I'm locked in my office. The stainless steel latch is flat against the door and the sky is heavier than it has been in a long time. Peter hasn't gotten around to shutting the windowblinds today, and the lights are off aside from my wee desk lamp. Peter's is unlit because he's snuck off into my lab installing horrible things (like Forte for Java and StarOffice and enlightenment themes) on my linux box. The light's seeping in ever so slowly and creeping at me everytime I swing my curls, and since princess is carrying me out tonight for a Samhein ritual and the ensuing ball, I wore my contact lenses this morning and the extraneous filter that usually sits between me and my warbeaten desk is missing.
And I'm coding. Just.plain.coding, in Java but at least I'm defining my own interfaces now and it's just a tiny little app to fit into a framework that's already been created but it's mine and it does stuff you're not supposed to be able to do with transparent files and xml and randomly generated session keys, and it doesn't work yet, but it's going to...
And I had a glass too much beer at lunch and there's a pink and white wig strewn across my desk and my rubber-bitch-collar draped over it, there are juggling balls scattered everywhere and coffee spilled in deliberate patterns along my specs.
And I'm sitting here with headphones plastered firmly on, thinking... "Steven has already seen this, hasn't he?"
When I was wee and mousy and my hair was cropped a practical two inches long and my Big Dream was to be locked in a laboratory where the walls echoed the clink of glassware and my own high-pitched maniacal laughter.
When I was slightly less wee and had a bad attitude about University well brewed by then and I waltzed into Steven's class determined to escape with as little effort as possible because it was All Bullshit Dontchaknow and I wasn't aching just to be in tech support anymore (once upon a time to me, that was a dream fucking job, that was where You Got Your Start, that was where you didn't have greasy ovens and grills and where your feet didn't hurt, only your brain), I wasn't aching for anything much...
And then I sat down and the comic strips appeared on the slide projector and the Unix kernel was fucking cool and built out of the same not-so-maniacal-in-restrospect urge to build something because you can and because it is useful, and because it is clever and beautiful and because it will make other people's backs slightly less bowed and not because you yearn for the clink of coin against coin.
And I picked up again and wanted so badly that dream, wanted so badly to be brilliant, wanted so badly to do and create and turn productivity into into this great game of hounds and jackals that I'd read once in a book about egyption avatars.
Only I knew that I'd never end up there. I knew that it was a silly dream, with silly math-obsessed monstre and her terrible grades and terrible attitude and terrible ability to retain microsoft related information...
And Steven would e-mail me, daily, deca-daily, and tell me how clever I was, and how he'd been there too, and I would try to believe him and then shake my head and say "naw, impossible, he's so smart and he knows so much and I'm just some awkward kid who spent too much time on BBSes."
That was less than a year ago. Less than six months ago, even, since my 6-month review here is up in a week and I haven't seen the time go by, locked in my lab, and I haven't looked back.
I haven't looked back to May when I knew for a fact that I was a failure and that ScrewUps was My Fault Too and that I'd never amount to anything and that if I followed my biggest dreams, those would be my highest plunges.
And no one believed I'd fall, and now I've forgotten to look down, because there isn't one anymore, there's just pale yellow walls and paperclip chains suspended from the ceiling, and the sun waning over reams and reams of beautiful code. Multicoloured, efficient, bright and creative and moving with every clever creak of a heavy compiler.
And I thought you ought to see my headspace. It tastes like dusk and cobwebbed laboratories.
And this frankenstein's room is the room that I crawl every cold morning to, the room I spend most my waking hours in, and it is a room that has never made me so proud and satisfied.
And suddenly, I feel so much less wee.