Week Nine: Day Five
So, the journey is finally over. There'll still be plenty more coding to learn, but the actual grind of the last nine weeks (less two holiday Mondays) is finished. Although we'd all talked about this day for the last couple of weeks, it didn't really sink in. It did a little bit when we were doing our to-our-classmates presentations today and our instructors were firmly tying up any and all loose ends (why didn't I do every single homework assignment? The four who did won a book), and the reality of day-to-day life with no instructors or TAs to ask questions started to hit home.
When I focused on it, it almost felt like a sense of grief. For nine weeks, I got into a military-like routine where I woke up around 6ish five times a week — I'd shower and hop on my motorcycle, hair wet under the helmet, and get to the lab for around 7:30. There, I'd eat the breakfast I was in too much of a rush for to do at home, CBC Radio 1's Matt Galloway keeping me company from Monday to Friday (except for that one time when Coffee Maker loudly proclaimed it to be "boring"). I got to "sleep in" on weekends, but that meant getting up at the grandly late hour of 8am because I was so used to early risings.
That that's gone now gives me a feeling almost like grief, almost like something died. It's such a sudden transition to go from such a rigid routine to no structure on the horizon at all beyond what I impose on myself. Of course, I can still drop by the lab and work — and I will — but it's not the same. I'm incredibly happy to be able to finally, for the first time in almost three months, to be able to close my curtains, guilt-free, and airplane mode my phone sans alarm during the week, but the thought of not having this structure to wake up to makes me feel incredibly empty on the inside. I never felt this for my high school and university graduations, and it was probably because I wasn't as emotionally and intellectually invested in those as I was with the coding bootcamp. When you're in the trenches with the same faces for this period time, the loss of the experience is felt on a deeper level.
But all told, I couldn't have scripted the last day any better. K and I skipped yesterday's lecture on JS animations and were planning to do the same today, but F was teaching the last one and it was about interview prep so I figured it'd be a good one to sit in on. We had two example interview tech questions — I figured there'd never be an easier time to mess up in public, so I volunteered myself for the second one and it turned out I wasn't as far off as I thought I'd be! There just may be hope for my skills and confidence yet. And to top it off, we had catered tacos from Los Caballitos for the SECOND week in a row AND I had the Good Lovelies concert at the Winter Garden Theatre to look forward to later on.
After a quick lunch, I was on my way out for a smoke with H when a woman holding flowers was walking into the building. I jokingly said to her, "Are those for me?" She laughed and said, "Nope, sorry!" Glancing down at the orchids, she said they were for Christina. I didn't think anything of it because there's a business on the fourth and fifth floors, and joked back, "That's my name". But then she started spelling out the last name on the card ... — ... and it matched mine!.
It was one of the very few times in my life where I've been rendered completely speechless ♥
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