Why This Post Isn't About The Javascript DOM

My original title for this post was "Why The DOM Is The Best Lousy Thing We've Got". I guess I'm not feeling terribly creative with my titles tonight. To be honest, I'm not feeling terribly creative at all tonight. It was a terrific week, but a pretty lousy weekend. I had some unexpected work take up all my time, and it put me in a sour mood for most of the weekend.

It's strange how creativity is so dependent on mood. I'm not just talking about blogging, here; I'm talking about coding, too. When I'm doing well, I can code anything, start to finish, piece of cake. When I'm doing poorly, then even writing hello.c is a huge effort. The work I talked about earlier involved some coding at the end of it— nothing big, just a few dozen lines to shove some data around— but if it weren't for that, I probably would have had a really lousy weekend, instead of the merely lousy one I had.

Ok, now I'm just sounding needlessly whiny. If you start seeing emo bands show up on my weekly top ten chart on the sidebar, send help. Like a box of kittens or something.

Anyway, where was I. Oh, that's right, having a lousy weekend because of work. I really started thinking that maybe I made a mistake taking this job; maybe I was more cut out for the Juniper job than the Google one. Now, here's the irony. When I left Friday, I was writing a document that includes advice to people who feel that way... pretty much saying, "No, it's normal, everybody feels that way, you'll do fine". (This is advice I had previously given Cheryl, and also talked about more in my blog.) And then this weekend I get hit with this wave. Wasn't expecting it.

I did get some useful stuff done for myself this weekend, though. The office is in much better shape, with the bookshelf moved, lighting hung, and desk accessories connected. Even the living room looks cleaner for some reason. At the end of it, I wanted to relax by writing some code. I was going to learn some SVG. Still, as I sat down to work on it, nothing came to mind. I hate hacker's block.

If you haven't read Jhonen Vasquez's "I Feel Sick", it's about an artist who is suffering from artistic withdrawl once she takes a job at a big company. I hadn't read it, and didn't know what it was about, but picked it up tonight to read and forget about my bad mood. (Hint: the "Alice" soundtrack works well with Vasquez.) Y'know, that just didn't help me forget as well as I had expected.

Finally, I decided to write about a blog post I've been wanting to write for a while... I even alluded to it in a post from two weeks ago (when I refer to the "later, more technically-oriented post"). And that's what I've sat down to do here. Hmmm... I seem to have done a great job, haven't I?