I still don't know why I'm so tired, but whatever. I get my work done, I'm getting back into aikido. It could be that the chiropractic treatment, while making me feel better overall, is taking a lot of energy out in muscles needing to heal themselves. And, of course, my personal life has a certain set of challenges associated with it.
There was a bad but blessedly short meeting in my cubicle today, wherein a bunch of people at work got pissed at each other. I cheered at one person up, at least, by describing what it's like to work for genuinely stupid people, instead of merely inefficient. At previous jobs everyone careened at varying speeds towards solutions that were technically inadequate by any metric--wrong, in other words. (Sure, they met the desire for fast schedules, but as they say about buying in bulk, it's not a bargain if you can't use it. Similarly, software delivered quickly is no bargain if it sucks and requires extra time to modify and maintain farther down the line--a larger time investment at the beginning pays off on a scale that's difficult to describe.) At my job, everything takes forever (for a wide variety of reasons), but eventually converges on solutions that are not only technically adequate, but also, in most cases, elegant and relatively easy to modify and extend later on. I think this co-worker was happy to hear that (a) jobs come unimaginably worse than ours, and (b) all of the awkward communication eventually gets us to the right place.
I had dinner with a good friend this past weekend, who is now about two weeks late(!!) with her first child, and talked about my recent inclinations towards nesting, and why exactly one might have kids...she talked about children as "the great experiment", the ongoing energy and change and development of humanity on a grand scale, and procreation as participation. I'm starting to believe there is no rational reason for having kids: if you're not motivated by some emotional neediness or other problem of your own, every reason I've heard, from The Great Experiment to "natural outgrowth of the love of relationships" all seems to boil down to "well, we felt like it". Honestly arrived at, I think that's a fine reason--it's why I do almost anything.
I was about to say that I don't trust my analysis of my motivations, but fuck it. If I have kids I'll have kids, and for better or for worse I don't have to pass an exam to do it. I think for those of us who aren't parents, it's easy to forget that parents probably had a pretty full life before we came along, and parents hardly stop growing when they have children. They come to parenthood as themselves, with their own issues and fears and strengths, and they are who they are.
Terror Alert Level: