Eccentric Flower:199810/unwiring Columbines brain

six october ninety eight eleven a m

unwiring columbine's brain

You may have noticed that I've been considering more than ever lately how my time is spent. Milton has nothing on me.

I'm not usually this weird about the subject. The part of the story you're not getting is that I have been scrapping projects right and left, conducting triage, removing things which are clearly no longer worth the time, things which probably would be worth the time if I only had it, and things which fall somewhere in between.

Although the demise of Stay Tuned was some time ago, the bald announcement yesterday "since the death of Stay Tuned ...." apparently brought some mourners out of the woodwork. Yes, it's gone, and yes, I do have some more to say about that, but not in this particular postcard. I cite it only as an example of a project which lies somewhere in the middle - not a good use of my time, but hard to give up.

And last night, with my work project temporarily on hold due to other people's incompetence, a major project painfully jettisoned that day, and the evening free, was I working on my fiction projects? Why, no. I was scanning photos. (See previous postcard.) And playing an old computer bridge program experimentally. And listening to the Brian Setzer Orchestra play what is ostensibly "swing," I'm told.

I believe that if I have something I don't want to do, I will always do something else, whether it's good for me or not. And my usual reason for not wanting to do something is that I worry that I can't do it well enough - by which I mean almost perfectly.

Consider that, for several nights this week, after a day spent frantically trying to not work on the C program my deadline involves, I went home to voluntarily work on a Perl program for several hours at a stretch.

The difference is that fixing and changing someone else's C code does not fill me with confidence. I'm not sure I know the right way to do it. Whereas with these Perl CGIs I generally know exactly what I'm doing and why.

During the period when I hit a stumbling block in the Big CGI, I didn't work on it for two weeks - regular readers will remember my griping about it. I said at the time that I didn't have time to work on it, but I know better. It was because I had a problem I couldn't solve. As soon as I reach a point in an activity where I'm not sure what I'm doing, I drop it.

The punchline is that I eventually did resume working on the Big CGI, because once the code is done, it turns into a fiction-writing project, and the fiction jones will engage me even when nothing else does. I want to dump some of these waiting ideas into the project so badly that I eventually did resume work on the CGI, and lo, I found a very pleasant solution to the problem with only about a half hour of hard thought.

This doesn't reflect very well on me, does it? I have a reasonably good mind, I guess, but I hate the sinking feeling that comes with the idea that I'm out of my depth - and it's not hard for me to get that feeling. Mind you, it doesn't mean the puzzle has to be solved already for me to take it on. I devour logic problems and I used to be in a national association devoted to cryptograms, long ago and far away. I just have to be clear enough on the rules that I know I can solve it with some work. I hate not knowing the rules. I guess that's that INTP personality at work.

(Oops, I told. Stupid personality inventory. I hate being in the rigid little anal-retentive pigeonhole, almost as much as I hate anal-retentive people.)

Anyway, so last night was particularly ironic because of the side activities I was doing. Listening to Setzer, who as far as I can tell is doing the same things he was doing with the Stray Cats, but in front of a horn section. I love it and always did, but what makes it "swing?" The fact that people dance to it? The fact that he covers a Louis Prima song?

And I loaded an old card-playing program, almost too old to run on my computer (system requirement: a '386!) because my friend Eric has been teaching his son bridge and spreading a little of the enthusiasm around - so they'll have other players, I guess.

Now, here are three things which historically I have always wanted to be able to do and which I have always given up as hopeless causes:
- Being able to dance
- Playing the guitar
- Playing bridge

There are others - "being able to draw" is a big one, but there, the jones is big enough that I never really give up, just bang my head against the same wall every now and again.

I really do think that if I can't instantly do it well, I don't want to do it. I think writing has spoiled me. I was the kid who wrote A+ term papers the night before they were due. Some things have gotten harder as I grow more careful about style, but in general I can still just sit down and let the words flow out. Why can't everything else be like that?

Worse yet:

While playing the computer in bridge last night, I noticed a weird bidding pattern. The player to my left bid one no-trump. Her partner bid two clubs. Two clubs? She returned a bid of two diamonds. Wait, I thought, oh my goodness wait. I know what this is. This is Stayman. I just read about it. The two-clubs bid is a signal to find out how many suits she's good in. The two diamonds says "very strong." And, sure enough, her partner raised to three no-trump immediately - a very tough contract.

And I thought, oh my God, and that was that. I didn't immediately turn the computer off, but my heart wasn't in it after that. Because I thought to myself: I don't want to be a bridge geek.

I think somewhere in my brain "aficionado" became a bad thing. I have never mentioned cryptograms before this, even though I can read off those stupid substitution ciphers in the newspaper puzzles like they're plaintext. I don't babble about a lot of my skills or interests, and it distresses me that I mention computers as much as I do here.

So apparently I don't want to learn any new skills and if I do learn them I don't want people to know I have them. That's just great.

You know, I didn't think I was especially mixed up before I began writing these postcards but I'm starting to change my mind.

previous
next
this month

© columbine