B r a i n C l e a r

Sorting through life one thought at a time

Category: Real Life

  • Saving Power, Losing Sleep

    Don’t you hate being woken up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall back asleep? It always happens at the worst possible moment. Then again, is there ever a good time to lose sleep? Probably not. I’d like to speak to the manager of sleep, because the scheduling department is clearly broken.

    I’ve had periods of insomnia before. A whole week of waking up at 3-ish a.m. and staring at the ceiling like it owed me money. But that’s not today’s topic. Today we’re talking about the kind where something wakes you up. A person. A pet. Or, in my case, a surge protector that is supposed to be saving me power and has instead started clicking in the middle of the night like a tiny, passive-aggressive woodpecker with a grudge.

    It’s 1:20 a.m. I went to bed at 10:30. That’s roughly three hours of sleep. Definitely not enough for me to be done for the night.

    So what do you do? Glad you asked. I’ve been lying here for a while, so I’ve had time to think.

    Step 1: Stop looking at the clock

    I know. You already looked. You looked three times, and you’re about to look again. But every glance kicks off the sleep math: “If I fall asleep right now, I can still get five hours. Okay, four and a half. Okay, if I’m out in the next ten minutes, I’ll be fine.”

    Congratulations, you’re now a night-shift accountant, and your brain has clocked in for overtime.

    Turn the clock away. You don’t need another update.

    Step 2: Deal with the thing that woke you up

    If it’s a clicking surge protector, deal with it if you can safely do so. Lying there hoping it stops seems reasonable until you realize you’re now listening for the next click.

    Click.

    Maybe that was the last one.

    Click.

    Apparently not.

    If it’s a person, hopefully they settle back down. If it’s a dog, investigate what they need. Although if Hugo just wants more of the bed, I’m not sure there’s enough bed in the world.

    Step 3: Keep the lights low

    If you need to get up, use just enough light to move around safely. Leave the phone alone if you can, and resist the temptation to scroll.

    Checking one thing is rarely checking one thing. Suddenly you’re looking at someone’s vacation photos, and your brain has a whole new set of things to think about.

    Nobody needs to see Karen’s brunch at 1:30 a.m. Karen is thriving. Karen is probably asleep.

    Step 4: Know when to take a break from trying

    If you’ve been awake for roughly 20 minutes and you’re getting frustrated, get out of bed for a little while. No need to check the clock. An estimate is fine.

    Read a few pages of a book or listen to something quiet in dim light. Return to bed when you feel sleepy.

    The idea is to keep your bed associated with sleep, instead of the place where you lie awake getting increasingly annoyed about not sleeping.

    Step 5: Give your brain something quieter to do

    Your brain at 1:20 a.m. can have so much to say. Tomorrow’s to-do list. Something awkward you said years ago. A problem you cannot possibly solve from underneath a duvet.

    Try slow, comfortable breathing. Or do a gentle body scan, noticing and relaxing your toes, legs, shoulders and face. There’s no need to do it perfectly. That would just be another thing to think about.

    If you keep rehearsing tomorrow’s tasks, jot them down on paper. They can wait there until morning.

    Step 6: Be nice to yourself

    Being annoyed that you’re awake is understandable. Being annoyed at yourself for being awake probably isn’t helping.

    These are things to try, not another checklist you have to succeed at. If one doesn’t help, you haven’t failed at sleeping.

    Tomorrow, try to keep your usual routine, get some daylight, and resist the urge to move bedtime all the way up to 6 p.m. One rough night doesn’t mean the next one will be the same.

    So, is there ever a good time to lose sleep? No. Absolutely not. But at 1:20 a.m., you can at least make yourself comfortable, deal with the disturbance, and give sleep a chance to return.

    And if all else fails, you now have a blog post, a silent room, and the smug satisfaction of having won a war against a power strip.

    Click.

    …okay, there must be a second one. I’ll be right back.

  • Apparently I’m an Electromagnetic Disturbance

    It started Tuesday, just as I was about to drive home from work. Apple CarPlay wouldn’t connect. My car is a 2018, and I use an adapter to make CarPlay wireless. It can be a little wonky, so I unplugged it, plugged it back in, tried restarting my phone. Nothing. I finally played my audiobook through Bluetooth and drove home.

