Category Archives: Navel-gazing

I am the Hermit

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So today I was really stupid and went on Facebook and whined a little bit about not finding anything fun. Since I gave up drinking I realized that the vast majority of my recreational activities revolved around getting to drink. My favorite restaurants had ten page drink menus with ten or fewer food items. I used to like camping because it was an excuse to drink all day and read in the tent. I was exhausted and trying to figure out what to do today before giving into the inevitable by staying in bed and sleeping until early afternoon.

A friend of mine invited me out for a Solstice event in Illinois at her church. This event is starting around now (quarter to eight on a Saturday night) and is two hours away from me. I assume it will go on for some time, at which point I would need to drive two hours home and get home at like 3:00 in the morning.

I have no idea how to tell this person that I can’t deal with doing this.

My current job is incredibly mentally demanding. I remember a time before I started programming where I could go out with people after work and do a lot of stuff, but I can’t anymore. By the time I get done with my work for the day, I have nothing left to give. Trying to explain to someone that it’s just too difficult for me to drive four hours on the spur of the moment on one of the only days of rest I have is too difficult.

I see so many people around me who seem to have more demanding schedules than I do who seem to do more than I do. People who have children and full time jobs and still have hobbies and groups they belong to. I have no idea how these people do this. I have groceries delivered to my house because it’s too difficult for me to drive twenty miles and deal with traffic and all of the zombies that litter the grocery store. It’s easier for me to just cook for myself than it is to leave the house to find food, which is one of the only reasons I don’t do take-out.

Every time I leave my house I have to carefully plan it out to make sure that I reserve enough energy that I don’t completely exhaust myself. I do this when I have conferences. I know well ahead of time that I have one coming up and I make sure to rest adequately before going and I have proper recovery time once I get home. I have no idea how I used to be able to commute to work. Just commuting from my bed to my desk is a stretch on some days.

Nothing I am saying on here is about people I meet at conferences. I love attending them and meeting people. It’s a relief to get to spend time with people that I feel on some level grok me that I can have meaningful interactions with. Sadly, most of them live too far away for me to have enough of them to justify leaving my house on a regular basis.

I have a lot of local friends who are annoyed with me because I don’t spend time with them. They invite me to do things that require me to drive between half and hour to two hours to get to wherever they are. If they’re in a city, that requires me to navigate a bunch of traffic and find some place to park my car, which can get expensive. Sometimes they want me to drive them places because they don’t own cars because why would anyone own a car in a city. I am exhausted before I even get there.

I was talking with someone about building an airplane. Their hanger is 45 minutes away from my house. I spent half of a day with him driving to several regional airports to visit a bunch of people doing this. It took me over a week to recover from this excursion. I have been avoiding his emails because I don’t know how to explain that spending half a day driving around completely drained me of all my energy and that I don’t think I can work on a plane with him because the drive there alone completely exhausts me.

Sometimes I cancel on people because I know that if I put out the energy to go and do things with them that I will have nothing left for a week or more. If my presence was appreciated and respected it would be easier to justify going, but most of the time it’s seen as expected. It feels like a bottomless pit of need. No matter how much effort I put into maintaining a relationship with someone, they always need more. Everyone else can do this, why can’t you?

It makes me feel shitty. I feel there is something wrong with me because I simply can’t do what everyone else seems able to do. I don’t know if it’s because of how difficult my job is that I have no energy. I don’t know if I am depressed or I have something that is preventing me from fully being able to rest. I don’t know if I have too many projects. I don’t know if I am burned out. I don’t know if it will ever get any better.

I had a severe period of exhaustion about ten years ago that slowly got better over the course of two years. I keep holding out hope that this gets better as well. I think it’s slightly gotten better, but I am still painfully exhausted most of the time.

I am also finding that I don’t enjoy doing the things I used to enjoy doing. I used to go camping and go to movies and do board game nights. I don’t enjoy these things anymore. I find them mentally and physically exhausting. I find that I have empty, meaningless conversations with people who are trying to find an escape from their lives. I used to be one of those people, except I did escape from my life.

I don’t know how people can go out several nights a week. I don’t know how they can go to the movies and to concerts and to Geeks who Drink pub quizzes. I don’t know how people can spend their weekends at festivals and still be able to get up and go to work. I don’t know what they could possibly have to talk about. Based on my previous experience, you don’t do this stuff to talk.

I worry about mentioning any of these thoughts because I don’t want people to think I am misanthropic. I worry that this is simply a prolonged period of depression and if I tell everyone to fuck off and leave me alone I will be regretting it in a few years when I feel better and I am atoning for being an asshole to everyone.

I just know that right now I am tired. I have no interest in doing anything I found fun for the last five to ten years. I just want to spend all day in my house with my pugs working on programming. When I get too exhausted to do programming I don’t want to further exhaust myself by leaving my house and hanging out with strangers doing things that are supposedly fun but I find boring. I am sick of trying to explain myself to my friends who do not seem to understand because they personally don’t experience what I experience. I am sick of being told that if I go on a one week vacation that it will magically refresh me and make me all better. I am sick of people trying to give me unhelpful advice rather than just saying “Sorry to hear you feel lousy.” I am afraid to break off relationships with them because I am afraid of being alone. I am afraid I will snap out of this one day and people will hate me for being priggish and sanctimonious, so I keep trying to make efforts that result in me being resentful and further exhausted.

My friend told me that I didn’t have to talk to anyone at this event. I could just keep to myself and commune with the Lord. Well, I can keep to myself and commune with the Lord just fine from my house. If they do this again and she tells me about it ahead of time, I can schedule it so that I don’t exhaust myself. For now, I am the hermit.

The Value of a Liberal Arts Education

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Ten years ago around now, back in 2006, I was beginning to realize I had made a terrible mistake.

I graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater with a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism with a minor in English composition. I declared this major two years earlier. I attended my first journalism class and the teacher told us to look to our left, then look to our right. He told us that ten years after leaving college only one out of fifty journalism majors were still working in journalism and everyone else had moved on to something else.

I looked around me with a smug expression thinking “Man I feel sorry for the other forty-nine people here who are wasting their time!” Clearly I was not the brightest college student as I should have heard this statement and thought “Run for your life!!”

Here we are, ten years later, and I am one of the forty-nine. I don’t even really know why I chose a journalism major. I knew I wanted to write and I knew I didn’t want to be a high school teacher, so that kind of left journalism and getting a PhD in English and praying that by some miracle I found a tenure position or wrote a best seller. I think the best seller would probably have been the easier goal to achieve.

I kind of wanted to learn a trade, but universities don’t do that. Trades were for people who were too dumb to get into “real” college. I had a Photoshop class with a dude who was forced to retire from his paper because he was so old. He had been a film photographer for forty years so they figured he would be the guy to teach Photoshop. Another student introduced him to the Layers property. There was no hands-on anything. There were plenty of hipsters in skinny jeans gushing about Ayn Rand, however.

I got really good at writing research papers and getting on the bad side of professors who did not like being reminded that they were wasting their lives teaching MacBeth to a bunch of brain dead just barely adults who wanted to drink and didn’t really know what else they were doing with their lives.

Besides the not drinking part, I was also one of those brain dead kids who didn’t know what I was doing with my life. I knew when I was in grade school I was supposed to be learning how to make straight A’s so that when I went to high school I would have a good GPA. I was supposed to do well on the ACT so that I could get into UW-Madison and get an engineering degree, even though I didn’t know what engineers actually did. When that did not pan out, I was supposed to attend another UW system school and get a degree in something, because if I got a degree in something, then there would be a job waiting for me at the end of college.

After I was informed that I had in fact completed all of my course requirements I dutifully went down to the job placement office and asked them what I do now. They said “How are we supposed to know?”

“Um, this is the job placement office. What do you do here?”

“We tell you to put your resume on Monster and connect with the people who you did an internship for, if you did one.”

