Note: It seems that I'm at least unconfused enough to be verbose.
When I'm overwhelmed, I fall back on old habits (which is why I spend so much time trying to script mine). Tell yourselfwhat you're going to do. Do it. Tell yourself what you did. (Maybe tell other people too, but you've gotta know first. And this blog is for my future self anyway. I've played with the idea of explicitly putting that somewhere in the header so I don't feel compelled to restate it all the time.)
"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."
-- Cyril Connolly
I'm going to write about listening to Skullcrusher Mountain while tracing a Vulcan Salute for an Inkscape tutorial example. I'm wearing my (formerly Nikki's) blue Bathtub Unified Theory of Everything t-shirt over a black long-sleeves, lit by the glow of two monitors (my Thinkpad and a huge 30" Dell LCD propped up into ergonomicness by a D-link router box) and a bare bulb diffused by interlocking spirals of paper. "Maybe I used too many monkeys," sings Jonathan Coulton through my headphones. I finally remember the right order to hold down mouse buttons and shift keys and nail a tricky series of bezier curves.
Zoom out. I'm at Eyebeam at a FLOSSManuals sprint, thanks to Adam Hyde, to convert a book examples that use proprietary applications into examples that use Free Software applications. I've been on Inkscape Example Duty, but am transitioning to my Person Who Can Sort Of Code And Sort Of Write hat to work on the Processing chapters that will replace 3 sections on Adobe Flash.
The book is full of references to the "SHFT" key, which (in my mind) gives capitalization a sacred aura. SHFT, the key of G-D. I systematically go through and insert the vowel. I also keep on not-selecting the "a" when I'm changing instances of "anchor points" to "nodes" and grinning when "select the anodes" appears.
The sweet smell of solder is creeping up from an electronics workbench on the floor below me; conversation snatches and light from the bare bulbs downstairs are seeping in the crack between the floor I'm sitting on and the converted warehouse's brick wall, since the second floor is just a platform (a wide walkway, really) that's been added on.
I love New York's architecture, its old repurposed spaces, gutted and cut and patched together. I love the paleontologic layers of paint and brick, the exposed ceiling beams either black with age or freshly replaced, the way each odd cranny has been filled with something that just fits it; the mismatches match.
Brunch was very, very bad for me in a good way. I spent $6 on two hotdogs, a mango shake, and curly fries at Papaya King, plus a small cup of coffee (still trying to kick my sleep schedule back into normalcy). After a few weeks of incredibly delicious healthy eating (which, even though I wasn't trying, ended up being almost vegetarian), I was having over-romanticized cravings for junky food and grilled meat. I figured I needed a conscious relapse for a moment. If I'm going to eat junk food, I'm going to be aware of what I'm doing and I'm going to enjoy it without feeling guilty. Yum.
So I polished off the hot, crackly, well-spiced meat with great gusto and appreciation. Diminishing appreciation, really; I should have gotten just one hot dog, since by the end I was going "okay, that was good, but I don't need to stuff myself with this. It's not that good. I'd really like a pear." That takes care of my junk food cravings for a while.
I'm trying to get all of my writing bug out tonight in the next 15 minutes before I sleep (midnight, I hope). So that's all I'm going to do tonight - that and read until I'm able to fall asleep. Either way, I'll be up by 7:30.