Tomorrow's Here, but I Have to Call it Today
I love writing. Discovering blogging has been a bonus, too. After the assault in 2010, I didn't write for at least a little while. Then I decided that what me and my poverty needed was a woman. As ideas go, it didn't seem particularly stupid. Not knowing I'd had large swaths of neural trees obliterated, like a nuclear bomb leveling large swaths of forests? That and the total lack of a filter made writing the women of Craigslist probably a big mistake.
But write I did. Because I wrote just to write, and I wrote software, but none of it helped me progress. I could see something was wrong, especially with software I wrote at the time. But I had no idea what was going on or why. I just knew my ability to express logic was completely broken, both in free-form writing, and in logical code.
When I realized I had to write another human being in order to help me "see" the effects of what I wrote, how I wrote it, and how it might get perceived? I'm pretty sure I tried writing family and friends, first, but nobody wanted to hear from me. Should have taken that as a sign, but I like to get things done, and the peanut butter + chocolate merging of writing to answer personal ads in combination of the hope of a woman to build a life with was too much to resist.
I stopped writing the women of Craigslist a long time ago. But when I think about the experience, always interwoven with applying for jobs, and how it probably reflects on me with normal humans? I want to crawl into a hole under a rock. As far as variety goes, personal ads span the gamut of experience, desire, and emotion. I treated them like creative writing assignments and tried to write with a decent voice that spoke to the author.
It's telling that few wrote me back. Many were angry with me. I was honest about my getting injured and poor. It didn't dawn on me until much later that women want a guy with the package already put together. At least the women I wrote to on Craigslist. Plus, I didn't realize that I was spatially broken, so I wrote to women all over NYC and Long Island like they were in neighborhoods within walking distance.
Long story short? I sometimes clear my mind by confession. Today's been a weird day with regards to software and it reminded me of a long string of weird days, when I had no money and wrote a lot of letters as if I was writing story concepts for movies.
I've gone through at least five "Aha!" moments with one part of the implementation of Awesome Sauce Java. Each one looked good. Each one looked like the solution that I could build, use, test, and build the language on top of. Then, while exercising the logic (while reading Twitter, because when you know you have to write code but you don't know why but you're not because that's your mind saying "Wait, there's another optimization."), you realize there's another optimization.
Then, you optimize that optimization. Then you take that one a step further and realize that it's a new way of working with the internals of the language. Then, the whole pile of newness gives way to a language optimization that could help the language perform a little faster.
It's been a good day. But days like this have only happened when I work on Awesome Sauce Java. Writing a language is not just fun, it's rewarding. Because it gives me a lot of the positive reinforcement I'd been looking for when I wrote other humans - who literally never wrote me back, not even after sharing that I was struggling to survive after an exceptionally violent assault, not even to ask if I was ok via anonymous email.
It's nice to get some validation that I'm doing something well, even if it's an abstraction. While Awesome Sauce Java with Hot Sauce has a ways to go, and I have to learn to market it far better, it's taught me that when I stick with writing something and I'm interested in it and improving it, the work helps me function better and feel better about myself. I can see the improvement in my mental functions as well as the software itself.
While it's been a start-and-stop kind of day and week, getting to this point, where I can recognize that I've needed to separate fiction: primal needs, childish hopes, and unrealistic dreams, from reality: making real, measurable, adult progress, on a software language, tools, and OS, has been a big step forward. I've got to find a way to fund the project. If that becomes a reality, then it will allow me to start building spatial constructs that further help me reconnect with adulthood and progress and making sure I build things the way I was taught - to make it to the moon and back, with nothing breaking, to make sure nobody dies.
Having two kind, driven, parents was great, good fortune, given my need to survive and even partially recover from severe brain injuries, and mostly alone. But having the chance to learn from, and witness, my dad's work on Apollo really taught and reinforced how important purposeful design is, in combination with rigorous validation of every, single, component involved in making that rocket and cargo fly. While he explained a lot and encouraged me to read and study, he really only ever said one thing, "One mistake, everybody dies." And he showed me in every moment how hard, fast, and precise he had to work to make sure everything he devoted his mind to held up to that metric. Whatever Awesome Sauce Java turns out to be, it will at least be constructed the way dad taught me to build things. That's got to be good for something.