    A reasonable person might have left it there for the night. I went straight to Google and spent two hours troubleshooting in my garage.

    By bedtime, I was still thinking about it. I grabbed the bedroom TV remote yes, there’s a TV in the bedroom, I know, sleep experts everywhere are shaking their heads and pressed the button. The TV wouldn’t come on. I tried the other remote and got a screen asking me to log back into everything with a QR code or a password.

    Absolutely not. I had reached my troubleshooting limit. I put in my earplugs and went to bed. (The earplugs are because my Frenchie sleeps beside me. If you’ve heard a Frenchie sleep, you understand.)

    I woke up at 3:30 a.m. and couldn’t fall back asleep. Naturally.

    I go into the office three days a week, and Thursday wasn’t technically one of them, but skipping it meant a mandatory Friday instead, and Thursdays are usually quiet. So in I went anyway.

    I booted up my computer. No internet. Which meant I couldn’t connect to GlobalProtect. I asked a couple of other people if they were having trouble. Nope. Just me. So “I restarted the computer I had just started”

    That was number three. At this point I was beginning to wonder if I was the problem. Not in an emotional growth kind of way. In an am I interfering with electrical signals? kind of way.

    Apparently three glitches in two days wasn’t enough to make me leave the car alone. That night, I spent another hour in the garage trying to get CarPlay working. Still no luck. I went to bed hoping that, at the very least, everything would stay quiet until morning.

    Then, at 2:20 a.m. the fire alarm went off and scared the living hell out of me. It announced a problem in the “Family Room.” Except I didn’t have anything called Family Room in the app. Now I was awake, startled, and trying to solve a mystery in a room that apparently only the smoke detector knew existed.

    It turns out the detector can have one name in the app and a different name that it says out loud. “Family Room” was its default callout name. I still don’t know what set it off possibly dust but at least I know which room it was talking about. At 2:20 a.m., that information would have been helpful.

    And the car? After all the adapter troubleshooting, the problem appears to have been the cable. It could charge, but it wasn’t transmitting data. I got a new cable, and CarPlay came back.

    Which means the actual culprits were: one bad cable, one confused smoke detector, one TV demanding my life story, and absolutely nothing to do with my personal electromagnetic field. Disappointing, honestly. For a few days there, I almost thought the universe was trying to tell me something.

    Yogi Tea says: Not every signal is a sign. But every sign is also, technically, a signal.

  • Does the Bull Fit in the Barn?

    A friend of mine has a daughter heading into her final year of college. This daughter has had exactly one boyfriend the whole time. They got together a few months into freshman year and never really stopped.

    We got to talking about what comes next. The daughter wants a gap year before med school, and she and her boyfriend have floated the idea of getting a place together. He’s staying in school. No gap year for him.

    My friend wasn’t thrilled about the living-together part. Her worry: if her daughter moves in, he’ll have less reason to ever propose.

    I’ve been in the U.S. for years now. Long enough that I don’t expect much to catch me off guard anymore.

    And yet.

    There’s a specific flavor of surprise that only American dating logic can produce in me, and this was one of those moments.

    Come again?

    Because to me, the reasoning runs completely in reverse.

    It reminded me of that phrase people trot out here:

    “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”

    I have thoughts.

    Starting with this one: since when is he the customer and she the livestock?

    And why does the saying assume she’s just standing at the fence, waiting to be deemed purchase-worthy?

    Where I’m from, nobody’s buying anybody.

    Both people are choosing.

    If we’re going to keep the barnyard metaphor alive, maybe it should go like this instead:

    Why would a woman commit to a bull before finding out if he even fits in her barn? 😂

    Moving in together was never supposed to be a bargaining chip, something she trades for the promise of a ring down the line.

    It’s just how two people figure out if a life together actually works.

    And honestly, this goes well beyond the roommate question.

    The longer I sat with it, the clearer it got. Sweden and the U.S. aren’t just doing dating differently. They’re starting from different premises entirely.

    To be fair, Sweden isn’t game-free. Some version of “don’t seem too eager” is probably universal. It’s been a while since I was in the dating pool back home, but I’d guess the instinct to play it cool hasn’t gone anywhere.

    Women in particular seem tasked with the same balancing act everywhere: be interested, just not too obviously.

    Sweden included. We’re not exempt.

    But the actual mechanics of dating feel less scripted there.

