The Butt Ugly Weblog

"WTF is this banana peel doing on the table?" goes my beautiful wife this morning.

"Oh crap, there was no bag in the trash bin, so I started to put it there and I forgot all about the peel in the end." I respond.

With some mumbling and grumbling, wife starts to dispose of the banana peel, though she decides to put in some paper on the bottom of the trash bin first (because of the moisture).

After a few minutes she goes: "WTF is this banana peel STILL doing on the table?"

We laugh. We're very, very, very tired these days. And tired means easily, way too easily, distracted.

Just rewatched Coyote Ugly, a movie that probably doesn't include me in the target group. I say rewatched, because I saw it first ten years ago while I was still living in Australia. It brings back good memories, and for some odd reason, I find this movie quite charming (even if the charm is almost certainly coldly calculated) and enjoyable. It's clearly designed for the teenage girl (for the story) and is dosed heavily with scantily clad women (so that the boyfriends of the aforementioned teenagers would also pay for the ticket).

But I still like it.

Odd, how that works. Sometimes the strangest things become anchor points in life; points which allow you to ground yourself back into what you are and how you came to be. I'm now living the "busy years" of my life (kids'n'all that), and I do quite often feel lost in life, living for others more than myself. So I want to ground myself in not only the nice things, but also the silly, embarrassing - even strange or odd things of who I am.

My friend, Sanjay Khanna talks about "resilient people", and how they become people that are trusted by others upon times of great change. I find this a fascinating concept, though I am more interested in the process in how these people become resilient: Is it something that people are born with, or can it be learned? On occasion, I look at people like Steve Jobs as resilient persons - no matter how the computing industry changes, people buy Apple because they've learned to trust his taste. Or a great many politicians, who stay there no matter what. People flock to other people and stick with them, no matter what. It's interesting.

Okay, getting a bit rambly.

But really, what I've been slowly learning is that there's an interesting balance between grounding and fluttering around: you need the other to make sense of the other. Go one way too much, and you lose yourself. I can't explain it better than that, especially at fairly late on a Friday night.

Making sense of the quantum froth.

I saw my colleague using one of these, and after a few days of humming and hawing I got one myself, and have been a happy camper since. This is an adjustable desk from Reoffice, which allows me to work both sitting and standing. This is simply awesome, since all my back aches (which weren't that bad yet, but would've probably become worse over time) seem to have gone altogether. I try to alternate between sitting and standing, but especially when I'm listening to music while coding standing seems so much better as I can move my feet. The end result though is a weird little dance you kinda have do when the hands can't leave the keyboard...

Of course, any back pains are now replaced with aching feet, but I think it's a good tradeoff :-)

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