“I didn’t do an internship. Don’t you have, like, companies that reach out to you to help you place recent graduates with them??”

“Why would you think that?”

I found out later that this stuff existed, but the people I talked to had zero interest in helping me out. I was easily deterred because I didn’t know any better. I also realized I was very screwed.

I didn’t have a demo reel to show prospective employers. I hadn’t done an internship. I wanted to work for NPR, but NPR’s Madison hub was at UW-Madison and they would only hire interns from UW-Madison and if there were jobs after that they would only hire people who had already worked there.

I realized that not only was I missing a lot of requisite skills, I also was missing a network of people to call on to help me find a job.

I had been raised by my dad to believe that personal connections were completely meaningless. If someone was looking to hire, they would put out an ad in the classifieds. They would impartially look at the resumes of everyone that applied and if you had a better GPA than someone else, you would be picked.

This is complete and total bullshit.

I spent a decent chunk of time being incredibly angry that I did not get picked over less qualified people simply because the company already knew this person because they were referred or had interned there. I realized very quickly that if I wanted to get jobs I had to be that person that people knew rather than getting angry about how “unfair” things were.

I also realized these placed wanted people who actually knew how to do technical stuff that I didn’t know how to do. I hadn’t learned any of this stuff in college and I didn’t know how to learn it, so I held my nose and enrolled at a for-profit technical college specializing in audio and video technology.

I spent two years there getting to touch real sound boards and real cameras. A lot of our classes were working through the Adobe Classroom in a Book for things like Illustrator and After Effects. This is technically something I could have done from home, but I would have had to convince someone to buy copies of these programs for me and I would have had to have had the discipline to just sit my ass down and work through the book without the threat of a failing grade hanging over my head.

This place also exposed me to something I couldn’t get at my first college: Connections.

My mentor at this school was the guy that got Slipknot signed to a record label and engineered their first album. Another guy was a guitarist on a Nine Inch Nails album. Yet another worked with Michael Jackson.

This was the school where I also learned how to learn on my own. Halfway through my time there, there was a massive upgrade to both the Adobe suite and Apple’s Final Cut Pro suite. I didn’t know how to work with the new software and so I asked a teacher for help. He sat down and worked with me and showed me where everything moved.

I looked at him and asked, “How do you know this? Who taught this to you?”

He looked at me kind of confused and said, “Well, nobody. I got a copy of this a few days before class started and I taught it to myself because I had to know it to teach you.”

That was the first time it ever occurred to me that one day I was going to be on my own. That technology changes and you can’t just keep throwing out money every year to keep taking classes to learn all the changes. When you’re a professional, you’re responsible for knowing your own stuff.

After that I quit asking as many questions. I tried to find out the answer for myself before I would ask for help. Slowly over time I stopped needing to ask for help altogether because I could find any answer I needed.

I worked really hard to try and connect with these people, but I ran into a wall that would prove insurmountable: I was a woman.

As much as people bitch about how sexist the programming community is, it’s nothing compared to the music industry. There were companies expressly telling the school not to send them female candidates because they would not hire women. The guys in my class kind of treated me like a talking dog and would never take me seriously. They would all hang out at strip clubs after school and it was very clear that I was never going to be welcome into their ranks.

Well, actually, it’s possible I might have, but I think I would have been raped and drugged and generally abused for a job that pays ten bucks an hour. No thanks.

After doubling down on this bad bet, I had to find yet another thing to do, which was how I got into programming. I learned my lessons from these previous experiences in that it was really stupid to try and break into “prestige” jobs where there are fifty qualified people for every job out there. Even in something like programming, where there is supposedly a lot of demand, you have to know people and they have to know you. You can either do that by dropping close to six figures getting a computer science degree from UW-Madison or you can work your ass off networking with people and making public contributions on places like GitHub (or this blog).

Even though I never got paid a dime as a journalist, the training I received for that has proven invaluable. I learned how to distill down a lot of information into its most important parts. I learned how to ask good questions and figure out what the root of an issue was. I learned how to write very clearly, effectively, and concisely. My experience doing radio helped me tackle conference speaking, which gave me the kind of visibility I needed to break into programming.

I learned to hustle and work my ass off. I did not want to be in a position like I was ten years ago when I assumed the world owed me something just because someone gave me shitty life advice.

Life doesn’t owe you anything. People will pay you if you can do something for them that is more valuable than what they are paying you. People are more likely to pick whoever is the first candidate that is good enough and if you’re one of the first people they consider you’re more likely for that person to be you.

In spite of all the pearl clutching about how writing as a skill is going in the crapper, there is a lot of opportunity out there for people who can write effectively, especially in highly technical fields. I think it’s easier to learn the tech after the writing because if you learn the tech first, you’ll find someone to pay you enough money to not bother with learning the writing. That is never the case the other way around.

Even though things were pretty bleak ten years ago, failing spectacularly was a wonderful learning experience. I am happy I failed early so that I could have enough time to process that experience and pivot to something else before it was too late. I see people who never struggled with anything suddenly hit road bumps in their thirties and have no fucking clue what they’re supposed to do. I am proud of the person I have become and the life I have built for myself.

That is the value of a liberal arts education.

My First Year Being Alone

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One year ago today I went to a court house to dissolve my marriage. I was married for a little over five years to a man I have known since I was a kid. I don’t remember how we met because it was so long ago. We gave things a try and they didn’t work out.

This last year is the first year of my life where I have really been on my own.

I didn’t really have a lot of relationships. When I got engaged to my ex I hadn’t had a boyfriend in over ten years. I didn’t date at all when I was in college. When I married my ex I didn’t really have any career prospects and I was afraid that I had missed my opportunity to meet anyone and to get married.

I lived with my parents until I was 27 years old. I had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder when I was 16. I don’t think I ever had bipolar disorder. I was being sexually harassed by a number of people at the school I was attending (including the priest who taught our religion classes) and basically instead of doing anything about it, everyone just decided what I was saying couldn’t possibly be true and I must be crazy. I spoke to some of the people I went to school with over the last few years and they agree with me that something was terribly off about our school and that it wasn’t just me.

I spent ten years being medicated for an illness I don’t have. Those medications clouded my mind and destroyed my ability to function. I spent ten years being told that anything that I felt or observed that was inconsistent with what other people wanted to believe was wrong and I could be discounted because I was crazy. I was sometimes actively targeted by people who knew they could bully me and people would let them because I was the weird crazy girl. I was told to hide who I am and pretend like I was normal to avoid all the trouble people cause me. I was told not to set my sights too high because I was never going to accomplish anything and that just getting through college or holding down a job were high enough aspirations.

I am not recounting this to get sympathy or whatever. I am simply trying to explain why I didn’t have a job or live on my own until recently. There was a period of time where I didn’t think I would graduate from college. I never thought I could hold down a full time job. My self was slowly being hacked away over the years and I lost track of who I really am.

I married my ex-husband so that I could have a future. He seemed like a stable person and I had no stability in my life. He had direction and I wanted to have a better life. So I married him and we moved into our house six and a half years ago.

Things did get better. I got my first full time job. It was working at Target, but I did that job for a year. Then I got a better job and held that for a year and a half. Then I got a miserable job that eventually lead me to programming. I went back to school, I networked, and I now have a really great career.

Sometimes I forget where I came from. I forget how miserable and hopeless everything seemed in my twenties. I forget there was a period of time where I missed half of my classes because of various mental health issues. I forget that a teacher told me not to set my sights too high and I should just focus on finding a nice little town with a nice psychiatrist to settle in. I forget consistently being told I will never amount to anything and won’t do anything special or important with my life. I have a life I never thought was possible. My highest aspirations when I was 25 was to have a quarter of what I have now. It’s a miracle to me that my life exists.

Even though it’s a miracle, I still have felt a great deal of depression over this last year. I feel like I have no right to feel this way. I should be grateful for what I have, and I am. I shouldn’t want more, but I do.

