in a vacuum

I'm not a programmer; the closest qualification I have is that I'm a prolificly crap writer. So I, you know, type a lot.

I know I'm programming all wrong. I write, quickly and with no style, something that approximates what I need done. I cut and paste, and- because I can't visualize for shit- I run parts over and over until somehow I get them to do what I want. Sometimes this involves a couple thousand extraneous loops until I figure out why it's rendering on the order of minutes rather than fractions of a second. Then, when my hastily-cobbled-together jalopy is coughing along, I go back. I say "well, this piece over here is a lot like this piece, and if I move them both over there then maybe I can just call that. And so on- no line of code survives. Only after all that is done do I go through and comment.

I should, of course, be designing these modules in my head to be generic and re-usable. I should be commenting all throughout, not adding it after I'm done to clean it up.

And yet I struggle, in a vacuum, because that is preferable than inflicting my torturous stumbles and grade-school compositions on someone whose opinion I respect. There is as wide a gulf between me and good programming as there is between me and good writing.

I just can't get there from here, and it makes me want to cry.

notes from reading

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. This is a very conversational, readable book, and it makes some very good points as to why many people make the choices they do and how our minds can trick us into doing so. However, it's rendered me utterly depressed. 1) Because personal observation correlates that yes, the processes he describes are true for many people. 2) In many cases, they are not true for me. In this book I see the echos of nearly every disagreement with my mother, my inability to take simple joy in most things, my inability to relax and be in the now. Clearly, my brain is wired very differently than many other people's. And different wiring tends to result in a lot of friction between my reality and that of other people's.

I know, use more lube.

Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another by Philip Ball. This is an incredibly wide-ranging book- it's enjoyable just for the sheer volume of history and context it provides for philosophy, physics, economics, psychology, and a million things in between. Also, despite being BRIGHT YELLOW (I really can't stand bright yellow) the book *doesn't* make me depressed and in fact I quite look forward to reading more of it.

Fuck happiness, read about physics.