(Some phrases really, really need to be saved for posterity.)
God fucking bless America. Some days there's just not a whole lot of hope, eh?
I'm not sure what's happening with this week. Everything feels kind of numb again, a little distant; I'm anxious about money and finding work, but I think I'm sleepwalking through a lot of the day, just watching TV, doing a bare minimum of programming, screwing around with completely irrelevant things on the computer, and going to aikido. Even there I have to work not to dissociate, but I can feel the knowledge and the movements slowly seeping in: my body remembers, even if my mind doesn't always. I keep repeating the moves and one day I will go to do them and I will just know it like the back of my hand. I can already feel it happening with my rolls; I crunched my right shoulder a little bit a few times (what exactly I did, I'm not sure, because it felt like cartilage or something moving, but as I check on it, it's pretty darn solid), but I'm starting to get the easy rolling feeling, and remembering to breathe and be aware and present during the roll, instead of just hurling my body at the floor and spacing out until I come out the other side. And no more light concussions, always a bonus.
I wonder if I can motivate myself through my dissatisfaction with my technical skills, to just hack on something effectively. Dissatisfaction is sort of an endemic thing with me, though, regardless, and reinforced right now by my sporadic employment. I have at least one project to play with: porting Perl's module for getting stock quotes to Python, a very different sort of language I want to sharpen my skills in, although it's unlikely anyone would pay me for it. I just like accumulating skills, I guess...it does make me more employable (when there are jobs, at least), but it also makes me feel better about my abilities and the end results of my having put effort into learning this whole "software engineering" bit.
It's times like this when I miss being in my nice green hills in New England, where it rains throughout the year and there are cloudy days and there's my parents and brothers I never see, and my nieces who don't really recognize me (well, Emily is all of six weeks old, but Sarah's something like two and a half). I haven't seen New England except in winter for the past 3 years, and I haven't been to Cape Cod in...um...a long time. Five years, maybe? Places to which I have a really strong connection.
Of course, besides the huge community I have here that I don't have out there, jobs for me are even scarcer. The few listings I find for tech work are all older skills, dating back ten or twenty years, mainframe programming for insurance companies, that sort of thing.
On the bright side, UC Berkeley is having a huge map sale tomorrow--books, too. I'd like some maps of California and New England, especially over time and/or having interesting geographical features (so something besides a road map). And aikido in the morning, if I'm awake for it.
Bleah.