This past year has been incredibly upsetting. I have never had a time where I had to figure out who I am. I have never had to pay my own bills. I didn’t know if I would run out of money because I did something stupid like buy too many books and so I wouldn’t have heat. I was afraid I would forget about paying my property taxes and lose my house. Those were the first insurmountable things.

After that, I found other things insurmountable. I am just now starting to figure out what I want to do with my house. I never decorated it or organized it because it was simply too overwhelming. I also wasn’t committed to staying here since there was nothing keeping me here anymore. I was deeply ambivalent about it. I also had a worry that if I started treating the house like it was mine that i was precluding the possibility of letting another person into my life. I know from my experiences with my ex that he treated the house like it was his house. He begrudged me any space in the house because he thought of it as his. I know that if I paint the house and bring in all of my bookshelves and I fill all the space in the house, I am basically enforcing that I have no room in my home for anyone else except me. I am afraid that the longer I am by myself, the less likely it is that I will ever feel comfortable letting another person in.

I don’t want to be alone forever. Being alone right now is fantastic. I can do whatever I want. I haven’t put my laundry away in over a year. I don’t have to coordinate what I cook with anyone else. I don’t have to spend my weekends being dragged around by my significant other when I would rather be at home working on my electronics projects. Being alone right now is great, but I don’t want to be alone for the rest of my life.

One thing I didn’t count on with the divorce was the deep depression I felt. I had fantasies about spending long glorious weekends programming and working on electronics projects. I thought that if I could control all of my time that I would have this golden productive period where I would get so much done. A lot of days it was a struggle just to get out of bed.

I miss being touched. I don’t think my husband and I were particularly physically affectionate, but apparently it was enough that I didn’t feel the overwhelming ache that I feel every day now from not being touched. I sometimes will lay on my stomach on the floor because the weight being applied helps with the pain. The pugs help with the pain too. One reason I adamantly wanted to work from home the last year or so is that if I can’t touch the pugs I fall into a massive depression because of lack of physical contact with another living thing.

I read a while ago about some company talking about doing cuddling as a service. I would be all over that. I keep having people telling me I can get guys to take me on dates so I can be touched, but that tends to lead to things I am not ready to do yet and I think it’s fraud to pretend to be into someone just because you miss being hugged. I would like it if I could just pay someone to cuddle with me for an hour and leave and know it’s not going anywhere.

People have suggested online dating, but I really don’t want to go there. I have spent a lot of time and energy avoiding the vast awfulness that is The Internet that I don’t want to open myself up to unsolicited dick pictures and verbal harassment from guys who are mad at me for not responding to their dick pictures. I would like to find someone through networking like I did with my job, but in spite of the reputation that programmers have for being antisocial neckbeards most of the men I encounter in our community are married and in long term relationships. That being said, DON’T ASK A WOMAN OUT AT A PROGRAMMING CONFERENCE!! EVER!! Those are professional events and I go to them for professional reasons, not to meet men.

So why am I writing this blog post? I am writing it partially because I have had a number of people over the last year come to me to talk about their pending divorces. I wanted to share my experiences with depression after my divorce because those feelings are normal. Even if you were the one who wanted the divorce, you’re going to feel sad. It’s okay to feel sad. Don’t beat yourself up because you have days you can’t get out of bed and the world seems hopeless. Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t do all the stuff you thought you were going to get done once you were alone. You’ve gone through a trauma and traumas take time to heal.

Also, don’t necessarily rush into a relationship immediately after getting divorced. Even though it’s painful and difficult, it’s important to be alone with yourself for a while. It’s important to know who you are and what you want from life. If you immediately jump into another relationship with someone, you don’t have time to process why your last relationship failed. I think we’re all so eager to avoid being unattached because it’s somehow socially deviant that we’re setting ourselves up for failure because we are treating being in a relationship like being in a job. You can’t be unemployed. If you are, then there’s something wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong with being alone and deciding that you’re not going to give up your freedom for someone unless they’re special. Also, get a pug. Pugs are great at snuggles.

Last thing I want to do is thank this community of people. I would not be here right now if it wasn’t for the people in this community. I thanked everyone for being awesome this weekend and someone thought I was leaving programming. That’s not the case at all. Programming has given my life meaning and direction over the last few years.

I want to thank Eric Knapp for teaching me how to program and letting me ask him the same stupid question over and over again because there was some nuance I didn’t understand that was bothering me. I want to thank Emily Van Haren for holding me in the hallway at school when I broke down sobbing because I didn’t think I could continue on anymore because life was too difficult. I want to thank Josh Smith for getting me to talk to Dave Klein about speaking at CocoaConf and changing how I thought about myself. I want to thank Chris Adamson for being one of my first mentors and for helping me fulfill my lifelong dream of writing a book. I want to thank Brad Larson for helping me to solidify my programming skills and for giving me the job I needed to be able to leave my ex-husband. I want to thank all of the conference organizers who let me speak at their conferences when I was nobody and unemployed so that I could network with people and have a future. Lastly, I want to thank everyone I have met, everyone who follows me on Twitter, and everyone who reads this blog. I spent my whole life being told to hide who I am because no one would ever accept me. The amount of support and acceptance I have received from this community is something I never thought was possible. I would not be here without that. So thank you.

The Great TV Binge Quest of 2016

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The last few days I have been asking people for suggestions for shows to binge. When I am cooking or doing something where I am not just watching TV in a dedicated manner I want something on in the background that I can tune in and out of without missing too much stuff.

My go-to default for most of my life has been Law and Order. I have seen most of the episodes so many times that once when I was waiting to go to the airport from a conference I saw the end of an episode with the sound off and I not only knew every detail of the story, but I knew that was the season finale of Season 14. That’s incredibly pathetic.

Law and Order was great because for a period of time in the early 2000s it was on ALL THE TIME. There were three cable channels that had it on. There were three iterations of it in NBC. If you were trying to kill twenty minutes with the TV on, odds were pretty good you could just throw on an episode of Law and Order.

Since I cut the cord and apparently cable TV has moved on to other shows, this is no longer the case. I have spent a good portion of the last six years trying to find a replacement for Law and Order. It isn’t that I think Law and Order is the greatest show that ever existed, it just had the right combination of characteristics that made it ideal for the purposes I had.

What makes an Ideal Crappy TV Show To Binge

Here are my criteria for what makes a good background TV show:

  • Must be at least five seasons long
  • Can’t be too engaging
  • Has to be somewhat repetitive
  • Has to have procedural elements

So far the best show I have found that meets these criteria is Grey’s Anatomy. I started looking for shows on Netflix that had at least five seasons and even though I really didn’t want to, I gave it a try. It’s actually quite a good replacement for Law and Order. It’s been on for a long-ass time and it’s going to keep going for a while. It has serialized elements in being a soap opera, but each episode has procedural elements where there will be some patient or case people are working on. There will be some kind of surgery. You can walk away for five minutes and still be able to kind of figure out what is going on.

Top Chef and Project Runway have worked pretty well too. Since they’re game shows the generalized structure of each show is the same so you can figure out what is going on if you stop paying attention for a while.

Shows That are Too Good

One problem I am having is people recommending shows that I should sit down and actively watch rather than garbage I can just have on in the background.

Breaking Bad is not a good candidate for my purposes.

Supernatural is also one that I can’t binge on. I have slowly worked my way up to season five, but it’s not something I can just passively have on for five hours.

Pretty much anything that has been on cable with abbreviated seasons like Mad Men and Halt and Catch Fire are not good candidates because I want to actively watch them.

Any prestige TV is not a good candidate for my purposes. Prestige TV is something you watch to be actively engaged. There is a time and a place for Prestige TV, but when I just want a steady stream of macaroni and cheese I don’t want to deal with prime rib.

