(Phaysis)

Yes. There’s that much going on in my life. You people have no idea how hard it is to live my fast-paced life. I can’t keep writing journal articles while I’m trying my best to find ways to kill the boredom, stiffle the ennui, and pay less attention to myself so I can actually focus on something else long enough to do something worthwhile. It’s a tough life, so stop yelling at me for not writing as often as you want me too. Jeez. So just lay off with the flood of blog comments, I hear you. Ok? Ok!

Thank you for understanding.

I noticed that my journal has been really quiet this year. So far, 9 entries total since January. Nothing in the past month and a half. And you’ve most likely noticed too; I apologize.

You see, I’ve had a bad month. Really bad. July started with a wimper, went out with a sigh. The 4th of July wasn’t kind to me; it was raining pleasantly, but I stayed inside instead of watching the fireworks downtown. Had coffee, got a migraine, went home early. The rest of that week, I started hurting in my lower abdomen; thought it was gas pain, so I lived on a diet of simethicone and wheat bread. No luck. That friday, I started hurting worse at work. I went home after work and stayed home instead of going to the usual friday night gathering I do. Tried laying down, sitting down, standing up, walking around, nothing I did could alleviate the pain in my lower-right abdomen. It was then that it struck me: that’s where my appendix is. I knew I needed to go to the ER, so I cleaned up, prepped some things in case I needed to be hospitalized, and my roomate took me there.

A urine test, blood test, CT scan (complete with having to drink a half liter of barium sulfate on a nauseous stomach), a prostate check, and two shots of morphine later (because of the worst pain I’ve ever experienced), the doctor sent me home with a prescription of Ciprofloxacin (an antibiotic) and a treatment plan for…prostatitis. I had a prostate infection. How? I don’t know. But it hurt.

My fever came and went that weekend, and the infection started going away. In my followup appointment with my regular doctor, he cut my four-week prescription regimen down to three, stating that the extra week is really just overkill. So, after experiencing the bad side effects for a few days, I didn’t argue the point.

Well, the side effects are thus: stomach pain, depression, fatigue, susceptibility to tendonitis and tendon damage, and in some extreme cases, paranoia. Basically, I sat like a lump from the time I got home from work until I went to bed, where I laid like a lump and had fitful sleep broken up by extreme dreams, another side effect.

I knew I had stuff I could do. I knew I could have been writing about it, getting it all off my chest, putting out the painful personal truths that I was seeing in my lowered state. But I lost my motivation, lost my drive. Nothing mattered, nothing meant anything. I just sat there at my desk and watched TV. Tuned in, dropped out. For a month. I knew the depression was due to the Cipro, but at times I could not be sure.

Well, my last dose was the last friday of the month, almost a week ago. I felt fine and was glad to have finished the regimen. Except I felt a tenderness in my middle back, near my kidneys. A secondary infection? I dunno, but by monday I was fine. Until this morning when I started feeling more pangs in my lower abdomen again. So, I’ve been taking it easy, pushing the fluids, taking the cranberry pills, loosening my belt. I put myself back on the Cipro tonight; already feeling the twisting of my stomach. If nothing is better by monday, then I’ll see the doc again.

Seems every time I make a journal entry, it’s bad health news. Maybe I’m turning the corner at the old age of 34. It’s all downhill from here. I dunno, it’s just that I have things to say, but no will to post them for the world to see when really they’re kinda personal thoughts. I have some further issues to deal with there, and now that I’m back on the Cipro, it won’t get any easier.

Sleepy. Mellow. My thinking is currently numb, quiet, and studious.

About two weeks ago I reached burnout. I have so many projects and ideas swirling around and perpetually ongoing. Nothing finished. Nothing usable. There’s so much work to programming, and there’s so little time in my off-work life. If I was paid to do this, I’d hate it, sure, but I’d get more done. The best times of my day for programming would be during the day when I’m on the clock at work, but there’s none of that for me, none. I work at a printshop. So when I spend most of my free time either in front of my computer or chained to my laptop, I can’t think about my code because the very code that I wrote only weeks ago is now foreign to me. I spend so much time just staring at the code, glazed, because I can’t stay acquainted with it, I can’t devote large chunks of time to it. So I poke a few lines here, spend a few minutes getting lost, and then I spend a few days away from it either by schedule, disinterest, or inability to find a place conducive to writing the code. So there’s my burnout. There’s my brain fry.

So, what now? Chrontium development is suspended until further notice. My website engine is on indefinite hiatus. Those and like 10 other projects are all back-burnered until I get some basic groundwork figured out again, until I get my stuff together, until I feel like making headway again.

My apologies to anyone that this may dishearten.

