Influences – Michael Herf

I’m not a very social person. I tend towards introspection, and I don’t have many friends. To a fault, I too easily lose contact with people, and I presume that it’s a measure of social anxiety which keeps me from assuming that people forgive the injustice I perform when I withdraw and fade.

In any event, I find in my life that I tend to build vocabularies with which to frame my ideas and my ideals. I find concepts that I like, and in order to give myself a shorthand, substitute a symbol for those concepts into this sort of imagery matrix upon which more complex concepts are built.

I wrote poetry from 1994 to 1999 or so. I stopped for several reasons. One was that I was in a relationship which stifled that spark, but I can’t blame her for that – I gave it up, she didn’t take it from me. Another fundamental reason, I think just as important, was that I had built my vocabulary. I wouldn’t say that my life made sense at the time, but when I had to work things out in my head, I didn’t feel big gaps in that matrix. I was busier, and less contemplative… and that may have been why I felt completeness in my vocabulary… I slowed the depth of my thinking and spent more time living. When there was a hurdle, I could build upon my prior poetry, and in particular in little snippets of imagery, upon which I could build my perception of the problem.

Just like the poetry, there are people who touched my life in ways that I still refer to often when I’m working things out in my head. Sometimes it’s helpful in framing experience, and sometimes it’s helpful in what someone has taught me about myself.

I think of many people and events often, and I feel like I need to begin to make tribute to them. I’ll largely cover people with whom I’ve not had contact for years, and I’m not particularly seeking them out, but hoping that perhaps the six degrees of separation in the world (or perhaps vanity, in the days of Google) will allow people to discover themselves how they’ve touched lives in ways they may never have known.

And to begin this experiment, I give tribute to Michael Herf.

In late summer of 1993 — on my 18th birthday, to be specific — I arrived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to study Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. My floor in the C-Wing of the Mudge Hall dorms had an interesting mix of folks, many of which left a lasting impression after my relatively brief stay. Some may appear later in this series, so I’ll leave them unnamed for now.

At the opposite end of the floor lived Michael Herf, of Evansville, Indiana. Mike was a gentle soul, contemplative, amazingly intelligent, with a dry sense of humor which made his eyes glow as his mind chewed playful thoughts. He was a Christian who attended a bible study group, but who I never felt judged my genuine but fairly incredulous questions. He composed beautiful songs on his keyboards and sample mixer thingies (I never really got into MIDI). Mike’s natural inquisitiveness led him to be incredibly well informed about the world in general, and he was certainly the type of person to sit around and talk to for hours.

He also was far ahead of me in computer skills, and when I got a 386 for Christmas, Mike helped me experiment with Linux, giving me just enough to get started and knowing when to answer my follow-up questions, and when to tell me to RTFM. Like an ideal teacher, Mike sensed that I was capable but undirected and helped me get some direction and let me figure the rest out myself. I got the pride of teaching myself, with the safety net to keep me from getting discouraged.

Today, as a manager, I try to pay it forward to my employees in this way. My patience isn’t the best, and I often fail inpractice, overstepping those limits between guidance and execution. But I know the ideal I’m trying to achieve because of what I was taught. Thank you, Mike.

I also found that when Mike played me his long instrumental songs, they evoked stories in my head. I didn’t hear just sounds, but like a good soundtrack, I knew what was happening while the music played. We experimented, with him playing things, me telling him the story I saw and felt, and discussing them. Sometimes we were in sync, other times not, but I look back to this day to that experience to understand how I experience the world. I drew upon that experience when I began writing poetry, and some of the things I wrote then haunt me to this day. After I left Carnegie Mellon, I continued to write poetry, and I believe that I really developed my craft by interpreting the art of others. In sharing my writings with artists, I found a way to communicate what their art conveyed, not so much commentary on the technique. I found that it was appreciated as feedback and a way to connect with their audience. In realizing that my mind works by processing symbols and not images, I’m continuing to develop my understanding of how I understand things, in hopes of finding ways to be more in a state of flow, which is where I find my happiness. Again, thank you Mike.

There are a number of other things that make me think of you as a routine part of my life, and while I’m sure you’ve touched many more, I sure as hell appreciate how you’ve touched mine.