July is over. We're already seven days into August. Time sure does fly when you're quarantining, I guess. So what happened?
Well, between these two points, the feds were in Portland, OR., where I live. Work on the Rust rewrite of our delivery system began in earnest. I started helping with Orogene, another JavaScript package manager. I finished Zelda (again.) I picked up Ghost of Tsushima, which is beautiful but empty by comparison. Truly this generation of game consoles has been the "open world with a bow-wielding, horse-riding protagonist" era. A friend's brother died. I... barbequed a lot more, because it's been too hot to cook indoors. Another person I know (distantly) died. Krysten and I painted a TV console (our first time painting furniture!) We also finally broke into Overcooked. It's been a strange couple of weeks; time feels especially soupy these days.
I spent a lot of the last month struggling with the dissonance of things going well at home vs. the wanton brutalizing of Portland protestors. Struggling to maintain my focus and not let others set my pace for me. Struggling to balance all the things I want to do in my free time with my need to rest, to do nothing.
For a few weeks I tried working on my WASM parser on my off hours from work; then tried (& failed) to resist the urge to contribute to Orogene. I noticed my mood at work dip more and more: the longer I moonlit on these side-projects, the more irritable & less effective I was during the day.
So, I took the last week "off." All I've done in the evening is cook & play video games. I've been getting to bed at a reasonable time, & reading comics before that. Work this week has been fun, mostly, as a result.
The phrase -- which sounds better in my head -- that comes up when I'm trying (and failing) to resist picking up side projects is "a torque on one's soul." I'll experience this as some new disquiet that's compelling me to move forward, towards a goal I didn't have before. This is occasionally useful: I've learned a lot by following this urge. The problem is that I have trouble ignoring it.