Thoughts for an old friend

 My father died almost 10 years ago.  When he passed away I had contact with him for like 5 years and only sporadically by phone and once or twice a year when my work gave me the opportunity to travel to Hawaii as part of a rapid cycle corn breeding in person.  I am grateful for those visits because otherwise I wouldn't have seen him before he died. When I wrote about his death 10 years ago my feelings were a little raw. I didn't know how to process the complexity of what I felt when he died. This has shifted or softened or changed over time.  I have more nostalgia and fond memories of him now than I think comes through in his obituary that I wrote then.

When he died, his friends had a service for him in Hawaii that I did not attend. My father had converted at some point to the Baha'i religion.  He never mentioned this to me in any of our conversations, but his friend Bill from the Baha'i had helped set him up with an apartment and got him on disability so he wasn't homeless. I had a couple of quite frustrating and emotionally draining conversations with Bill leading up to the funeral because I wasn't following the Bahai traditions for burial. Bill was trying to convince me to follow Baha'i practices and bury my father in Hawaii. I did not have the money to pay for a plot in Honolulu. Total cost for a burial plot and casket in Honolulu that complied with Bahai rules would have been almost 100K and I had no instructions from my father on how to handle his funeral. So I had him cremated and the ashes sent back to me. My mom and brothers found a small plot in Nampa. We had a family graveside service where we buried the ashes in a small wooden box. And I didn't know what to do with his personal effects that were piled in a terrible mess left after his death in his apartment that the police told me they would arrange with the landlord to take care of it because it was a biohazard and there was nothing of any value inside. He had no money or will or physical things worth salvaging so none of us went to Hawaii. Bill sent me tapes from the Baha'i service but I couldn't make it all the way through them because I was angry and heartbroken that the person they eulogized was a stranger to me.   

I had one emotional wound that I kept circling back to.  It still is a sore point that I haven't quite forgiven or forgotten. In my last conversation with Bill, he said to me - "It sounds like you feel like your father abandoned you." 

I paused for a long time and told Bill, "He did. I didn't see him for more than 20 years." 

Bill couldn't believe this.  He said my father talked about us kids all the time - I asked him if he talked about his grandchildren. Bill said he didn't know that he had any.  He didn't even know my children's names. My father didn't ever ask about them or much about the details of my life after we finally did get back in touch.  He did tell my sister he was proud of everyone for all of their education and professional achievements but thought I just pollinated corn for some seed company - not the worst description of my job, but I was a heck of an expensive corn pollinator. 

Recently, my old bishop from my childhood ward/church contacted me with a conference talk and bearing his testimony again about the church and inviting me to come back.  It poked this old wound because this was someone that I desperately looked up to as a father figure, but as I moved away, got married and built a life I lost touch with him. There were three men in that ward that were pillars of support for me when I was a teen - they were mentors and confidants and friends. They took me on campouts, fed me dinner with their families, and helped my family both financially and spiritually and emotionally.  I will always be grateful for them, but when I graduated their job was done and they went on to focus on their own families and new church responsibilities and projects.  I didn't hear from any of them for 20 years. 

Then I wrote about leaving the church and posted it on Facebook.  Suddenly, I was a project again and they reached out to talk to me about my "potential" and how sad they were that I was making this choice, and to send me scriptures and conference talks.  I know intellectually this is Mormon for "I am thinking about you and care about you." but it still smarts in this same kind of way because my old mentor doesn't really know me as a person now or my family.   

DNA Replication Real Time!

2024 - Catalyst: Looking back at 2023 and ahead to the new year.

2023 people and places 

Last year was a year for a lot of change for me personally and professionally and 2024 is looking to be another dynamic year at Bayer and for me. This year, I hope to be a catalyst for helping connect people, ideas, problems and solutions. 

One kind of fun metric for me of my career evolution is to look at the jobs that LinkedIn's algorithm recommends. It is a fun and eclectic mix - VP of Product Design for Facebook, customer sales representative for multiple companies, a quantitative genetics role at a start-up, digital design, and a breeding lead role. Some of the mix-up is that my role titles in 2023 changed from cotton product design - which was leading the cotton breeding team responsible for population improvement, parent and line selection, and genomic prediction, to then Customer Insights Deployment Lead - where I am working on selection indices, breeding product concept definitions, and incorporating customer feedback in how we breed and what we select. 