    Two people meet. They start spending time together. They sleep together.

    Or, honestly, they might sleep together first and the “spending time together” part follows. 😂

    Sequence aside, here’s the real difference: nobody typically has to schedule a sit-down conversation titled “So, are we exclusive?”

    Once you’re seeing someone regularly, exclusivity is the default setting. If that’s not the case if someone else is in the picture too that’s the part you actually have to bring up.

    I’ve got a much younger sister, which means I’ve watched Swedish dating unfold long after I aged out of it myself. What I’ve noticed is that when someone isn’t looking for anything serious, or wants things kept casual, that gets said out loud early, precisely so nobody ends up confused or hurt.

    The American version often runs the opposite direction.

    You can be dating, sleeping together, spending every weekend together, and somehow still need a formal check-in about whether either of you is doing that with anyone else, too.

    My Swedish nervous system finds this baffling.

    Then there’s the friends-and-family piece. In Sweden, meeting someone’s friend group isn’t loaded with meaning. Meeting the parents isn’t a milestone with a flashing sign over it either.

    Sometimes you’re just around, long before anyone would call you the girlfriend or the boyfriend.

    And that same casualness carries all the way through, right up to the question that kicked off this whole train of thought: marriage.

    The old cow saying isn’t really about timing. It’s about the fear of never getting picked at all about being the one left standing at the fence while somebody else decides if you’re worth the commitment.

    I’m sure that fear exists in Sweden too. People are people, and relationships can make all of us insecure. But the idea that a woman shouldn’t move in with a man because it might make him less likely to marry her feels very foreign to Swedish culture.

    Living together before marriage is simply the norm. The idea of proposing to someone you haven’t lived with first would feel almost backwards.

    Marrying someone means formalizing two lives you already know fit together, not making a leap of faith and hoping the daily reality works out.

    Sambo, the word for living together, isn’t a stepping stone toward the “real” thing. For a lot of couples, it basically is the real thing, just without the paperwork. People buy houses, have children, build entire lives together and may never get married at all. Nobody is necessarily waiting for the next step.

    And even engagement looks a little different.

    In Sweden, when you get engaged, both people wear a ring.

    Traditionally, the rings are engraved with your partner’s name and the date you got engaged, signaling the commitment you’ve both made to the relationship.

    When you get married, the woman gets a second ring. The man often keeps the same ring it’s taken off for the wedding ceremony and put back on, with the wedding date added to the engraving.

    Sweden has definitely become more Americanized when it comes to engagements. There are more diamond rings and elaborate proposals now than I remember growing up.

    But the man still gets a ring.

    And usually, even if the proposal itself is a surprise, the idea of getting married isn’t.

    They’ve talked about it along the way. Both people already know this is where the relationship is heading.

    The proposal might be a surprise.

    The answer probably isn’t.

    And maybe that’s why another American question has always sounded a little strange to me:

    “Why hasn’t he married her?”

    Not why haven’t they gotten married?

    Why hasn’t he married her?

    It’s such a tiny difference in language, but there’s an entire relationship script hiding inside it.

    He’s the one deciding.

    She’s the one waiting.

    He’s choosing.

    She’s hoping to be chosen.

    And suddenly we’re back at the cow.

    Of course Swedish women want love and commitment. Of course people wonder where relationships are going. And yes, we can make ourselves completely insane over another human being too.

    We’re Swedish. We’re not some emotionally evolved Nordic species. 😂

    But underneath all of it is an assumption I grew up with that I never really thought about until I lived somewhere else:

    Both people are choosing.

    Maybe that’s the part that gets lost in the cow-and-milk logic.

    A woman isn’t giving a man the benefits of a relationship and hoping he’ll eventually reward her with marriage.

    They’re both trying the relationship on for size.

    They’re both deciding.

    They’re both committing.

    And if they get engaged, they’re both wearing the ring.

    Forget about buying the cow and getting the milk for free.

    I’m still stuck on a more important question:

    Does the bull even fit in the barn? 😂

  • An Update From the Spider HOA

    Yesterday I cleared a few spiderwebs off the patio up in the north GA mountains.

    For the record, I have nothing against spiders. They’re good to have around, they eat bugs, they build genuinely impressive webs, they mind their business. I only asked one thing:

    Please don’t build across the spots where I walk.

