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Always drive on roads
I'm not dead. And I'm not even depressed. I'd have covered those entries with something cheerier, but I'm at a point now where I'm conducting triage on a daily basis: Which task will I do now? Because I don't have time to do them all justice.
The journal will continue to be the low end of the stick for a day or two, I suspect. Including today, which is fairly random.
Jim Varney died. I made an Ernest assessment of this news, and find, to my surprise, that I'll actually miss him.
The trend over the last 20 years or so has been to design computer languages that enforce a state of paranoia. You're expected to program every module as if it were in a state of siege. Certainly there are some feudal cultures where this is appropriate, but not all cultures are like this. In Perl culture, by contrast, you're expected to stay out of someone's house because you weren't invited in, not because there are bars on the windows.
- Programming Perl, O'Reilly
That's all good and well but it doesn't change the fact that my main agony right now is that someone wrote a lot of Perl code - very clean, very good Perl code - whose only problem is that it really wants to be C++ code. If it HAD been C++ it would have been easier to add new features. I adore Perl but there are some things it was Not Meant To Be. Despite what its advocates will tell you.
Installed Netscape 4.7 on my Mac at last, after ages of refusing to update from 4.05. I've turned off most of the gobbledygook, but I can't seem to disable this automatic URL-completion (where it tries to guess the URL while you're in the middle of typing it, and always guesses wrong). Anybody know how?
I wanted to try AIM, but it was just too damned intrusive - wanted to force me to use Internet Config (which I've resisted successfully for ages) and put tendrils all over my system. Into the trash it went. Probably for the best - look how seldom I use ICQ ....
Memo to designers of Macintosh software: I dislike System Folder bloat. If you put something - anything - in my System Folder without making a case for why it absolutely, positively, has to be there, that's a good way to get me to not use your software. I feel the same way about Windows programs dropping all sorts of junk in the Windows system directories (tell me again why we invented hierarchic file systems in the first place, just to drop everything in a heap?) but since that OS has permanently lost its sanity already, it doesn't hurt as much.
Everybody's gettin' spanked but me.
- Allyson Hannigan, as Willow
(Would someone please let this girl have a lesbian fling? Please?)
When you get chastized by Kymm Zuckert, from whom there is usually never a harsh word, you know you've crossed some sort of self-loathing Rubicon and you'd better Get Back To Where You Once Belonged. I apologize to Kymm for quoting this, but I've never had a message that made me want to snarl, belly-laugh and slap my forehead and go "D'oh!" all at the same time before:
All I kept thinking, in reading your recent entries, is that it must be so exhausting being you, constantly having to throw these roadblocks in your own way, constantly having to make certain that everything is just as difficult as it can possibly be. Sometimes reading what you write is like watching someone run uphill in a sweatsuit in the heat of summer while carrying 100 lb. weights in their teeth when, right next to them, is a shaded escalator that will get them to the top of the hill in comfort.
That will serve as a concise summary of my mailbag the last few days. In particular, several friends wrote to say that my ideas of what would be "good enough" are invalid, because as soon as I actually achieved them, I'd find a reason to reject those achievements as well.
The outside isn't going to do much for you until you work on the inside. (I hate sounding like my mother's psychology texts.) As long as you peg your feelings of self-worth to the outside world's opinion, you're going to continue to have problems.
I've told Nonelvis about some of these emails, and she'd like to thank you all for saying some of the things she's been trying to tell me for months. (Sigh.)
Look, I'm not interested in more of this subject, but I do have to reject this part: I don't believe my feelings of self-worth are tied heavily to the outside world's opinion of me. I will agree that I judge myself more harshly than is good for me, though, so can we call it a split decision?
Columbines have lovely delicate flowers, and that's as it should be. They don't grunt and heave and try to sprout pinecones or watermelons. (Oh, aaargh. The picture I'm getting of that makes anything else I was going to say just too silly, and the analogy doesn't work anyhow. I think I'll just stop now.)
Disclaimer at the bottom of a TV ad for a new car which shows the car apparently crowd-surfing in a mosh pit:
Always drive on roads, not on people.
© Columbine
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