Happy Friday friends!! Aren’t we cute? Don’t we look happy?
The truth about marriage
The truth is, our marriage is messy. It ebbs and flows. Sometimes we are close, and sometimes we are not.
People change
I’ve changed, he’s changed, our relationship has changed. There are times I’ve just looked at him and thought, who is this person? 😤 And other times we are in a crowded room and all I can think is wow, I really do like him more than anyone else in the world. Even the kids.
Marriage is hard work, and sometimes it sucks
I didn’t really get what people meant when they said marriage was work. (Yeah yeah of course it’s work… ) I realize I probably don’t know some of the challenges headed our way. I do know the work can suck—it hurts and can feel like sobbing and wanting to yell and pack your bags and never see their ugly face ever again, and yet staying. Forgiving. Listening. Trying.
Marriageis wonderful
But marriage also means having an adventure partner, a shoulder to rest on, someone to hang out and eat pizza in sweatpants with. It means washing the dishes next to someone who loves and accepts you and is trying to be the old man holding your hand 50 years down the road.
But also
I know it doesn’t always work out, despite our best efforts. That’s ok too.
Here is the truth
I just wanted to share this picture of us looking cute and happy and for you to know that we are cute and happy, but also sometimes we are petty and ugly-crying, and that is just part of the whole experience.
Marriage isn’t perfect
I debated sharing this because it’s hard to admit publicly that my marriage isn’t perfect. I much rather share just the good stuff! But let’s be honest, as good as it is, it’s not all good stuff! I feel like you all know me a little bit more, if you made it this far. 😂
Let’s be real
Let’s be real online and share the good and bad. Let’s talk about the awkward things and learn from one another. Otherwise, what is the point of this space? Who has the best curated brag-show? 🙅🏻♀️
Thank you!
Thank you for being a part of the conversation! I don’t get enough opportunity to sit and talk (my favorite activity), so I love the conversations we can have here.
I’m here for you
I hope you’re having a wonderful day and if you ever feel like you need someone to talk to, I am here! It really wouldn’t be weird, I like talking to people. Not sure why I felt like I needed to add that, but I did and I meant it! ✌
This might have been our most basic year yet, and I am totally ok with that. I feel like you get to this place in life where life just is and it keeps rolling forward, and you get to choose how much you are going to enjoy the ride.
Like any day, we rushed to get Gavin off to school, Chet went to work, I went to the gym.
We ordered pizza and salad so no one had to cook, and video called our parents to wish them happy Valentine’s. We ate some chocolates Chet bought and read sweet notes he made for each of us.
After the kids went to bed, we watched The Bachelor by the fireplace and bonded over how alike we think and how ridiculous the show is.
Lately, I have been dreaming of selling all our stuff and jetting off to some exotic destination where we can experience a different lifestyle and grow closer as a family. I know it sounds a bit naive and romanticized, but living abroad in Shanghai whet my appetite for this kind of lifestyle.
I want to be a nomadic family. There, I’ve said it.
I have always wanted to travel, it’s a core part of who my am. My biggest beef with life is that I can never decide what life to live because I want to live ALL THE LIVES. I wish I had 100 lives so I could be an artist in downtown NYC, a soccer mom nestled behind the white-picket fence, an actor on Broadway, a lonely National Geographic photographer, a busy book publishing exec in stilettos, and a warm psychologist with an inviting cream-toned office.
For me, travel is the answer to this dilemma. I can’t live 100 separate lives, but I can essentially live as many lives as I can find destinations.
Pre-China I was definitely living the young mother in LA suburbs life–I would go to mommy group play-dates, take the baby to the library and the park, eat at Chik-fil-A while my son enjoyed the play area, made DIY crafts, and made oh-so-many meal plans.
At the park with Gavin
And then BAM, I find myself in Shanghai, living in a HUGE city (upwards of 24 million) for the first time in my life. Suddenly I’m dressing chic as I hail a cab to meet up with a friend at a trendy cafe, dancing on the 87th floor of the Jin Mao Tower in the financial district, squeezing (and I mean squeezing) onto a subway during rush hour on my way to work, jetting down the insane chaotic street on my scooter to pick up my son from his international bilingual preschool.
It was intoxicating.
It was also hard and complicated. Pollution was a big problem. School had it’s challenges. My son missed out on some things–his language development slowed down as he tried to learn a second language (this is perfectly normal for bilingual children and their language skills are often more advanced later in life). He really missed his extended family. It was nearly impossible for us to sign him up for team sports like soccer. He literally had no idea what go-gurt, pirate’s booty, or pop tarts were, which I’m actually ok with, especially since his favorite foods were red bean paste steamed buns and xialongbao.