    Cool, well, that request got denied.

    This morning several webs were already back up. Overnight. No permits, no contractors, nothing. Just fully rebuilt structures like it was nothing. Mildly impressive honestly. One even had a tiny spider chilling in it, so I guess they’re doing affordable housing now too.

    Tried to get a picture but the green background, my phone refusing to focus on an actual spider, and my frenchie barking at me the entire time made it basically impossible to document.

    So here’s where the Spider HOA and I landed:

    You can stay. Eat the bugs. Build your webs, I respect the craftsmanship.

    But if it crosses into my walking path, I’m knocking it down, no notice.

    We’ll see what they’ve got tonight 😂

  • Things You’re Not Supposed to Complain About

    Apparently, there are certain things you’re not supposed to complain about.

    Traffic is one of them.

    Sleep is another.

    Unfortunately, I currently have complaints about both.

    This week, it took me almost two hours to get to work. The first hour was just my normal commute, which already feels like I’ve completed a small task before I’ve actually arrived at the place where I’m supposed to do tasks.

    Then I got to my exit.

    There had been an accident, and traffic was backed up for what looked like at least a mile. I sat there for almost another hour.

    At first, I was remarkably reasonable about it. There’s been an accident. Someone is probably having a much worse morning than I am. Getting irritated isn’t going to make the cars move any faster. I’ll listen to something. It’s fine.

    I was fine.

    And then I noticed the left-turn lane.

    Cars were sailing past all of us who had been sitting there, patiently waiting in the lanes that actually went where we were trying to go. One after another. They’d drive all the way to the front and then force themselves back in.

    At first I just noticed them.

    Then I started judging them.

    Then I started keeping track of them.

    Then I could feel the heat rising.

    I wanted to honk. Not because honking would accomplish anything. Obviously it wouldn’t. I just wanted them to know.

    I SEE YOU.

    This was when I noticed something slightly alarming .

    I might be turning into my mother.

    My mother’s road rage is legendary in our family. This is not classified information. She knows it. Her children know it. I’m reasonably certain a few motorists in Sweden know it.

    She’s also usually not wrong. Someone is following too closely? That’s dangerous, you need room to brake. Someone is doing something stupid in traffic? They probably shouldn’t be doing it.

    It’s the delivery where Mom and I differ.

    I might think, that person is following way too close.

    Mom has been known to arrive rather quickly at MOTHERFUCKER.

    All of her children tease her about this.

    And yet there I was, sitting in Atlanta traffic, watching what felt like the hundredth car cruise past me in the left-turn lane, feeling my internal temperature steadily rising.

    Oh no. Is this how it starts?

    Fortunately, I remembered First Date Follow Up. It’s a radio segment where someone goes on a first date, is certain it went wonderfully, and then can’t understand why the other person has vanished off the face of the earth. They call the missing date to find out what went wrong.

    It is ridiculous.

    It is also extremely entertaining.

    And, ironically, my mother is the one who told me about it.

    So apparently my mother provided both the genetic predisposition toward road rage and the treatment for it.

    I turned it on.

    Within a few minutes, instead of monitoring the left-turn lane like an unpaid traffic enforcement officer, I was deeply invested in why some stranger wasn’t getting a second date.

    The cars were still cutting in. Traffic was still barely moving. Nothing about my actual situation had changed.

    But I had stopped caring quite so much.

    By the time I got to the office, I was exhausted. Which seems ridiculous, considering I’d spent the previous two hours sitting down. But apparently trying not to lose your shit in traffic takes energy.

    So yes, I’m complaining about traffic.

    And while I’m breaking the rules, I’ve also been woken up around 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning three nights in a row.

    Traffic and sleep.

    Two things nobody wants to hear you complain about.

    I’ll try to come up with something more interesting next time.

    In the meantime, if you see me sitting in traffic, talking angrily to people who cannot hear me that’s just the family gene showing up.

    I’m still in the early stages.

  • Vendor Speed Dating

    A couple of weeks ago, a woman reached out to me on LinkedIn about an invite-only event: leaders from the data and AI world, sitting down for roundtable discussions on data strategy, AI, and where the two are headed.

    “Blending peer perspectives with real-world approaches,” the invite promised.

    Sounded interesting. Totally up my alley.

