emergence, maybe.

I wonder repeatedly why I bother continuing when faced with shit like this.

That's okay, you too can have a career as an engineer.

One time I went to visit my grandmother, who lives up in mining country, where they had a lot of Cornish miners (I guess Cornwall has a lot of coal mines or something, so they were brought in as skilled labor). So around these towns are places selling English pasties, the British analogue to Italian calzone, only without the part where it tastes like food. I had one of these things in Palo Alto once, and it was easily the blandest thing I've ever had: less taste than raw tofu. They hadn't bothered even with salt or pepper, just potatoes and overcooked carrots standing alone in all their glory.

So I was visiting my grandmother, and I needed lunch. She said, "Well, they have these wonderful English pasties here. Of course I wouldn't eat one myself...".

My family rocks.

Things have actually progressed at work! The Projects Which Will Not Die have been set aside in favor of assorted new tasks, one of which is tearing apart one of our web applications to put it back together for the new version. This is a happy thing because I get to delete lots of silly code--our system designs are very good, but some of our implementation details are kinda dumb, and I'm usually the guy who gets to go in months later and change it all.

Every day I learn something is a day where I get harder to replace with someone in India. *smile*


Sometimes it feels like this tunnel doesn't have an end. I've decided to stop thinking about my life, or me: anything other than What I'm Doing Right Now just leaves me tied up in a painful knot in my head. If I stop to think about it, what I want is a future, stability, security, reassurance. I probably have that desire in common with a lot of people. But it's not who I am, I think, at least right now. In place of reassurance and a future, I have a requirement of faith (trust in myself, my friends, and the patterns of the world through which we move)--a leap, a daily adventure, a tightrope. Instead of safety, just the explosive potential of each moment, of spending my time doing instead of thinking. But even that's not a fate, or anything like it. It's just what is.


Chris