June 8–20, 2003 — The truth is it’s myself

I can’t sleep anymore. I’ve started work on the database design and internet programming project that I’ve been putting off for a month, and I have two weeks left to finish it. When I work on projects like these, I keep working on them long after I’ve turned off my computer. I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and think of novel new ways to eliminate database fields and reduce programming overhead.

I had stayed up late working one night, and it took a long time for me to fall asleep. In my dream, someone had broken into my room and I was hiding in the closet. I thought he was gone and got out of bed to see what he had taken. Then he grabbed me from behind, and I woke from my dream screaming. I’d never woken up screaming before. I was struggling with my sheets, convinced they were attacking me. It took me several minutes to calm down, and it wasn’t until hours later that I could sleep again.

(I learned the next morning that a friend of Jeff’s had crawled in through one of our windows because he’d made plans to sleep in our living room, but we’d locked the front door. It is no wonder I had a dream about home invasion — he must have made a lot of noise getting in, but not quite enough to wake me up.)

I have settled into a routine: I wake up at around 10:00 am. I shower, get dressed and walk to Loblaws. I buy a fresh bagel, walk home and eat breakfast. Then I brush my teeth and settle down in the living room with computer books. I read about the things I plan to work on later that day. Sometimes I will go for a bike ride.

Once it gets dark, I sit in my room and avoid working for awhile. I’ll visit web sites I normally wouldn’t and shouldn’t visit, and I work on web sites I don’t get paid to work on. Once Jeff goes to sleep, I’m normally ready to start work.

The problem with not starting work until after midnight, though, is that I start to become a bit sluggish. It takes me far too long to do simple tasks, and I write code without knowing if it will work, planning to figure out my mistakes later on. And I have to take lots of breaks. Whenever I finish anything even vaguely significant, I reward myself with fifteen minutes of Instrument, the Fugazi DVD, or The Corrections, a book by Jonathan Franzen that I am slowly making my way through.

When my deadline started to get closer and closer, I had to reduce my break schedule and stay up later and later. Towards the end I was working eighteen-hour days and not going to sleep until 8:00 am.

On the last morning, the sun was up and I was still working. I felt very sick; I was sweating even though my room was cold, and my stomach felt like it would never digest food again. I was talking to myself as I tried to write the final MySQL select statement.

I eventually gave up and sent an email to the project manager saying that everything worked except for the search function. I promised to finish it as soon as I woke up, before I went into the office for the project wrap-up meeting that afternoon.

I think my life was less stressful when I had a job.