    I noticed they specifically weren’t inviting salespeople.

    Now I know why. 😂

    Walking into a room full of strangers and making small talk is not exactly my idea of a good time, so I was hesitant. But the subjects sounded too good to pass up, so I went.

    I got seated with two other people, one from Microsoft and one from HP, both at companies about the same size as where I work. We hit it off immediately, mostly by admitting we’d each almost bailed, and then by discovering we all wore Oura rings.

    None of us knew what was coming.

    There was a stack of papers on the table. It looked like we were supposed to rate something. I didn’t think much of it.

    Then it became clear.

    Speed dating. Basically.

    Except instead of asking what you like to do on weekends, they ask about your data architecture. And instead of deciding on a second date, you’re deciding whether your company needs their software.

    Eight vendors. Every 10 to 15 minutes, they rotated from table to table. Pitch their product, ask about our problems, explain how they could fix them.

    Yes, I realize this is also known as a sales pitch.

    Luckily, the woman from HP had an actual use case, so I mostly sat back and watched vendor after vendor take a swing at solving it.

    Ding. Next vendor. Ding. Next vendor. Ding. Next vendor.

    This went on for a couple of hours, after a full workday.

    Here’s the thing, though. I’d spent all this time before the event wondering if I’d be out of my depth. Would everyone else know more than me? Be more fluent in AI strategy and governance and all the impressive-sounding stuff?

    Instead, I noticed something I didn’t expect: we are all trying to figure something out.

    People from massive companies were stuck on the same kinds of problems, fishing for the same kinds of answers, sometimes just sitting there letting someone else do the talking, same as me.

    That was worth more than anything any vendor pitched.

    A bell rang for dinner. I’d made enough professional connections for one evening.

    I left.

    No dinner, no new software.

    Just slightly less impostor syndrome, a funny story to tell at work, and a few new LinkedIn connections.

    I’ll take it.

  • Life as an Analyst

    The truth is, we spend most of our days trying not to follow every interesting rabbit hole the data puts in front of us.

    Someone asks for “just a quick number,” and three joins, two CTEs, and one existential crisis later, we’ve found it—along with four other numbers nobody asked for but that we now can’t stop thinking about. We tell ourselves we’ll ignore them. We do not ignore them.

    Case in point: I sat down last Saturday morning to look at one weird number. Four hours later it was afternoon, I still hadn’t finished, and nobody on earth had asked me to work on a Saturday. That’s not dedication. It’s curiosity… with questionable boundaries.

    I’ve always loved puzzles. Crossword puzzles, logic puzzles… it doesn’t really matter. I don’t even mind asking for a clue now and then. The fun isn’t knowing the answer. The fun is figuring it out.

    That’s probably why I became an analyst.

    The truth is, half our job is explaining that correlation isn’t causation, while the other half is secretly hoping it is—just this once. It would make the story so much cleaner.

    People think analysts spend their days building reports and dashboards. We do. But what we really do is ask questions.

    Why is that number different? Why did it change? Should those two reports match? What happened here?

    Every dataset tells a story. Our job is figuring out what it’s trying to say.

    We build dashboards that we genuinely hope will help people make better decisions. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they’re opened once, admired for thirty seconds, and never seen again.

    The truth is, nobody actually wants the raw data. They want the one number that confirms what they already believed walking into the meeting.

    We know this. We give them the number. Then, gently, we show them the other numbers.

    This is called being thorough. It’s also called hope.

    Every “quick question” is a Trojan horse for a two-day project, and we say yes anyway—not because we have to, but because we’re curious like that. Somewhere between the fifth JOIN and the sixth GROUP BY, this stopped being a job requirement and became a personality trait.

    We don’t fix the data because someone asked us to. We fix it because leaving it wrong feels like leaving a picture frame crooked on someone else’s wall. It nags at us until we fix it. Or maybe that’s just me.

    I didn’t finish that Saturday problem in one sitting, by the way. I came back to it Sunday. I’m still a little annoyed about it.

    Maybe that’s the real job description nobody puts in the posting.

    Not “Proficient in SQL, Power BI, Tableau, SSIS…”

    Although yes, preferably someone who can also remain reasonably calm at 11 p.m. when a package fails for reasons the error log refuses to explain.

    No.

    The real qualification is curiosity.

