I wrote a post yesterday that was such a downer it had to stay behind the safe confines of a locked LiveJournal, but turned it around later in the afternoon. I didn’t play guitar or run errands or go by Space but my friend Tyler did IM me with a request for help on the Facebook application he’s building so I met him at Gachet at 5:30 and having to jump right into some serious technical shit snapped me back into it—and motivated me to get cranking again on the approx 6 outstanding tech projects I have on the table. I did a tiny bit of database design consulting—but not much, I’m no expert (at one point I was in the query screen in PHPMyAdmin trying to do a subquery and quickly realized I couldn’t do it off the top of my head). I was looking for the database design for one of my vaporware products (see bottom right of this diagram) as an example and couldn’t find it.
So upon returning home a couple hours later I was determined to find this DB design on an external hard drive or older notebook. Did not find. It doesn’t exist. But for some reason, this motivated me to work on it.
But while sifting through these old notebooks I found a lot of shit! Some of it was kind of a downer—like, I was probably clinically depressed for years before diagnosed (but still an edge case where drugs are of suspect use). The stuff about my ex-wife wasn’t much of a downer anymore, which is nice. Enough time has passed there I guess. I found a notebook I kept for my first therapist in Florida. Lots of stuff from my childhood that I don’t even remember having to deal with anymore, yet alone the original events. Original notes on SWIM (“DWM” — “Dynamic Widget Mover”) and opensourcelife.com (yet another never-done project!). And little notes that very much resemble tweets ... “Dreams are definately [sic] an early-warning system.” “Kenny crying.” “1 month or so a year we come out of our climate-controlled mobile ecosystems.”
And notes about other projects: “Book: 2 stories. come together to tell the same ending from diff pers. mult endings.” Then a drawing showing two columns, one “John” the other “Johny” ...some things have been around for a while…this was 2001.
I don’t know where I was going with this. It was sad yet hopeful; it seemed as if nothing had changed inside me despite all of this change outside of me; and it seemed like I hadn’t accomplished a single thing in the last 7 years despite having a not-short list of accomplishments from the same time period. I had a couple beers and fell asleep on teh couch.
Other things I did to make me happier: got a surprise, put my iPod on shuffle, didn’t eat for a while.