On the upside, though, I picked up a book on XML. Something offline to help keep me going. I’ve been wanting to figure this XML thing out for a while, and finally I found a book that helped me make sense of it. XML is pretty technical, but it’s human-readable. It’s a system of marking up regular text into what each piece of text actually is. If you’re publishing a paper you can, say, put the title inside a title tag, and the introduction in an introduction tag, and later down the road a person or a program can read those and go, “Ok, this is the title. I’d like to make all my titles have 24-point bold text.” Through the use of style sheets or XSL, you can do that. Pretty cool stuff. Very “object oriented” – everything is enclosed in something else; it’s all “tree-like” in programatic structure. Nice.

If anything, reading up on XML has helped me keep an interest in programming, if only for the pure “objects and containers” aspect. Figure out the most basic units of function and build from there. I’ve begun attacking certain pieces of code, just experimentally. Nothing towards any specific ends. That’s when programming is fun, I suppose.

Tonight, I took my mellow, quiet mood and stopped by Cheapo Records to pick up some fresh music. I decided to go with today’s Cure thread and beelined for The Cure’s “Pornography” (1982) which, after tonight’s first spinning, is rather good. Essential listening for any Cure fan. I then went cruising up and down the cd bins when another band name appeared in my head, and I had to check it out. The band is Slowdive, and I know very little about them other than repeated recommendations that I should listen to them. I grabbed their cd “Souvlaki” and took it to the counter for a test listen, and the clerk was like, “Dude, just go ahead and buy it. It’s that good.” After hearing parts of a few songs, I was clear on the matter: “Sold.” I stopped off at a hidey-hole of a restaurant for some playing with code while I ripped the two CD’s. They’re in my playlist now, and they perfectly fit my mood.

Blue, black and green.
Melancholy, emptiness, and hope.

Yep. Bored with life. Pretty much. Yeah.

sigh

And no, Virginia, stupidity isn’t in the equation. Things just suck. No forward motion, that kind of thing. M’kay?

Settling into an increasingly harmonic vibration; a monotone. 439Hz. Hum drum. Been at my job long enough I was allowed to sign up and start my 401(K). Couple that with my savings account and, um, does that mean I’m getting old? Hmm. Being old wouldn’t matter if variations happened, if things were interesting for once. Christ’sakes.

Tired of working, tired of eating, tired of laundry, tired of sleeping, tired of hanging out, tired of missing concerts, tired of skipping parties, tired of iced tea, tired of ramen, tired of smoking, tired of anxiety, tired of projects, tired of programming, tired of driving, tired of writing, tired of reaching out, tired of talking, tired of digging for shit to say, tired of keeping with bored company, tired of trying to find a good woman, tired of wondering what the secret formula is, tired of having no reason for people to seek me out, tired of seeking, tired of being without base, tired of appearing to lack depth, tired of lacking confidantes, tired of sharing too much with acquaintances, tired of “too much information”, tired of helping, tired of no returns, tired of failure, tired of this journal entry.

Serendipity, I could really use your touch right now.

I feel like wandering.

(update)
How appropriate. When I viewed this message after posting it, the fortune cookie gave me this: “Far duller than a serpent’s tooth it is to spend a quiet youth.” Synchronicity is cruel.

Hey.

Ok, I’m kinda bored. Have a few project ideas. I know which project I need to be working on – Glyph, my website engine, for one. Hmm. Working on this journal script gave me a few ideas and helped me clarify, for myself, some methods in doing what I want to do with the main engine. It’s just sad that the total “working time” for building this engine is, um, something like 3 years. And still no palpable results. But that’s changing.

No, really.

Ok. So work sucks. The work itself is kinda light right now; it’s just the interpersonal bullshit between workers. Had a coworker cuss me out unexpectedly last week. I was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time, and I was there to receive his misguided anger. What makes me even more angry is that he hasn’t even apologized. I don’t expect him to. We haven’t said two words to each other since the incedent. Whatever. Fuck ‘im. The whole thing only clarified to me, in bold, beautiful colors, that I’m not there to make friends. Apparently, workplace comeradery simply doesn’t exist there in that department.

Ah, well.

Enjoy my site, what little there is of it. Funny that I pay $20us a month for web hosting space (with a slow database server, at that), and $34 for two years of domain name purchases. Aah, phaysis.com. How you are a labor of love. Hopefully soon I’ll get around to cleaning things up around here, giving everything a uniform look. It’s all kinda cludged-together right now. Priorities, man.

Priorities.

Ok. If you’re reading this, then, um, message me or something. Ok? It’d be nice to know someone out there visits my site. My server logs show me I’m getting a lot of hits from viewers that aren’t of the human persuasion. Damned bots. Ah well. So long as Google visits.

Show me some love.