Asymptomatic

Well, if not "ever", then a long time.

Work was crazy this week. After tomorrow, I will have commuted into the city 3 times. That's pretty nuts.

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Many designers (and the people that hire them) don't realize or appreciate what happens on the development side of their web projects. Tweaking things a pixel this way or that for them is a matter of dragging it around in Photoshop until it looks good. They then hand it off to a developer expecting it's done, when in reality we not only need to do the same thing they did (at least in terms of positioning, if not aesthetics), but we have to do it by typing in code that they're typically completely incapable of producing themselves. Regardless of having to reproduce their designs in code, we frequently need at least rudimentary skills with design tools like Photoshop both to open their files and prepare their designs for the web, and the overlap is such that the only things we're really missing are 4 years of design classes (trivial compared to what we're forced by our profession to learn almost daily), and that harder to obtain ineffable sense of what "looks good".

In addition to converting their designs to code, we often need to produce, install, or at least troubleshoot a back end that lets someone create content, make it account in some way for the fact that those content creators are going to screw up the designer's pixel-perfect vision for the site with poorly-formed content, and code it all so that it scales over hundreds of pages that individually vary the one or two designs they've so elegantly produced. And too often, we're left to explain issues to the client of why the site doesn't do anything interactive (because there's no design for it), or why their navigation colors won't appear on top of the image that the client swaps in later (because it doesn't magically change from low-contrast black to high-contrast white), or why search engines will never find that paragraph of text that absolutely must be in that bizzaro font in that weird texture pattern in front of that stock art I've seen lately on your competitor's site.

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By now you should know that I've been posting a list of personal principles for the past few days. Yesterday's was about moving forward every day. Today's is about getting the most out of work.

I remember growing up always being encouraged by my parents to reach for the stars. There wasn't anything they discouraged me from when thinking about what I wanted to be when I grew up.

It started at an early age, when I wanted to be an astronaut. Now before you laugh, I put some actual planning into this. I had a kind of path to my goal sorted out -- I would enter the Air Force Academy to be an aeronautical engineer, become a pilot, and eventually fly the space shuttle. All of this came to a crashing halt when, in preparation for my future years of touring the stars, I took a drafting class in high school and found myself in a remedial math class on fractions for the vo-tech crowd.

There's nothing wrong with vo-tech, and nothing wrong with remedial math, but when I was taking Advanced Placement Honors Calculus at the time, remedial fractions broke my delusions of getting ahead in aeronautics in high school. Nonetheless, my parents were still encouraging.

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Ah, I've finally made it out of the house. I've been cooped up there all week for one reason or another. Until yesterday, I hadn't even been outside of the house other than to get packages of of the covered porch - a crime, considering the weather. But today, today is a good day.

Clients seem appeased, and work - although steady and challenging - is not frantic and stress-inducing like it often has the capacity to be. Also, we've got new projects and new people coming in, which is exciting. I'm particularly pleased with a little side project I've been coding for use at work - a Drupal module that replaces and vastly improves on Campfire's chat capabilities.

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It's frequent over the last few years that between early November and mid-January I enter a kind of soul-numbing melancholy. I'd managed to avoid it last year with the new job, and I was doing so well this year, not really thinking too much about it, but I think it's sneaking up on me. I can kind of feel its approach.

Interestingly, I think that it's nothing to do with the holidays, which maybe it used to be. And it doesn't have anything to do with my birthday, which I will once again not be celebrating on the actual day. I guess it's that I'm bothered by work stuff more these days, which is shocking considering what an influence it was last year to staying out of the funk. Now it's most of the cause. If I think about it too much, I just want to crawl into a hole somewhere.

It's a weird mix of feeling underutilized while also feeling ineffectual; overburdened while simultaneously not doing much. For things that I'm supposed to be expert at I frequently feel like that expertise is being eschewed. Things that I've volunteered to learn more about - things I don't already know much about - to help out in areas that we're weak seem to be things that I'm already expected to know, and when I don't, I feel worthless and like I'm not doing my job well.

I'm missing opportunities to work on things that might have a finite scope because I have other work that is consuming me - things I know I'm not great at, don't like to do, and have no end that I can see. It might be nice to start, finish, and be praised for something to have some simple success. My schedule seems to not allow this, I guess. Or I just suck too much to actually be given tasks like that.

I keep wondering if I'm telling myself that I am good at this, but really I'm mediocre. Or worse than mediocre. I'm questioning a year's worth of thinking that I've ever been good at this. Again.

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