Just a Black Dog Day
Aug. 19th, 2020 03:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsMan, the black dog really came around today.
This morning was a weird one. I had taken the day off from work so I could help a friend get to a minor surgical procedure, one for which she had to show that she had someone else to drive her home. While I worry about any friend undergoing surgery, I was somewhat looking forward to a carefree day of, frankly, shopping. In the era of COVID-19, I know that's a somewhat fraught activity and I had no plans to linger anywhere, but there was a book I wanted that was quite expensive and a lab notebook that I needed to replace.
I'm one of those weird people who gets up before dawn. I like doing that because it means I have the noösphere to myself for several hours before I have to commit myself to my job and my family. Those are often some of the most productive hours of the day, and I love to be able to sit and write without interruption.
Omaha was up before I was. She couldn't sleep. The kid was actually still awake; apparently there was some 24-hour video-thon thing going on that he had to be a part of. Twenty-somethings and FOMO, people; it's a thing. So I didn't get my usual peace and quiet and meditative morning practice.
I'm going through a bit of a personal project crisis. I hit a brick wall with respect to my current software project, and have had to backtrack to learn a discipline I'm actually rather bad at-- lexing and parsing. Part of the reason for my riggedregex experiments was an attempt to understand it from the ground up. I sorta succeeded, but sorta not, and I still feel utterly terrified whenever I have to write a parser in something other than Javascript-- and even then, I tend to prefer the modern.
So at 8:15 I picked up my friend and drove her to the clinic, and after signing a statement indicating that I would be available to drive her home, went out.
The bookstore didn't take cash.
The stationery store no longer carried my brand of lab notebook.
I headed northward, because I knew of another stationery store that might carry it. The phone rang.
The surgery was canceled. My friend is elderly and fragile, and there had been a screw-up on the orders and the wrong kind of anesthesiologist had been scheduled for the procedure. Apparently there are different grades of anesthesiologist, and she needed a better one.
I picked her up, got home, and doomscrolled.
I realized I was doomscrolling and tried to read up on lexing/parsing techniques. The more I read, the more bewildered I felt, as if it was all skating off my brain.
Now I feel physically awful, like vaguely nauseous. I've been trying really hard to stay off Twitter except for short, scheduled periods where I look at some curated lists of people I really care about and avoid as much of the politics as I can, but given my reading habits so much of it leaks through. The weather is hot.
I'm hoping tomorrow is better.
This morning was a weird one. I had taken the day off from work so I could help a friend get to a minor surgical procedure, one for which she had to show that she had someone else to drive her home. While I worry about any friend undergoing surgery, I was somewhat looking forward to a carefree day of, frankly, shopping. In the era of COVID-19, I know that's a somewhat fraught activity and I had no plans to linger anywhere, but there was a book I wanted that was quite expensive and a lab notebook that I needed to replace.
I'm one of those weird people who gets up before dawn. I like doing that because it means I have the noösphere to myself for several hours before I have to commit myself to my job and my family. Those are often some of the most productive hours of the day, and I love to be able to sit and write without interruption.
Omaha was up before I was. She couldn't sleep. The kid was actually still awake; apparently there was some 24-hour video-thon thing going on that he had to be a part of. Twenty-somethings and FOMO, people; it's a thing. So I didn't get my usual peace and quiet and meditative morning practice.
I'm going through a bit of a personal project crisis. I hit a brick wall with respect to my current software project, and have had to backtrack to learn a discipline I'm actually rather bad at-- lexing and parsing. Part of the reason for my riggedregex experiments was an attempt to understand it from the ground up. I sorta succeeded, but sorta not, and I still feel utterly terrified whenever I have to write a parser in something other than Javascript-- and even then, I tend to prefer the modern.
So at 8:15 I picked up my friend and drove her to the clinic, and after signing a statement indicating that I would be available to drive her home, went out.
The bookstore didn't take cash.
The stationery store no longer carried my brand of lab notebook.
I headed northward, because I knew of another stationery store that might carry it. The phone rang.
The surgery was canceled. My friend is elderly and fragile, and there had been a screw-up on the orders and the wrong kind of anesthesiologist had been scheduled for the procedure. Apparently there are different grades of anesthesiologist, and she needed a better one.
I picked her up, got home, and doomscrolled.
I realized I was doomscrolling and tried to read up on lexing/parsing techniques. The more I read, the more bewildered I felt, as if it was all skating off my brain.
Now I feel physically awful, like vaguely nauseous. I've been trying really hard to stay off Twitter except for short, scheduled periods where I look at some curated lists of people I really care about and avoid as much of the politics as I can, but given my reading habits so much of it leaks through. The weather is hot.
I'm hoping tomorrow is better.
