giving answer to the why

[bubblingbeebles]

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)

Comments

[bubblingbeebles]

hm, so i have been debating where to post about the aforementioned tasks project (i.e., somewhere i could present a little more professionally), and i just thought hey, what about my yet-empty dreamwidth? is that sensible, or some kind of internet faux paus?

[_tove]

As far as I can tell, the internet considers LJ/Dreamwidth to be non-professional, and I share that view, but it's less to do with childishness and more to do with private-ness. I feel like LJ is for people to talk to their existing friends, and the usual mode of reading LJ is via one's own friendspage. Of course there are also people who make friends on LJ, but it still seems to me that that is largely through Communities. (There's also the thing where LJ itself shows obnoxious ads to people who aren't logged in, which is definitely unprofessional. I don't think Dreamwidth has that problem?)

[jcreed]

oh man captain awkward is kind of amazing. I wish I had had that advice when I was younger. Well, I think I wish I did, I'm not sure if younger-me would have taken it to heart, necessarily.

[_tove]

for me, the angst is a manifestation of my mental blocks to creating

I have this problem too, and I find that basically the only way around it is still to make something, but to pick a project that involves basically no decisions -- so it's creating (in the sense of altering physical reality), but not actually being creative, as it were. It has to be something that goes from start to finish in under an hour, and has a set of instructions that are as pre-determined as possible. The idea is to let my hands do something that my mind can't use to choke on perfectionism. My go-to used to be dyeing my hair; some other tasks I use are cleaning (of the getting rid of dirt variety, not the organizing variety!), baking chocolate chip cookies, and various "luxury" personal hygiene tasks (trimming/cleaning fingernails, shaving legs). I can also be un-blocked a bit by helping other people with projects that I am already good at -- the problem with my own projects is I always pick stuff at the edge of my ability, and sometimes it's nice to

[bubblingbeebles]

the problem with my own projects is I always pick stuff at the edge of my ability, and sometimes it's nice to just do something I mastered years ago and not have to worry about the latest work's symbolic-merit-and-position-in-my-artistic-oeuvre[-blah-blah-blah-&c.].

oh man yeah. this is a lot like one of my big reasons for picking working at mozilla (comfortable concurrency and language design work) vs nvidia (learning a bunch about stuff new to me) - i had just spent the year exhausting myself on research and really just wanted to do some fun hacking.

[bubblingbeebles]

hm, i think that it is really Loreena Mc Newline Kennitt, and the font makes my handin big the lowercase 'c' big.

[bubblingbeebles]

i am glad to hear that it works for you. hopefully it will turn out that i work similarly. :)

[gregh1983]

thinking about dating/relationships, and lamenting over lack of available opportunities / accumulated experience / whatever

This used to reliably happen to me every spring for about a week, and then it would subside again. It might be that even recognizing that period as such, or just being a crazy-busy undergrad, helped make it go away... at least until the one year when it was an all-consuming problem for about six weeks :-P (This is not necessarily a helpful comment; just a thought to say that this feeling happens to others too.)

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.This was a bit surprising for me to read. I think of you as someone very in tune to your personal happiness (and state in general) as it may be affected from a large variety of sources. Does that mean that the joy of good home-cooking

[bubblingbeebles]

This used to reliably happen to me every spring for about a week

i am curious about this, largely because you have been dating someone for as long as i've known you. was it during that time, or before? i wish to learn more about the same problem happening in different circumstances (it is a debugging tactic, if you will).

I think of you as someone very in tune to your personal happiness (and state in general)

aww, shucks, thanks. sometimes i feel solid about it; sometimes i feel totally not together.

'legitimate' isn't the clearest word for this. another try would be to say that it exists, but doesn't stick. not "beauty inherent", but "beauty despite", as i think tak once said. my ingrained criteria for 'winning at life' sometimes don't match up with what makes me actually (transiently) happy

[gregh1983]

was it during that time, or before?

Oh, definitely before. Quick version: You met me about four months after my current relationship got started, but the history there is that I was already 24 years old and it was my first. Before that, I was always too shy to say anything to anyone I was interested in. Most of the time I was OK, but there was something about the weather getting nicer in the spring, I guess, that always brought my continual lack of girlfriend to the surface for a bit and made me worry about it. We can talk more in detail if you're interested.

The story of Happy Ben and Sad Ben reminds me a lot of what I now call my "depressive semester," which was roughly the spring of 2008. It was the same for me: as long as I was doing something and engaged with other people -- and you guys in the Cohort played a big role in that -- I was fine. But the usual happiness baseline for my alone time was just tons lower in a way that I didn't fully understand.

[bubblingbeebles]

Most of the time I was OK, but there was something about the weather getting nicer in the spring, I guess, that always brought my [imagined personal failing] to the surface

hm, this also sounds a little like one of the reasons i'm a bunch more comfortable in the wintertime than in the summertime.

i would like to talk more, yes. you may have to coax me into it.

But the usual happiness baseline for my alone time was just tons lower in a way that I didn't fully understand

sounds like all of this past year for me. >_< it is hard to get over, but has been clearing drastically since i got out of town.