giving answer to the why
hi, internet. i am having a summer!
the, um, plurality of my waking time is spent working on rust. this is really a blast, and i keep having to rehearse the argument for why i'll be happier in the long run being a grad student. today i finished (sans some final touches) my major project, which is rebuilding the task (== unit of parallelism) infrastructure to provide linked failure propagation. i will write a separate post about this; it has a number of bits i am fond of. just under four weeks are left... i have come to terms with the fact that my internship is half over, but not with the fact that it's two-thirds over.
i was going to write a little bit more about work, maybe, but i wrote this post all out of order and now want to sleep. enjoy the rest of my temporally-challenged stream of consciousness while i enjoy that bed over there.
it just occurred to me that when the semester starts, i might try working four days of the week and taking one day off to take care of errands (or myself or friends or whatever). when i work, it's hard to stop myself from going all-out, spending all my time juggling all that's going on, and always being too exhausted to appreciate my free time. and when i get on a roll with this, i get a ton done, so maybe i can "afford" to scale back. i like better the idea of taking a whole day off instead of mandating max hours per day worrying about work - the latter doesn't stop me from worrying, and anyway i've always occasionally threatened to take "mental health days" if things get "too stressful" but never actually do.
---
some folks who are "used to live in pittsburgh, currently in san francisco" (in at least 3 different degrees of severity) were around last week, and last friday some of us went to the french laundry, arguably a best restaurant in the world. many people asked me afterwards "was it worth the money?", for which my reply is "yes, once." i have some pictures that may show up in their own post later.
one of the things i beat myself up about most this summer has been lack of creative output - consuming too much and creating too little. cooking is rare, but not never. (i found a baking book i'm really excited about! (oh, hey, i have more farmer's market peaches and nectarines than i have ideas for what to bake with them; help me out?)) sometimes i can tamper this by thinking of these months as 'vacation time', during which it's of course ok to consume all the time and produce nothing.
---
oh, can't write on livejournal without some emo, right? here we go.
i continue to have occasional spells of intense loneliness; a month ago or so i had what seems to be the "traditional mid-summer bad week". a lot of it has to do with thinking about dating/relationships, and lamenting over lack of available opportunities / accumulated experience / whatever. i know i am super lucky and have a ton of wonderful amazing friends at my fingertips, but sometimes it just isn't Enough -- at least i don't guiltily second-guess myself or anything for sometimes taking it for granted. i still haven't got words for a lot of this, and dunno if anybody wants to hear about it.
one thing on this track that occurred to me recently is that i can't seem to grasp that any happiness in the world is 'legitimate' unless there's some sort of "irrefutable artifact" that you can point at for it - and i guess i grew up always assuming that falling-in-love-having-a-relationship is the only way to make one of those. i have a hard time recognising other such 'artifacts', even obvious ones, let alone harder ones like memories of happy moments. getting this under control will be a long battle yet.
i dunno. it feels shameful to write about this stuff; it occurs to me that it's not that i think i'm bad for having bad thoughts (which is what i... seem to be afraid of??), it's that i'm ashamed of myself for not already knowing how to think and feel 'correctly', like i should have already built that.
---
one wonderful novel-to-me thing i've done is taking a book and sitting in oakwood's hot tub during the afternoon to read. it is hard for me to put away my list of worries (either the intangible one in my head or the errands-related one on my hard drive), so to spend the afternoon reading is to tell myself that i have no obligations. i love the sense of utter peace in staring up at the sky.
---
one of the olympic gymnasts i was watching yesterday had a loreena mckennitt song as their floor routine theme. it was great to recognise it just by the intro.
the, um, plurality of my waking time is spent working on rust. this is really a blast, and i keep having to rehearse the argument for why i'll be happier in the long run being a grad student. today i finished (sans some final touches) my major project, which is rebuilding the task (== unit of parallelism) infrastructure to provide linked failure propagation. i will write a separate post about this; it has a number of bits i am fond of. just under four weeks are left... i have come to terms with the fact that my internship is half over, but not with the fact that it's two-thirds over.
i was going to write a little bit more about work, maybe, but i wrote this post all out of order and now want to sleep. enjoy the rest of my temporally-challenged stream of consciousness while i enjoy that bed over there.
it just occurred to me that when the semester starts, i might try working four days of the week and taking one day off to take care of errands (or myself or friends or whatever). when i work, it's hard to stop myself from going all-out, spending all my time juggling all that's going on, and always being too exhausted to appreciate my free time. and when i get on a roll with this, i get a ton done, so maybe i can "afford" to scale back. i like better the idea of taking a whole day off instead of mandating max hours per day worrying about work - the latter doesn't stop me from worrying, and anyway i've always occasionally threatened to take "mental health days" if things get "too stressful" but never actually do.
---
some folks who are "used to live in pittsburgh, currently in san francisco" (in at least 3 different degrees of severity) were around last week, and last friday some of us went to the french laundry, arguably a best restaurant in the world. many people asked me afterwards "was it worth the money?", for which my reply is "yes, once." i have some pictures that may show up in their own post later.
one of the things i beat myself up about most this summer has been lack of creative output - consuming too much and creating too little. cooking is rare, but not never. (i found a baking book i'm really excited about! (oh, hey, i have more farmer's market peaches and nectarines than i have ideas for what to bake with them; help me out?)) sometimes i can tamper this by thinking of these months as 'vacation time', during which it's of course ok to consume all the time and produce nothing.
---
oh, can't write on livejournal without some emo, right? here we go.
i continue to have occasional spells of intense loneliness; a month ago or so i had what seems to be the "traditional mid-summer bad week". a lot of it has to do with thinking about dating/relationships, and lamenting over lack of available opportunities / accumulated experience / whatever. i know i am super lucky and have a ton of wonderful amazing friends at my fingertips, but sometimes it just isn't Enough -- at least i don't guiltily second-guess myself or anything for sometimes taking it for granted. i still haven't got words for a lot of this, and dunno if anybody wants to hear about it.
one thing on this track that occurred to me recently is that i can't seem to grasp that any happiness in the world is 'legitimate' unless there's some sort of "irrefutable artifact" that you can point at for it - and i guess i grew up always assuming that falling-in-love-having-a-relationship is the only way to make one of those. i have a hard time recognising other such 'artifacts', even obvious ones, let alone harder ones like memories of happy moments. getting this under control will be a long battle yet.
i dunno. it feels shameful to write about this stuff; it occurs to me that it's not that i think i'm bad for having bad thoughts (which is what i... seem to be afraid of??), it's that i'm ashamed of myself for not already knowing how to think and feel 'correctly', like i should have already built that.
---
one wonderful novel-to-me thing i've done is taking a book and sitting in oakwood's hot tub during the afternoon to read. it is hard for me to put away my list of worries (either the intangible one in my head or the errands-related one on my hard drive), so to spend the afternoon reading is to tell myself that i have no obligations. i love the sense of utter peace in staring up at the sky.
---
one of the olympic gymnasts i was watching yesterday had a loreena mckennitt song as their floor routine theme. it was great to recognise it just by the intro.