i've been a bit pissed off and depressed of late - for no reason in particular, just a general malaise which has come over me quietly like fog falls silently over a sleeping city. by monday it was starting to really knock me around when an idea popped into my head... not a solution per se, more a distraction: i was going to fix things.
i do that. i like fixing things. i've been accused in the past of fixing things as a defence mechanism - a way of making people like me. superficially this is somewhat accurate. past that it's really more that i like to make things work that once were broken, and it's something i've found i'm good at which gives me a buzz. since monday morning i've been fixing things like nobody's business. first i got stuck into some problems at work which a bunch of other techs had tried to fix and failed and proceeded to kick the shit out of them. i've started fixing Lou's bike - that's going to be a long-haul project, but we've made a good start of it. i spent an hour writing some little scripts to keep my music and photos synchronised between my computers. i dropped in on Matt and Jules where i got to meet Marcus (who's a touch over 2 weeks old) and wound up fixing M's computer... then took his MP3 player away so that i could fix it tonight. this evening i did a bodge job on my bike that'll have to hold until a replacement part comes in before sitting down at the coffee table and stripping M's little Creative Zen down and putting it back together again.
i get paid a fairly obscene quantity of money to make broken things work. you'd think that i'd want no part of it when i got home - well you thought wrong. you see, it seems that i can't build anything worth a damn, but REbuilding? that i can do...
it's all a distraction though. i'm not sure what i'm waiting for, but i know i'm just marking time. i'm putting one foot in front of another while i trudge towards what looks like a featureless horizon, cramming books into my brain, rebuilding machinery and making computers sing. filling the gaps in my life with activities that make me believe, for a fleeting, happy moment, that my breathing in and out isn't wasting someone else's oxygen.
hanging with Shadow has been good though. he seems to have worked out that i'm happiest when i have something to make work or make better, so he's always coming up with little tasks i can complete for him. they're always useful and sometimes they're even a challenge, but i always wind up getting to do something constructive and walking out the door with a smile on my face. good friends will pick you up when you fall down. great friends, on the other hand, will make it feel like you managed it all on your own...
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