I share an office with a man, no, an utter and delightful freak, and somehow his moods mirror mine all too often, whether it be from picking up on the stress lining the halls with their thin sheen of emotional decay, or if the culprit is yet another overdose of caffeine and the long spun recovery.
Today, we're opposite ends of the spectrum, though, but it works out, his bristling energy has somehow resulted in our windows being open for the first time this year, and the lazy climb of a single narrow sunbeam onto my keyboard, fading out just before it would hit my screen and blind me, is delightful.
And lazy.
My arms are limp somehow draped across the vast beigeness of my multi-featured spacedesk, Tom and Joe from Montgomeryville are bouncing past my door at random, hypercaffeinated (they took a taste test), intervals.
We ate our lunch outside, basking in restless sunbeams, we fetched coffees and bummed cigarettes and sat there letting them burn in our fingers.
We sat in the same spots as I sat nearly a year ago, basking in the excitement of my First Official Full Time I'm Not A Student Anymore Job.
It doesn't feel that way today, though. Rachel and her nasal excuse for an operatic whine and her attempts at arias flitting down the hallway like a hippopotamus dressed in pixie clothes are further and further from funny. Everyone's stressed, everyone's annoyed with each other, and it's getting to me too.
Especially the quick surge of "look how clever I am" when Peter asked me for help this morning converting all sorts of stuff in 1000 lines of his code from hex to rgb values... A quick perl script and several hours of work were done before my 10:30am coffee ritual. He was stunned at my cleverness, I was left wondering where my brilliant flashes of insight have disappeared to.
One second I'm bemoaning not knowing my code well enough, not being ready enough to go from the design to the project stages, next moment I am so lost within lines of messy c that I am thinking like a drone. Procedurally, methodically, and without an ounce of insight.
And part of it is that a script is easy to churn out whilst a project this big and messy and lost is far more difficult, something eats at me still, and what I am yearning for is inspiration.
And some clean laundry, and time to do my dishes, time to sort out the confused babble in my head, but mostly I yearn for the chaos of inspired thought.
Not love, not lust, not friendship, not pride, not anything but the incredible rush of inspiration.
Selfish, I know, but there's one drug that no star-crossed clinic will ever cure me of my addiction to. The adrenaline rush of creating something magnificent. It's pathetic and human, and I miss it with every glimpse of pale yellow corporate walls.
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