    Someone who can’t walk past a number that doesn’t quite fit without wondering why.

    The most honest conversation in any company happens in a footnote that says, “Excludes outliers.”

    Almost nobody reads it.

    We read it. We wrote it. We know exactly which outliers were excluded, why they were excluded, and we probably have strong opinions about whether they should have been excluded at all.

    That’s the quiet, slightly obsessive, deeply curious life of an analyst.

    Chasing the number nobody asked for. Straightening the picture frame nobody noticed was crooked. Following one more rabbit hole than we probably should.

    Because every unexpected number tells a story. And every story begins with someone curious enough to ask one more question.

    Our minds aren’t wired to stop at the answer. They’re wired to wonder what else we might be missing.

  • Peanut Butter Toast

    Some favorites never change.

    When I woke up this morning, I knew I wanted to write something.

    Here’s the thing: I have a long list of subjects and ideas for future posts, but they all seem perfectly happy staying on that list. They rarely volunteer to become an actual blog post.

    So, I wandered into the kitchen to make myself something to go with my coffee.

    Peanut butter toast.

    I’m trying to remember when I got hooked on it. It definitely wasn’t growing up because peanut butter wasn’t really a thing in Sweden when I was a child. Somewhere along the way it found me, and apparently decided it wasn’t leaving.

    If you ask me what my favorite food is, there’s a good chance I’ll say peanut butter toast with sliced bananas.

    Which is funny, because I’m actually a foodie.

    Food has always been a big part of life in my family. We made a celebration out of good meals, and whoever had cooked was praised as if they’d just won a Michelin star. I still love trying new restaurants, new cuisines, and dishes I’ve never had before, and one of my favorite parts of traveling is discovering local food.

    There’s something special about that first bite of a meal you know you’re going to love. I swear it sends little feel good signals all over your body.

    A while back I won a prize at work, and they interviewed me for the company newsletter. One of the questions was, “What’s your favorite food?”

    Without thinking, I answered, “Peanut butter toast.”

    I’m pretty sure they expected something a little more exciting.

    The picture I sent to work when they asked for my favorite food: peanut butter toast and bananas, on my favorite koala plate.

    It’s hard to pick just one favorite — avocado’s a close second (if I see it on a menu, I’m probably ordering it before I finish reading the description), and peanut butter with chocolate is its own category of unbeatable. But none of that changes the answer I keep coming back to.

    As I stood there this morning with my coffee and peanut butter toast, I started thinking about comfort food.

    It’s funny how some foods stay with us through the years. Not because they’re fancy or impressive, but because they never disappoint. They taste exactly the way you expect them to. They make an ordinary morning feel just a little bit better.

    For me, that’s peanut butter toast with sliced bananas.

    Simple.

    Reliable.

    And somehow… still perfect.

  • The Rabbit Hole of Overthinking

    “I was thinking maybe, someday, I’d like an electric car. Five minutes later I was calculating battery production, worrying about climate change, imagining my dogs overheating, and wondering what kind of planet my nieces and nephews will inherit. Meanwhile, my perfectly good car was sitting in the garage wondering what it had done wrong.”

    Anyone else’s brain take the scenic route?

  • Sunday Funday

    Every Sunday I become the CEO of Good Intentions.

    My agenda includes meal prep, organizing, exercising, watering the plants, answering texts, reading a book, and somehow relaxing.

    I got up at 6 a.m. with a solid plan:

    Walk the dogs and get some work done before my 9 a.m. Pilates class.

    It’s now 11:30.

    I’ve taken the dogs on a long walk, gone to Pilates, gotten sucked into my current audiobook, spent way too much time comparing Apple Watches because mine is a Series 7, and somehow it’s almost lunchtime.

    The work I got up at 6 a.m. to do? It’s still patiently waiting for me.

    Funny how some days you can be busy for hours without touching the one thing you originally planned. Then again, the dogs had a great walk, I moved my body, and I got lost in a good book.

    Maybe Sundays aren’t meant to be efficient. Maybe they’re just meant to be lived.

    And after all… it’s only lunchtime. There’s still plenty of time to get a few things done.

    At least that’s what the CEO of Good Intentions keeps telling herself while sipping tea and making absolutely no move toward her laptop.

    Just wondering… am I the only one who creates a to-do list worthy of three people every Sunday?