River: The Silicon Mistress

[mdlbear]

Oddly enough, it seems that jealousy has little or nothing to do with sex. Most people reading this probably knew that already; it came as a complete surprise to me, but I'm a geek and often find real people surprising. The Wikipedia article says that jealousy happens "when a person believes a valued relationship is being threatened by a rival." But what if the "rival" isn't even human, and the threat isn't to the partner's affection, but only their time and attention. That's enough.

This came to my attention after I'd been spending altogether too much time on IM for about a month and a half. My wife, Colleen (flower_cat), has long referred to the computer as my "Silicon Mistress"; what I hadn't realized is that she meant it very literally. It wasn't until IM gave the mistress a name that we finally put sufficiently large values of two and two together to get five.

Thanks to that, I now know exactly what the term "jealous rage" refers to. I had it coming.

It might still have worked out except for two things: I have a lot of trouble tearing myself away from a fascinating conversation, and I have the geekish ability to get totally involved in what I'm doing -- be it an IM conversation or a debugging session -- and totally block out everything else. When "everything else" includes my wife, well... It was a trainwreck waiting to happen.

It strikes me that this has probably happened to some of the other folks reading this, or is happening now. I've already mentioned managing attention: refining the to-do list (few things are worse for Colleen than letting something important slip through the cracks, except maybe letting something unimportant slide so long that it becomes a symbol of neglect) and dialing down the IM bandwidth. Here's what we're doing about the Silicon Mistress specifically:

It comes down to sharing our toys and our time: turning our relationship with the Silicon Mistress from a love triangle into a genuine, happy Ménage à trois.

There are now two computers in every room that Colleen and I use on a regular basis. The office has always had two, but Colleen doesn't like to hang out there. I added the bedroom workstation when I started recording my CD, but I don't use it much. Most recently, I got Colleen a little Asus EeePC for Mother's Day, and set up a little work area for myself in the living room next to her chair with a guitar, a music stand, and an ancient IBM Thinkpad. It's not nearly as comfortable as my Aeron chair in the office, and the laptop's screen is only 800x600, but here's the thing: we can work together there, and I'm within hand-holding distance. That little fact, that she can reach out her hand and I can hold it, makes a world of difference.

It used to be that I'd get home and Colleen would have some video on the TV, the phone to her ear, and often be in the middle of some domestic crisis on top of it all. I'd say hello, give her a kiss, and retreat to the office. At one point, after I'd told her that the TV was a major distraction, she started turning it off when I got home. But she neglected to tell me why. I don't do subtle. It wasn't until she told me what she was doing that I finally made the effort to set up my laptop; it's been in the living room ever since. Sometimes we computer geeks need a little more documentation than "normal" humans.

I get up and start out in the office as usual, but as soon as Colleen gets out of bed (she needs a lot more sleep than I do, because she's not in the best of health) I can move to the living room on a moment's notice.

I can come home and check email, LJ and IM in the living room while we tell each other about our respective days. No, she probably doesn't care what my latest meeting was about, but she likes to know whether it was boring or productive, and what one of my coworkers said about my latest song. I don't need to know which movies she watched, but I need to know what the kids are fighting about, and whether one of the roses bloomed and made her smile.

After an hour or so of hanging out, dinner, and conversation, I can go into the office if I want to. Sometimes I don't. Usually I do, because some jobs are a lot easier -- or impossible without -- a large monitor and good audio.

Later on, I can follow her into the bedroom; we don't have mail and nethack working on her laptop yet, and the bedroom machine has a better -- or at least bigger -- monitor and keyboard, and a different selection of games. So she reads mail while I take my drugs, water my nose, and brush my teeth. Then most days we can go to bed early, while we're still awake enough to snuggle and talk for an hour or so. Sometimes we do more than that, but after 32 years of marriage we've learned that the happy snuggling afterwards is often better than sex.

(Yes, it does feel like an assignation. It's meant to. The kids have a regular gaming night on Sunday, too. *grin*)

Colleen can usually go to sleep at that point. Talk and exercise often wake me up, and I need less sleep in any case, so I can kiss her goodnight, tuck her in, and go back out to the office. It works.