Have a great day!
Michael
3/2/18
But write I did. Because I wrote just to write, and I wrote software, but none of it helped me progress. I could see something was wrong, especially with software I wrote at the time. But I had no idea what was going on or why. I just knew my ability to express logic was completely broken, both in free-form writing, and in logical code.
When I realized I had to write another human being in order to help me "see" the effects of what I wrote, how I wrote it, and how it might get perceived? I'm pretty sure I tried writing family and friends, first, but nobody wanted to hear from me. Should have taken that as a sign, but I like to get things done, and the peanut butter + chocolate merging of writing to answer personal ads in combination of the hope of a woman to build a life with was too much to resist.
I stopped writing the women of Craigslist a long time ago. But when I think about the experience, always interwoven with applying for jobs, and how it probably reflects on me with normal humans? I want to crawl into a hole under a rock. As far as variety goes, personal ads span the gamut of experience, desire, and emotion. I treated them like creative writing assignments and tried to write with a decent voice that spoke to the author.
It's telling that few wrote me back. Many were angry with me. I was honest about my getting injured and poor. It didn't dawn on me until much later that women want a guy with the package already put together. At least the women I wrote to on Craigslist. Plus, I didn't realize that I was spatially broken, so I wrote to women all over NYC and Long Island like they were in neighborhoods within walking distance.
Long story short? I sometimes clear my mind by confession. Today's been a weird day with regards to software and it reminded me of a long string of weird days, when I had no money and wrote a lot of letters as if I was writing story concepts for movies.
What I Did Today isn't What I'm Doing
Writing has to be free. It has to flow. Writing software has to be free of restrictions sometimes. Today highlights why. You know those times when you're stuck on a problem and you understand it's important to figure out what's up before moving on? Today has been a lot of that. Lately has been a lot of that.I've gone through at least five "Aha!" moments with one part of the implementation of Awesome Sauce Java. Each one looked good. Each one looked like the solution that I could build, use, test, and build the language on top of. Then, while exercising the logic (while reading Twitter, because when you know you have to write code but you don't know why but you're not because that's your mind saying "Wait, there's another optimization."), you realize there's another optimization.
Then, you optimize that optimization. Then you take that one a step further and realize that it's a new way of working with the internals of the language. Then, the whole pile of newness gives way to a language optimization that could help the language perform a little faster.
It's been a good day. But days like this have only happened when I work on Awesome Sauce Java. Writing a language is not just fun, it's rewarding. Because it gives me a lot of the positive reinforcement I'd been looking for when I wrote other humans - who literally never wrote me back, not even after sharing that I was struggling to survive after an exceptionally violent assault, not even to ask if I was ok via anonymous email.
It's nice to get some validation that I'm doing something well, even if it's an abstraction. While Awesome Sauce Java with Hot Sauce has a ways to go, and I have to learn to market it far better, it's taught me that when I stick with writing something and I'm interested in it and improving it, the work helps me function better and feel better about myself. I can see the improvement in my mental functions as well as the software itself.
While it's been a start-and-stop kind of day and week, getting to this point, where I can recognize that I've needed to separate fiction: primal needs, childish hopes, and unrealistic dreams, from reality: making real, measurable, adult progress, on a software language, tools, and OS, has been a big step forward. I've got to find a way to fund the project. If that becomes a reality, then it will allow me to start building spatial constructs that further help me reconnect with adulthood and progress and making sure I build things the way I was taught - to make it to the moon and back, with nothing breaking, to make sure nobody dies.
Having two kind, driven, parents was great, good fortune, given my need to survive and even partially recover from severe brain injuries, and mostly alone. But having the chance to learn from, and witness, my dad's work on Apollo really taught and reinforced how important purposeful design is, in combination with rigorous validation of every, single, component involved in making that rocket and cargo fly. While he explained a lot and encouraged me to read and study, he really only ever said one thing, "One mistake, everybody dies." And he showed me in every moment how hard, fast, and precise he had to work to make sure everything he devoted his mind to held up to that metric. Whatever Awesome Sauce Java turns out to be, it will at least be constructed the way dad taught me to build things. That's got to be good for something.
Have a great day!
Michael
3/2/18
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