michelle selvans Archives

Note: this was originally written May 14th, 6 weeks ago.

I thought I wouldn’t have to do this again. Not alone. Build a future from scratch. Carve it out of a big block of nothing. It felt so comfortable. So safe. At least there will always be Michelle. That’s what I thought. Now I’m moving out. She’s kicking me out. Get out. Get out of my life. Go away. Tyler doesn’t live here anymore!

I’m going to live in the front house for six weeks, and we’re going to try to get to know each other again. I feel like I’m a burden on her. An emotional liability to be written off if possible. Hazardous psychological material. Who would want to get to know me? And so the thought of going off again, into the world, to try and make a place for myself alone, seems impossible. But at the same time, it seems like that’s what she’s trying to get me to do. Think about being apart. Dream about it, and hope it’s not just a nightmare.

Colorado Dreaming and the Two Body Problem

While we were both in Colorado last winter, Michelle and I talked a lot about the emotional and physical logistics of moving back there permanently. Our two body problem. Location, career or love, (like sleep, good grades or a social life): pick two. We tried to write an outline of all the decision points we might face. A decision tree. It became a mess. Then we started writing it as a Python program, with zane and michelle objects, and method calls like zane.findjob(loc="boulder"). But it’s not really that kind of problem. It’s not deterministic. This is decision making under uncertainty. Strategic and emotional, not entirely susceptible to reason. It really stopped being an academic problem when I got the interview with NREL, and it seemed to go well. Even if I don’t get the job (they still haven’t said one way or the other, as of mid February August), it was certainly a useful exercise in the sense that It made us think and feel through the realities of what doing something like that would mean.