his hotel room, and I could drive down and visit the two of them and check out the tournament.

Now, at this point, I was still fresh out of an 18-month relationship with Эрика, and she was still my basis for comparison. Эрика liked to talk about her feelings. She needed to. She talked about things she was unsure of, so we could hash them out together, like I did. Аннет was totally different. So again, just as with Кэрол, it wasn't the open relationship or polyamorous aspect that bothered me. It was the way she declared that it was Just So, setting the schedule ahead of me, and then confidently declaring that of course she could manage things with care for my emotions, despite this divided attention. Some part of me had assumed that while she and I were nurturing our relationship past the initial stages, she wouldn't go hooking up with her other lovers out of respect for the process. But that was me, trying to apply my own hypocritical standard to her emotional life, and basing my trust on that standard. Polyamory doesn't work that way. You can't assume anything. You need to make the subtext text, and then work with that until everyone's on the same page.

Even though I knew I was reacting unfairly, I very suddenly cooled to the idea of a relationship with Аннет in general. She had laid claim to a title of "expert at polyamory", but here she was constructing an awkward situation without realizing it. I would be meeting this very important stranger for the first time, by driving to the motel where he and Аннет were going to be canoodling all weekend. It didn't feel good. This was a bad setup, and we needed to discuss it.

Which we did, at length, but the discussion did not go where I expected at all. Аннет insisted that my unease didn't make any sense, since sex was just a fun physical activity, no different than going bowling. Would I begrudge her going bowling with a friend? No, of course not. Then why would I begrudge her having sex with this guy? I told her I didn't buy into her premise. To me, sex was very different from bowling. More intimate, more important.

She said she didn't understand, and wanted explanations. She wanted me to present a reasoned argument. I knew I was coming from a place of emotion, but I also knew there were rational arguments I could make. I gave her one based on anthropology, and she responded with a stump speech about how we should all become masters of our instincts in pursuit of the optimal happiness promised by polyamory. I changed tactics and asked her: Why is sex fun in the first place? It's basically a wrestling match ending in fluid exchange -- how dull. Yet it's pursued endlessly and elaborately by nearly everyone on Earth. The point is, its appeal is not based in reason. We don't pursue sex because some debate team won our minds over as adolescents, we pursue it because we are constructed to do so. Whatever reasoning you add to that is only in service of answering the question of how and why we are constructed that way -- not whether. And, it's the same thing with the perceived importance of sex, sexual propriety, sexual access, et cetera. These are complicated and often sensitive issues with real, legitimate emotions driving them, and you can't redraw their foundations with argument, any more than you can argue a gay man into lusting for vaginas on the grounds that it "makes more sense".

She hand-waved past that, reiterating that it was all a matter of integrity and respect, and that in her past, when people had actually trusted her to handle their emotions with integrity and respect, she did right by them, in spite of their nervousness. I couldn't tell if she was trying to gaslight me, or if she really didn't understand that a fundamental difference had just been laid bare between us: Sex meant more to me than a few rounds of bowling. A piece of my soul was in it.

Аннет gave me a lot more words, in spoken and written form. She said that she loved "all her partners equally", but in practice, the most this actually meant was that she currently loved whichever one she felt like making time to see slightly more than the ones she was currently keeping in the holding pattern. Another favorite saying of hers was, "All my relationships thrive on their own merits, separately." The unspoken addendum being, "therefore your jealousy is illogical." Anyone who's ever had to support a lover depressed from a bad breakup with someone else knows that this idea is wishful thinking, polyamory or no.

I gave up on arguing with her, and asked her to describe the other man in greater detail, thinking that if I could build a picture of him in my mind and find that picture approachable, perhaps this scenario could work. She held forth with, "I owe everything to him. It's a relationship deeper than any I've ever had. After four years, it's a connection that I'm not going to just throw away, just because we live on opposite coasts." I asked for more detail. She described how the man and his wife had been married for 15 years, and she'd moved into their house and lived with them for two of those years. How she'd formed a triad from a marriage that was on the rocks; how she'd moved out west when the drama became unbearable and the wife began to hate her, how the man was now already seeing two other women but was "flying out to California on a regular basis, to show me he still loves me."

