Week Eight: Day Three
Golly, but I've been remiss in posting about the coding bootcamp course! It's a sign of how crazy the last couple of weeks have been, but still, my goal at the beginning was documenting the nuttiness that is an academic bootcamp.
A few weeks ago, I remember feeling — I'm not sure what the word would be, but I suppose it's something a little milder than anxiety/trepidation/hesitation — I was feeling this mashup adjective at reaching the exact halfway mark of the course. I figured, the first half of it meant it was okay to be stumbling along in the dark but after rounding that bend, I should be grasping things with a firmer handle. Every single day I was at class, I never felt like I was fully understanding the material (a feeling that still hasn't gone away with just 1.5 weeks left). But I was putting mental pressure on myself to get it once that magical 4.5-week mark passed.
Now that there are only 7 course days left, I'm fighting falling into a mild version of a panic. Where on earth did the last two months go? The only other time I remember time passing this quickly was when I was 7 or 8. It was my grandfather's birthday and I don't remember at all what we did (probably just the usual family gathering with way too much food), but I do remember it the next year. I was standing in the kitchen of my childhood home, looking at the clock on the stove. For whatever reason, at that exact moment in time, I was deeply aware of the last year suddenly passing. It seemed like it had gone by in just a day, but it was actually 365.
I've heard that the Einsteinian principle that time slows in relation to the speed of light and that it's been sort of adapted to age, i.e. the older you get, the faster time passes by. But at the age of 7 or 8, is time supposed to go by that fast? Even 20+ years later, I still remember that evening as vividly as though it happened today. And today, I was struck by the same feeling. I was talking to a couple of classmates and it suddenly hit me: two months have just gone by! I have this sort of fuzzy memory of it being early August and now the leaves are changing colour, Halloween is coming up and we're only a few weeks away from the clocks going back an hour.
Speaking of Daylight Savings Time, that's been a niggling thought I've been trying — fairly unsuccessfully — to push out of my mind. For about the last five years, I've been experiencing something akin to grief once the sun goes down around 5pm and I'm walking around outside. I have this other memory from last year of walking down the street from my house, jacket zipped up to my chin and hands stuffed in my pocket, striding across the parking lot. As I passed under the obnoxiously unforgiving, artificial fluorescent lights, all I could think of was how they were so opposite of the natural warmth of the sun. It was the late afternoon and dark, with crispy yellow and red leaves strewn across the street. Just seeing this scene, which is so beautiful during the day, made me absolutely miserable at "night". It felt so wrong to have no sun so relatively early in the day, and it felt like part of me was missing.
So, for the last couple of weeks, I've been plagued by competing feelings of anxiety of the course being soon over and not ready for it, and trying to mentally prepare myself for the inevitable time change and way-too-early-in-the-day darkness. Autumn is such a gorgeous time of year (go on the Don Valley Parkway for proof), but it's tinged with a feeling of grief for me that grows stronger every year. I think I need to get one of those sun-imitating lamps or something, because if the pattern continues, I'll just get unhappier and unhappier this time of year with each passing year.
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