Shows That are Too Engaging

There are so many shows that are disqualified because they require you to pay attention. One of my early candidates to replace Law and Order was NCIS. That stupid show is way too intricate for what it is. You have to pay attention to every single thing people say and do to know what is going on. I listened to an audio commentary from the actors where they got distracted for a minute about something and were like “Wait, what just happened? Why are we in this basement now?” It’s not worth the mental capacity to pay attention to what is going on to get through the entire series.

The West Wing is nothing but people walking and talking. You have to pay attention to every bit of dialog and after a while it gets incredibly preachy and irritating because it’s the world as Aaron Sorkin wishes it would be rather than the world that it is and it just makes me angry and thinking about politics and then I can’t deal with anything anymore.

Shows I have Already Seen

People have suggested some really good shows. The issue is that I have already seen those.

These include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Battlestar Galactica
  • Futurama
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer
  • Scrubs
  • Firefly
  • Doctor Who
  • Lost

Part of the issue is that I don’t want to just get into a rut where I watch the same show over and over again. There is scary amounts of stuff out there that I haven’t seen or read. Even if a book is shitty or a TV show goes off the rails, it’s still good to explore and absorb new things.

I find myself coming back to shows I have already seen like Alias and Chuck, but I would like to contemplate the possibility that there is an amazing show I haven’t seen yet.

That is what happened with Fringe. I tried to get into it a few times, but the first season was kind of slow. My affection for Walter got me through the rocky first season and I discovered a show that I actively looked forward to watching to see what would happen. When it was over I was so happy with how it wrapped up. It was like finishing a great book. But then I was sad that it was over and I can’t see it for the first time again. I want to hope there is something else like that out there and I won’t find it if I just keep watching Grey’s Anatomy over and over again.

Potential Binging Shows

Here is an informal list of shows that I keep forgetting exist that meet my criteria:

  • CSI (I watched it up through Season 7, so technically haven’t seen most of it)
  • Medium
  • Crossing Jordan
  • The X-Files
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager (saw DS9 all the way through when it aired but not since, could never get into Voyager)
  • Stargate:SG1, Stargate Atlantis, Stargate Universe
  • Person of Interest

A lot of these are older shows. I think that with Peak TV come with the death of the kinds of shows I am looking for. Peak TV is similar to what is going on with film. There are lots of incredible prestige shows that demand constant attention and prompts rabid fan discussions on the internet. Then if you’re not a prestige show, you’re something like The Big Bang Theory. There is a huge amount of really bad, not funny or smart TV that is too bad to be good for having on in the background because when you do pay attention to it, you recoil in horror at the sexist, homophobic garbage being spewed.

There does not seem to be much of a demand for shows without vast mythologies and serialization that is fairly repetitive. Ironically, I am basically looking for the TV equivalent of the Marvel Movie franchise. Those movies are awesome. They are basically the same story over and over again with some variation in the setting and the primary hero.

I realize that by writing this huge blog post complaining about not finding bad TV to watch that it makes me seem like a couch potato neck beard who never leaves my parent’s basement. I think of this stuff as white noise going on in the background. It’s like trying to find a good radio station to listen to while you work. It’s hard finding music that helps you focus and doesn’t just make you flip through stations going “Nope, nope, hell no, aw this is the end of my favorite song and now they’re playing something I hate!”

I will continue my mission to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new shows and new storytelling. To boldly go where lots of other people have gone before!

Stir Fry My Way

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This is a giant, pointless, first world problems rant about food. If you’re looking for insight into tech, this isn’t a post for that.

My dad has a lot of weird control issues, especially about food.

My dad does all the grocery shopping and cooks all the food in the house. He keeps insisting my mom can’t cook and has taken it upon himself to do all the cooking in the house. He has told me that he sees it as a source of pride that he provides for his family and makes sure we have food.

I can only imagine this is why he controls things the way he does.

One thing that he does that drives me completely insane is that he won’t let anyone serve themselves.

When it’s dinner time, everyone lines up at the counter and he serves you. He cuts giant chunks of overcooked salmon and steamed brussels sprouts and deposits them on the plate and unceremoniously hands it to you.

Prepping stir fry ingredients.

Prepping stir fry ingredients.

Being handed a large plate full of food you know you’re not going to finish is really upsetting, especially when you get yelled at for not cleaning your plate. My dad will make enough food for ten people and tell my mother to eat heartily but that he doesn’t want to eat too much because he’s watching his weight. Then he yells at her for wasting the food he made too much of that he didn’t want to eat himself.

I don’t eat a lot. I never have. I also hated both salmon and brussels sprouts until I got out on my own and found out that if they were prepared properly they could be delicious.

One of the things that drove me absolutely crazy (besides being handed the wrong fork and having to fish the right fork out from the silverware drawer) was how he would dish out stir fry.

I like to put the rice on the plate first and then ladle the stir fry over the rice. That way the rice can absorb all the sauce. Dry white rice is miserable and soulless and the only way it’s tolerable is as a sponge for sauce.

My dad would never let me plate my own stir fry. He would dump the stir fry on first then place it next to the rice. The sauce would flow all over the plate and be lost forever, leaving three quarters of the rice naked and unsauced.

I know this sounds really fucking stupid to complain about how food is presented to me. I didn’t have to pay for it. I didn’t have to cook it. I should just be grateful and shut up and eat my food without complaint.

It just bothers me to see people not paying attention to details and aesthetics. Salmon does not have to be disgusting. If you cook it properly and put some garlic and salt and pepper and some butter or sesame oil it can be awesome. Cooking it for an hour with no seasoning takes almost as much work but it completely destroys the fish.

This stir fry tastes of freedom. And ginger.

This stir fry tastes of freedom. And ginger.

It doesn’t take that much thought to think that maybe if you put the stir fry on the rice it will absorb the sauce. I have known my dad for 34 years and every single time he has plated my stir fry I have had to fix and and go grab the right fork out of the drawer.

I feel like it’s almost a battle of wills. I feel like he purposely doesn’t remember that I don’t use a large fork and that I don’t like salmon and I like my rice under my stir fry. I wouldn’t need him to remember if he would just treat me like a god damned adult and let me serve my own food.

So tonight I made stir fry. I was trying to figure out how to get the rice and stir fry ratio proper when I realized that it’s my food and I can control it and do it however I want.

So I mixed the rice and the stir fry together so that none of the sauce would go to waste and I wouldn’t have to deal with the last parts of the rice being unsauced. And I ate it with the right fork and served myself as much as I knew I could eat.

I know this is a really stupid thing to complain about, but being able to mix my rice and stir fry together is one of those things I get to do that makes me feel like an adult and makes me feel awesome because I have control over something in my life and I can do whatever I want. Whenever being an adult seems too overwhelming and I worry about paying my bills or losing my job, I try to remember stuff like this to remind myself that it’s all worth it.

Publicly Available Information

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Okay, I am probably going to get a lot of flack for this blog post, but I am writing it anyway and I don’t really give a damn. If someone can give me a compelling reason to think I am wrong, I am happy to hear it.

So, yesterday I posted a few pictures of packages I have received on Twitter. I had several of my friends reach out to me to ask me if I meant to post my address on Twitter.

I didn’t post it on purpose, but I didn’t think that it was that big of a deal. I understand that one of the big things that tech feminists have been mentioning people doing to terrorize them is to “dox” them by posting their phone numbers and addresses on malicious websites where people who mean them harm can see them.

I am not in any way discounting how terrifying that can be and they have every right to be upset by that behavior, but this is my take on things…

Back in 1985…

Back when I was growing up we had these things called “phone books.” They were large books that arrived in the mail each year that had a listing of the names and addresses of every person who lived in your county. If I wanted to look up a classmate’s phone number, I could haul this stupid large book out and look up their last name. Sometimes there were a few people that all had the same name and you would have to call a few of them to find the right person.