As the whole story emerged, I grew a bit disoriented. This was the arrangement she'd learned her skills from? It reminded me of the twisted, dysfunctional scenario I'd weathered several years ago. I told her I saw some parallels with her situation and mine, and I wasn't surprised when she protested that opinion fiercely, setting off another long-winded far-reaching debate about polyamory etiquette, and explained that he was both a perfect gentleman to his non-married women (what I couldn't stop myself from thinking of as his "harem"), and a hero to his wife because he was still working on their marriage. She took it to email, and backed herself up with pages of exposition. From my point of view, she could have easily explained herself with a few short sentences: "I still have feelings for him, and I want to keep seeing him. Sure I could move on if I wanted to, but I don't. I'm not ready to go through that pain."

That would be a statement about feelings, however, and she was determined to keep those out of the discussion. To her, sexual politics were a guide to the appropriate emotions, and if we all acted with rational self-interest, we could all get what we wanted.

After a few days of mini-essays back and forth, I grew exasperated with her -- and with myself. I tried to "bottom line" it: She was lovely, and I could keep spending time with her, in and out of bed, if I would just accept that she wanted to bang a couple of other people on an ongoing basis as well. If I never met those people, it would essentially be like we were dating. The usual "don't ask; don't tell" rule would apply. If I met those people, it would be a journey into the world of polyamory again, and I would need to start accounting for the emotions and quirks of several people, only one of whom I had deliberately chosen. Maybe it could work out fine, maybe not.

I suddenly didn't feel up to the task. Not this soon after my breakup.

Besides, the math was bad. I didn't like the idea of getting involved with someone who was overconfident and evasive with her feelings and carrying a massive torch for a man who had, from my point of view, cynically exploited her by welcoming her into his spider-web of a marriage, and was still exploiting her even now from three thousand miles away. (In my opinion, the best thing he could have possibly done for her was to stop talking and disappear.) To get to a place of real commitment with her - if that was ever possible - I would first have to rise to the top in an ongoing competition, with that guy parked on the throne. It sounded like a slow road to heartbreak.

A few days later, I officially called off the relationship, and moved on with palpable relief. She seemed stunned by my reversal, and also stunned because I had made no attempt to bargain with her, even after all that discussion. I had just picked up my hat and gone for the door after making my discomfort known. She kept pushing me for details, and we corresponded enough for me to admit that I didn't think I could put in the work of polyamory with her in good faith. I said I just wasn't ready.

What was the real truth of the rejection? If we were just dating and I was having fun, how much should I care about all this? Аннет was fun to talk to and a physical knockout. Maybe it was just the logistics: I would be dating a woman living deep in the suburbs with no car and no bicycle, with crazy work hours, little money, and a 24-hour mandatory dog escort, who was dividing her time between me and several others. The cynical part of me probably just thought "I can do better."

A few days later she emailed me to ask what she should do with the socks I left in her room up in Oakland. I told her to just throw them away. About a week after that, I received a package in the mail, and within it, the two dirty socks. I sat on the steps to my house and laughed, and then pitched them into the garbage can. At least we had both treated each other with integrity and respect.

Quite a while later - about a year or so - we spotted each other in a park while she was out walking her dog. She smiled and waved at me, but I didn't wave back because I was on a date at the time. That evening we traded a few kind words of greeting online. Аннет and I weren't a perfect match, but I'll always remember that energy radiating from her face like a sunbeam.

I rarely write about my work here. But today I think I will!

I've worked on many codebases, with very large numbers of contributors in some cases, and only a few in others. Generally when you make a contribution to a large codebase you need to learn the etiquette and the standards established by the people who came before you, and stick to those.

Not making waves - at least at first - is important, because along with whatever code improvements you may contribute when you join a project, you also bring a certain amount of friction along with you that the other developers must spend energy countering. Even if your code is great you may drag the project down overall by frustrating your fellow contributors. So act like a tourist at first:

• Be very polite, and keen to learn.
• Don't get too attached to the specific shape of your contribution because it may get refactored, deferred, or even debated out of existence.
• It won't always be like this, but no matter what kind of big-shot you are on other projects, it may be like this at first for this new one.

Let me put it generally: Among supposedly anti-social computer geeks, personality matters. There's a reason many folks in my industry are fascinated by epic fantasy world always on the brink of war: They are actually very sensitive to matters of honor and respect.

Anyway, this is a post about code commentary.

In one codebase I contributed to, I encountered this philosophy about code comments from the lead developers: "A comment is an apology."