All those titles are a bit of a word salad and confusing to LinkedIn's algorithm, but there is a connecting thread from my education in cytogenetics, agronomy, plant breeding to my current role. I still continue to be interested in how to test new ideas for how to improve agriculture and breeding. I am grateful that Monsanto and now Bayer has let me do that in new ways throughout my career. 

I am a terrible pessimist by nature. If you ask me if I am a "glass half full" or "glass half empty" kind of person, I am probably a "glass going to be all the empty eventually, and let me tell you how" kind of person. Last year, I had some really unique opportunities for collaboration and travel last year that have given me a lot of optimism and hope that we will be able to meet and solve the looming problems in agriculture and climate change. I was able to visit Africa, India, Australia, and New Zealand. Visiting customers, breeders, and scientists in across the globe gives me a lot of hope as I see the brilliant people and solutions that they are working on for some really big and hard problems. 

I want to thank those that have collaborated with me in 2023 and hope to do better at that in 2024. I had some mental health and personal challenges that meant I had to step away from work I was committed to and not doing well with NAPB. I have been the world's slowest writer for some papers that I have been working on with IITA and Roslin scientists. 

In 2024, I want to continue that journey - connecting people, ideas, and solutions to the big global challenges that we face. That is the commitment I want to make for this next year - to be a better catalyst for that purpose. 

Happy 2024 and looking forward to the new year.

2023 - Year in Review

Aleah - Lots of big life changes.  Started an electrician training program at State Technical College and moved into her own apartment in Linn, MO.   She is learning a lot and enjoying living on her own, even if she has to ride her bike around. Linn is not really set up great for pedestrian or bike traffic, but she is loving the independence after graduation.  Next steps - car and driver's license. 

Emily and Celia - From Emily: 

"This year, Celia and I moved into our own apartment with our three cats: Baby, Lolly, and Kevin. This has been an awesome upgrade from having roommates. We have been playing an excessive amount of the RPG Vampire the Masquerade.  we have had campaigns set in 2023 Gig Harbor, WA, 2032 San Francisco, CA, 2023 Athens Greece, and the 1850s San Fran.  Celia has been working on her capstone: a series of poems. Celia has been Battalion commander of ROTC this semester and will graduate in the spring.  Over the summer I was a paraprofessional. This fall, I have been doing my first-year teaching middle school art. It has proved difficult but rewarding. At the beginning of the year, I got knee surgery - an ACL replacement and meniscus repair.  The recovery has been challenging but I am able to walk and lunge, etc. without pain."

Colleen - Sophomore!  Jobs - Lifeguard manager, Lifeguard, Babysitter, Hostess at Paul Manno's Italian Restaurant.  Best memories - bus ride back from Winter Guard.  getting driver's license, end of summer lifeguard party, epic hike around Lake Geneva. Worst moments - Pool backwash flooding incident. Recs Books: Lessons in Chemistry and Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.  Cried so hard.  Music: Lana Del Rey, Hippy Sabotage, Pouya.  Top songs - Forever waiting for you at my window - Pouya.  Work by Charlotte Day Wilson. 

Alex - 9th grade. Highschool attack. Fav memories of 2023 - Cross Country.  Getting the crazy PR of 27 at the best course in the cold and rain.  Sitting outside reading during the summer.  "It was lit" Went to Lake Geneva and running on the lake trail behind all the fancy houses on the edge of the lake. worst of 2023: "Race where expected to do well and read the clock wrong and then realized that it was not that good and everyone else got PRs.  Hate that course for ever and ever." Book recs: Vicious by V.E. Schwab.  The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak. Music - Everything thing from Lana Del Ray.  Men I trust. Fiona Apple and Taylor Swift - newer stuff not old Taylor. Movies - Dune, Across the Spiderverse. 

Becca -- Grade - 5th grade. Ms Williams class. Fav memory: NWA tests especially the math tests are the worst because it has 43 questions, and it has a lot of hard questions because it gets harder if you get them right. One of favorite memories - Going to Cub Creek camp for a whole week.  Animals galore, riding horse named Cheyene and new friends. Hoping that school trip to BizTown next week will be the best of the year. Fav summer - No school.  Worst summer - Not having stuff to do. Rec - Percy Jackson - Heroes of Olympus and the Insiders. Owl House. Hello from the Hollowood's, Night vale and Taylor Swift.  Spiderman, Lana Del Ray

Leila - more detail to come.  Leila signed us up for a 18th century ball this year and sewed her dress - it turned out so great. It was such a fun night even if we were late sewing last bits of the costumes.  Leila also has new patterns and quilts this year that doing well - check out: Leila Gardunia Quilt Patterns and sign up for the newsletter to get the latest.  