We didn’t have caller ID, so you never knew who was calling you. You couldn’t block malicious numbers, but most calls weren’t malicious. More often than not it was a telemarketer and you learned after a while that if you picked up on the first ring and there was a long pause it was probably a telemarketer and you hung up on them.

Having your address and phone number publicly available didn’t used to be a big deal.

The new phone books are here! The new phone books are here!!

The new phone books are here! The new phone books are here!!

Today

My address is publicly available. Wisconsin (for now) has open records. I went through a divorce last year and never moved. You can go to the Wisconsin Circuit Court access and look me up and find out where I live.

Back when I was starting out I was really stupid and printed my home address on my business cards. I handed these out for a while before I realized this was a really stupid fucking thing to do and got new ones printed that only had my personal phone number on them. Then I just started handing out pug stickers with no identifying information whatsoever on them.

Point is, if someone wants to find out where I live, it’s not hard.

I know there is an outside chance that someone I don’t know will show up at my door and do something to me, but that possibility doesn’t worry me very much. I live in a town in rural Wisconsin that has no public transportation. Most of the developers I am aware of who live in my area live in downtown Madison because it means they don’t have to have a car. In order to get out to where I live they have to find a car and drive half an hour to where I am. My parents live closer than that and even they don’t like to drive to where I live. That’s just the people who live here. If you’re some asshole in The Bay Area you would have to fly and drive out here to mess with me.

Every one of my neighbors has a gun. I have had my neighbors call my parents when my ex husband and I got home early from a trip and they saw someone moving around in my house.

If someone intends to harm me, it would take a lot of trouble and money for them to do so. My not publicly posting my address somewhere is not going to prevent someone who is intent on harming me from doing so. I also will not hesitate to call the cops if someone shows up that I don’t know and didn’t invite.

Risk Assessment

Of all the things I worry about, having a stranger show up at my house is pretty low on my list.

I worry about my house burning down while I am at a conference. I worry about my pugs choking on something and dying. I worry about losing my job and having to relocate to San Francisco because no one will let me work remotely.

I am willing to accept the possibility that at some point in the future someone could show up at my house with the intention to harm me. Someone could send a bomb in the mail to hurt me and my pugs. Any number of things could happen.

I just think the odds of that happening is so unlikely that I don’t think it honestly matters that much if I inadvertently post a picture of my address on Twitter.

I don’t want to spend every waking moment of my life worried that someone out there is out to get me.

My personal experience with this community has been that it has been incredibly supportive. I wrote several blog posts recently during a bout of depression and I had at least five people reach out to me personally via phone and email to support me and give me helpful advice.

I know a number of people have been poorly treated by strangers on the internet and I empathize with them. I know that a well known female developer in Madison was stalked by another developer in Madison and that was completely not okay. She went to a lot of trouble to hide her address, which was not publicly available, and had it revealed by the police to someone who had presented a clear and real danger to her. I am not trying to discredit her experiences by saying that because nothing bad has happened to me so far that her fears are irrational.

I took down the photos because enough people seemed worried about it. But I just find it strange that a bunch of people acted like I posted my social security number and my credit card number on Twitter and just trusted people to not steal my identity or show up at my house and murder me. I have found 98% people to generally be decent and respectful. I would prefer to focus on that percentage rather than judge on the smaller number who make life difficult. If I am proven wrong I will be the first to admit it. But I would like to give people the benefit of the doubt that they are not planning to attack me just because they can find out where I live.

Self Destructive Tendencies

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I have a problem and I am writing about it because I want to know if anyone else has the same problem.

When I start a new project I get really overwhelmed.

My dream project for the last few years has been to write a synthesizer application. Every time I start to think about writing this application I get incredibly overwhelmed by a lot of things:

  • How much math do I need to know how to do?
  • What kind of synthesizer do I want to write?
  • Oh shit, everything is in C++. How much C++ do I need to know?!
  • Can I use this audio programming book that’s in C++ if everything in it assumes you’re using Windows?
  • How do I do the user interface?
  • How do I fit all these little elements on an iPhone? Can I lay it out differently?
  • Do I need to know OpenGL to do a decent user interface?

So I get super overwhelmed and I sit down to try to figure out one of these things.

I sit down to learn C++ so I can read the book on audio programming.

I figure out that I don’t understand the math and I get freaked out and I try to learn the math.

Then at a certain point I get overwhelmed, feel stupid, and curl up on the floor crying because I am stupid and will never amount to anything and I should just give up on programming because I am a failure and should just go back to working at Target.

This doesn’t just happen with my personal projects. Sometimes this happens at work too.

At my previous job I had to learn a bunch of stuff about network programming. I have never done network programming and I honestly never want to do it ever again. I had people telling me to play with Paw to learn network programming. I don’t know what Paw is supposed to do. If I don’t know what it is doing, how do I play with it? I have no context for anything I am doing, so I wind up in this creepy, paralyzing mental mode where I am grappling with a bunch of unfamiliar terminology that has no context and if I can’t do my job I will get fired and I can’t pay my mortgage and I will be homeless and it makes me curl up on the floor breathing into a brown paper bag.

How do I avoid this?

Learn by Doing

I know from my own personal experience that I learn better by doing.

For a really long time I learned by doing a lot of tutorials. The first time I would do a tutorial I would have the overwhelming paralyzing feeling of not knowing what I was doing, but then I would do the tutorial over and over again a few times until I got the feel for what I was doing.

Back when I was a full time student and had the luxury of time, I could do this 60-80 hours a week. It was kind of magical about how by the third or fourth time I totally understood what I was doing.

Then I went out into the job market and started to mentally feel like I couldn’t do this and have tried to find ways around it. I used to keep trying to do tutorials, but I would only have time to do them once and I would be stuck in the paralyzed overwhelming stage, so I stopped doing that.

The only way to learn and grow is to write code.

You start with a blank project and you ask yourself how to make something work. That gives you the first step you have to take to find your answer.

I know this. I have experienced this. So why does it always take me by surprise when I figure this out for the fortieth time??

Lazy Information Initialization

I noticed I tend to get overstimulated and unfocused when I have to start on something. I tend to shave yaks.

I think that I can read a book on math for 3D graphics programming and learn all about that before I start a project rather than going in and just learning what I need to know to do what I need to do.

I do things that seem like work but aren’t actually productive.

I know on some level that trying to learn this difficult way by reading math books in the bath tub is not helpful and actively causes me mental harm. But I feel guilty if I am not working and I have adopted a lot of destructive behaviors that feel like work and make me feel like I am being productive that are making me less productive.

As I have gotten more and more burned out I have worked harder and harder on these self destructive tendencies because I haven’t known how to break out of them.

I have noticed at most of my jobs there is an implicit feel that working on code that does not directly go into a project is considered wasteful. Saying I am going to set up a sample project to learn a concept sounds unproductive and people would really rather that you work directly on the code base or read documentation. (Except when I worked for Brad. He did this stuff all the time and this is where I got this idea from and I finally started getting it through my thick head.)

In my experience, those things don’t work nearly as effectively.

I am trying to be better about asserting what I need to be a productive programmer even if it’s not what people want to hear. It’s not enough to just say “I need to do these things.” I also have to put them into practice.

And part of putting those into practice is to stop doing these destructive behaviors that make me feel like I am doing something when I am actually destroying my ability to function.

I think it’s important to understand how we learn and to stick to it even when other people don’t want to hear about it. It’s really easy to do a bunch of things that make you feel busy but aren’t getting you anywhere.

I am sick of feeling tired and burned out all the time because I am doing things that I know don’t actually help me. I am trying to figure out how to be a more productive person because my career and my mental health depend on it. This is too important to ignore and wait to resolve itself.

So I am not going to exhaust myself reading programming and math books with no context. I am going to do more sample projects and I will only learn what I need to know to solve a problem with my code. I am not going to expel a lot of energy on something that causes mental friction and generates heat that burns me out. I will only use energy on things that are actively productive. I will be less tired and less hurt this way.

