I know why you all come here. You come here to enjoy my fun little rants about my flat. Well it’s over, you hear? Over. There’ll be no more of that. From here on in it’s purely professional.

FLAT NEWS (for the last time)

I am writing this on Thursday in the hopes that if I write it will happen: I will complete the sale of my flat tomorrow. It has been a very exciting journey, and generated heaps of hashtag content for me, but I will be very, very pleased to have the damn thing off my plate. Today’s hilarity was a sequence of questions at C-minus-21-hours, all of which could have been answered by reading the things I have sent several times by email. I do not appreciate being used as the search function on whatever terrible implementation of Sharepoint they’re using, even if it is faster.

Once I finally have everything offloaded I get to do a bunch of offboarding from services. My electricity was very easy and is already lined up. The council’s website was…less good, and I’ve had to take a pause because I’m not at all convinced that I’ve pressed all the buttons and made the appropriate sacrifices in the right order.

And then – at long last – the poem I wrote will have a new home. And I’ll need to find something new to write about.

Writing code

This is going to be a little less interesting for folks, but.

I’m working on some code to match Fast Streamers, and I’m now getting into a nice crunchy question of how we calculate scores and things. As we do, I’m trying to keep in mind that I’ll need to separate things out later. Some schemes will want to score different things, and there’ll be different inputs. At the moment I have a certain amount of inheritance going on, but I’m keen to figure out better ways to write this. At the moment there’s a sort of buzzy sense around composition, and some factories maybe? Like each scheme might have its own scoring approach and if not it can fall back on the default…I think. Comments welcome.

I’m also very aware that my colleague John has been doing some work on our shared mentoring labour, and I have things to fix up. I suspect that we left it alone for too long and some library we rely on hasn’t been updated or has rotted away. Such is the nature of writing code in the 21st century, alas. John: if you’re reading this, the moment I’ve sold my fucking flat, I promise I’ll do some work on the mentoring code.

Being in love news

It continues to be awesome and I recommend it to everyone. I write poems for the people I love, which means being loved by me is double awesome, although then you do have to do literary critique as homework.

Terror of getting older news

I saw my parents over the weekend and we had a conversation. And it was frank and open and honest, which I love about my parents. From them I get a really strong principle of right and wrong; heaps of compassion; a willingness always to help those in need; and autism.

The autism means I know exactly how that last sentence will land and crafted it specifically, because one of my hyperfixations is words and language. The phrases get longer as the sentence go on and then abruptly stop, ending in something that’s not like the other. It’s why I could come up with a diatribe against what I believe is their joint unwillingness to accept they’re getting older (even as I, hypocrite that I am, have not done proper exercise in weeks! I eat fast food at least once a week!) off the cuff. I can…feel? I think? The shape of the words that need to come next.

But we stayed up late talking, and that was good. I am slowly getting to a better place with my parents. Step by step, I’m treating them less like my parents, and more like my peers. And that’s sad. It’s sad because they become necessarily a little less when they step down from the lofty perch on which we put our parents. My dad is still the same person, but he looms a little less. He is a guy. He is a guy with whom I have so much in common and with whom I love to hang out. But he’s also just a guy. I don’t have to take all of his opinions seriously, and I don’t have to argue with all the ones I don’t agree with.

And if he’s just a guy – if I can keep the image of the parent separate to the people – then when they die I will not be as angry, or as broken. Because folks will die. People I know will pass. But my dad will always be with me, and my oldest guy friend will die, and I can keep these separate.

Because I think deep down the reason we struggle so much with our parents leaving us is because they promised that they wouldn’t. We are deep down the children we were, and as we look at their bodies failing we feel their strong hands slip from our little ones in a crowd of strangers. And we are once again alone, and terrified, and surrounded by strangeness that cannot be made sensible.

Our parents aren’t supposed to leave us, and they do.