The idea behind it is, comments are only needed when the code you write isn't self-explanatory, so whenever you feel the need to write a comment, you should refactor your code instead.

I believe this makes two wrong assumptions:

• The only purpose of a comment is to compensate for some negative aspect of the code.
• Code that's easy for you to read is easy for everyone to read.

The first assumption contradicts reality and history. Code comments are obviously used for all kinds of things, and have been since the beginning of compiled languages. You live in a world teeming with other developers using them for these purposes. By ruling some of them out you are expressing a preference, not some grand truth.

Comments are used to:

• Briefly summarize the operation of the current code, or the reasoning used to arrive at it.
• Point out important deviations from a standard structure or practice.
• Explain why an alternate, simpler-seeming implementation does not work, and link to the external factor preventing it.
• Provide input for auto-generated documentation.
• Leave contact information or a link to an external discussion of the code.
• Make amusing puns just to brighten another coder's day.

All of these - and more - are valid and when you receive code contributed by other people you should take a light approach in policing which categories are allowed.

The second assumption is generally based in ego.

I've been writing software for over 40 years, and I haven't abandoned code comments or even reduced the volume of the ones I generate, but what I have definitely done is evolve the content of them significantly.

I've developed an instinct over time for what the next person - not me - may have slightly more trouble unraveling. That includes non-standard library choices, complex logic operations that need to be closely read to be fully understood, architectural notes to help a developer learn what influences what in the codebase, and brief summaries at the tops of classes and functions to explain intent, for a developer to keep in mind when they read the code beneath. Because hey, maybe my intent doesn't match my code and there's a bug in there, hmmm?

The reason I do this is humility. I understand that even after 40 years, I am not a master of all domains. The code I write and the choices I made may be crystal clear to me, but not others. Especially new contributors: People coming into my codebase from outside. Especially people with less experience in the realm I'm currently working in. For the survival of a project, it's better to know when newcomers need an assist and provide it, than to high-handedly assume that if they don't understand the code instinctively, then they must be unworthy developers who should be discouraged from contributing, like by explaining what's going on you are "dumbing down" your code.

Along the same lines, it's silly to believe that your own time is so very valuable that writing comments in code is an overall reduction in your productivity.

You may object, "but what if the comments fall out of sync with the code itself, and other developers are actually led astray?"

I have two responses to this, and you may not like either one: First, if your comments are out of sync with the implementation it's either because your comments are attempting to explain how it works and the implementation has drifted, or your comments are explaining the intent behind the code, and the behavior no longer matches the intent. In the first case, the comment may potentially cause a developer to introduce a bug if they're not actually understanding the code. But if they're reading the code and they can't understand it because it's complex, then the commentary was justified, and it should be repaired rather than removed. (Or, you should refactor the code so you don't need to explain "how" so much.) In the second case, someone has already introduced a bug, and the comment is a means to identify the fix.

And second, if it feels like a lot of trouble to maintain your comments, then perhaps you write great code but you're not very good at explaining it in clear language to other humans. You should work on that.

If it's your project, you can make the rules, and if it's your code, then obviously it's clear to you. But if you want to work on a team, and have that team survive - and especially if you want to form a team around your own project - then you need a broader philosophy.

By the way, I should note that there are less severe incarnations of "a comment is an apology" out there. For example, "a comment is an invitation for refactoring". That's a handy idea to consider, though it still runs afoul of the reductionist attitude about the purpose of comments.

You should indeed always consider why you think a comment is necessary because it might lead to an alternate course of action. Even if that action has no effect in the codebase itself, like filing a ticket calling for a future refactor once an important feature gets shipped, it may be a better move. But this is an exercise in flexibility, and considering what you might have missed, rather than a mandate that code be self-explanatory enough to be comment-free (and an assumption that you personally are the best judge of that.)

Here's my own guidelines for writing comments. They're a bit loose, and they stick to the basics.

• Comments explain why, not how.
• Unless the how is particularly complicated. Then they explain how, but not what.
• Unless the what is obscure relative to the standard practice, in which case a comment explaining what might be useful.
• You learn these priorities as you go, and as you learn about a given realm of software development.

Always be thinking about the next person coming in after you, looking around and trying to understand what you've done. And, try to embrace the notes they're compelled to contribute as well.