The Seattle Freeze

When I first moved to Seattle from Silicon Valley in 2004, I noticed something a little odd about the area right away: It seemed that making friendships and connections was more difficult than I had imagined it would be. Yes, Seattle area people were nice and polite, but being able to strike up a conversation with a stranger wasn't easy. At first, I attributed it to living in a rental neighborhood; after all, renters often move, and there's not a sense of community in these places. Besides, my coworkers seemed friendly enough, so I didn't let the concern bother me much. As time wore on, however, it seemed to be more and more palpable; no longer was it simply odd or frustrating, but it actually seemed to start impacting my quality of life. I was becoming more perplexed by it: Though I'm not exactly an extrovert, you can put me in a bar, or almost any social mingling situation, anyplace in the English speaking world, and I can easily hold my own. I can carry on friendly conversation, and in fact after a few drinks I can be a very charming new acquaintance. Any state in the US, or Amsterdam, or Sydney, or London, it didn't matter, I could at least break the ice with people and create some bond in relatively short order. Seattle, however, even months later was proving to be very different. By this time I had moved out of my rental neighborhood into a community on the Eastside, and even after being there for some time, not a single neighbor had introduced himself/herself, much less made any effort at befriending me. I was starting to discover, however, that I was not the oddball: Other "transplants" seemed to have the same sense of ostracism, and as I Googled the subject, I had no trouble finding numerous articles collaborating my feeling. In fact, as I started to venture into social networking circles, I discovered entire groups formed around Seattle's freeze behavior.

I remember quite well meeting a young woman about half my age from---of all places---New York city. I started to ask her if she perceived the Seattle freeze, and before I could finish my sentence she had emphatically done so for me. New York, as my former community of Silicon Valley, is hardly known as a warm and friendly place, yet we both felt far more welcome, more accepted, in those circles than in the PNW. I recall very well my time in San Leandro (just across the bay from San Francisco), and my neighbors went out of their way to include me, a single male, in any local neighborhood activities (I was never left off the invitation for their children's birthday parties!). In Seattle, however, once the minimal social requirements were met, it was good-bye, please leave us alone.

I'm not going to speculate on why this might be; the article I referenced previously does a very good job listing the possible root causes. I simply would point out to anybody considering a move to Seattle: Research this topic. It's real, it's palpable, and frankly it can have a significantly adverse impact on your quality of life. If you do move here, you'll need to make active, persistent efforts to network and find new friends; it will, in many regards, be as challenging as a new job.

UW Off Campus

After all these years, all the places I've been and things I've done, I have to say that one of the most universally exciting is the area around a university, preferably a large one. Whether you're talking California, Florida, Washington or any other place I can think of, few feelings compare to the vibrancy, the unbridled hope, that comes with a university and its environs. I'm in a coffee shop just off the UW Seattle campus, and the sights, the sounds, really are not all that different from when I was a student at UC Davis. OK, sure, there are things like free Wi-Fi which didn't exist when I was in college, and about one-third of the customers have a laptop in front of them, but beyond that it would be hard to distinguish this from a coffee shop of 20 plus years ago. (Hot drip coffee in a beer pint glass is still a bit hard to drink, but it was done in my day.) I don't think the people who are here day in and day out realize what opportunities they have in front of them; I know I didn't at the time, and one of my biggest mistakes was to underestimate the possibilities for the future, to limit my expectations, my goals, and my dreams.

I guess part of the problem is that as people age, they (we) lose out on the idea of swinging for the fences. Today's OK, tomorrow will be more or less the same, no better, no worse, so accept the tedium. The sitcoms will be on tonight, the future is predictable save for the name that is attached to the winner of the next "American Idol." Passion and dreams for the future are left behind, and in fact ridiculed other than "planning for retirement," preferably starting at a young age. To be sure, there's nothing wrong with stability and security, but when life is so predictable that tomorrow will be a rerun of today, I have to wonder if we haven't lost sight of why we are here. We speak of "risk takers," but how many of us are willing to step beyond the known, the tired, the true.

Boredom is something I feel all too often. It's not, however, simply my life, but rather what we as an American society seem to accept, in fact what we seem to demand. Where's the growth and the stretch to reach a higher level, to do a little better tomorrow than today? Hint: It's not in that sitcom rerun.

I'm on a roll. No postings for five years, and now two in one day. Obviously, I'm under the same delusion as every other blogger and website owner: Out of all the hundreds of millions of choices out there, people are going to choose to read what I have to say, to flock to my words while abandoning all others. The masses are probably already waiting breathlessly for the next posting, so I can't let them down. Post away!

That actually does bring up an interesting question: Does anybody really read another person's blog? Sure, if I send the URL to a friend, colleague, or some other acquaintance, they'll probably give it a quick look out of politeness, but other than that, are these words really being written for anybody but myself? In the olden days it was called a diary or journal, full of carefully guarded secrets, often kept under lock and key. Today, we post our dirty laundry on the web, hoping and waiting for somebody to read it.

In spite of the lack of readership, I've been trying to figure out how to move this thing forward...obviously, rewinding five years would be an arduous assignment, not to mention the gaps that would exist due to the multiple brain cells that have lost their way (those poor soldiers who would have survived if only I had not had that last beer). I'm not sure yet, but I'll probably intersperse the present with the past, hoping that it is obvious which is which. More than likely I'll be diligent with my posts for a few days, then they will dwindle off, only to be randomly resurrected periodically thereafter.

Also, I need to figure out which ground rules to follow. Do I use my real first and last name, do I make this viewable by the search engines, do I keep it G-rated, or a tad more risque, or really let the alter ego out? If somebody does read it, will it be that potential employer as he does a background check on me? Surely then, the answer must be multiple blogs, compartmentalized and tailored for completely different audiences: Business associates go here, potential love interests go here, friends and neighbors this one is for you...

It's the afternoon of 24 June 2008. I'm bored, so I decide to start poking around on Google to see what toys they have to play with when I stumble across their blog posting service. Interesting enough, I decided I might as well sign up for it. No big deal, no big surprises, till I get to the part that asks for the URL I would like to use. I put in "mpoese.blogspot.com," and much to my surprise Google informs me that URL has already been taken. Given the scarcity of people with this last name, I find it hard to believe, so I go directly to the URL, and yep, somebody started a blog with that URL back in August 2003, with nary an entry since. Actually, even the 2003 blog was nary an entry, just consisting of some "Welcome to my blog" gibberish. I'm perplexed, spend quite some time trying to figure out who would have signed up for the URL, when some faint memory strikes me that I might have done it a few years ago, bored, after a couple of drinks. I can't actually remember doing it, but it seems like something I would have done, the forgotten about, and I can even imagine myself on the old blue, dog-chewed sofa as I wrote that first entry five years back. So, to make a long story short, I try to guess what my old login credentials would have been, and owing to my lack of creative thinking back then (which continues to today) I am able to guess right on the second attempt. I was able to login and claim my long lost blog, and here I am today, just shy of five years later, putting in my second entry.

So, what has transpired in those five years? I've left Silicon Valley, moved to Seattle, worked for yet another now defunct Internet startup, purchased, run, and shutdown my own business, put my two dogs to sleep, put up with one or more opposite-gender mindgames, and am now in the process of trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life, just ahead of my milestone birthday. I'll try to backfill the missing pieces in the next few entries, and bring things up to the present, but for now I'll just post this and try to figure out where to start.

BTW, if somebody stumbles across this in 2013 and there have been no subsequent entries, please send an email to mpoese{at}gmail{dot}com and remind me that it's still here and I should continue updating it.