Seven Years

As of today, it has been seven11 “Seven” of course being considered the perfect number in antiquity. years since I started this newsletter — which also means it’s been seven years since I moved to the Bay Area.

In that time, I’ve written 189 posts across 8 “seasons” — though, owing to some site updates a few months ago, that includes a few dozen posts that I originally posted without sending as newsletters. Buttondown says I’ve sent 164 emails, or about one every other week, though that’s heavily weighed towards this year’s weeknotes.

Season 1, back when I called this newsletter “Adventures in Dilenttantery”, was pretty disparate — like the newsletter today — but was typically structured around “what I’m reading” / “what I’m watching” / etc. Season 2, starting with this post in mid-2020, saw me rename the newsletter to “Applied Dilettantery” and move towards a mini-essay format. Season 3 was a short series of short stories, starting with “The House” in late 2020. Season 4, starting with “What’s New, Rooby-Doo?” in early 2021, moved back to a mini-essay format, though it pretty quickly ran out of steam, since I also tried to move to a once-per-week format instead of biweekly. Season 5 opened with my first yearly book review at the start of 2022, but most of the other pieces now listed as “season 5” were originally independent pieces as I took a year-long break from writing.22 2022, not surprisingly, was the year I suffered from fairly intense occupational burnout… Season 6, starting at the end of 2022, is where I renamed to “rwblog”, moved back to a biweekly cadence, and started writing shorter posts. Season 7 opened with leaving my 5-year-long role at Asana — definitely my biggest career shift to date — but otherwise continued with shorter, discrete notes, similar to season 6. Season 8, towards the end of last year, moved to the current weeknotes format.

In that time, I’ve lived surprisingly few places — after two years in the “armpit of SoMa”33 A block away from the yearly Folsom Street Fair, in fact, which was one of the few highlights of an otherwise fairly moribund neighborhood. , I moved to Mission Bay, currently famous as the red-hot epicenter of the AI boom (and its attendant rent increases…). I have, however, spent a non-trivial amount of time in every neighborhood of San Francisco except Bayview44 Though I have biked down to Candlestick Point and spent an afternoon at Archimedes Banya, which perhaps counts. , Visitacion Valley, and, weirdly55 “Weirdly” because it’s the location of San Francisco classic Beep’s Burgers, which seemingly everyone in San Francisco has been to, except me. , Ocean Avenue. I’ve barely been to East Bay, South Bay, or the rest of NorCal, though, because metropolitan areas are fractal.66 A topic I could have sworn I’ve written about, but can’t find. Perhaps for another time! I’ve visited Vancouver (three times), Hawaii (three times), Chicago (three times), New York (twice), Toronto (twice), Paris (twice), Barcelona, Lyon, London, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Bali, Melbourne, Taipei, Shanghai, Suzhou, Cancún, Puerto Rico, Ottawa, Montreal, Tahoe, Monterey/Carmel-by-the-Sea, Dillon Beach, Mendocino, and Lassen.77 Only now as I write this out do I realize just how much I travel, oops.

I’ve worked at Asana88 Albeit across a number of different teams in my five years there. , Descript, and now Vanta; I’ve written, depending on how you count, seven unpublished manuscripts99 And, er, multiple drafts of most of those. But this one is the one, I swear! . I’ve logged 415 books and 310 movies. I’ve completely achieved 32 and partially achieved 26 of my 85 yearly goals since I started tracking — one of which was getting married 😉

Oh, and I survived a pandemic. Kinda weird to think about how long ago that was, eh?

I’ve probably done a whole bunch of things I’ve completely forgotten about — I barely remember half the posts I linked up there… — which is why I guess it’s nice to have this all documented, more or less. Seven years feels like practically no time at all — I might as well have graduated from university last week, it sometimes feels — and yet also feels like a massive amount of time, like decades and decades have gone by and I have no connection to that little kid who “moved to SoMa and lived1010 A title that has always bothered me, a bit — I often read it as “SoMa is a particularly rough neighborhood that I barely survived”, but the intention was to say “moving is really stressful”. to tell”.

So, no matter how long you’ve been following along, thank you for joining me on this deeply disparate, probably slightly confusing1111 Which is a pretty good description of life, eh? journey. Here’s to seven-times-seven more years!

And now, to round us out, something I’ve heard about for seven years but only finally got to see this week: the tenacious wild parrots of San Francisco! A better symbol for “keep going” I cannot imagine…