I feel flat emotionally today. I don't know where to start or what to talk about but I am here, on the page, because it's been a few days and I feel lousy about ignoring my writing in favor of other things, the same way I have done my entire life.

I wonder if I will ever truly be able to write for the satisfaction of it, instead of squeezing it in between obligations and – let's face it – other hobbies and pursuits that I simply prioritize above it.

Since I don't know what to write about I'll do a boring bulleted list of things that have been going through my head, and stuff I've been working on.

  • I think I finally stopped smoking. I had a few cigarettes on Friday, mostly because I was bored, but also because the anxiety that never leaves me seems to call out for them continually. I try not to write about quitting smoking in my journal because even the mention of it implies something contractual, and I inevitably break said contract in a week, and then feel silly and stupid about putting, in writing, the so-called fact that I quit smoking for good. Which increases the frustration and guilt that I feel around smoking, because I tried to quit again, and failed again, and I must be a shit. Better to not mention it. But I'm mentioning it here. I'm old. If I don't quit now, I'll surely get cancer. I might get cancer anyway, I've been smoking for so long. I tell myself that I smoke so irregularly that it's unlikely it's affecting me. But it adds up. I wind up going through thirty packs a year. Trust me, I did the math on it. That's a lot of cigarettes – six hundred! Which means I'm averaging nearly two a day. Some days five, some days none. It's over. I don't want to be that guy who at 70 is on an oxygen tank. The social stigma of it is alarming to me. I started imagining, for the first time in my life, other people talking about my (imagined) cancer. My close friends, who know I "used" to smoke, will say things like It's a shame Tobias couldn't quit. And everyone else will be gobsmacked. What terrible luck, for someone who doesn't smoke to get cancer and die. They'll say that because nobody knows I smoke. It's a big secret. I'm tired of that too. If I'm not smoking this brings the total number of so-called bad things I do down to just one: occasional cannabis gummies. Which is not as occasional as I would like it to be, but dammit, I seem to need something sometimes.
  • I have been thinking a bit more about the upcoming shoulder surgery. Next Tuesday. This is the arthroscopic surgery on my left shoulder. I am trying not to be nervous about it but the fear is creeping in with every day that passes now. On Thursday morning I have a phone appointment with a clinician to go over the details. If I need to do anything to prep and that sort of thing. And what time the surgery is – I don't even have a locked time yet! So it's hard to visualize how the day is going to go. Sometimes I think I should back out. That voice sounds like this: I can still undo this. I don't have to. My shoulder isn't that bad. It's just occasionally the bone slipping out of the cuff because of the tear. It's only occasionally causing me a lot of pain when I reach upward above myself because of the cysts. I am only occasionally having tingling in my forearm, wrist and hand because of the pressure on the biceps tendon. It's not so bad, you shouldn't bother. But the other voice, the one that made the appointments with the doctors to get this done, is adamant. It's been bothering you for fifteen years and progressively getting worse. It's impacting your life. When you have a new strain or flare-up, you can't sleep on your left side, which means you're then on your back and snoring. This doesn't merely impact you – now you're also impacting Penny. It's not that invasive, it's just a scope! You've been reading about MLB pitchers doing this for twenty odd years of your life. Plus you are young now – recovery will be smooth and easy, most likely. Just do it. You'll get time off work and Penny will handle more around the house and you'll manage it all. It'll be ok. Stop worrying about it. So that voice wins the arguments and I stay the course and I'll wind up on the operating table on August 11th letting a doctor cut into me and wondering if, in a year, I'll look back at this and feel like it was a good decision or a bad decision. It's impossible for me to know right now, and it's that uncertainty that it is difficult to sit with.
  • Work is work. I still spend too much time on it but I have also been mixing in some time on my hobbies during the day as I go between one meeting and another. I'm working on what I think of as "the big merge" now. Reconciling differences between our SAML and OIDC clusters. There are a lot of details to keep in live memory, inside of my head, until this is done. Little things – configurations that I changed and have to remember to import later – trickle down dependency effects and so on. But ultimately the big question is: will we discard the so-called Remote User authentication flow? I sure hope we decide to do this. I spent a week finding a bug in that code and harassing Alpo, who is the application creator and owner, to fix it.

The flatness is starting to take me. I have more to say but the will to actually say it has left me. I wanted to write something beautiful today and looking at this entry I'm pretty sure I failed.