13 September 2001
Last year: She was a little taken aback, I think, by the thought that intelligence could be an intimidating thing.
I had cursed my office for expecting a more or less normal run of things yesterday. "How the hell am I supposed to concentrate on bug-hunting?" I demanded. "Debugging requires a high level of mental involvement - I'm too distracted to get anything done here!"
I was right. I didn't really get much done yesterday. Besides the distraction of wanting to know what was going on with the country, sometime around noon the overwhelming mental and emotional strains of the disaster finally caught up with me, and I spent the rest of the day feeling so completely exhausted it was all I could do to talk.
But as it turned out, I was grateful for the work that needed to be done. Even if I couldn't truly focus on it, it gave me - as it were - a distraction from the distractions. For minutes at a time, I could immerse myself into a world of orderly, precise syntax; a world of rigid rules and traceable actions... A world where everything makes sense.
I am burned out on the heartbreak. My friend Mike, in California, was telling us stories and speculations on IRC last night. Matt logged out rather than yell at him to shut up. I remained logged in, but tuned him out. There's only so much I can take.
I called Karen around 9:30, when she'd gotten home from work. She can't get internet access from either home or work; I'd received an e-mail earlier from her boss, who has a cable modem and was therefore still connected. I'm afraid I tuned out Karen's stories of heartbreak and horror, too.
I simply can't process them any more. I couldn't even process the happy stories of loved ones found. It was like the batteries powering my emotional circuits were not only drained, but melted. I'm going to have to clean out the whole system before I can handle this again.
And there are forty bulletins in my freshly-restored office e-mail... Forty-one.
Time to go begin the day.
Word of the Day:
sic - intentionally so; thus (used after a printed word or passage to indicate that it is intended exactly as printed or to indicate that it exactly reproduces an original)
Song of the Day:
Moonlight Sonata (Beethoven)
Currently Reading:
- nothing
Current Projects:
- drawing
- Hall stuff
- garden