Shorthand for Nothing

It is quite possible I am the only person who finds awkward reintroductions kind of enjoyable, if only because of that shared moment of realization. I started the night of ISH with an awkward reintroduction to someone I’d met at Harvard Free Culture what feels like months ago, and from then on it was more or less predictably enjoyable. But in a good way.

Over previous parties, there was a marked improvement in things to both eat and drink. Previously we tended to opt for a few bags of chips and maybe some cookies, which went away quickly. This time there was a Costco run and an ungodly amount of nostalgic and semi-nostalgic snack food staples from being a kid in the 1990’s. And Capri Sun.

Sporting a nametag bearing the legend ‘it’s complicated,’ I discussed unnecessary linguistic dilemmas, Karl Rove’s Twitter account and how it is well-maintained, Moses Lake’s Twitter account and how it is poorly maintained, Washington state politics, places Greg Marra should go when he is in Seattle, memes, circus peanut candies, the classiness (or lack thereof) of drinking wine straight out of the bottle, pretentious philosophical plays, and some idiot’s microfiction blog. and several other things besides that have since eluded me.

Something about tonight felt different–perhaps the absence of some of the more conspicuous characters of previous events, or our failure to conclude the evening at the IHOP, as is our wont. This is a mystery I will probably never solve, because I am lazy and not very curious about it.

This to say nothing of XORCon, which was also enjoyable and which will receive its own treatment later this week (GET OUT WHILE YOU STILL CAN)–once again a good crowd and good times had by all.

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So, it’s been over a month since YawnLog was created. I still look back on the 24-hour hackathon and wonder what happened. Little fragments of the evening float through my head. I remember brainstorming, saying that, “No, we don’t want to be a dream tracker, there’s millions of those. We want to track sleep, and let people tell us if they dreamed.” The elaborate planning. The mild frustration. The occasional moments of terror: “Wait, did we check to see if someone has already done this?” “We can’t use this design mockup.” “I need more information.” “Are we even going to have a closed beta?” The now ridiculously small aspirations: “Maybe we’ll get a hundred users.” We just hit 4000 tonight. (more…)

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I could talk about the YawnLog meeting tonight–mention how it sounds like we’re really going places, that we’ve got plans and a future and it’s going to be glorious–but what I really want to talk about is cheap boxed wine.

I was expecting bad. I mean, that’s what cheap boxed wine is all about, right? Something which is cheap and available in bulk and isn’t good by any stretch of the imagination? But no, it wasn’t like that. It was cheap–some California blush wine–but it had almost no flavor. It wasn’t pleasant by any stretch of the imagination, but it was drinkable. It was flavorless, but drinkable.

I never asked Tim Hwang why he had it. That would break the magic, surely. So we drank bad wine from a creepy sack, and discussed, in many ways, the future of our little organization, whatever it is. I think we’re on the verge of doing something genuinely impressive. YawnLog is both our proof of concept and our best and greatest hope for the future, our flagship.

And if anything tonight was its christening, not with champagne, not with ceremony, but with cheap wine and a bunch of kids sitting around a flimsy coffee table, joking and talking and maneuvering and generally getting there in the end.

I’m excited.

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There reaches a point in every all nighter when you’ve been up too long but there’s still hours before the morning comes. It gives you pause. Is it worth it? There’s a moment you find yourself asking if it’s worth waiting until morning, until the project is done.

Then you get linked by someone with 70,000 followers on Twitter. And then you realize there’s really not much of a choice.

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