Niels Joaquin

We came up with an elaborate carpooling system out in the suburbs of South Texas. Two families, three kids plus two kids, ages zippering in sequence like two streams of traffic merging onto a highway: Jerome Muniz was the eldest, followed by Samantha Joaquin, my sister; then Stephanie Muniz, then me, and finally John Muniz. As each kid learned to drive—learner’s permit at 15, driver’s license at 16—the newly minted motorist carpooled the next younger person to high school, who a year later drove the next person, and so on, until the relay race of adolescence had finished and everyone had achieved the vehicular freedom of choosing how to spend those precious hours after school but before “It’s 10:00 PM. Do You Know Where Your Children Are?” For the record, my parents’ answer to that query was invariably yes: it had the airtight conclusiveness of a theorem. “Do You Know Wh—” “Yes, obviously. Next question.”

The barnyard duck had no notion that his little head was big enough to contain oceans, continents, skies; but of a sudden here he was beating his wings.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars¹

I lived in Chicago for six years, and at the midpoint of that residency in my first post-college town, I got a brief taste of what it was like to commute to work by bike. I lived in a neighborhood called Old Town, close to the city center, and I had easy access to the Lakefront Trail that runs for 18 miles along the shore of Lake Michigan. At one point my office was temporarily at 303 East Wacker Drive, a building also very close to the water, so the shoreline commute was a breezy three-mile bike ride that required almost no interaction with car traffic.

In February, the computer scientist Paul Graham posted a long essay called “What I Worked On” to his blog. The piece is a comprehensive account of his professional development, taking readers through his earliest encounters with computers, his work on the programming language Lisp, and the creation of Y Combinator, the pioneering startup accelerator. Interspersed with Graham’s professional milestones are serious forays into decidedly non-programming activities like art school and painting. He ends by declaring his career a “messy” one, because it doesn’t have a straight narrative that threads through every piece neatly—but he hopes such a written account of a successful person’s wanderings might be “encouraging to those with similarly messy lives.”

[Note: This was originally an internal memo that I wrote when I resigned from the company that has meant the most to me personally. Although the intended audience is small, I’ve posted it publicly because it covers a very important period of my life.]

It’s still hard for me to believe I’m leaving Care/of.

This farewell is a big shift in a long-running trend for me. For every corporate job I’ve left, I’ve always written an overly long, valedictory missive—but it was often because I was leaving the place with some irreconcilable differences. Something fundamental had changed—the tides were turning; a dream was fading—and my writing was a chance to take control of a conversation where, as a more junior employee, I didn’t have a voice.

A lot of my musical education came from my dad, whether I liked it or not. He drove my sister and me to elementary school every morning, first in a two-door Datsun bought around the year of my birth, and later, when my parents’ lives as first-generation immigrants achieved some level of comfort, in a gray Toyota Land Cruiser whose new elevation lent an air of control and importance. The drive was so short that it’s amusing, in terms of duration if not of fuel efficiency, to think about it from the perspective of a (now) New Yorker: if a half-hour subway commute, door to door, is acceptable by metropolitan standards, the car in Texas took you several miles farther in half the time.

I’ve seen a resurgence of interest in Greg Mottola’s film Adventureland. The streaming service Mubi is featuring it in one of its rolling 30-day windows, with an accompanying video essay on the film’s remarkable soundtrack, and the site Indiewire canonized it as a New Classic in its thoughtful appreciation. It’s a film that I instantly loved in 2009, and upon a rewatch my affection has not faded. As those two pieces express, Adventureland captures the ephemera of young adulthood that, despite their seeming insignificance, end up being strongly felt memories—wisps of the past to reach for, charged with momentous banality, held with wonder at a romantic distance.

Friends, that multi-camera, laugh-track sitcom, too often minimized as conventional from the vantage point of television’s New Golden Age—with this age’s boundary-pushing depictions of vice, or its mockumentaries replete with self-aware mugging and deadpanning—played a huge role in my life. I was nine when the series premiered in September 1994, and I watched it with burning ardor every week from about fourth grade to the end of high school. I had a friend named Hector in elementary school who was similarly enamored of the series, and I remember recapping episodes with him and my fifth-grade teacher like “The One the Morning After,” a shining example of how deft Friends was with its comedy. The episode contains the most dramatic event of the whole series, the fight between Ross and Rachel after the former’s infidelity, but that weight is beautifully balanced by the unfailing comic relief of the other four players, trapped overnight in the next room: Joey needs a new, “’take notice’ walk”; the friends ingest depilatory wax for sustenance.

I am so deeply introverted that I’m surprised I can function in the external world. And arguably, I never really have. I’m happy that I can hold a job now, and that I can find joy in making connections with other people. I’m actively seeking out friends who share my interests, and who can somewhat sympathize with my temperament. But it took a quarter of a life to understand my personal need to be alone most of the time, to self-reflect constantly, and the practical need to achieve success in a culture that demands gregariousness out of you in order to be noticed.