General sentiment of the day, during the moments where I've stepped back to breathe a bit: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA? AAAAAAAAAA! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

Chris Carrick's homemade beer is very good. It still tastes very... new? Fresh? Not mature yet? It's sweet and viscous, with tones of honey; the flavor hit is right up front, without much lingering complexity. It was a pleasant bottle, made more pleasant by knowing the person who made it, and by being able to watch a bit of its creation.

I feel a little silly about liking "How to save a life" by The Fray. I think it might have something to do with being able to hear things in the song other than vocals, bass, and the bass and snare drum. "Wait... there's this high melody sort of thing in the background, and it - it makes it sound cool." I can't hear that layering in a lot of songs, and suspect there are better songs with more complex layers of sounds that aren't accessible to me right now.

I thought this was an interesting practice, and I might try it out.

When Red Hat was trying to push all their internal development traffic out to the Fedora community, dwmw2 used to reply: "I will not answer this message until it's posted on a public list".

It's interesting to see how different people react to stress. My bad reaction is that I destabilize. At alternating times, I overwork, detach, wibble, develop a short temper (which I've managed to catch and control and direct into frustration with myself - I've chosen to do this for a long time because it's the least externally-damaging alternative I have right now), become hyperrational, get verbose, tense up...

My good reaction is that I become more meta. When I catch myself destabilizing, I keep stepping back and stepping back and back and back until I can regain control over myself, until I can have the space I feel I need to think so that I can do the things that I should do to be the kind of person that I want to be.

Then I can - as I've phrased it before - build walls around myself so that I can thrash safely within them. Asking friends for permission to rant to them for 5 minutes, 10 if I'm really stressed. Allowing myself to sleep in on a certain day, and choosing to deal with whatever time and workload consequences happen as a result of however long I crash for. Allowing myself to attend an afternoon talk, take a hot shower, spend an evening with my family without feeling guilty; these are things I choose because I want to, above all, not burn out.

I have burnt out before. I will go back there for the right reasons, though I don't want to go back. I know the warning signs and how to obey them or ignore them. (I've seen some warning signs and pulled back; I see the early warning signs multiple times a day, these days. It's good feedback for keeping me in check.) I have an idea of a lower bound for the kind of capacity that I could unleash while draining myself (though I don't yet have full control of how and how much to floor the pedal, I can keep my foot off it as long as I want) and I know what it feels like to me to be burning out, to be burnt out, to recover afterwards, and how long and how much that recovery would take. Trust me: I don't like it. It makes me miserable. I know how much I might not recover. That's the worst of all - and the most powerful knowledge to have.

When I burned out before, it was unconscious and uncontrolled; I didn't really know what burnout meant. Now that I've burnt out while watching myself go down in flames (my knee-jerk reaction of meta-ness turned out to be good here), I know what I could buy by choosing to burn out, and I know how much it costs, and I know what I won't pay it for. I don't yet know what I would pay it for, but I know that it hasn't come yet. And I hope it never will.

Another thing - closely related - is that I choose not to have a scarcity mentality. I will make sure I always have enough, feel like I always have enough, more than enough, enough to freely give all that I have to others when I'm with them.

It means that I may, at times, need to limit how much I can be with others people, because I want to be there while I'm there. It probably means that I'll continue to be lonely for a little while. That's fine. When you see me, it means I'm ready and willing to be hit. Ask me for things. Let me know how I can help you. Drag me in. I'll let you know if I need to ghost out for a bit because it's getting to be too much, though I should be mindful enough of my own reservoirs, and capable enough of tapping my adrenaline* (ADHD is useful sometimes) enough to outlast nearly anyone at being fresh.

*seriously; I freak Nikki out by doing this sometimes. When I'm tired, I can decide to be not tired for a while; it defers the crash-cost (plus a bit of interest) to later, and it's completely recoverable-from. Handy ability to have.

I'm going to work, then read a while to unwind, then sleep a bit, then wake up and get myself ready to work again. I'm taking at least 24 consecutive hours off this weekend. I'm going to cook and eat a meal with friends or family at some point this weekend. And I'll be good to keep on going.

Sustainability! It is something that's learnable. I'm not a good student of it, but hey. Learning. "Sustentabilidad" is the right word, I think.

All right. Work!