A drizzly day. Without alarm, sunlight, or plans to wake me, I sleep until eleven, the gentle drips of the raindrops and the dull silver light lulling me back to sleep whenever I think of getting out of bed. As soon as I vacate my spot the cats take over, both of them sprawling across my bed in that particular boneless way cats have, telegraphing previously-undreamt-of levels of laziness. They look as though they may never move a muscle again.
Once I’m up, though, I’m up: breakfast (lunch?) aside and a cup of tea near at hand, I park myself and my laptop at the dining room table and pick up where I’d left off the previous night, re-working a programming assessment for a job application. With little to no experience with the preferred languages, I spend several hours Googling frantically, tweaking and occasionally completely redoing the code as new ideas occur. The cat climbs onto my lap—a rare enough occurrence—but I barely notice him. In the throes of a project like this I can never really relax or concentrate on other things. Even if I’m doing something else, I can feel the bottom of my brain looking at whatever problem I’m having from different angles, teasing it apart. Periodically it will spit out an answer and I’ll have to stop what I’m doing to go test it. It’s like a constant tension, a low-level hum that I can tune out but that nevertheless prevents me being fully engaged in anything else.
A few hours later I fix a bug in the program (although I still don’t quite understand why it was a bug), put it all together, and send it off, and I can finally relax. It’s like I’d been holding my breath and could finally let it out, expelling the stale air from my lungs. I celebrate with another cup of tea.
(And no, this picture has nothing to do with the post. Isn’t it pretty, though?)
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