fly away on my zephyr

i’m writing this on california zephyr, the amtrak from sf to chicago. the ride is supposed to be 52 hours long but the first 20 hours of the trip took us 26 hours to complete because of engine failures, so who knows how long i’m actually stuck on this train for. on the bright side utah was gorgeous, and i got to see way more of it than anticipated because delays pushed the utah portion of the route from partially nighttime to entirely daytime

work and travel once again conspired to ruin my sleep. i’ve been helping start a nonprofit called transluce and launch day happened to align with the first day of the train ride. tuesday/wednesday was an absolute fever dream - get to the office at 10am, work on the launch until 7am, uber to the train station, try to keep myself awake throughout the california portion of the route. it was only when we reached nevada (by far the ugliest and most boring scenery of the trip unfortunately) that i finally let myself sleep

the train is overwhelmingly white. by which i mean that i’ve seen one other asian person on board, and some white guy spent five minutes trying to say 你好·to him until he clarified sorry, i’m japanese. i get the feeling that the person who sells food has disliked me from the moment he first saw me. he keeps it professional though so i try not to think too much about it

tuesday night was oddly heartwarming. it reminded me of a hackathon, but only the good parts, none of the spectacles and technical shortcuts and reward-hacking. i think it was the most productive late-night experience i’ve had with a group of people that i liked - i’ve had productive nights working alone or with people i didn’t particularly like eg. for school projects, and i’ve had unproductive nights working with people i liked eg. most recently the brain hack where i was often incompetent, but that’s about it. i think there’s a big difference between we happen to work at the same lab/company and like each other enough to be friends and we like each other enough that we’d be friends even if we never worked at the same place, and i also think friends are often not ideal collaborators for serious projects because of skillset redundancy (eg. you both predominantly write code but one person is significantly better than the other at it). it’s tricky to find experiences at the best of both worlds so you have to appreciate them when they happen

the other thing launch prep reminded me of was rehearsing for a cappella concerts in college. it was unlike other technical projects i’ve worked on because we were optimizing for virality and knew everything important would happen on either the first or second day of release (unlike, say, writing a paper or open-sourcing code). so it’s like a concert in that you spend months grinding through all the details to create single-day payoffs, but you have no idea if everything will break day-of or if the general public will like the thing you made. (in our case we had no prior experience with autoscaling to handle large bursts of activity and no idea how much traffic to expect so it was difficult to be confident anything would go well. and please don’t tell me modal solves this problem; it doesn’t because non-enterprise gpu limits are low and start-up latency can be high.) i also did not realize until getting on the train that there would be no wifi and oftentimes no cell service either so i would not be able to help if anything went wrong. i guess i’ve been spoiled by the nyc ↔ boston trains which have always had reliable wifi and cell service

it’s hard for me to think of a worse two-day period in my life to be offline - every once in a while we pass through a town and i get a notification like we’re ready to share the demo, please get on twitter or two of your favorite former coworkers just announced they are leaving imbue or hey, wanna get dinner with sam altman next week and then i scramble to respond before we exit the town but most of the time i end up having to wait until the next town to do anything. i also didn’t bother downloading books in advance because i thought it wouldn’t be necessary, so i really have been forced to just pass the time looking outside and watching the scenery. it’s been an interesting change of pace

there are many families and very few solo travellers on the train, which i suppose is not surprising. during the day i don’t mind being alone because there are so many pretty colors and shapes to look at, but at night when the windows become pitch-black and everyone goes to sleep the train feels more like a tomb that i am waiting to die in

while traveling by myself i often think about that monologue from bojack s5e2:

“the real reason you go to vietnam is because you accidentally see your soon-to-be-ex-husband kiss someone else. at first you think ‘oh, it’s a fling; they’re drunk, it’s a party.’ but then he puts his hand on the small of her back exactly the way he used to do to you. it means, ‘i’ve got you’, and when he did it to you it made you feel safe, and you realize he will never do that to you again. and it breaks your heart again, after your heart was so broken that you thought it could never get any more broken. you thought it was safe but it somehow still finds a new way to break. because even though you’re the one who asked for this, now that you’ve got it, you’re completely adrift, with no compass or map or sense of where to go or what to do - so you go to vietnam. you think you might find a community, a connection to something bigger, but you don’t. in fact, you feel even more alone than before you left. but you survive. you learn that you can survive being alone”

i have not had the experience of watching my ex-husband kiss someone else, but i wonder if i am running from heartbreak all the same. there are so many little heartbreaks to grapple with - leaving school, growing up, leaving a job, your best friend moving to another continent, and so on. i’ve learned that i can survive being alone, but i certainly don’t want to. i’m excited for the rest of my travels but am also itching to be back home