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Great Cakespectations

Chariots of the Dog(s)

B R

B R

— 3 min read

Part of a big/distant move is, of course, getting rid of a bunch of stuff. Mostly boring stuff - bikes, a big couch etc. The funniest things we are shedding are the various Dog Chariots:

This was used one (1) time.
I promise you: it’s fine. She always looks this pathetic.

Montréal is a great biking city by all accounts, but we have like three things like this and it is pretty silly to keep more than one.

Anyway: the big things this week were (1) saying goodbye to my work and (2) saying goodbye to my 30s.

I haven’t talked about my work here, but the short story is that I spend most of the last decade working on a series of tech startups dedicated to at least something of social value - bathymetric data, legitimizing legal cannabis, and, finally, making reforestation scaleable.

Millions of baby trees.

That last one I am particularly proud of; both because it is still going strong - growing and planting more trees than ever - and because I had a pretty big hand in shaping the strategy and culture. We built a strong, diverse team of do-gooders dedicated to fighting climate change and kept each other safe and funded/paid during COVID.

We had a farewell party last on Wednesday and it was extremely sweet.

Here’s how you can tell it is still a startup: this cake was clearly bigger, and had been partially consumed and subsequently expertly repurposed/refrosted from a retirement party for someone else earlier in the day.

We played the CEO’s favorite game, which is to get into a circle and shower an increasingly embarrassed chosen person with positive statements - like the opposite of how some cults try to break people with insults. Frankly I might prefer the roast version.

Because everything has to happen at once, I’m also turning 40.1 Did I reuse the above cake for that party? Absolutely.

I remember turning 30 and being pretty down about it, not realizing my 30s would be substantially better than my 20s in every possible way:

  • Enough wisdom to be dangerous

  • A career focused on helping people/the planet???

  • Dated a bit, men and women, and found someone great

  • Close friends and even closer enemies2

  • A good gym exists??

Because of this, I think my 40s will also be pretty good; doing weird and/or new stuff at the start of every decade is apparently my thing

  • End of 10s: move from home for school, witness a truly demonic political atmosphere
  • End of 20s: get divorced, move to a good city, get unabashedly queerer
  • End of 30s: leave company I kinda helped found, move to a distant city where I don’t know the primary language

  1. Literally today, as I finish this post. ↩

  2. Specifically, I’ve never been so geographically close to a more worthless government (the politicians I mean, the workers are good) and even worse police department. I invite every member of the SPOG to dive into an open manhole. ↩

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