Cause I think I’m going insane.
Well, not really, but I am driving myself insane. I am in the process of starting a website. Got the host, the CMS software that I decided on, a bunch of components for the software, etc. Got it all installed and started working on the actual design of the thing.
Web design is not a skill of mine. I had a basic idea of how I wanted it to look, and the software that I am using came with a couple of templates, so I set about modifying the one I liked most to match with my hopes for how it would look. The last time I did any dabbling in HTML was when I was setting up a small scale intranet page at one of my jobs about 7 years ago, and that was all just very basic stuff.
Now, I have this tendency to get completely fixated on new projects. Sort of like a temporary OCD. The server was ready for me last Monday and pretty much all I have done since then is work on the site. Endlessly. Obsessively. It was to the point where I would sit in front of the computer at 9 in the morning, and be absolutely astonished to realize that it was somehow 7 at night, and that I hadn’t eaten anything, and had only left the computer for coffee and bathroom breaks. THere was a nearly two-day period where I didn’t even open my front door, and a three day stretch where I didn’t actually see any other live human beings. Realizing this, I forced myself out of the house over the weekend and tried desperately not to think about the site at all during my “off” time (though I didn’t really succeed).
Anyway, eventually I got the design to where I wanted it to be, which took a lot of the load off my mind. The main thing now is just to start creating the content. But just as everything was settled, I was talking to my father and asked him to register at the site to make sure everything was working fine. In the process, he uncovered a problem, and I was back to square one. Searched the documentation and the web for any possible answers, left message on various forums hoping for help, etc. All to no avail. So, because it had worked at one point, I decided the best thing to do was to back up my CSS and HTML code, scrap the files and database, and reinstall. After two deletions and reinstallations, I finally got the thing working.
Unfortunately, it seems to have turned me into a slightly neurotic mess. My dreams are seriously plagued with thoughts of the website, and worries about something not working correctly. This has been going on for a few nights now. I’ll be kissing Valentino by a crystal blue Italian stream, when suddenly he’ll look at me and tell me “the newsletter component won’t work right”. And I’ll half wake up and start puzzling it out in my head until I fall back asleep again, only to have the cycle repeat itself. Last night, I must have woken up a dozen times, trying to figure out why some new dream scenario wasn’t working. It is extremely rare that my dreams relate to current events in my waking life. I’ve been amazingly stressed out in the past, and never had the source of those stresses come knocking in my sleep, so it’s been a little bit bizarre.
This morning marks the first day in over a week that I don’t have any technical stuff to do on the site. No reinstalls, no new components, and everything is working fine. I can only hope that this means my brain will stop worrying about it even in my sleep, because if it doesn’t, I won’t need anyone to tell me I’m not crazy. I’ll know for sure that I am.