There were many benefits as well. He was exposed to friends from all over the world, got a chance to see that not everyone is like us, and learned how to make friends on the fly. He knew that the world didn’t revolve around him like it often does in this artificially kid-centric world. He became basically the easiest-going kid ever, learning that yeah, sometime you need to walk far when you are tired because we are still a few blocks from home. We backpacked across Vietnam with him and brought literally two toys and did no “kid activities”–you know what? He was fine. He was more than fine, he LOVED it!
So how do I balance the benefits of family, school, and kid-oriented activities with the desire to teach my son to be open-minded, flexible, and adventurous?
No seriously, I’m asking, what are your thoughts?
Here is the best I have come up with: summers abroad.
This is a compromise. Its not what I really want: to be nomads living in different places, or be exapts living abroad on several-year assignments. I loved being a part of an expat community, we were so tight-knit. If you ever get the chance to live abroad, I would definitely take it! You’ll find that you will go, have this amazing life-changing experience, return home, and find that everything is mostly the same. Or maybe Trump will be president and that would be a shock to the system, like what happened to us, but otherwise everything else was mostly the same.
I told Chet when we got married that I waned to have a decade abroad, like when we are 50 and the kids are all out of the house, we sell the house, quit our jobs, and live in 5 different places for two years each. Enough time to feel established and really get a taste of what life is like in those places. But you know what? I don’t want to wait until then!
Ok, so back to my compromise. The main thing holding me back is school, I just feel like Gavin is really flourishing in school right now, so much more than before. I don’t trust that I could do as good of a job at home, though maybe I could if I really applied myself. But for now, I don’t want to take school away from Gavin.
So I was thinking we could pick a different destination each summer, and live there for about two months, and return home for school, family, and the typical American childhood. If nothing else, it could be an educational bonding experience for our family, satisfy my travel craving, and be a test for life abroad, giving me a better idea before I dive in. So yes, its a compromise and isn’t the ideal, but I recognize life is about compromises and I am not the only person whose needs need to be taken into account.
Have you or someone you know ever done something like this? How did you decide to take the plunge? How did you work it out with your/your spouse’s work? Where did you go or where would you go?
I’ve been lucky enough to be participating in Grow with Google and Udacity’s Front-End Web Developer Scholarship. I’ve been participating in a front-end web development course offered through Udacity and sponsored by Google with the hope of being selected to get a scholarship to take Udacity’s Front-End Web Development Nanodegree for free. This has been a huge opportunity for me and a great learning experience.
Here is a mock-up I made in HTML from a pdf image. It’s my first mock-up so I wanted to mark the start and watch my skills progress.
Humans vs. Machines: An AI Odyssey
By Christopher Watkins
March 10, 2016
***Breaking News: AlphaGo has won the first two matches!*** In this, the third in our series on the epic Go matches being played between AlphaGo (Google’s Artificial Intelligence software) and Lee Se-Dol (Current Go World Champion), we look at the history of Humans vs. Machines, and the innovations that have led us to this incredible moment in time.
For as long as humans have built things, we’ve wrestled with the implications of what we’ve built. In many cases, these philosophical and ethical wrestlings have made for great drama—think Frankenstein, or 2001: A Space Odyssey. Often, the hypothetical scenarios we envision come remarkably close to true, and the discoveries we’ve made in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning make clear that a “computer with a mind of its own” is going to take over the world not such a fantastic thing to imagine any longer.
The Triumph Of Deep Blue
Perhaps this is why we are so captivated by human vs. machine competitions, because the idea of being overcome by that which we’ve created speaks to something very deep within our collective consciousness. When IBM’s Deep Blue faced off against Garry Kasparov1, the event resulted in more than three billion impressions around the world, and when IBM’s later creation Watson challenged the champions on Jeopardy, millions of viewers were glued to the proceedings.
DeepMind’s AlphaGo
Taking place right now, there is an event that, while not likely to scale the same media heights, may in fact have far greater implications when it comes to the future of “intelligent” machines. On March 9, in Seoul, South Korea, a computing system know as AlphoGo (built by researchers at DeepMind—a Google Artificial Intelligence lab) began a five-game match against Lee Se-dol, one of the very best players in the world at the ancient game of Go.
The game of Go has long been viewed as the most challenging of classic games for artificial intelligence due to its enormous search space and the difficulty of evaluating board positions and moves.
Put another way, winning at Go is a kind of Holy Grail for those who strive to create machines that can “think” on their own, because success at this uniquely complex game seems to require something more than just skill, knowledge, and experience. It requires intuition. Feel. Style. Characteristics we associate with humans, not with machines.
1 Garry Kasparov is a Russian chess Grandmaster and former World Chess Champion
Our Place in the Sun 