Took this shot in the elevator lobby at Vancouver City Hall: some 1930’s brass something-or-other.

Unrelated to photo

A week ago I wrote about how sensitised I’ve become to the insufficient rest effects of just one late-ish night. If I do one 3am week night, not only is the next day shot, but the whole week is. Well, seems this phenomenon is not an isolated thing; it’s just part of a larger trend that threads its way through my life. Example: this past week I went out of the house for dinner

(yes, with other people) three nights in a row: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. None of them particularly late nights, BUT three nights away from home base is definitely a departure from my usual six consecutive nights a week at home here up at the fortress of solitude. The kingdom of private chillitude…ness. And so yeah, I probably could have manned my way through two consecutive social evenings without really feeling the pinch on my solo time. But you add that third evening out , and the system is overloaded and everything falls apart. I get impatient and irritable and grouchy and I need my Patrick time. So all day at work yesterday, all I could think about was getting home.

Another example: I have no tolerance for using AutoCAD the way most people use it, with the colour palette dating back to 1989: the harsh red, blue, yellow and cyan etc lines. Makes no sense to me. There are 255 colours to choose from; why use the ugliest? How can you possibly design something beautiful when the screen interface of the tool you use to design looks like dogshit? I certainly can’t. Which makes working at architecture firms that aren’t interested in replacing their horrible CAD standards with the very refined and very cool looking AutoCAD pallete that I have developed very difficult. I can’t really even do much with their system, because instead of concentrating on the work, all I can think of is how ugly the screen is.

The CAD example is cut from the same cloth as the examples above. The pattern is consistent: under the right (and sometimes, narrow range of) conditions, I do just fine, but if you change some very key criteria or environmental variables, I’m really not fine at all. In some cases I can hardly function. So It’s not a continuum with plenty of shades of grey; it’s more like either black or white, one or the other. I’m very condition specific. It’s a theme.