Acts of God

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I am writing this post from an airport hotel in Irving, Texas, which is near the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport. I have been in Texas for the last two days and I don’t anticipate being able to leave for another few days, at the earliest.

I am booked through American Airlines. I usually book through Delta and have found them to be very good and reliable, but this was a business trip. I did not pay for my flight and so I didn’t really get to complain about not getting on the carrier of my choice.

I arrived in Dallas yesterday evening. My flight to Madison was supposed to leave at 8:20 in the evening. 8:20 came and went. The passengers asked a lot of questions and they were not answered for a considerable period of time. The flight kept getting pushed back hour by hour.

After it was pushed back to 10:30 we were told that there was a maintenance issue with the plane and they were waiting for a crew to come and fix it. They said they were bringing a second plane in case the first one wasn’t fixed in time.

The second plane arrived and we were told that the second plane also had maintenance issues. We had two broken airplanes and no idea about when we would get to go home.

Around 11:30 the flight staff announced that if we wanted to rebook our flights for the next day, they would do it for free!! BUT… we would not get a voucher for hotel, food, or transportation if we chose to do this. Unsurprisingly, no one took them up on this offer.

At 12:30, our flight was officially cancelled. We were told that the first plane had been fixed, but that they didn’t have the right paperwork to certify it was fixed and so the plane could not be used.

The stranded passengers were scattered to three local hotels. Many of us were placed at the Super 8. We were told to call a number and a shuttle would come to get us. We called the number and were told that the shuttle stopped going out at midnight and that we needed to take a cab. Half of us were given cab vouchers and half were not. I was among those who was not.

After finally getting to the hotel, I had about six hours to sleep before I had to go back for my rebooked flight. When we got up in the morning the shuttle was actually working, so I didn’t need to line up a cab to get back to the airport.

When we woke up, it was raining cats and dogs (sadly, not men). It was seriously pouring outside. We all had a sinking feeling that we were not going to be going home on time today. We sadly piled into the shuttle back to the airport and hoped for the best.

We found a bunch of people from our flight the day before waiting around the airport. Their flights had been cancelled and they were rebooked on our flight.

Every hour or so for the rest of today we would hear that we had a gate change. We all picked up our bags and hiked from gate to gate so many times we lost count.

We finally settled down at the gate that we were at last night. We all hoped and prayed that things would be different this time.

Our flight got pushed further and further back. We watched hopefully as we saw planes landing and flying away. There were a lot fewer of them than we would have liked, but we held out hope that we would get home.

This was not to be.

Seven hours after my flight was supposed to leave (and ten hours after others were set to leave) our flight was cancelled. We frantically tried to speak to representatives both in person and on the phone. When I called, I was told that the earliest they could fly me out was Tuesday morning, which is the day after tomorrow. I asked what I was supposed to do until then. The representative told me that she would help me find a hotel and give me a special rate, but that since the flight was cancelled due to weather that I would not be given another voucher. I asked if I could get my checked bag. I was told I could and to talk to the baggage service representatives. She said if I went to them they would have my bag brought out.

One reason I took the train a lot a few years ago was because I went through a similar situation to this in 2008. I was stranded at O’Hare because much of Wisconsin had flooded and no one could fly into any of the airports there. At that point I could take a bus from O’Hare to Madison. That isn’t really the case here. I knew at that point that I probably couldn’t get a flight into Wisconsin for love or money, so instead of flailing and trying to fight with everyone else to try and book the last flight to Wisconsin, I just accepted that my best option was to take the Tuesday flight and stay at the hotel. The hotel would be much cheaper than any other flight I would book before then anyway. I work remotely and I can work anywhere. I asked if the hotel had WiFi and since it did I was happy.

I was happy until I found out I couldn’t get my bag. I have been wearing the same clothes for two days. I didn’t take my contacts out yesterday. I had no toothpaste or deodorant. The idea of keeping my contacts in for another two days was unbearable. I grudgingly realized my best option was to get a Lyft from the hotel and pick up all the stuff I needed. I was pretty sure I could find clean underwear and hopefully another shirt.

I am laying here in my room after this ordeal and I wanted to go over the personal cost of this situation to myself and to the other people on this flight.

My Personal Costs

Here is an itemized list of my personal expenses incurred by this situation:

Hotel: $130

Since I can’t get on a flight until the day after tomorrow, I had to book a room for two days. Other people from my flight looked into finding flights on other airlines. One person found one for $230. Another friend said he found one that he cashed his loyalty points into that would have cost $730.

I work remotely and have people to watch my pugs. I would like to be home, but I can work anywhere. This was the cheapest option.

I do not know if this is a reimbursable expense. When my business trip was arranged this was not part of the budget. I am working under the assumption that I am responsible for this expense.

Lost Gift: $30

When they cancelled our first flight, we were taken to a nearby hotel. I forgot that earlier in the day I bought a gift for my mother at the San Jose airport. I found some vinegars that were from a local vineyard. I wanted to show her how much I appreciated her watching my pugs and I hadn’t had a chance to go anywhere to find something special for her.

I was super happy that I found something unique that I could give her that was thoughtful. I like to give people thoughtful gifts that I think will delight them.

I got pinged by the TSA this morning because I forgot about the bottles. I couldn’t put them in my checked luggage because it was trapped somewhere in the bowels of the airport.

I was told that I could check my backpack, but I don’t want to check a MacBook Pro and an iPad Pro just to try and save my vinegar. I was told that they are going to dump the vinegar down the drain. These bottles are hermetically sealed and still in the packaging from the airport.

I understand the issue with bringing liquids through airport security, but I honestly wish that I had been given some kind of option to save my gift for my mom because it wasn’t my choice to leave the airport and have to go through the line again.

I am hoping if I go back to San Jose I can find it again.

Toiletries: $40

When our second flight was cancelled and I called to find out when I could go home. They said the earliest I could get out was Tuesday. This is Sunday.

I figured it would be okay. I was told I could go get my checked bag. I packed too many clothes, so I had a few fresh outfits to wear along with deodorant and toothpaste. When I went to the baggage help desk (that I had been told would give me my bag) I was told that they would not give me my bag. I was told it was still on the plane and that it would not be taken off and would be at my destination.

Considering that my flight was not until Tuesday, I am highly skeptical that they are not going to have a flight tomorrow or before I am flying on Tuesday.

I have been wearing my contacts for the last two days. I can’t wear them for another two days. So I had to find a drug store near my hotel.

I had to buy the following items:

  • Contact lens solution and container
  • Deodorant
  • Toothbrush and Toothpaste
  • Another Shirt
  • Underwear

If I had been allowed to take my bag like I was told I would be able to do, these days would have been a lot less unpleasant.

Transportation: $60

The first night I got a hotel voucher, but I was not given any transportation vouchers. I was told the hotel would send a shuttle, but the hotel we were placed at did not send shuttles after midnight.

We were told that we could not share cabs with people who had been given vouchers. We were told it counted as a separate fare and would cost $48 a person to go to our free hotel.

I said fuck that and contacted Lyft. I was able to bring three other unfortunate people without vouchers for one fare. Even with a large tip, it was only about thirty bucks. I tried to just cover it, but people gave me cash.

Since I wasn’t allowed to get my checked bag, I had to get a Lyft to and from a drug store to pick up necessities for the next few days.

Higher Costs Paid By Others

This situation has been an annoyance to me. I don’t get to be home with my pugs or cook my own food.

But I have a lot more flexibility than most people do. I can work remotely. I can work tomorrow as easily from my hotel as I can from my house. Even if my current contract doesn’t reimburse me for this situation, it’s not going to affect me financially that much. It just means I dip further into my savings and I will be annoyed.

There are a lot of other people on my flight who were affected far worse than I was.

