Tag Archives: ennui

What I’d Say If I Were Actually Busy

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.

Unmotivation

I’m sitting here at the very tail end of the weekend, and I can’t help but feel like I’ve completely wasted my time. Trying to find the words to say, to put together, to make myself feel like I’ve done something, like I’ve not let 56 hours of my life slip by with nothing to show for it. But it’s hard. There was once a time I could flood the page with meaning and passion. Once, I could fixate on a drawing and produce a thing of beauty. Now, I just want escape. Want to create without having to explain. Want to put out a chunk of creative output without providing a back story. Want to not be distracted. But in my middle age, all I can think of is my job and how, even though it’s great, I just want to turn off and escape it when I’m not at work. And when I’m not at work, I don’t want to work on anything; I just want to wander, to leave, to be unmotivated. And that is the horror of it all. That my motivation has vanished, and that I spent the last 56 hours of my life with nothing to show for it.

Too Much Life

Sometimes I just want to click off. Existential angst of late. I’ve had the desire to formulate some kind of journal entry, but as things are going, it takes too much work and energy to do so. I’ve had so much Life coming at me at once, there’s not enough energy or will to put the words together. Hence my usual silence. Seriously. Too much of Life.

Big fires to put out, little fires to put out. So scattered, all over the place, bunched up in little notes and to-do lists. So concerned with forgetting to do something that I write it down, make a note, and then I fail to remember. Sometimes I fail to actually attempt to do what’s on the list.

To-Do lists are the tool of the devil. Make a note of that.

I’m looking for another car. It’s that season again, and now that I commute 25+ miles a day my Mirage is failing sadly. The increased smoke is drawing attention, and there’s an aweful lot of cops on the road. Was looking at a Honda Civic: 2002, 130k miles, EX trim package with power everything and a sunroof, stickshift, 4-door. Everything I wanted in a car for $7,000. I didn’t move soon enough; the dealer jacked the price up another thousand. Fuck that. My search passively continues.

I am currently digesting the first season of Battlestar Gallactica (the remake). I wish I had been old enough to follow the plot of the original, but I was in 2nd grade; all I cared about was the kid and his creepy robot monkeydog. I will tell you this much about the new show: I am hooked. Damn you all to hell, I am hooked. This is the most I’ve ever seen Edward James Olmos speak, and he’s perfect for the part.

You should know what kinds of assholes I share my apartment complex with. Monday night, the jackasses downstairs decided to crank their music loud enough that my floor was vibrating. So, I did what any angry neighbor would do: I kicked the floor. Expectedly, they turned it down…and then proceeded to agressively slam their ceiling with whatever they had. I fully expected them to start fucking with me; I don’t care so much about breaking and entering now that Texas has the Castle Law, I’m worried about them doing something stupid to my car, to the plants in front of my apartment. People can be that trivial.

I hate apartments. Keep thinking about moving out.

Found out there’s a hiring freeze at my job which is expected to last a while. Even the permanent employees are required to burn off some of their vacation time over the holidays; mandatory closure as a cost-cutting measure. Last time I saw that was 2001, during the dotcom crash; I was contracting at Motorola and after the layoffs of unimportant staff, they had each department take one week off. Shortly afterwards, Motorola sold its Austin campuses to its spinoff company Freescale. I don’t see much logic in mandatory closure; I guess it saves energy and infrastructure costs and requires employees (most of them salary, mind you) to spend their vacation hours instead of acrue them. But you lose so much time during the ramp down and ramp up periods after the closure. How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot, 2.0.

Ruby On Rails made me her bitch tonight. She spanked my ass hard with an important lesson. I’ve had this mind-crushing problem with trying to build a test harness for one of my model classes. I set the record attribute, try to save, and my missing-attribute validation kicks in. I know I fucking set that attribute, so why’s it not passing validation? Here’s the lesson: ActiveRecord uses automatically-created accessor methods to set/get the values of a database record. What was I doing? I was trying to use an ActiveRecord instance as a hash with special powers. That’s wrong, wrong, wrong. When I go “person[:password] = ‘secretpass’”, I’m setting something in a hash somewhere that AR is not paying attention to. I’m really supposed to go: “person.password = ‘secretpass’”. What a dumbass. So two weeks of frustrated freetime were spent debugging an issue that was all my own fault.

- I should call my mother some time. It’s been a while.
- I need to take a shower before bed.
- I should go into work early tomorrow.
- I need to start using my bicycle more; I paid so much for it, and I’m so out of shape.
- I need to pick up some antacids.
- I have a dentist appointment next month.
- I now have 1.5Gigs of ram in my laptop. I can play games again, but I need to make space.
- I have so much more to do with my Rails project, it’s unreal.
- I need new shoes
- I should get a haircut some time soon
- I’ve got to put all this on my to-do list

Blue, Black, Green

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.

Whatever. No Patience To Be Found Here.

So here I am. Whatever. Nothing ecstatically, fantastically great to report. Whatever. I hate technology. My Time-Warner cable modem connection has been sucking shit for the past three weeks. You expect me to feel gung-ho about life when I can’t reliably tell anyone? Time-Warner states that there indeed is a problem in the neighborhood. No shit. It’s not like it’s rocket surgery. Fix the fucking thing, or I cancel service. Then again, going to another company wouldn’t work — they all use the same fucking equipment. Whatever.

Last week, during the morning of a major downpour, there was water pooling and flowing across the road in the construction zone outside of my apartment. It’s a stretch of road I have to drive every day to get to work. Around 3pm, I stick my head out the back door of my job to check on the weather. It was then that I noticed that I was the proud recipient of a flat tire. Fuck. Three-inch long piece of stamped steel, looked like a hinge or a latch, buried in my left-rear tire. It must have washed into the roadway from the construction debris. So, I finished up a job, excused myself, clocked out, put on the donut tire, and limped to the nearest tire shop. One hour and $100 later I have two new tires to replace the flat and the other rear tire which has been patched a year ago. So, with all that, I was officially, undeniably poor. I still am until this friday, a long-overdue payday.

Things suck.

If you know me (which you should, since you’re visiting my site), and you see me in my recent daily life, you’ve probably noticed (if you cared enough) that I’ve been getting really short-tempered lately. I’m growing impatient with a lot of things. My tolerance of bullshit is growing really thin.

Case in point — the bosslady is growing on my ever-fucking nerves. I really don’t know what the hell is up with women who grew up as the girls who made THE RULES of the playground. They made all the rules, they made all the games, and if you weren’t playing according to the rules, spoken AND unspoken, then you were the target of their anger. So the bosslady, a.k.a. the woman married to the boss, has joined our team in an effort to police her husband make things more efficient and to help “set up ‘systems’” (that’s a term straight from corporate hell). Whatever. If she doesn’t stop pandering and condescending to us, I’m afraid she’s not going to have a workforce left to help pay for her future retirement. We’re adults. We’re not her daughters. Stop that shit.

So, yeah, I’m hating my job. Too much bullshit. Leave us alone and let us do our jobs. That’s all we ask.

But you can’t tell her that.

I was going to go to Texarkana last weekend to see my mother for her birthday weekend, but I don’t feel comfortable at all with driving that distance with my timing belt getting as old as it is. It’s about 50-thousand miles overdue, and I don’t like that. How much will it cost me to have it replaced? Hold onto your lunches, because I lost mine: no less than $450. What the fuck for? God. Something replaceable like that, there’s a system for doing it if the mechanic’s experienced. No sense in that shit. $80 for a new belt and water pump, so what’s the rest of the cost? Four hours of labor. Fuck that shit. Bullshit.

Nothing good to brag about. Sorry. Tune in later.