I spent longer than I care to think about fixing things today.

This is normal for me. I am a Mr. Fixit type. I am an engineer.

Today I fixed a ton of shit on this blog. I connected mailers to DNS to my own server at home that runs unraid with docker containers, one of which hosts Ghost, which is sort of like the lighter weight and more easily customizable version of Wordpress, and you probably know what that is.

At work I helped a junior co-worker fix static image rendering on my company's login and logout pages for their portal. He insisted he made the fixes correctly yesterday and checked them into source. I insisted on going into source and showing him the commits weren't present. He said that's not possible, I committed them. I said you either are misremembering or you committed to a different branch or origin. They are not there. End of story.

In the middle of this I contact my town because I am trying to fix the deck on my house. It is broken. Carpenter ants invaded the railings and tore them apart. I knocked the railings down two years ago and applied some kind of poison to kill the queens. The deck now has ankle-twisting sized holes where the railings used to be. Two slats bend when stepped upon, another thing that will make an unsuspecting person trip and have a reason to sue you, or, if you are my wife Penny, declare this is my fault somehow.

I didn't always used to be this way. This is a common thought I have nowadays when considering my position in the world. How did I get to be like this?

As a teenager I could not give less of a shit about fixing things unless it was something that was of immediate importance. Once I dropped a relatively new Disc-Man into the toilet because I was pissing while trying to listen casually to Metallica's Ride the Lightning. In an instant I dropped down, stuck my hand in the water and urine mix, grabbed the silver player out, opened the battery compartment, took them out, and left the unit out with the clamshell open so it would air. Two days later and it still didn't work. But five days later, it did. I wanted to fix that thing so I could listen to music again. I wanted to see if I could get better at peeing while listening to music, hopefully safely on the next attempt.

Now I fix things compulsively. I fix my home media setup. I raze and pave my music library just so I can re-download things with the proper metadata and structure, because sorting manually takes too long, whereas using indexers to search by artist and bulk download is actually very very fast with modern internet speeds and neat programs like lidarr. I fix my subwoofer, because the jack on it broke, so I order the right replacement part, get out my soldering iron, heat it up, and go on a tinning spree. (It works now. That's how I used part of Sunday.)

At some point I started to enjoy it.

Penny and I got into a fight on Saturday, on the way home from her friend's house. It had something to do with wanting to do something else with your life.

Penny hates when I talk like this. When I say I am sick of my job and sick of obligations and I want to write and play guitar. She thinks I should have no aspirations other than pleasing her and work on the house and our IVF project. She becomes irritated when she feels I am spreading myself too thin.

What Penny wants, at all times, is for me to just sort of generally be around.

I do not want this. I need space. I told her in the car, look, I'm not like you, I must use my brain every day. It almost doesn't matter on what. But I need to keep it active. Talking to other people isn't enough. I need to learn something, read, write, try to get better at a skill. I don't know why. I've been this way for a long time.

This did not make her feel better. She asked what it was I was hoping to accomplish exactly. I said I don't know. She said people who accomplish a lot aren't really accomplishing anything because at the end of the day we all end up dead so we might as well have a good 'ol time whenever possible.

That's what I mean though. My good 'ol time is not always your good 'ol time. It is sometimes. I had a great day with you and your friends. But it is not all the time. I need to do things for myself.

This is the fact that makes her uncomfortable. It's hard to understand why. She becomes almost angry. I have to say stupid platitudes like agree to disagree and shit like that and then hope the conversation will fade out of her consciousness.

Tonight I have space because I was working. We just completed the cutover. I'd been working on this enormous software project to replace the identity provider that my organization uses with something open source with home grown customizations. It's taken me a year. I could write about it for days but I haven't yet. Part of me feels it's too boring to write about. Another part of me thinks I absolutely should write about it. It's been the most time consuming and important part of my life for the past year and how in the fuck am I not writing about the NUMBER ONE THING IN MY LIFE.

I don't know. I think it's the same way we go to dinner parties and ask one another what the kids are up to and where have you travelled recently and who are you rooting for in the world cup? We do not go into detail into our work lives. We do not tell our friends that we have a co-worker named Alpo that is now showing up in our dreams only to be punched in the face several times by yours truly.

It's a wonder to me. How we hold these things apart, even though they will all come back together again at night, when our brains – or at least the one I'm cursed with – try to reconcile everything into one coherent personality.

But some things cannot be fixed by dreaming about them.