The pilot from the first cancelled flight didn’t get paid for the time he was at the airport. He only gets paid if he flies. Since neither plane was flight worthy, he didn’t get paid last night. While the rest of us passengers got varying degrees of vouchers, he was on his own for providing his own hotel. I heard him calling around trying to find a hotel room and negotiate a better rate.

There was a man there who was missing his parent’s 50th wedding anniversary. He kept looking at his watch saying around 4:00 that the party they were holding was wrapping up about now.

The absolute saddest story I heard the last two days was from a soldier who is stationed in Korea. He was taking 17 days of leave to come home and see his wife. He hadn’t seen her in six months. Today is her birthday. We was supposed to be home last night. If he is in the same situation that I am in, he won’t get to go home until Tuesday. He potentially has burned a quarter of his leave hanging around a fucking airport/hotel trying to get home to his family.

If he had known that he would not be able to fly out until Tuesday, he could have rented a car this morning and been home tomorrow. He could have driven to another airport and tried to get home sooner that way. Instead, he was given false hope that home was just around the corner. It’s just another hour, then you can go home.

The man whose parents had their 50th anniversary will never get to see it because it only happens once. The soldier will never get those days back. This man is representing our country and I felt he was treated very badly.

Acts of God

I know that airlines don’t control everything. Stuff happens. I just feel that things could have been handled better and they were not because of the desire by the airline to try and not spend money.

The regional carrier model of transporting people from smaller airlines like Madison to regional hubs like Atlanta and Dallas is a cost savings measure. Regional carriers are usually owned by companies other than American and Delta. I have read a lot of bad things about this business model that I can’t directly cite and therefore do not feel comfortable referencing. Based on those things, I was not really surprised that there were maintenance issues and I was honestly a little worried about the plane even before they told us that it had broken.

Rather than telling us that we would not be able to fly out last night, they tried to con the passengers into rebooking the flight on their own rather than being up front with the fact that we were probably not going home.

Had we known that we were not going home earlier in the day, we could have found other ways to go home. Once people determined that there were no American Airlines flights until Tuesday, people scrambled to find another way home. People could have rented cars to try and get to other airports outside of the affected area.

It would have made a huge difference to me to be able to have access to my checked bag while I am stuck out here. I have no idea why I didn’t get access to it, but I think there should have been a way for me to get it.

Most of all, I think it’s terrible if we can’t do better by soldiers who are serving our country. I am incredibly upset that this man missed his wife’s birthday and possibly won’t get to go home until Tuesday. I know that we all feel like our own personal perspective is the worst, but I would like to think that someone could have taken a few extra steps earlier in the process to make sure this man got home.

All day yesterday and today, I felt like we were collectively treated like cattle. We were herded from one end of the airport to the other. We were seen as a collective herd and treated as such by the airline.

We’re not a herd. We’re people. We all have stories. A lot of people have been inconvenienced this weekend, but a number of them missed precious moments of their lives that they will never get back again.

Hobbies and Hand Grenades

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One of my goals for 2016 is to try and be more mentally healthy.

I have written before about the guilt I feel when I am not working, or doing something that feels like work. I take programming books to the bath tub. I haven’t taken a vacation in three years. I have a panic attack if I don’t check my email once an hour.

I deleted Twitter and Facebook from my phone about two weeks ago. I was going to try and stay off of Twitter completely for like a month, but my blog was hacked and enough people expressed concern about it that I felt it was necessary to explain on Twitter what was going on. I am now checking it periodically, but I am trying not to be on it for more than five minutes at a time and no more than three times a day. BTW, the battery life on my phone has increased to three days from about twelve hours, so #winning.

I am starting back up with reality in a week. I was hoping to get some things resolved during this break so that I could get back to work all refreshed and recharged. I always had this idea that if you took like a day off that it would undo all the damage you’ve done to yourself for the last three years. It doesn’t quite work that way.

Wanted to do an assessment of where I am at before I start my last full week of being AFK.

Tired

I am exhausted. I was still running on some nervous energy before I went to RWDevCon, which explains why I have actual programming posts on my blog from that time.

I tried to make some attempts at working on a project so that I would not just fall off the wagon while I was off, but I gave up on that last week Wednesday. I found myself staring at my screen not able to do much, so I turn off my work computer and left my office and decided to try and find something to do that was relaxing so that I could really make an effort to recharge. It’s been really hard.

Today I woke up for a few hours and then had to go back to bed. I have people who want me to go and do things with them, but I know if I do that then I’ll be completely worthless in the following days.

I feel horrible for not taking this time to deep clean my house or drop all the stuff I have boxed up to give away that is cluttering up my basement. I also feel guilty for not working on anything. I feel like I have this opportunity to do something for myself that I am squandering by just sleeping all the time because I am exhausted.

I tried socially drinking at conferences and I just don’t think I can do it anymore. Drinking makes me feel sick. I feel like I am being poisoned. Eating food I didn’t make for myself makes me sick too. I am slightly worried about the business trips I need to make over the next month and I am hoping I can find a way to maintain some physical health while I am away from my house.

I am giving up alcohol completely for at least six months. At this point it doesn’t feel like much of a sacrifice. I feel lousy all the time. I was treated for migraines about a decade ago and they’re coming back and being persistent. My therapist told me that a lot of the abuse I have put my body through doesn’t just resolve itself overnight. It takes time for my body to detox and recuperate. I am hoping that the steps I am taking right now are a step in the right direction so that I can go back to feeling okay again.

Bored

So since I am not programming and it’s too tiring to leave my house, I have been trying to find something to do with my day.

I picked up some of my hobbies that I haven’t done since I started programming.

I picked up cross stitch again. I brought out a project I have been working on for years because I just stopped doing it a while ago.

It was really weird to pick it back up again. I felt rusty and clumsy and slow. After a few days it got better. The things I learned over two decades of doing this came back pretty quickly.

I also started reading non-programming books again.

I have a box of random science fiction books that a friend lent me. I pulled a few books out of that box. I also read through a few books that I had been meaning to read but didn’t get around to.

One reason I got off of Twitter was because I would bring these books to the tub to read but I would only get a few pages in before getting bored and then going on Twitter for hours. By removing Twitter from my phone and just not having it near me when I am reading, I have been better able to stay focused and actually get through books.

I have been doing this for the last five days and it’s getting kind of boring and repetitive. There is only so long that you can do something until it gets boring. I don’t really know what to do from here. I am taking my dog for a walk most days because I need to get out of the house and she needs exercise, but I don’t know what to do to alleviate the boredom. All of the other hobbies I have, like working with electronics, are all very mentally intensive. I talked to a person about helping them build an airplane, but after I went out for a day to see what it involved I was spent for several days.

It’s very aggravating and frustrating to want to do things but not being able to do them. I am trying to continue to rest because I know that exhausting myself at this point is counter productive, but the temptation to just mindlessly graze on Twitter is great.

Lonely

The last bit is that, since I am not on Twitter, it gets somewhat lonely.

I am living alone. I have my pugs, but they’re not people. I know that I have a lot of friends who would love to see me and do things with me, but I can’t make myself do anything with them right now.

It’s weird. I am lonely, but the desire to be with people is far less than the desire to just be left alone. I didn’t think it was possible to feel both things at once.

I am hoping that the fact that I have nothing to do right now is the source of many of these feelings. I am hoping that because I have nothing else to do besides dwell on all this garbage that when I am actively engaged in a project again that a lot of this stuff will go away. Part of me is terrified that it won’t.

My goal in the future to avoid this is to try and figure out how to disengage and do things that help me relax mentally. I would like to find a way to incorporate my hobbies back into my work life. I want to set up my electronics workshop in the basement so that when I can’t deal with being in front of my computer for a while I have something I can do. When I get done with work I don’t want to just leave my desktop computer in my office to go to my laptop computer in my living room. I don’t want to fritter away my time on worthless Twitter drama. I either want to be fully engaged or fully disengaged.

