Who I are/Who you am
May not be the same as who I was or who I want to be. I had a spectacular day
at work. I bashed through a bunch of bugs, and since they're demoing it
tomorrow morning at Macworld, that's probably a good thing. Deadline drama and
namedropping isn't why I fired up vim though, so lets trek back to the first
sentence- my happiness is kind of disturbing.
I did good work, but honestly, it was trivial work. I bashed a set of classes
into shape so we can switch from the old SOAP authentication server to the new
RESTful one whenever the server crew gets their act together. I went spelunking
in some Qt xml files and changed a bunch of stuff we didn't trust them to get
around to. I ran down what I guess was bitrot in some OS X file-monitoring
code, and stuck in a call to stat(2)[1].
There's that, and the fact that I spent a lot of the time talking through what
I was doing with my boss. This made me surprisingly cheerful, but it's really
damaging the big lie I keep telling myself, that I can be alone all the time
and love it.
Circling around to get into hailing distance of a point, I don't really want to
be a chatty bug fixer. I want to be Paul Lutus in the hills, not snot nosed
Hank in Berkeley. I suspect that this is not to be. I lost my mind a little bit
living alone last year, and most of my trouble in college came from an
unwillingness to speak and my subsequent crushing loneliness. You can only
stare at a wall for so long before you think you deserve it.
I told a friend of mine last night I was saving up money for some rainy day,
when I'd strike out on my own and build my own little product. I used to want
that. I used to believe it when I said that. I've never been happier than I am
now. I guess I could bleed every day, but for what? An abstract sense that I
could do something awesome, some vestiges of my own vanity, a long string of
tales I've told.
Maybe it's not worth it.
[1] This seems like a strange bit of detail, but it means everything to me.
There are two teams working on this codebase, and a lot of tension over coding
style. This code is "owned" by people who favor mazelike layers of indirection,
so this felt a little like repairing a bridge and painting the side of it with
a veiny triumphant bastard.