The Toaster Flies at Midnight

I crashed my head down on my desk.

“Having problems with that export code?”

“It’s driving me insane. Is that a problem?”

“Well, don’t work too long on it. Go home. Go to sleep. It will come to you in a dream. You’ll wake up in the middle of the night with the answer.”

“I hate that. I end up dreaming about trying to program the toaster.”

I spent the bulk of the day unsuccessfully reworking the same patch of python code that wouldn’t run. For the last three hours, the only error message I could get out of it was “An SQL error has occurred.” Thanks. That’s a query language error. And that about covers it, doesn’t it? Ninety-five percent of all the problems we ever have communicating with anyone break down to someone forgetting to put quote marks around the right word or capitalize the right letter. You spend half an hour talking to someone only to realize that you each have a very different notion of the contents of variable X.

I left the office still caught in a loop.

Ballet clears the brain. That part of you that has to keep track of the to-do list, that’s thinking about the work problem, or the laundry, or planning the eminent conversation? It can’t hold your attention when you’re sweating bullets in a deep pleé while some evil woman is grabbing your other leg, pushing it up half a meter higher than it has any right to go, and then has the nerve to tell you to make it look easy. The if/then loops and the try/except clauses abort. They can’t compete.

Pointe work is even better. Nothing terminates those background processes like a cracked toe nail.

I left class with a clean mental desk. It’s clean because someone just wiped all that mess straight on to the floor, but now at least there’s a clean surface to work with. You can dig through the flotsam and start putting it back together with some amount of order.

It’s late. My clutter is creeping back up to the work surface of its own accord. It’s time to go to bed, where I’ll likely be haunted by dreams where the existence of bagels everywhere are dependent upon my ability to fix a line of code that runs a toaster oven which has inexplicably sprouted a USB cable. And hurry up because the cream cheese might spoil.

Somewhere in there I might just find a hint that will fix my real problem.

Or a Pop Tart. You never know.