 

There are a couple of technical details still to be worked out. It would be nice to have everything on one wheeled platform, but "traditional" laptop carts are much too flimsy, and the industrial-strength ones are in the half-kilobuck range. I'm occasionally tempted to do something involving a desktop machine and a UPS.

It isn't as easy as I'd like to switch from one location to another; ultimately that's going to require some jiggling-around of accounts because things like browsers and IM like to have only a single copy running for any given user. (The laptop has a separate account; that raises its own problems.)

I will be able to use my new laptop from work when it arrives; that will be a fine machine, but having to plug and unplug stuff twice a day could be a problem. Again, separate accounts will help -- fortunately Linux, unlike MacOS and Windows, really is a multi-user OS. And, of course, there's the fact that I'd better not forget it, at one place or the other. Either would be grossly inconvenient.

 

Ultimately, though, it's not about the techie details but about spending more time together; about spending more time with my wife and less with my silicon mistress, and sharing more of the time we do spend on computers. Yeah, I'll still hole up in the office or the bedroom/studio for some one-on-one action at times, while Colleen watches a movie or listens to a filk CD that would be horribly distracting if I were in the room. But the trend is in the right direction now.

I've been in the office for a total of about five minutes this evening, to swap CDs for ripping. I'm in the bedroom now. It feels good.

Comments

[danceswthcobras.livejournal.com]

You is very, very smart bear.

[mdlbear]

Thanks. Have we met, by the way?

... and did you know that my brother Alan is a herpetologist? Teaches at Old Dominion University.

[danceswthcobras.livejournal.com]

Many times at filk conventions, yes. I no longer live in the Bay area however and have not seen you for many years.

[mdlbear]

Good to know -- I've just added you to my flist. You'll want to go back and re-read the last few river posts ;)

[kyrielle]

Yay for insight, and yay for solutions also.

As far as the logistics of programs...this might be kind of hokey, but for non-audio uses, why not just use a remote-access program to connect to your desktop from your laptop? That way you'd be using the desktop at all times and have its programs, just be presenting it on a different screen.

Um. Assuming you have a remote-access program better than the ones I've used for Windows, anyway, which can either give you a scroll bar, or introduce screen scaling issues that make fonts unreadable. That would be a bit of a barrier. :/

[mdlbear]

Heh. There are actually three different ways to do remote access in Linux: VNC, X11, and ssh. Maybe more. The combination of X and ssh lets me run a GUI program on any machine in the house and have it display on my local screen, while still running some programs locally, so that's what I do: I use ssh for editing, LJ posting, and email; it also works between work and home.

Because the laptop's screen is so much smaller (800x600 rather than 1680x1050) it needs a drastically different layout, so it's much easier to keep different profiles on it and run Firefox and Pidgin (IM client) locally.

The bedroom machine is significantly faster than the others, and has the same size screen as the office machine, so I can swing either way on it depending on how I log in. If I log in as "steve" I'm using my home directory on the fileserver and sharing layout and application profiles with the office desktop; if I log in as "lsteve" it's more like the laptop. I'm switching over to "lsteve" because it lets me keep a separate copy of Firefox open.

The only real annoyance left is moving my IM presence around, but I'm not going to worry about it much. Might possibly end up using VNC for that one, or else switching to a command-line client and using screen, which gives you multiple sharable desktops in text mode.

[callibr8]

Isn't it amazing what some no-holds-barred direct communication, and some not-too-onerous changes of routine can accomplish in promoting closeness? Good for you and flower_cat!

[mdlbear]

It certainly is amazing. And talk about no-holds-barred! Ouch! Worth it, absolutely.

[catalana.livejournal.com]

Sometimes we computer geeks need a little more documentation than "normal" humans.

*snicker* Yeah, I hear you. I'm currently pursuing a gamer who is requiring a little helping along to realize that I'm interested in more than just hearing about his cool crossbow.

[mdlbear]

Colleen asked *me* to marry her. Made all the first moves leading up to that, too ;); I don't understand subtle. He probably doesn't, either.