See a good bird

I spent a long time today not sure what I wanted to write about, so I went for a walk. On that walk, I saw a new kind of bird. I'm not sure exactly what kind it was — there were a few of them, and they were clustered in the shade, and I couldn't quite make out their coloring. None of the options in Merlin looked right, so I tried to get a little closer, and then they all flew away to another tree.

But, suddenly, I was happy— and I realized I should write about how I argued with my partner for years about whether or not I like birds.

The argument about it started in Hawai'i. A few years ago my partner and I took a last minute vacation to Waikiki — plans with other people had fallen through, but since we had the time and the budget already picked out we thought, why not go somewhere else? We picked Hawai'i because it was winter, and we wanted to go somewhere warm, and a friend of ours had gone recently, and it's pretty close to where we lived in California at the time, and it seemed easy. The standard vacation location.

But because we were doing it around the forcing function of "we have this time and this budget and we just need to pick a location" I didn't have a lot of time to plan. I picked Oahu and Waikiki kind of haphazardly. Even once we got there I didn't have a clear idea of what we were going to do. I was worried about not doing the vacation right — wasting the time and the money we were spending on it and not getting sufficiently relaxed. I ended up having myself a bit of a freakout once we got to the hotel room, because I didn't know what I wanted to do, and I was worried I wasn't going to do anything.

As I often do in situations like this, I ended up making a list: All the things I wanted to do on the trip. Mostly they were pretty simple, achievable things. Go on a hike. Eat at a particular restaurant. Go snorkeling. And at the top of the list I wrote, "See a good bird."

We saw many good birds on that trip. One of my favorite things about that Hawai'i is that you can see a good bird in a parking lot. The best bird we saw, though, was at the zoo in Honolulu — a Victoria crowned pigeon. When people asked how the trip went, the first thing I told them was that I'd seen "a big pigeon!" but no one was as impressed by that as I thought they should be.

A few months later my partner made an offhand comment about how I, "really like birds."

"I don't like birds," I told him. "I don't care about birds."

"You wrote 'see a good bird' at the top of your list of things to do in Hawai'i."

"Yeah, but I don't like birds."

We argued about this for years, me insisting that I did not like or care about birds, and him pointing out that I obviously did.

Mind you: The "good bird" incident took place about a year after I downloaded Merlin Bird ID and started keeping track of the birds in my neighborhood in Los Angeles — hummingbirds, bluebirds, crows, feral parrots. I could talk at length about how mostly what hummingbirds do when you give them nectar is use the energy to fight each other over territory for hunting bugs.

But I didn't like birds.

I don't remember exactly when he got through to me, but I remember how. He was trying to cheer me up, and suggested that we go look at a bird.

Again: "I don't like birds."

"But you're always happy when you see a bird."

And it's true. I have no particular explanation for it. There's no conceptual component to it. It's a very simple equation: I see a bird, and I am happy. I missed out on years of seeing good birds because not only did I not notice that they brought me joy, when someone did notice, I told him that he was wrong. He couldn't be right. I don't like birds.

I don't know why I was so insistent about that. Maybe because birding was too weird, a hobby with approximately the same social valence as stamp collecting. I have plenty of other nerdy hobbies, though, so I suspect it's more a combination of general orneriness and a mystery of the human spirit. Self-knowledge is hard.

The bird thing is relatively minor, in the scheme of things. I always keep birds in mind when I travel, now. "Where can I see a bird?" is a good heuristic for finding a good way to spend some downtime. I have a bird feeder, that I put right outside my kitchen window in the winter. I have a little section of my YNAB budget specifically for upgrading my yard's bird amenities.

But I wonder a lot about what other preferences I'm just wrong about. I don't think I have a particularly good sense of what makes me happy or unhappy professional, for instance — many times when I've pushed particularly hard to get onto a particular team or a particular assignment, I've discovered later that I hated doing that particular kind of work. For a while I thought I was being misled by things other than my preferences — that I was chasing after money or status — and that if I could just figure out what kind of work I like, and then decide to pursue that work, I'd be fine.

But I don't even know if I like birds.