There is a book called ‘The Phantom Tollbooth‘ it’s one of those books that I read that redefined my personality. There was demon in that looked like le fils de l’homme only he actually didn’t have a face. He went on all the time about change being bad. This was also the book that made me love math and language. It was dark in places and demonstrated that just because you were a child you could still deal with tough decisions. Indeed it really emphasized that when you are a child your lack of experiance makes MANY things a tough decision.

The one thing that really stuck out in my mind though was a house with a door on each of its four walls. Each door was labled differently. There was ‘The Giant’, ‘The Midget’, ‘The Fat Man’ and ‘the Thin Man’ as you may have guessed each door was answered by the same perfectly average man. The reasoning was that from a thin perspective, he was fat, tall he was short etc.

This made a profound impact on my life. That and Obi one Kenobi saying that much of live depended on a particular point of view. that being said I am feeling more and more stupid at work. A database problem continues to ellude me and because of this I feel worthless. My one shining star is that one of my co-workers is doing incredibly well and by all accounts is succeeding just as spectacularly as I am failing. Keep in mind I am biased towards this individual, just as I am biased towards myself. That is to say this person gets an automatic plus 100 to all rolls dealing with my perception and I automatically decrement 75 from my own rolls. (and the obligatory DnD reference was hit)

I have just been thinking that my perception of me is lacking right now. I wish I could see what other people think of me because at the very worst they will think what I think they think. wow. THAT was a bad sentence. Anyway I know I am pretty cool and most the people that know me seem to like me. I also know I am pretty smart. As and Bs without trying as hard as I could is a good indicator of that.

combined with lack of sleep and lack of proper nutrition I have been,, not depressed but,, something very similar, despondent works. I feel hopless and trapped like nothing is changing and that I am stuck in one place unable to get out,, I don’t want to go to work because I face the Sisyphean task of trying to beat a MS 2000 sql table into performing a task it SHOULD be able to do but can’t because the designers have only vaugly heard of primary keys and thought they didn’t sound like too much fun so they ignored them!!!!!

COME ON! I didn’t know ANYTHING about databases and I KNEW to put in primary keys! if you have a PK and a table linking your stupid data I don’t care HOW much data you have you are better OFF. lets see, I want to link this table with those results? okay well Ill just make a table that gets populated with a trigger and a stored procedure whenever there is an update and BAM its DONE. I have concatenated all your orders into one table and everyone is happy! but NO primary keys are for LOSERS! we dont need them we can make aggregate keys from our non normalized database that has only a bare semblance of uniqueness if you only select the top 5 rows!!!!!!!! HOW THE HELL DO YOU EXPECT TO GET ANYTHING OUT OF YOUR DATA BASE?! think of it logically! a 3 week old blind rat with no arms (do rats ever have arms?) could easily see that you need SOME way of identifying your data! Im gonna put all your clothes in identical boxes with no labels or outward signs of whats in them. I want you to find the purple boxers, the red shirt and the yellow pants (and thus prove you are in fact a clown) WITHOUT CHECKING ANY OF THE OTHER BOXES!!! come on!!! can’t be done!

okay one other really odd thing I realized today, I have been having bad days at work, because of it being hard and feeling useless, and I discovered on my way home that what I really really really wanted to do was take care of someone else so I could feel useful and appreciated. Let me tell you THAT was a weird realization.

whoo hoo! it was less than a month since my last post,,, oh,, wait,, no woo hoo less than two months since my last post!

alright SCHOOL starts in a few weeks! YES masters program! YAY Im a grad student! woo hoo!!!!