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schizophrenia, bipolar disorder...
Mar. 25th, 2003 02:11 amEarlier today, already not entirely stable, I ran across this absurd bug in Squeak, which halted progress on the bit of the project that I was working on at the moment. I wasn't super-happy at that point, having chosen to skip a pair of classes to get this done, and working with Squeak generally doesn't improve one's mood. It seems silly in retrospect, and maybe I was on the brink of hitting this thought anyway, but that was what pushed me over the edge -- the HTTPRequest class in Squeak breaks your URLs when it tries to do the right thing with the escape characters in them, and this broke my grand designs for my 2340 project.
So from this, I decided that my existence was utterly worthless, that I wasn't really helping anyone, because nobody really cared about the majority of what I did, which was write stupid little computer programs for classes, which are only there to cause trouble for the teaching staff, so they can assign me a number that I don't particularly care about, so that eventually I could get a sheet of paper that says that the Institute gives me the seal of approval, so that... maybe eventually I'd inflict the computer science lifestyle on other professionally. I came to the conclusion that ultimately, computers are useless, and that nobody really cares at all, and that I was away from my family, living in a little box and doing pointless things and completely isolated from any sort of reality that there might be.
I broke down and cried, actually. I had debunked my own identity, with the impetus for this being a bug in the Squeak distribution. I hadn't cried in a long time, although I realize that I've been pretty well upset and occasionally depressed...
Esther spoke to me over AIM, at this point (right after I posted that last entry), and she was reassuring and loving and helpful, and she got me to get up, clean myself off, and go to teach the 2130 recitation. That was really amusing, actually -- my spirits were raised from that. On the way over, walking to Skiles, I was still in a really foul mood. Somebody was trying to tell me something about the SGA elections, I think, and I managed to put off this "don't mess with me -- I'm in a foul mood" vibe as I walked past -- he backed off. I went to pick up some coffee and jelly from the cybercafe, and was still dealing in clipped sentences and monosyllables, and when I came in, I related my situation (in very vague terms -- "I'm depressed today" and "I realized that my whole identity was bunk"...) to Aron, who's always really sympathetic.
Right as the recitation was supposed to start, a pair of guys came in and asked if they could make an announcement, and we let them, and they proceeded to go through this spiel about a comedy club and how they were selling tickets at an Amazing Discount!!! ... afterwards, one of the cooler students in the class, Luke, informed us that he'd seen those same guys earlier today, and that they'd been hitting rather a large number of classrooms. For some reason, I found this really amusing... I was in a pretty caustic sort of mood, pretended to take great mental strain and whiteboard space to work out the discount on the tickets they were peddling (behind their back -- they were sitting on the desk in front of the whiteboard), and burst out laughing when they left... I don't know quite why that was so funny. The rest of the recitation found Aron and myself trying to explain some subtle-ish parsing concepts, which I also found amusing...
Aron's great... he listens to me complaining about stuff, and we joked about CS majors and stereotypes about us on the walk back...
... and then I came back and worked on the Squeak project, made it work, and as I was saving... Squeak crashes. So I got to go back and redo that. That managed not to be upsetting, though, because I remembered what I'd done and reproduced it pretty quickly...
... and I spoke with my mother, and she's wonderful and wise and helpful... and then I went to eat dinner with Zach, and since then I've been hanging around, working on stuff, running 'round and tossing disc with Corey and Marty. Tonight mostly involved organizing stuff for the Heathen Center's foray into this year's Relay for Life, which promises to be interesting.
On another happy note, Esther wrote an absolutely beautiful and glorious poem about an afternoon we shared a few Sundays ago... one of the nicest gifts ever :) Thank you!
... and I was thinking about talking about meaningfulness for a while (Nietzsche comes to mind...), and how my approach to thinking about it changes more or less minute-to-minute, but I think that I'll go and sleep instead. Boo-yah! Go read Esther's poem!
So from this, I decided that my existence was utterly worthless, that I wasn't really helping anyone, because nobody really cared about the majority of what I did, which was write stupid little computer programs for classes, which are only there to cause trouble for the teaching staff, so they can assign me a number that I don't particularly care about, so that eventually I could get a sheet of paper that says that the Institute gives me the seal of approval, so that... maybe eventually I'd inflict the computer science lifestyle on other professionally. I came to the conclusion that ultimately, computers are useless, and that nobody really cares at all, and that I was away from my family, living in a little box and doing pointless things and completely isolated from any sort of reality that there might be.
I broke down and cried, actually. I had debunked my own identity, with the impetus for this being a bug in the Squeak distribution. I hadn't cried in a long time, although I realize that I've been pretty well upset and occasionally depressed...
Esther spoke to me over AIM, at this point (right after I posted that last entry), and she was reassuring and loving and helpful, and she got me to get up, clean myself off, and go to teach the 2130 recitation. That was really amusing, actually -- my spirits were raised from that. On the way over, walking to Skiles, I was still in a really foul mood. Somebody was trying to tell me something about the SGA elections, I think, and I managed to put off this "don't mess with me -- I'm in a foul mood" vibe as I walked past -- he backed off. I went to pick up some coffee and jelly from the cybercafe, and was still dealing in clipped sentences and monosyllables, and when I came in, I related my situation (in very vague terms -- "I'm depressed today" and "I realized that my whole identity was bunk"...) to Aron, who's always really sympathetic.
Right as the recitation was supposed to start, a pair of guys came in and asked if they could make an announcement, and we let them, and they proceeded to go through this spiel about a comedy club and how they were selling tickets at an Amazing Discount!!! ... afterwards, one of the cooler students in the class, Luke, informed us that he'd seen those same guys earlier today, and that they'd been hitting rather a large number of classrooms. For some reason, I found this really amusing... I was in a pretty caustic sort of mood, pretended to take great mental strain and whiteboard space to work out the discount on the tickets they were peddling (behind their back -- they were sitting on the desk in front of the whiteboard), and burst out laughing when they left... I don't know quite why that was so funny. The rest of the recitation found Aron and myself trying to explain some subtle-ish parsing concepts, which I also found amusing...
Aron's great... he listens to me complaining about stuff, and we joked about CS majors and stereotypes about us on the walk back...
... and then I came back and worked on the Squeak project, made it work, and as I was saving... Squeak crashes. So I got to go back and redo that. That managed not to be upsetting, though, because I remembered what I'd done and reproduced it pretty quickly...
... and I spoke with my mother, and she's wonderful and wise and helpful... and then I went to eat dinner with Zach, and since then I've been hanging around, working on stuff, running 'round and tossing disc with Corey and Marty. Tonight mostly involved organizing stuff for the Heathen Center's foray into this year's Relay for Life, which promises to be interesting.
On another happy note, Esther wrote an absolutely beautiful and glorious poem about an afternoon we shared a few Sundays ago... one of the nicest gifts ever :) Thank you!
... and I was thinking about talking about meaningfulness for a while (Nietzsche comes to mind...), and how my approach to thinking about it changes more or less minute-to-minute, but I think that I'll go and sleep instead. Boo-yah! Go read Esther's poem!
