Remember the anticipation commercial from
back in the late seventies or so?
The ketchup was so thick that it seemed
to take forever to pour out of the bottle.
Anticipation is the mother of anxiety,
I believe. So many nuggets of wisdom
address this issue.
Such as,
“The waiting is the hardest part”
Damn, that always makes me think
of Tom Petty.
Tom Petty, now that is one cool cat.
Even if you don’t care for his music,
dude is cool, he has always had his
own stride.
When I think of Tom Petty,
I always remember that Alice in Wonderland
inspired video he made, which I really enjoyed.
This reminds me of when MTV first came out,
Martha Quinn, damn I wanted to bang her,
and I’m not really sure why.
What was the first video MTV played?
“Video Killed The Radio Star”,
by the Buggles.
My tangent has become a one to two relationship,
one of the downfalls of writing in the linear fashion
that is the norm, you cannot simultaneously
develop two ideas in parallel.
After spending so many years writing code
for clusters and other situations that required
this type of concurrency, the inability to effectively
achieve this when writing has begun to
appear to me to be a major design flaw.
So now, I am forced to apply a work around,
a kludge so to speak to introduce the idea
that fit so well as a thread off the Tom Petty
Video.
My favorite programming language has always
been Smalltalk. It’s popularity, is not so popular,
but the design is pure. You may not realize it,
but the way you use a computer,
the graphical user interface and
the mouse both came directly from Smalltalk.

People who use Smalltalk describe the difference
in how they look at ideas and problems after
learning and embracing the methodology
and philosophy. When I began to learn Smalltalk,
I was told over and over to read
Through the Looking Glass
by Lewis Carroll.
More Alice and her Wonderland.
It seemed utterly ridiculous to me,
until the pieces of this puzzle of seemingly
blobs of green began to take shape, and
become a forest of trees with leaves.
I keep a copy handy with the other
books that I treasure.
The Art of War
by Sun Tzu,
Advanced Programming in The UNIX Environment
by Richard Stevens,
and
The C Programming Language
written by my heroes Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan.

Again the failings of linear writing have become obvious,
so I will have to break the flow and swim upstream
to return from whence I came.
Alice In Wonderland, the movie.
Is it just me, or is Tim Burton a one trick pony?
All of his movies have the same look and feel.
I much prefer Tom Petty’s interpretation.

Anticipation, wasn’t that the original topic?
Why yes, and that is why I mention it now.

I had also had an interview two Friday’s ago,
and was offered the job. I did not accept the job,
for a variety of reasons. The money was good,
but not quite what I felt I should be paid. I was
left feeling unsure about the whole situation.
I wondered if I had handled it poorly and
maybe even foolishly.
I was asked to go on another interview last Friday,
I was excited about the job, as well as the pay.
I endeavored to stay cool, and not be overly anxious.
I was interviewed by two guys, and they were kind
of hard to read. I thought I had done well, and hoped
they shared that opinion.
There was no call immediately following this interview
to offer me the job. I reassured myself that it was
perfectly reasonable. The weekend of waiting was
long. I felt every minute, it was slow.
I thought maybe I would wake up this morning,
with an email containing an offer.
I received not one email during the night.
The anticipation I had been feeling was doing it’s
best to give birth to anxiety throughout the day.
I fought off the demon thoughts that assaulted my mind,
I was not going to let myself fall prey to their attacks
of panic.
The hands of my clock, the hands of all my clocks
had now completely stopped, as if time itself had
become frozen.
I busied myself with an endless array of time wasting projects,
anything to keep my mind from creating endless permutations
of possibilities, or a plague of “what if” scenarios.
Finally,
my phone rang.
I was told the interview went very well,
and the gentlemen who had spoken to
me had given the green light hire me,
all that was needed now was just a final
stamp of approval from the man that
ultimately decides such things.
I am told it is merely a formality,
and that I should hear an answer
this evening, or maybe tomorrow.

So once again,
I am holding the bottle of ketchup
and singing along with Carly Simon.