A Minor Update

This isn't going to be long, or deep; just an update on my life.

Time has been flying by for the past week. Right now I feel slightly depressed. I'm not used to being depressed. It's as puzzling/foreign to my rational mind as it is explicable, and predictable. Lately at work, although I know I'm making progress, I've been under a lot of stress. I've been dancing around some seemingly unsolvable roadblocks to my finishing one of the components that I'm writing. The thing is, I know it's possible to solve, and the knowledge to do so lies in the brains of one or more other programmers in the building. The problems are (1) this knowledge can be difficult to track down (2) these people are busy with their own work, and (3) programmers, by and large, are not hired for their superior communication skills. It's not like I'm sitting at work staring at my computer screens and banging my head on the desk⁰; there has usually been something else I can work on, and I am (slowly) making progress, but these problems are looming around the corner. Last night I dreamed I got fired, which was totally irrational and bizarre, but it betrays my frustration. I don't feel like I'm accomplishing anything.

It sounds counterintuitive, but I think part of the reason that I feel a bit down is that I spent lots of time hanging out with my friends and acquaintances. I'm an introvert, which means that (in contrast to an extrovert), my "batteries" re-charge by spending time alone, and the energy is spent interacting socially with people. With notable exceptions, I don't feel like I "mesh" well with the people my age up here. That, and they're so tight-knit/related, which leads to social gender polarization, in which groups of members of the opposite sex have nothing to do with each other, even when spending hours in the same small apartment, and even while playing the same group game together. Their natural state of equilibrium is two "circles" of conversation, a few feet apart.

Hence, I am frustrated at work and with friends, and this week I spent a lot of time playing video games, which you might think helps an introvert, "cause it's a 'man-cave' activity,¹" but doesn't really re-charge me, as it is largely mindless. That, and a lack of sleep all adds up to an anticlimax in my mood. I feel like I relate to so few people up here, at least people my age, and the ones I do are never around, or have gone galavanting off to other countries.²

Speaking of gallivanting off to other countries, I just bought tickets to fly to Buffalo, whence I will ride in a car to Cambridge for a weekend later this month. My parents will be there too, so that's a nice bonus.

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⁰Well, at least not all the time, and there is Slashdot.
¹This has nothing to do with introversion, and a lot to do with male unwinding, and that merely according to some pop-psi book. It is a great way to escape reality, but then so is beer, and the two are equally good at actually fixing the root problem.
²Not that I blame any of them in the least. I'm just relating how it has effected me in my emotionally fragile state *sob*