(Written last night.)
It got warmer on Saturday. My immune system was the first thing that noticed. "Hello, impending spring!" it went. "My, you certainly have had a sudden jump in allergens, haven't you?" it went. "I think I'll send all my histamines out to greet you!" it went, as I groggily started diving towards every tissue box within my line of sight. After 3 nights of pumping warm saltwater through my nose (it's called a neti pot), normal respiratory pathways have, by and large, returned. I'm chugging Vitamin C and sleeping as much as my brain will tolerate me sleeping, though. Just in case. I'd hate to get sick now, what with all this impending awesomeness coming up.
Songs with continuous lyrics that spill across rhythmic lines make me very, very happy. For instance:
Thoughts meander like a restless
wind inside a letterbox they
tumble blindly as they make their
way across the universe
Or:
I've been fighting but I just feel too
tired to be fighting
guess I'm not the fighting kind
I can sightread tab notation on the guitar now - badly and slowly, but I've gone entire melodic lines now without looking down at my hands. I don't nail it perfectly, but I'm able to figure it out; I'm trying to get a sense of where the fingerboard is in physical space rather than having to eyeball it each time.
Last night I described how-I-work as similar to Tai Chi walking - in that you put your foot fully down, and then shift your weight to it. When you're building something new, something socially constructed, something with other people (a community, I suppose - but I'm trying to avoid the mental habits that word tends to trigger for me) - you're stepping out over a dark chasm. And what you do is plant one foot on the ground where you do stand, and then stretch the other foot out over the void - and place it where the next step ought to be, but put no weight on it.
But it's clear that there must be a step there for you to go forward, so the makings of that step begin to coalesce under your foot, and as they do, you then begin to shift over your weight until you're standing on a new and solid step, and your rear leg is empty - that is to say, bearing no weight - and then you bring that forward over the chasm, and the next step begins to coalesce underneath it, and then...
The "Innovator's <noun>" that Clayton Christiansen writes about in all his books? That's Tai Chi walking. Foot out, foot down, then the weight shift. Foot out, foot down, shift. Foot out, foot down, shift. I oversimplify, and I also don't do Tai Chi walking all that well, but as far as I can tell, they're the same thing. Just... one has feet, and one has technologies. Or educational paradigms. Or companies. Whatever the analogy becomes.
Tonight I am going to be a bad panda and leave my temporary desk up overnight.