Excited! 14: Altitude Chamber 😶🌫️
In the first six months as new parents, it was everyone's first question: "How are you holding up?"
So I'd explain it, as best I could, by talking about a 25-ton pressurized metal box on a government facility in Florida.
Pardon me 👋🏻 — Hi, I'm Jason, and at some point, at least four years ago, you subscribed to a very, verrrrry infrequent email newsletter that I send about things I find exciting. A few things have happened since the last email. You may want to load images. Let's get back to it.
This big ol' metal box — imagine a shipping container with lots of hefty pipes around it, and a door that looks like it's on a submarine — is what's called an altitude chamber1, and it's a routine part of training for a pilot or aircrew.
Your small cohort of folks files inside and finds seats on either side. An instructor helps you connect your oxygen mask to a nozzle next to your seat. In your lap is a clipboard and a small pencil. The doors are sealed, expectations are set, and everyone dons their mask and inhales crisp oxygen in measured breaths. One of the instructors leans toward a small, thick window to make a hand signal to the operators outside the chamber. Things are underway, and you shoot nervous/excited glances at the folks across from you.
We're about to simulate hypoxia, which is when the brain is starved of oxygen (as it can be at high altitudes). It's important for you to know what it feels like, what it looks like in others. The atmospheric pressure in the box drops. You remove your mask, and look at the clipboard.
It's a preschooler's crossword puzzle; every word is only three letters long. Seriously?
You get a few words in, and for some reason it's taking longer. As you're striving in vain to figure out the last letter of the word "cat," something clicks deep in your lizard brain.
You'd forgotten why you were in this metal box in the first place. You swiftly fumble for the oxygen mask, and gulp down a few deep breaths. Clarity returns.
(One of your peers is determined to press ahead and master that crossword; he pushes away help. An instructor has to convince him to reapply his mask. Sometimes, you're told, folks put up a fight and an instructor will wait until they pass out, then put their mask on for them.)
So.
Yes: that's what the first six months with a newborn is like.
You're so sleep deprived that you're perpetually forgetting how to do basic things, forgetting why you came to the kitchen, struggling to do tasks that were once simple. Occasionally, you realize what's going on, but mostly, you're plugging along and hoping you don't mess up too much.
"When does it end? When do your brain cells come back??" you ask your friends who already have grown kids. They smirk.
"In about eighteen years."2
(It's worth it, though.)
Oh, hi! 👋🏻 When I started this newsletter, I was self-employed, and the section down here was full of CODENAMED PROJECTS (inspired by the blog of the late great studio BERG and the newsletter of Deb Chachra). It was a welcome reminder that I was making progress, even when it often felt like a frantic paddling of webbed feet under still waters.
2024 was a strange, awful, and wonderful year. With the start of a new year, and the start of a brand new job, it seems fitting to close out as many of these ancient open projects as I can, just for completeness:
- PEPIN was a workshop on machine learning for beginners, which evolved into a few different presentations. Here was a 10ish-minute distillation for a company vlog.
- COLCHESTER was a (hasty and overstuffed) presentation on Svelte and component JavaScript frameworks for a company lunch-and-learn.
- PHTHALO was a brief consulting project, collaborating with Ben, using Particle Boron boards, for an IoT startup.
- UMAMI was the intention to make a proper website for Code Kitchen, a local creative coding meetup. I had stepped already stepped back from helping to organize the meetup, and this project fell off the backlog soon after.
- BRAUE was some extension work for Vikus Viewer for the Williams College Museum of Art. I'm grateful to Chad for the opportunity to work on it with him!
- BOWLER was a redesign for my work portfolio, which now needs an overhaul again.
Thank you for tracking projects with me! There will still be — always be — projects, and perhaps this section will return at some point in the future, but for now, it feels time to move on.
That's all for now. Happy 2025!
How the heck have you been?
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Altitude chambers are also known as hypobaric chambers. ↩
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It's not quite that bad. Things generally start to improve by the end of the first year. When you compare notes with other parents of slightly older kids at a playdate — has their vocabulary come back? do they still forget basic things? — they confess that they still fake it every day. ↩