• 12:56 A.M.
  I don't have cancer! Yet!

This week is the last week of vacation. I'm not sure what's going to become of my schedule once I'm back in the office. Weekends will matter again, I'll start thinking about what I want to do on vacations, perhaps I'll just go to sleep when I'm sleepy, rather than going through my entire "before I go to sleep" regimen of tasks. (Probably not. I like my journal and my teeth.) Most likely I'll be more mentally fatigued at night, having spent a hard day thinking about stuff.

Thinking is probably the most wearying part of programming. You can toss together a system without really thinking first, and that's an okay way to get something up right away. The quick progress is invigorating, and most problems you encounter at that level are solved through a few conditionals here and there, perhaps a global variable or two. The problem is later on, when you need to expand to a new level of abstraction, your design is a big ball of mud, and tiny changes affect the whole thing in slow-to-find ways. To make a system that will become big, you need to spend a while thinking about it before you can really make progress. I do not relish the sitting around thinking stage. It gives me something to do on the bus, to be sure, but to a manager, it looks exactly like zoning out and staring at the wall, drawing complaints. It's hard to discourage people from trying to talk to you while you're thinking.

Fortunately I'm working with people who seem to have a fairly good idea of what I'm like already. I go in on Wednesday to sign myself up for corporate citizenship (or a corporate visa, as it were) and to put my moai head on my new desk. A . Uh.

Okay, someone outside is screaming his head off, as if someone had grabbed a gobbet of his flesh in a pair of craftsman needle-nosed pliers. I mean, right outside. In ned flanders territory. I wonder if he stepped on a tack? No, this is an angry type of scream. Someone else is definately involved in whatever anguish this person is experiencing. I can hear my upstairs neigbors mobilizing, looking for reasons why 1 AM and screaming might happen at the same time around our befished apartment building.

I think I've heard that man scream before - once when there was a nearby alarm going off, 6 AM-ish or so. He made a loud entreaty to "answer your fucking alarm!" He is both less patient and more vocal than I am about disturbing noises coming from near his sleeping quarters. I think I faintly hear jabbering female voices, though they are not as nearby nor as infuriated as Ned Flanders/Mr. Hyde. Maybe he is mad at them? I know I've got neighbors that think nothing of belting out Bonnie Tyler lyrics in the middle of the night. Oh... but they aren't on that side. The neighbors on this side, they just leave their bikes locked up in their front yard for years, despite important parts disappearing overnight.