Brian - Moments I won't forget:

I started taking meds for ADD this year. It was one of the worst moments when Leila and I argued about it. I didn't want to admit how desperately overwhelmed I felt and how much my anxiety was getting in the way of my life. Then that first day when the medicine kicked in and I felt at the same time a little buzzy, but also able to make a to do list, rearrange my calendar and just do those things without feeling like I was drowning.  Hasn't solved my problems but may help me deal with my life. 

Walking with my work colleague and friend in Spain while we argued about some challenging politics and moments at work and the possibility of me changing jobs.  It was lightly raining, and we had these intense conversations over coffee and toasted crusty bread spread with fresh tomato and olive oil. I have been spoiled at work where I have been able to make my own job multiple times and this new job means I get to focus on a mix of economics and genetics. I will miss my cotton team, but after two years they're ready to take on the problems without me. 

The other two work moments I want to remember really are from trips to Kenya and India.  Sometimes the world feels overwhelming to me: climate change, politics, pollution, wars, all of my other anxieties that I don't dare say out-loud most of the time but fill my brain, but on both trips meeting with African and Indian scientists and farmers I felt a growing sense of optimism and possibility for the future that has been inspiring to me all year.  Both countries are growing and developing in different ways but trying so hard to do the right things for farmers and the environment. 

Travel - Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Spain, US: Lake Geneva, IL, Boise, ID, Tucson, AZ, Illinois farm tours and Farm Progress Show, Australia, New Zealand, Kenya, India. 

Recommendations:

Books - Run me to the Earth by Paul Yoon, Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin - always will recommend.  Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. The Strange by Nathan Ballingrood. The Last Cuentista by Levine Querido.

Music - Hillary Hahn - Ysaye recording, Brandi Carlile - all of the artists she produced albums for this year is a great list of new and upcoming singers. Tanya Tucker - Sweet western Sound also made the documentary that is hilarious and heart-warming "The Return of Tanya Tucker", Joni Mitchell at Newport, Brandy Clark, Lucious, and The Secret Sisters

ADHD meds and response to "Search Engine" podcast

 From an email that I sent the "Search Engine" podcast team.  It is a really intriguing series and I am pretty invested as I have struggled this last few years with a lot of anxiety and frustration trying to keep focused.  

https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/whyd-i-take-speed-for-twenty-years

I feel like I should start this email with something like on talk radio where the caller says - "long-time listener, first-time caller." I have been a big fan since the beginnings of Reply All.  It was one of the first podcasts that I listened to every episode of and I have enjoyed the new podcasts you have done since leaving that show.  

This series though I put off listening to.  I wasn't sure what you were going to say, but I wasn't sure that I wanted to hear it. I am 46 and I have a three month old prescription to Vyvanse that I just started taking.  I was officially diagnosed with ADD three years ago after my wife pushing and pushing for me to start seeing a counselor about it basically for 20 years.  I wouldn't have started to take medication at all, but we had a huge fight about it and I ended by conceding and admitting that maybe, maybe that taking something might help me.  

And it has been three months where I keep thinking - "why didn't I do this sooner.  Is this how regular people's brain's work?"  and to my wife's credit she hasn't once said I told you so.  

I don't have the same experience as most people that were given ADHD meds.  I do remember in 2nd grade that my teacher, Ms Murr, made a special rule for me that I had to be touching my desk at all times - and I have this moment frozen in my brain where she is at the front and i am standing with one leg hooked around the leg of my desk and going around in circles while she talked.  She also told us she would put up any artwork we did in the classroom and my neighbor and I that were obsessed with dinosaurs got a roll of butcher paper and drew all the dinosaurs we could find pictures of in the encyclopedia and she put the entire roll up on the wall, cutting out a circle for the clock.  