My goals for 2016 are to begin learning electronics and C++. I need to structure projects for those so that I can be engaged with them, but I will not do that until I am done with this coming week. This is the last time I have to do whatever the hell I want, and right now I just want to be left alone to wallow in my own sense of self loathing and apathy.

Why I am Trying to Give Up Drinking

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Anyone who follows me on Twitter or knows me in real life knows that I am quite fond of my evening glass of wine. It’s at a point where it’s almost a personality trait, along with my pugs.

I am vaguely aware of the fact that it’s not really a good thing to be known as the person who drinks a lot. I had the problem of thinking that people like Dorothy Parker and Lucille Bluth are super cool and have lead me to attribute this as a positive personality trait.

I wasn’t always like this.

How I Started Drinking

The first time I ever got drunk was at my bachelorette party. It was a very interesting experience for me. It felt like having a migraine only it didn’t hurt. It put me into this weird, almost meditative state that I found very stimulating.

I never partied when I was in high school or college. I used to spend my Saturday nights watching public TV with my parents. When I was in college I would spend all night alone in my apartment doing cross stitching while watching Law & Order marathons.

I felt kind of like I missed out on my youth and I wanted to make up for lost time. I figured I would get tired of it and I didn’t worry about it too much.

I went back to school to learn programming. I had a lot of anxiety about how I was going to find a job because I knew that the tech industry was very youth-centric. I knew as a woman in my 30’s with no experience it would tricky to break into the industry. I knew my best chance was to work my ass off and try to increase my skills as fast as possible. I stopped cross stitching and doing all the things I used to do to relax. The easiest way to get myself to relax was to drink. I half heartedly tried quitting a few times, but I was so stressed out that I figured I would deal with it later.

Then my marriage started falling apart.

The last year I was married I gave myself alcohol poisoning five times. Two weeks into my first job I was out for New Year’s and I drank so much so quickly that I could not keep water down for a few days. I didn’t want to tell any of the young guys at my job that I got so drunk I couldn’t keep water down, so I just kind of got through it.

After I left that job I worked from home and worked on a book. I used to keep boxes of wine outside where they would freeze overnight. I would bring them in and by the time noon rolled around the wine was thawed enough for me to drink it.

After the divorce I went through a massive depression that I did not expect to go through. I had to commute sixty miles a day to and from my job. By the time I got home I was so spent that all I could do was open a bottle of wine and drink in the bath tub. I deluded myself into thinking I didn’t have a problem because I stopped giving myself alcohol poisoning.

I am painfully aware that these behaviors that I am describing are really unhealthy. But I was stressed out and depressed and this wasn’t at the top of my list of things to worry about.

Why I Am Going to Stop

I am honestly trying to remember what triggered this most recent decision.

The last few months I haven’t been able to go for walks because of the weather. I used to walk 45 minutes a day. It was therapeutic. I wasn’t doing it to lose weight, it was just to get away from the computer and try to clear my head.

I hit 34 and started noticing things like lines around my eyes. I feel like I have put on a bunch of weight over the last few months. I bought larger jeans that used to be loose that are now not anymore.

I recently was able to start doing my walks again recently. I realized that even though I was jogging two miles a day I probably wasn’t going to lose any weight because of my drinking habit.

For some reason, this really bothered me. I don’t want to be a person who is obsessed with losing that last ten pounds, but I am at the point where a bunch of this crap is really bothering me.

I have cleared out enough other emotional baggage from my queue that I now want to deal with this.

I don’t want to feel this way anymore. I have had enough periods of my life where I was out of shape and not feeling particularly well. I know that inevitably at some point I am going to be old. It will be harder to lose weight than it is now. My joints will bother me. I can’t keep this from happening, but I can push it off a while longer by making changes now. It’s better late than never.

What I am Trying To Do

My initial thought was that I would do things in moderation. I would limit myself to one glass of wine a night. I then realized that was not going to work. I always think I will have one, but then after the first one I feel really good and the evening is still early, so I have more.

I also decided not to try and replace alcohol with another sweet beverage like fruit juice. I want to be healthier and lose weight, so replacing alcoholic sugar with non-alcoholic sugar was not a great idea.

I am trying to go cold turkey on most sugar.

I did this a few years ago. I drank nothing but water for like two weeks to retrain my palette not to expect everything it encounters to be sweet.

I am restraining my beverage intake to just water, sparkling water, and tea. I am putting some honey in my tea in the mornings because I am also putting lemon in it and I need something to ameliorate it. I know honey is sugar and sugar is bad for you, but I am confining it to that one thing and I have no allusions that it’s healthy, so don’t lecture me.

I am taking this one day at a time. I know from watching people fail at diets that I am going to have bad days. I will have days where I simply can’t deal with it and I will drink. I will not throw in the towel and give up on the experiment. I will just try to do better next time.

Things I have Notice So Far

I am only on my third day of this, so in a few weeks this might be a laughable blog post. But I have noticed a few things so far.

Nights are Boring

My routine used to be that I would finish work, take a bath with a glass of wine, get warm and comfortable, then go to bed.

I can’t do that anymore.

I used to think that after I got done with work, that I was spent for the day. I would basically drug my brain to get it to relax and calm down so I could sleep and work the next day.

The last few days I have realized I can take a bath and be refreshed enough to work on something else that I actually want to do.

It’s really disconcerting. I know I am tired and I need to sleep, but my brain gets a second wind.

This might be a temporary thing and I will probably crash in a few days. At that point I need to figure out a better way to relax. I never thought I would forget how to relax. It was so hard to do any work when I was younger that I never thought I would be stuck in the mind set that I had to work all the time.

Sugar Withdrawal Really Sucks

I think part of the reason I was drinking as much as I did was because I trained my brain to associate sugar with work being over.

I knew that alcohol had a lot of sugar in it, but I didn’t think about the fact that I was slowly increasing my intake over the last few years.

Yesterday I wanted to stab someone for a drink, not because I craved the alcohol, but because I craved the sugar. I ate a few pieces of dark chocolate and I felt better and the craving went away.

The long term goal isn’t to replace one source of sugar with another. I know that cutting back on all sugar is the goal, but it takes some time to get there. At least the chocolate provides some satiation. Alcohol is an appetite stimulant. I will not be hungry, but then I will have a glass of wine and suddenly be famished. Cutting back on the alcohol not only cuts those calories, but also all the ones I would eat after getting the munchies.

I am hoping the cravings get better the longer I stick with this.

Not Exercising Bothers Me

My Apple Watch got pretty passive aggressive with me over the winter because I wasn’t going on my walks. It was annoying, but I didn’t feel super compelled to do anything about it.

The last few days I have been crawling the walls if I can’t do some kind of exercise.

I wanted to go for a walk yesterday and I almost jumped out of my skin trying to find a time I could get out of here. It was too cold to walk, so I did a strength training exercise for half an hour and even that didn’t feel long enough.

Sitting at my computer today drove me crazy. I am going to try to find a way to do a standing desk of some kind. It’s harder to do with the retina iMac than it was with the laptop and the robotics boxes.

Moving Forward

For me, the biggest test of how this will go is when I got to my first conference this year in two weeks, RWDevCon. I need to decide if I am going to forgo drinking altogether at that event or try to limit myself to one drink. If it were right now I would forgo it completely, but I will see how I feel then.

I wish I could see this in an optimistic light. Yay, I can work on side projects after work. I can work out and lose weight and be healthier. This is going to be super awesome.

But I can’t think of it that way. This is going to be a huge and difficult adjustment. I know I used to live quite happily not doing this every night and I can probably do that again. But it’s going to take some time and effort to relearn how to relax so I don’t burn myself out. I feel like I have taken the fail safes off of myself that kept me from doing too much. I knew I could force myself to relax by basically drugging myself. Now that I am choosing not to do that anymore, I am not sure how I am going to function. I guess I will find out.