Not my best moment.
It’s no small wonder that I can’t sleep tonight, after consuming 4 Red Bull during the course of my day. Throw in a morning Coke for good measure and I have had enough caffeine to power a small army. I worked another long day today, leaving after 19:00. Having slept about 2.5 hours last night, I was surprised that I was half-way lucid this morning. Up and out, Red Bull in hand I was at work before 8am. Tonight, I slept for less than an hour this evening before I awoke. It’s 00:35 as I start typing.
I wish. I wish… for I don’t know what at the moment — which of course is a problem for me. I have great distain for those in-between moments in life. Which is what about 99% of life? (I’m not a control freak, I’m just drawing that way.) Writing software is about limiting chaos within a system. Writing database queries is all about Set Theory. Are you in or out of the set I am looking for. I picked up a primer on Set Theory a while ago. It is a very interesting topic. Yes, I actually enjoy reading about this stuff. All sets contain the empty set. (Could that be my soul?) I write have been writing application-based code and database-based code this week. One mindscape has me buried in the SQL Server 2005 CLR, writing C# structures. Another mindscape has me writing T-SQL and yet another mindscape writing VB code for the data-layer within a Windows Application. Each paradigm offers different challenges and different opportunities. I have written four or five hundred lines of C#, creating several different objects and writing transformation utilities to manipulate my company’s sales budgets. T-SQL is not object based, so I write set theory-type code to discover specific sets and manipulate those sets accordingly using a procedural model. The VB is bastard form derived from procedural code which has been morphed into an OOP language. I write the VB so the application developer has a data source to hook into within his app.
So I am living in two worlds right now. (Another prophetic concept?) On one hand, I have code, pure logic implementations and rigid order. One the other hand, I have the fuzziness of life, of social interactions and relationships of various kinds. A clash of thought paradigms equates to a clash of cultures. The rigidity of thought diminishes my ability to deal with other people, to accept the limitations of form, action, and design.
I’m have a very hard time accepting the weakness of the developer that I am working with. Why can’t he figure this stuff out? This is very simple math or very simple constructs or a straight forward type of user interface. The two of us have an interesting dynamic. He is very self-deprecating while I’m sardonic. I don’t really feel like getting too deeply into the dynamic, but we are like oil and vinegar. We work well together when well shaken, but separate immediately when at rest. I get frustrated with his lack of motivation and ownership. It’s his app, but he never tests anything then starts sweating bullets when something goes awry in the production environment. One sure fired way to totally piss me off is to make the programming department, and by extension me, look bad because you failed to do a very basic job requirement — test your fucking code before you release it.
Anyway…
It has been a very long time since I was so obsessed about work, years in fact. That last time I worked like this I was at Intel before the bubble burst or maybe even farther back when I was at Wells Fargo. Depending upon the method of computation, it has been 5 or 7 years since I entered this mental state, trying to balance work with my personal life. I am not doing very well on the personal front. As I wrote last night, I have been feeling a dislocation, a dislocation of my soul, of my internal compass, of any want or need to be… social, to share my thoughts and feelings in a real world context. I can (obviously) write down the echoes within my skull, but to be audible, to actually share them in ‘real-time’ has been an illusive skill lately. When these moments hit, I desperately want to withdraw farther, to saddle up and escape from all manner of humanity for a while. Alas, that action is not possible just yet. Tony is moving this weekend and I signed up to help.
So when will this phase end for me? I honestly have no clue. I am in new/old territory. The last time I entered this zone I ended up divorced… again. That is not a precedent I am comfortable with. I know I’m a bastard to live with at times like this. That knowledge doesn’t actually make it any easier to ‘be nice.’ I enjoy my work and I actually like the mental twists. The people thing still gets me. To restate, it is the filtering I have to do when I have human interactions. I don’t know anyone that actually understands my work AND understands me. I try to be an ever shifting creature, learning, growing each and every day. Some days, that growth is internal. On other days, it is more external. Today I was blazing a trail through new structures to write my C# CLR and the ‘people shit’ went completely out the door.
Not my best moment.
Well, it’s now after 01:15 and I need to get back to writing my code. A mild chuckle as I realize if I wasn’t co-hebetating I would just take a shower and go back to the office where I have a better/faster computer and high-speed connections to my servers.
Like I said… Not my best moment.
