I’m in the nuclear industry.  I work in a group called Pipe Analysis and Fracture Mechanics (PAFM)….  which of course sounds wonderful and interesting.. don’t worry I will not….arghhhh

(pause)

This is how left-brain I am.  I lock up talking to a voice recorder because I feel like I’m censoring myself in order to make it ‘perfect’. 

I lock up terribly in the process of writing as well.  It’s an obstacle I need to get past.  It’s not that I can’t write - I’m actually decent or so I’m told - it’s that I have trouble letting my real voice come through.

When I was young I was a terrible swimmer.  By the time I was in college, I could only swim to save my life, and I am a long time sailor!  Since I knew this problem wasn’t going away, I had to get over it.  So, I invoked my friend Abhi (swims like a fish, his high school records are still displayed at Stuyvesant High School) as a service and went to the pool three times a week to get over my inability to swim well.  I can swim a lot better - can even do flip-turns and such - but you get the idea. 

When I was a kid I was terrified of heights, so I started rock climbing.  Rock climbing certainly helped me get over heights.  Fricken love heights now.  Love to go to the edge of cliffs and just stare down.  Might be a bit of a masochist or a thrillist… who knows. 

The point is I can’t stand my inabilities.  I can’t stand any short-coming and therefore I need to fix it.  Just recently, I was denied an in-person interview at a job I really wanted cause I didn’t have enough web expertise.  This is true.  There’s nothing wrong about the statement.  Today I started going through tutorials on HTML, XML, CSS and the like.  Things I don’t really know. Thinking that, well, there’s so many jobs out there at tech startups that require coders.  I don’t want to be a code monkey, but I should at least understand the stuff.  Now I come from a background of taking some classes in java.  I code in FORTRAN of all languages in my current job and have even done some visual basic for applications.  In comparison, I had always thought web development was going to be hard!  I looked at these tutorials and I had no problem at all.  I couldn’t believe I didn’t put these things on my resume or that anyone would put these things on their resume because they seemed so simple and straight forward.  Now mind you, I’m talking just about the markup languages and being able to understand it.  I’m not talking about serious script editing or the real work that these Web APIs do.

I have these shortcomings and I feel the need to overcome them whenever I can.  That’s why I started this blog, aptly named ‘Left Brain to Right Brain’.  My left-brain has full control at the moment.  I know I have a good capacity to do right-brain activities.  I just need to be in the moment.  I have artistic ability, I have creativity, I just haven’t tapped into them in …er, years.  So as I try to write this, I’m trying to employ more of my right-brain side.

I lock up because writing for me is something that can’t be done perfectly.  That you always have to work at it.  That it’s hard work and you could iterate it a thousand times and it will never be perfect in my mind’s eye.  So today I’m trying a new approach.  You’ll notice that the previous blog posts are all pretty stilted or just a short little tribute like videos or a picture.  I’m trying today to record my voice on my phone and then transcribe it to a blog post.  

Ha!  Funny thing is once I started recording, I had all these thoughts in my head that are just a stream of conscious but once I start recording I can’t even… I lock up… it’s incredible.  That’s what the story of this blog is.  It’s me starting in a very left-brain centric area and trying to move more right-brain as I progress through my career out of nuclear engineering and hopefully eventually into starting my own company.  And that’s that.