Work
Work this week has pulled me in a lot of different directions. I am working very closely with a colleague on building a platform for an experiment. In a fast paced environment, I see the value of being able to build across the stack more than ever. My colleague primarily writes python, so maybe I will be able to get more familiar with it over the next few weeks/months.
“Came for the language, stayed for the community” is a common slogan on t-shirts at python conferences. Some of the kindest people I know in programming circles write python. I ran Pyladies Bangalore for about a year, but stopped as it became less relevant to my everyday work. Bangalore is bursting with communities and with tech communities but there still isn’t an active Pyladies event that happens here. Maybe one day in a few years I’ll support efforts to run it regularly again.
I took two days off this week so I didn’t get as much done. I also spent a lot more time than I should have debugging some issues with deploys. Maybe I need to watch senior frontend engineers debug things more on some livestream? Taking recommendations. What are other ways I can get better at debugging systems?
Also; with fast-paced jobs, how do people make time to learn about entirely new concepts? I really need to understand service-to-service auth better, but I simply haven’t found the time. I think I should be taking advantage of llms and their study modes here.
Health
Wednesday morning was Litchee’s schedules dental scaling. Halfway through the scheduled time period I got a call from the doctor saying that some of his teeth were so rotten the roots were exposed. They had to be taken out. He’s lost six teeth in total, mostly molars and premolars, and one incisor. Recovery was hell - so much worse than his last stint with general anaesthesia. Perhaps it’s because he was in a lot more pain, perhaps it was just a fluke, but the poor boy just kept yelling unhappily all night, insisting on going in and out of his litter box when he could barely lift his legs. Last time, it was funny and cute and I took a few videos and was generally in good spirits. This time I was worried and on edge. I didn’t sleep at all on Wed night or Thursday all day. I had a bad back from lying on a shitty floor mattress. I was distracting myself by drowning in narrative (again).
A friend put me to bed on Thursday night and since then I’ve been relatively more stable, but it has not been a good week for me or the baby. After the first two days post surgery he has thankfully been alright. He’s been sleeping a lot more and less social, but he was curled up with Jalebi when I left the house today morning. Most importantly, him and Jamun haven’t fought yet (that I saw). I hope it stays this way.
Litchee is on a slop diet for the next three weeks at least. I have three cats and they all have different diet requirements. I don’t work from home any more, so this is going to get a little challenging to wrangle. I am also on the lookout for easy to make liquid food diets so I don’t rely on wet food packets all the time. Please tell me about what your pets ate and went through so I feel less alone in this.
Life
I am finally getting my Nothing Day tomorrow. I’m really looking forward to it. I did work from home this week but since all of my time was spent in caregiving my home feels like an even bigger mess than usual. It’s smellier, and more things are out of place, and there’s medication everywhere and split shelving that I need to fix.
I don’t see myself getting a roommate. Maybe I should downsize.
:(
A friend earlier this week sat me down and talked to me about how they are sad I don’t spend time with them any more. I started blaming on work, but then I stopped. I was on the other end of this exact conversation last year, and I know from experience that the response I was going to default to feels like bullshit. When someone is telling you they miss you, it’s not to force you to reprioritise them. It’s to bring attention to a lack. Then, after acknowledgement, the thing to do is figure out ways to be able to fulfil that “lack” even if you don’t have the same time/energy wells any more. Of course, the nature of the engagement will change, but the feeling of the engagement doesn’t need to. I don’t have 5 hours to work on my friend’s couch any more, but I can still rant in their DMs about a specific git thing or react thing and they will feel close to me.
I think it also helps to know there is an end date to these kinds of things. I firmly believe that romantic monogamous domestic long distance relationships (LDRs) shouldn’t be attempted unless there is a clear plan or date to “closing the distance”. LDRs are a good example of something that is universally seen as a thing to be sad about and gets understanding from society at large. A similar feeling exists in society when you have a (romantic monogamous primary domestic) partner that works long hours such that they no longer have the time/energy to put into the relationship, but I’ve found that the solutioning of this problem is just “oh, one has to deal with this” or “oh, what can you do, such is life”. I find this so frustrating! And utterly useless. I feel like this generic social messaging also validated my then partner’s relationship to the problem and the approach they took to it.
For platonic relationships? The social understanding of this messaging exists even less (or not at all). I think as more of us live in found-family like communities we have to internalise how to talk about these problems. And I refuse to be the person to blame a situation for a “lack” that someone I love is feeling. This might be a reactionary bout of idealism from me. I might be setting myself up for burnout or failure. I hope I’m not. We’ll see.
Media Diet
Reading
I am finally moving on from Dramione - into rarepairs. That’s Neville/Pansy, Harry/Pansy, Theomione, Wood/Flint for some reason, and other various permutations.
One of these days I have to break down why, after a decade of not wanting to do anything with this fandom, I am back and consuming things with a vengeance.