An addendum to my previous post on the same issue, I’ve thought further about my energy levels and what seems to affect them.

Today, instead of sitting at my desk and reading Slashdot for my lunch break, I took my lunch outside, sat in the sun and read my book. It was a lot better. I got to have my half hour (and a bit more — oops!) eating and reading something totally unrelated to work, and I did so while sitting in the sun and soaking up a very limited amount of vitamin D.

Anyway, the other thing that happened today that has seemed to bolster my energy levels is two-fold: I had something to do in the morning, something specific and requiring research, something that I was able to accomplish, eventually. That was, disabling removable media via group policy. I got it all implemented, and it works. The second thing was, from the afternoon’s meeting, I had a task list which I set myself, and made some allowances for times to perform those tasks, and roughly an order, too. So, some structure will see me making better use of my time, consequently I’ll be less worried about just how my time is being spent.

I’m happy at the moment. I don’t even mind so much that it still takes me an exorbitant amount of time to get to and from work (on the order of a couple of hours, nearly), because I can tuck into a book and just relax. I’m good at ignoring the world around me when I have something interesting to distract myself with; a computer, book, game, whatever. It makes no difference. The hustle and bustle of the city and public transport fades away, and I can just enjoy my book.

Still, it’d be nice to have a choice about what I spent my time doing, instead of just using it for travelling. Suppose I ought to seek out employment closer to home.

A further addendum: these are all lessons I’ve learnt during my time of study, why have I been so silly? I guess, it’s more about taking those past lessons and applying them to new circumstances. I think that’s what I’m still coming to terms with.

It seems as though it doesn’t matter what time I go to bed, I invariably wake up tired. Whether it’s to do with the current cold weather or some other environmental factor, or due to my current state of health, or due to some other influence on my life, I’m not entirely sure.

I find that going to bed at 10pm and getting up at 6am or 5.45am, whichever is necessary, results in me being quite tired by the time 2pm rolls around. I eat breakfast, typically toast (wheat, carbohydrates, fibre) and a cold milo (energy, fats) or milo cereal (all of the above). I have fruit for morning tea: an apple, orange, kiwi fruit or passionfruit and some yoghurt. For lunch, two sandwhiches (four slices of wholegrain/multitrain/high-fibre bread) with ham (filler and flavour - probably no nutritional value), cheese (calcium, fats), spinach (iron), and tomato (good stuff?).

I don’t usually have afternoon tea, but that’s because there’s no time for it. Dinner sees me eating steak or chicken, pasta or baked vegetables.

I rarely snack. I never buy soft drinks, chocolates or other food tidbits. I have my three meals per day, and that’s all I eat. Yet I find my sleeping patterns unsatisfactory, and my levels of energy low. As I was saying, I can go to bed at 10pm or 11pm or 12pm, and the only difference it makes to my day is just how hard it is to wake up in the morning. The earlier I go to bed, the easier it is to wake — but only ever so slightly. I’m always still tired in the afternoon.

I do have a theory however. I believe it’s stress related. Days where nothing much happens at work see me not expending much energy, but I still feel drained. I’m stressed about having nothing to do. Days where I’m full on and doing stuff all day see me drained, but for similar reasons: I’m stressed about not having done enough. I can’t seem to find a happy medium where I am satisfied with myself, for the sake of myself and my employer. I thought that my new job was going to save me somewhat from this, but I was wrong. Today, I didn’t achieve what I wanted to achieve, and I came home tired and stressed.

I get to the point where, after I’ve driven all the way home, I park my car in my driveway, turn it off, turn off the headlights, and sit in silence. I sigh a big, drawn-out sigh, and I think about all the things I still have to get done, and how it all seems so never-ending. I’ve only just started my working life, and I’m already tired of it. Apparently.

I think I’m just whinging, but I know I have a point. It’s not the amount of work I have to do that’s large or particularly stressful, I think it’s simply the fact that I don’t have any adequate mechanisms for dealing with such stress. The parallel I draw between this and my last post is that the burden of choice is huge. I no longer have hard-set deadlines like I did in university with assignments, but now that my task completion is more open-ended and up to my determination and responsibility, I find myself extremely lacking. I expect more of myself; perhaps too much. My employers seem pleased, so why can’t I be too?

I just don’t know. I think I’m worried I’m not “good enough” at all the things I’ve been studying these last few years. I think maybe I’m worried about having wasted too much time, and I think maybe I’m worried about having fallen behind all the other examples of students of my age. I think this is partly why I used to (and once again are) occupy my spare time with so many personal projects.

Matter of fact, remove all the uncertainty from the previous paragraph, and you have the exact reason I’m under so much (self-imposed) stress.

Well, this post helped me figure that out. This is what my blog is for, and I’m sure I’ve mentioned that before, but perhaps not so blatantly.

For a while there, I’d lost my groove. I’ve always been seriously interested in constantly learning new things about computers, and learning new things in general. For a while there, my interest was waning somewhat. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what it was, although I know many people will tell me it was my other half. Haha, yeah, that works.

Anyway, the point I’m making is that for the last 12 months or so I’ve been wallowing a little in my own self-pity. There was an interesting story on Triple J’s hack programme Friday, about how kids — well, young adults — these days are stressed out to the max when it comes to making life decisions. Australia’s quite a well-off nation, and our high-school graduates are faced with so many choices because of this. Straight into work, tertiary education, travelling the world, dole bludging even. The comparison is made to the era of our parents whose career choices were extremely limited. A good example would be my own mother who finished school at the end of year ten, whose only marketable skills at the time saw her placed into any of the following roles: secretary, typist, or administrative assistant. Yeah, you see what I’m getting at?

