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May 15 2011, 07:01
Okay, let's see if I can shed some light on the past month or two. After coming home from Atlanta, my introversion instinct catalyzed with my professional frustration. I became extremely withdrawn and wanted to think absolutely nothing about who I am, what my goals are, and my place in the world. Instead, I wanted to immerse long-term in some other story, which generally means an Archive Binge of something. So I read ALL of the mixed-media serial epic Homestuck. I am aware that I am among the very last to discover this thing but, well, it looked stupid from the outside.
When I was done I nearly managed to feel social again, because reading all that dialogue mostly in the form of chat logs primed me for the medium, and I felt like I could totally chat with a bunch of people, even while their world crumbles around them, which sometimes would be the case. But the usual problem of nobody ever being available at the same time prevented any such adventures, and soon enough I retreated into my shell again. A number of expected mail-order deliveries were keeping me in an early morning 2am-to-2pm sort of schedule.
At about that point I had to refocus my attention on work. The font digitization job that I thought I had completed before my trip went into extra innings when my client said "what about italics?" I could have just skewed the whole thing with one click and he wouldn't have known the difference, but I had to do it right. I explained to him how correcting the curves and line weights to make it look right would take extra work, and he agreed, and that meant I had to do it. That dragged on for weeks because I was getting sick of looking at it. Every day I would dither around and pick at it while thinking "I should be able to finish this today," and of course the reluctance to go to bed with it still undone spun my sleep schedule around erratically. All the while I got more withdrawn and reluctant to say so much as boo to anyone.
Somewhere in here I had to put off my parents' demand for a visit because I was busy and also because I know what it always does to my morale even when they're perfectly nice to me. The phone call turned out to create this effect all on its own, because they've found Facebook and think it's a good place to put their photos. I had to try to explain to them why I do not intend to join Facebook. They don't understand what anyone, least of all I, would want personal privacy for. Why wouldn't I want all my friends and family to have immediate access to one another? Why, indeed, wouldn't I want my every online account linked together and commodified so that corporations can spam them with "Here's what we think your son would like for his birthday, based on his Amazon purchases and YouTube viewing." How could that go wrong.
Anyway, last Friday I told myself I wasn't allowed to watch the season finale of MLP:FIM until I was done with the font job. That kind of worked. I got through the actual glyph work, leaving only the chasing bugs and fighting my computer. Then I somehow messed up my neck in my sleep, and the next several days were a series of short and frequent naps as I tried to lie perfectly still as much as possible while waiting for it to get better. Then I chased the bugs and fought my computer (apparently the length of a filename can affect whether a font installs or not), and finally delivered the files to my client, knowing the phone would wake me the next day to talk him through his confusion, because he's old and losing his memory and isn't comfortable using his computer at all.
So I wade again through the whole murky problem of why the pdf won't go into Fontbook (it's not the font, it's a page I laid out showing all the characters) and why the otf won't print from his e-mail like the pdf does (it's the font), and why Fontbook only shows A-Z, a-z, and all the other characters are missing (This is apparently what the preview of a font in the Macintosh font manager Fontbook looks like, which is why he thinks he needs to get the pdf in there because it has all the characters and obviously the otf doesn't. I can't sell him on the idea of opening an application and testing the installed font by actually using it, because that "sounds complicated"), eventually leading him to a grudging half-understanding that he's in possession of what he wanted. He really is a nice old guy and has no complaints about my actual work once he can see it. I think the whole thing is finally off my hands.
That brings us up to now. Hi. I have a couple days to start thinking more about what I actually intend to do with my life before I go have dinner with my parents and come home feeling like a child that will never be able to do it, whatever it is. Woo.