Mood update: I did crash at the end of yesterday. Who knows if that was a delayed laptop bricking reaction or not. Here's maybe an embarrassing thing to say: I feel like I'm helming an alien spaceship that may or may not need repairs. I'm sitting in the cockpit, handling the controls, checking the bright colors and weird symbols in the many monitors. Occasionally, I have to go down to engineering and ask what the fuck is wrong. I know where I want to pilot the alien spaceship and I kind of know how to fly it. But sometimes it refuses to move. A system overheats -- maybe even a system that I didn't know existed. If I fly too fast there are problems, if I don't fly fast enough there are problems. If I don't keep up routine maintenance, I run into problems. But if I spend too much time on maintenance, I fall behind in my mission. All the spaceships around me seem to be flying competently with ease. Like their captains have actually been given the alien spaceship manual. (That's true except for the high school kids I teach. A few of them definitely do not know how to fly their spaceships. They're idling off my starboard doing unintentional barrel rolls, radioing me: "I didn't finish the homework.")
So I'm trying to get better. To learn what all the flashes on the monitors mean. To get a handle for when a bolt is screwed on too tight and when it's not on there tight enough. To figure out what are useful sub processes and which ones are just slowing the whole thing down. But the technology is complex. And like I said, parts of it might just be broken. Plus I've been flying this thing for 33 years now. Definitely enough time for mastery by Malcolm Gladwell's standards. And I still don't know where they keep the on/off switch.
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