I was smart, I did great in classes.  I read obsessively everything I could and being a fast reader was my superpower.  My parents were divorced when I was 11 and my mom went back to school to be a math teacher at that time.  I saw that doing well in school was a way I could escape and get the life I wanted.  And I was driven.  I worked so hard that I used to fall asleep doing homework at 1 or 2 in the morning and then deliver papers before school every day through high school.  

I pushed hard through undergrad, masters, PhD and work in a unique RnD job that I kind of made up and Monsanto and then Bayer keeps paying me to do that is everything I wanted.   But things were starting to fray and fall apart.  The ways that I was forcing myself to be productive and focused weren't working anymore as I got into my forties.  Then with Covid, I had crippling anxiety and that made it harder and harder to focus.  Working from home those years made it worse and I desperately tried to cover that up at work, but at home it was increasingly clear to my family that if I was going to survive this I needed an intervention.  It was like a reverse intervention where my wife and kids one on one and in a group basically were like - you need to start taking drugs.  

There were signs before. Most people assume that I have ADD/ADHD - I can hyper-focus and I survived for years by procrastinating and then desperately finishing at the last second. This is a stressful way to live.  I had three seizures in college - which my neurologist attributed basically to lack of sleep and overwork.  I had MRI, EKGs, all of the other tests he could find but I refused to go on any medication because it took all of the focus I had to try and force myself to get to the end of my degrees.  

I was insistent though that I could handle it and I have been for my whole career.  I felt like taking medication was admitting to a weakness that I was overcoming with just hard work.  And I was doing it, but looking back a few months in I realized that I was also doing it with a lot of anxiety and desperation that I didn't need to have.  

My first day on Vyvanse I sat down and wrote out a to do list and then proceeded to do it.  Just like that.  Without any procrastination or anxiety.  It was insane.  I did feel a little buzzy - and at the same time quiet.  Like my brain was silent while I worked and I didn't know what to do with that.  I worry a little because I crave that feeling now even after just three months.  I wake up in the morning and I find myself thinking about it and wanting it.  I dread that I am dependent on this drug and that I am unable to feel like that without it. 

I loved the series.  I appreciate your public introspection and honesty about this.  I don't know what my life would have been like if I had started taking this sooner, but I feel a little sad that I fought it for so long.  Maybe, I would have been happier.  Maybe I wouldn't have had to struggle and fight my own brain to get to where I am now.  Maybe not.  Maybe it would have made me less creative. 

I swore to myself as a teen that I would live without regrets.  But now in middle age, I think that is impossible.  I wish I would reboot my life like a video game sometimes and see what difference it would be if I had taken a different path.  Or like a choose your own adventure book where I could turn back the pages and find another chapter that took me on a different journey.  But, I can't.  For now, I guess I will see what my brain and life is like as I take a low dose of meth every morning. 

Meditations on memory and focus

I don't know if it is a peculiarity of the eye, the brain, or the camera lens but I can never seem to get the focus on the camera to match what I see or remember.  As I flew home from India over Greenland, I looked out of the window and saw a plane that seemed to be just below us - so close I thought.  Contrails erupted from the tips of its engines and I could see clearly the logo of the other airline and dots of the windows reflecting the glacier and fjords below both of us.  But in the photo I took with my phone, the plane is far away and a pixelated blur against the horizon and clouds.  

Was it an illusion of the mind and eye that when I looked out the window it seemed to zoom in or is a fault in my iPhone camera skills to be able to mirror this focus and clarity?

This is probably a testable hypothesis or googleable question, but I like the idea that my brain and eye can make the sunset and the nights sky better IRL than the camera of my phone.  

I want to be able to pull that clarity on my self and my time.  I wish that I could see it better than it is captured by a camera or a word, but the reality is that I cannot and it slips away so fast.  

Even the image that I had so clear of the plane, that seemed so profound, is losing its realness.  Pieces I can remember - the parts I described above.  Those even closer images are zoomed in and crisp, but the rest of the details are just an outline between them and now as I write the memory becomes this. I see the blurry edges like a sketch drawing and the focus sections blown up around.  

Will that fade to be replaced with just words and memory of what it felt like to write this? The ache in my hand, the tired feeling from being up too late, the drying tears of the sad book that I finished before looking down on the plane, my cold from India and my suppressed cough in my throat, the sweat on my sandals and my cracked lips. 

No, that too will fade.  Even as I read these words in the future I will have to imagine this moment.  Maybe then I will remember but each time I try it shifts and changes by the act of remembering

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