These days, we have so much freedom in terms of choosing our career paths … it’s quite stressful. The point is made on the programme that it sounds spoilt, but the burden of choice is extremely taxing on our young minds, and it’s not an easy decision at all.

Anyway, the point I’m getting to is that I’ve never really know what I wanted to do. Parents and teachers always asked during high-school, and even before, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” — which I think stemmed from their own upbringing, and the mindset that you were destined for some arbitrary role in society of your limited choosing. They asked a question which wasn’t relevant to the children whom they were asking. In my case especially, as I’ve never really had any life goals.

I want to own a sports car, and I want to own a house one day. The time frames are pretty undetermined. Though these days I’m thinking more about those two goals, if you’d asked me about those things three years ago, I wouldn’t have had an answer for you. These things do take time.

So for the last twelve months or so I’ve been doing not much with my life. Just studying and working when I have to, and in my personal time, chillaxing. Which is fine, but I think I neglected my self-learning a little. I dropped out of the loop for a while. In hindsight, I can see that it was a good thing for me to have done. I was getting bored with it all, and I needed a change of pace. So I spent time with my girlfriend a lot, and more recently started wasting time playing World of Warcraft.

I don’t mean to say that I’m going to neglect my personal time now that I’ve re-energized myself. I’m going to devote more thought to my personal time so that the time I do spend on myself, and on others, is more worthwhile.

Work has picked up, though. Not my main job, that’s still pretty bland. I don’t care about finance so much. It’s remotely interesting, and I’ll pick up tidbits as I go along, but I won’t actively teach myself about it. My other job however has started off excellently. I’m my own business and I’m doing some research for a guy who does full IT system implementations for small businesses. The twist is that he does it using all open-source software. You know how much I love open-source.

So last Wednesday, my first time working for him, I spent some of the day researching ways to do unattended installations with Ubuntu Linux, and then I spent the rest of the day starting to implement our first revision of system we’re putting in place. I spent the entire day working on my laptop (Arch Linux), logged into his server (Ubuntu), using awesome open-source tools (Firefox, Tomboy Notes, vi, etc). It wasn’t restricting (licences). I didn’t have to learn to speak another language (Microsofteese). I wasn’t constantly worried about lack of documentation (third-parties).

So now even though I’m about to spend my Sunday fixing not one but two Windows PCs for friends and family, I’m not in that poor a mood. I’m going to fix one by installing Ubuntu on it and having all the Windows-only apps run in a virtual machine courtesy VirtualBox, and the other I’m charging for. So that balances out for me!

Anyway, the Ubuntu ISO has finished downloading, so I better get to it.

Well, yesterday, it happened. My graduation ceremony. Initially I was reluctant to go. I only went to my high-school graduation ceremony grudgingly. Some people may say I’m an idiot. Indeed, many people would’ve thought I at least looked like one. While everyone else was dressed in suits and ties for the formal, I showed up in khaki pants and a hawaiian shirt because I wasn’t going to the formal. I didn’t really like anyone in highschool outside my own group of friends, none of whom were themselves going to the formal. So, I didn’t care about it.

Anyway, I was having similar feelings towards my uni graduation ceremony. Not only did I have to wear a crazy square hat (called a mortarboard I found out) and some robes, I would have to pay $55 for the privilege! Well, I was outraged. A little. Not really, I just didn’t feel like paying that much for something I didn’t really need to be at anyway. Though thankfully, friends and family convinced me otherwise. I went, and I’m glad I did.

Wearing the robe and mortarboard was a good feeling. The ceremony was held at QPAC in South Bank, and after robing up before the ceremony I met with my mum at the art gallery. This meant walking around in public in my academic dress, and that made me feel good. Aside from the other graduates I saw (there were 390 that day; the largest ceremony ever apparently), I noticed that nobody else was wearing robes. And although statistically speaking it’s probably unsafe to assume the people I saw didn’t have degrees, the fact was that I was graduating that day and they weren’t.

The ceremony itself was pretty long; as mentioned, there were almost four-hundred graduands to be handed their certificates. This length wasn’t helped at all by the various guest speakers chattering on. Most of them were welcome, but there was an MP there, Mike Kelly, who seemed to make a rather round-about point on how important our degrees were. His speech was the longest and most awkward. He was a private practice lawyer before working for the ADF for 20 years and then turning to politics. His language was interesting as it he used some typical legalese, but combined with the bluntness of language only 20 years of ADF service can create, it came out a little strangely. Anyway, I digress.

I sat with my fellow graduands for about two hours total, with the preceding speeches and ceremonial back-and-forth providing some interesting introduction to the entire affair. After all, I haven’t graduated from uni before yesterday, so it was interesting to see just what went on. The process of handing out the certificates was straightforward, and nobody messed up their order. Unlike the ceremony on the day before where someone placed in position 44 accidentally sat in position 244 and missed out on their special moment.

One thing I haven’t mentioned yet is that the ceremony itself was held in the Concert Hall at QPAC. All of the graduands were seated on-stage, which was interesting, because it was the same hall where I’ve seen a few acts previously, most notably Ross Noble. It was weird to see things from the performers’ side of the stage lights. They’re very bright by the way.

What I found super-awesome though is that while friends and families from outside were being seated, the music team were playing some songs on the huge pipe organ. One of the songs they played was the Star Wars theme song which I had a giggle at. It was epic to hear it played on the huge organ though.

So now I’m going to get my certificate framed and put it somewhere people can see it I think. I also think that I might go on to do my masters, or maybe another degree entirely. I can’t see myself settling into a work-only lifestyle, unless the work’s particularly challenging.