Glum Tonight

I'm feeling glum tonight.

I'm feeling glum because I've spent the day grappling with both Things With Which I Don't Like To Deal, and Things With Which I Feel Temperamentally Unsuited To Deal.

And since these things cover pretty much the gamut of my life, I just feel like I've been hammered into a little cage of stress, and so I'm just unhappy.

One of these things is that I've been talked into going to a costume party, with Debbi and Mark and Yvette and Lisa and Michel. It's a Three Musketeers Ball, which Debbi and Lisa and Michel were interested in because they have Three Musketeers costumes from a few years ago. My problem is that I dislike costuming. In fact, I dislike anything where I have to wear clothes other than those I feel comfortable in, which is pretty much restricted to my everyday clothes. This was something of an issue with an ex-girlfriend of mine, who was in the SCA.

Here's an illustrative story: When I was a kid - maybe ten or so - my parents bought me a Boston Red Sox T-shirt. I may have been younger than ten, as my only memory of having any interest in baseball before 1986 (when I was 17) was in buying baseball cards around 1975-76. In any event, I'm sure I was no older than 12. Although in principle I thought the T-shirt was pretty cool, I only ever wore it once. Because when I wore it I felt like a total dork. Because all I ever wore the rest of the time were polo shirts. So the T-shirt was actually less dressy than my usual clothing, but I didn't feel comfortable wearing it.

I've only in the last few years gotten used to wearing suits, and then mainly just because I've gone to a few weddings.

In theory I understand why people enjoy getting dressed up, including costuming. I just have a total disconnect in that it does nothing for me, and in fact I actively dislike it. My feeling is, "Why can't we just not wear the funny clothes, and have a good party dressed like regular folks?"

Anyway, so the party is Saturday. As yet I have no costume to wear. Yvette and Mark are going to loan me some clothes to try on for something relatively simple (i.e., period but undistinctive). Yvette's first comment was that I could wear some brown sweatpants and match clothes to those. To which I thought, "This assumes I wear sweatpants." I own exactly zero pairs of sweatpants. I don't wear 'em.

So.

I am having two different issues at work, which I'll now discuss in the usual oblique terms. I will start up front by saying that both of these issues are ones which could be - I suspect, are - largely in my head, and that I should just Get Over It. However, it is very difficult to tell. I suspect that it's exceedingly rare that my cow-orkers ever notice when I get tied up in knots like this. Then again, maybe it happens all too often and they just never tell me. Which isn't a comforting thought.

Anyway.

The first issue is that I spent some time on Friday and today trying to figure out a way to add some functionality to substantially simplify some of our code. This was something I was looking into because an opportunity presented itself, and I didn't plan to invest a lot of time in it. If it didn't work out, oh well. A cow-orker suggested that I look at a certain piece of technology to implement what I wanted. So I looked into it, found that there was a bizarre characteristic to this technology which made it awkward to use, filed a bug, and after mucking around a little longer, decided to leave the project for a future time.

After which I find out that another cow-orker has implemented basically the same functionality with basically the same technology, though he hasn't yet committed his changes (and no, he hasn't worked around the problem I encountered, AFAIK; he just feels the added functionality is worth the awkward use patterns).

So I'm feeling pretty odd about this. Though I know he was moved to implement it for far more urgent reasons than what prompted my little investigations, it's still strange to have ended up coming to such different conclusions. Partly I think I am just annoyed that the technology seemed so close to doing exactly what I want, yet had this one problem. And partly I am annoyed with myself, concerned that I'm holding things to too high a standard to be practical.

The second issue is a matter of process: Sometimes the process we're using for our development changes, often for good reason. Sometimes it changes with short notice, and unfortunately this is the sort of change that really just throws me off - probably more than it really should. I can deal with changes in process given some notice. I can even deal with projects coming to the fore when they aren't easy to handle under whatever the process at that time is. But when the process changes fairly abruptly, and I know that I would have planned my projects differently had I known ahead of time, I get grumpy about it.

And I don't really like being grumpy. So it's a two-step sort of thing: Not only am I generally grumpy about the change, but I get frustrated with myself for not handling it more gracefully.

What I basically like about being a programmer is building things and seeing them work. Really, nothing makes me happier in my job than making something nifty which works well. (Well, okay, someone else telling me that it really is nifty is pretty nice, too.) But today I both grappled with not being able to get something I was building working, and struggled with my reaction to the changes in procedures around my actual coding. So I was just kind of frustrated all day.

My fantasy baseball team is staging a collapse of perhaps historic proportions, with several of my star players in relentless slumps, punctuated by one star and a contributing player sustaining season-ending injuries last week. I already know I invest too much in my fantasy baseball team, emotionally, but this has been really, really freaking annoying.

My car makes a light squeak when I lift the clutch pedal. I took it in a couple of weeks ago and they said they'd grease the boot on the joint which was squeaking. It hasn't helped. However, the clutch works fine. However, I am now dreadfully paranoid that my car is going to stop working at some inopportune point (such as, during my mother's much-anticipated visit next month). But I have no concrete reason to believe this is so other than this little squeak. And I can't very well take it in (again) and ask them to tear it apart to find out what's wrong, can I?

Stress.

Still, as long as I don't get stranded in the hinterlands, I can always rent a car for a few days or a week if necessary. I'm a big boy.

So, that's my big pity-fest for the night. Cheerful, eh?