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Daily: Life, Being Frazzled, and, Yes - I Really Did Make an Inukshuk from Jam
Tue, 01 Nov 2005

(Awhile back I mentioned the idea of making an Inukshuk out of jam packets. It had occurred to me one morning while sitting in a a breakfast-jernt, that the jam and peanut-butter packets looked like excellent building blocks. As every geek knows, anything that can be built with must be built with, so I began trying to construct various things, but it turns out the packets are badly weighted and too slippery to produce useful things. Still...)

From the too-stressed-and-fealing-tightness-in-the-chest department. Er, wait, thats.. from the whining department :)

I've not posted much in the last week or two .. its just been too nuts. I realize now that one of the great dangers of being too busy (or being burnt-out again?) is that the more wiped out you are, the less tasks you can handle concurrently. Normally we can all handle all manner of simultaneous jobs - having to book appointments, working insanely, preparing dinner, washing laundry and dishes, and still designing some complex new code in our head - but toss in day after long day of such things with high intensity and not enough sleep - Boom! - Instead of being able to juggle dozens of things at once you're frazzled with just a couple of things. Worst of all, the little things that'd never phase you before - the grit in the oil - are suddenly stressing you out and leading you to annoy everyone around you.

Normally I'm an endlessly cheery fellow who doesn't sleep much, but this last week or two I've just been run down - moving a little slower and in general being a grumpy-dumpy. Really, thats not a big deal, but I regret imposing that state onto my lovely wife. Shes used to my endless energy as I swirl around the house taking care of things, or being cheary after work - she feeds on my mood like an emotional lamprey. If I'm cheery, it helps her deal with her day. If she calls me at 4pm before she heads out of work and finds me a wreck, she'll be all PO'd when she gets home. Emotional symbiosis. And here the last couple weeks (since a funeral for her Uncle-in-law, though not directly related to that event) I've been a sailor-mouthed wreck.. not good.

The why is easy.. house issues from a couple months ago, then car issues, then work issues, then family issues.. just being busy for all day every day of the week, without actually accomplishing anything.. drives me nuts. I need to accomplish, to chalk things off the to-do-list. Perhaps the mere idea of keeping a to-do-list causes anxiety. I did get a bit done with Manticore, but I've just not been able to get enough moments to address some Shadow issues I'd like to, or write up some Shadow documentation needing doing. And new issues with the Tungsten X are going to make me mental I'm sure (can Palm possibly release a device without buggering up something under the proverbial hood?)

Nab brings up an interesting thought - thousands of years ago, we as a people could just blame the gods - a volcano wipes out a whole village.. damn, its the gods fault. Nowadays, when a flood rips through a city (*cough* Louisiana), we can't just blame the gods, though we should (so as we can wash our hands and move on). Blame it as an act of god... but then who could we sue? Instead we have become arrogant, assuming that some geologist somewhere keeps track of all these things, simply because we have the ability to do so. If we wanted. Well, thats not important anyway.. we just need to know who to blame. We've become arrogant in our knowledge.. perhaps knowing too much has just caused anxiety. Anyway.

So here, I am determined to take all of Wednesday and clean myself up. I've got a little office to clean the mess up in (when lightning brought out the magic gas in the computers there, I had to take everything apart after having just rewired the LAN a week earlier. Since I was so annoyed and in such a hurry to rebuild, I've just left the resulting mess of randomly placed bookshelves and such), support email to catch up on, bills to sort out and pay, company books to balance out, code to finish and.. perhaps most importantly of all.. finish watching the first episode of FireFly (a 90min episode, of which I've sat to watch it 4 or 5 times the last month, but have only seen a total of the first 20 mins or so.) And maybe play a little on the PSP.. I bought it, but haven't used it more than a few minutes total.

To summarize.. time to take back some humanity; finish up some magazines, have an apple, sit on the step and have a deep breath. I want to be happy, and calm, and help make my wife smile as I normally do. No more grumps for me. Whew. I can almost taste it.

Halloween slipped by; I was busy, but I do love to hear the higher pitched little voices of children trick-or-treating, so that was cool; and I'm so against all this anti-Halloween jib-jab thats been in the news of late -- sure, of course some kids got candy-mugged. Happened in the 50s, happened to us, happens now. But its not the norm so get over it. (Whats with parents dropping their kids off at the schoolbus, then driving along behind the bus to ensure they get off at school? And surrounding the playground with parents watching the kids.. isn't that more creepy than just letting them play by themselves life when we were little?) Heck, while I'm ranting, Intelligent Design is utter crap -- we cannot let our society fall into an anti-science mode of thought. Creationism -- fine. Evolution -- fine. Creationism+Evolution -- fine. But Intelligent Design's theory of gaps where we just rabidly say 'its god, I feel it in my bones, because I dont' understand it' - bullshit. Believe what you will, but do it intelligently.. even creatively. Where has our human instinct to think and question gone? Oh, sure, I suppose 50% of the people in the world just spend their time finding food, water, and a place to hide from the overlord, but the rest of us surely can philosophize, right? Nothing wrong with theology, but people.. use your head.

Scariest games to have played on Halloween late at night? "Thief" for the PC creeped me out, bad, back in the day.

Jeff out.

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