Ephemeral. It's a fancy way of saying "transitory." That, in turn, is a fancy way of saying "temporary." Temporary. That's all we have, all we are. "Like sands in the hourglass..."

Yes, this is where I go emo, or something like that. I will try to not make it utterly self-indulgent.

This actually started at work. Remember how Mike, the guy I replaced, had nine years of experience with the product? Well, I've been doing his job now for a month or two, and it's gotten easier. I've looked over some of his test plans (actually, another guy's writing, Mike didn't write much by way of documentation) and am shocked by how little of the product I'm testing. I simply didn't realize there was this much depth to the product.

Aside from the expected panic and self-doubt, this also started a philosophical pebble rolling. I've handed off jobs to people. There are 'you sit here and do this' jobs, and then there are the 'I'm not sure what to tell you to expect, but you just have to keep this system running' jobs. The former are pretty formalized, easy to see the lines. The jobs may be easy or may be difficult, but their boundaries are known, their instructions are set.

The latter jobs are challenging. They're ambiguous. They have no clear game plan, no set play book. When something happens, you react to it. When you have to plan to do something, it's usually something that's not been done before, or not been done this way and will require some expertise in setting up. It's not cookie-cutter.

We know all this already. I've complained about the lack of process, the absence of documentation. That's not the point here. The point is this: When Mike left, a lot of unique knowledge walked out the door with him. I know how to do the basics of his job, but some of the more esoteric stuff, I've never even seen until I read the test spec, the list of general areas he was testing. This doesn't even begin to cover the "Oh, if this and that and this and that, then you do this" sort of one-off stuff that he does like magic to troubleshoot things.

Long story short, this is a metaphor for life. I'm going to leave this life with unfinished business.

SpouseKitty and I clash (s)words constantly about how many tax-related documents to keep, and how long. I'm responsible for filing them, so it's in my best interest to keep the number down. I'm also responsible for retrieving stuff from them as needed, so I want to either retain more documents so I increase my chance of having the right one, or retain less so I have a shorter time to search and say, "Nope, don't have it. Let's ask them to reprint the form."

The unfinished business is this: I'm not the one who'll be responsible for straightening this mess out. I just spent much heartache going through my mom's papers, all of them in Chinese (and I don't read a word of it.) Papers, lots of papers. Sheafs of paper. Bundles of papers. Envelopes of paper. I'm going to leave that to someone else to plow through after I'm gone.

After I'm gone.

Yeah, it's one of those posts. We all die sometime. Rarely do we get to complete our life's work before that happens. I'm just looking at what I leave behind. Not just the loose ends. Not just the four incomplete stories. I'm thinking about lost knowledge, lost art. Specifically, I'm talking about origami, but it can be generalized to the rest of my particular shard of the human condition.

I met one person who was interested in origami and had sufficient craft that I was able to teach him how to fold the X-Wing. That's a pretty basic piece, actually. The TIE Fighter is completely original, and will be completely lost when I go. The Death Star is a bunch of Sonobe strips, so someone should be able to recognize the form from the model. But the TIE Fighter... that's unique.

I've been folding it a little more often. It's the most challenging single-piece model of the three (well, of the two, as the Death Star is nothing close to a single-sheet model.) It's my own creation, start-to-finish. It's the most 'simple' of lines, and it's the most ... at risk. I'm folding it and thinking of the possibility of mapping it out somehow. How to draw it, how to annotate it.

It's an odd thought, isn't it? Facing my inescapable mortality, and worrying the most about a sheet of paper...