Derik Badman's Journal

This is the first day in a month that I've not gotten to this journal before noon. It's code release week at work, and I like to get some of it done early enough that we don't have many customers online, so that took precedence over my morning. But a few minutes ago, it suddenly got very dark in my office and then a heavy rain with some serious thunder started passing over. Up on the third floor is a little too close when the thunderstorms are going right overhead, so I fled to the ground floor.

I've been trying to be more conscious about stress and anger lately. I need to better identify and deal with my stressors. Work is often the main one, but so is Buddy, especially lately. And often those two combine: I'm working and stressed about it and then Buddy wakes up and stands next to my chair meowing incessantly. He wants pets or sometimes food, and he just won't shut up, and that combination tends to set me off into being angry and cursing. My anger is never of the hurting type, it's just cursing and sometimes banging on things. One time many years ago, when I was still pretty new at my job, inexperienced, and really struggling with some programming issues, I got so stressed and angry I kicked the wall in my old office. Put a divot in the drywall. I felt so bad about that, I've never done anything like that since. So I don't worry about breaking things or hurting myself (or Buddy), but I don't like the way I feel, tensed up, with this sense of energy that needs to be expended. It's like the build up of the stress is also a build up of energy in my body and at a certain point it reaches the maximum I can hold. I need to do something, cause it can't be good for me to feel this way.

Moving pretty quickly through the first volume of The Book of the Long Sun. Really enjoying it, and also surprised at how, in comparison with The Book of the New Sun there has been very little plot as of yet. New Sun is almost picaresque in the way Severian ends up wandering all over the place, while in Long Sun so far Silk, the focalizer, barely goes anywhere. Curious to see if that will change, or if this series is more enclosed than the previous.

Still rewatching Deep Space Nine in dribs and drabs (mostly during lunch and while making dinner), and I'm impressed this time with how well the writers deal with some of the minor characters, particularly the ones that are (or seem to be) the "bad guys." A few recurring characters of that sort (like Gul Dukat or Garak) are given enough time and story to be often sympathetic even when you know they have done awful things.

Thunderstorm seems to have passed, so I guess it's back to work.