Some stuff

This past week hasn’t been a very good one. Exams have started, and they always manage to get my mood to swing dangerously low, which in turn makes me see everything inevitably black and jeopardizes my ability to study. Throughout the year I’ve managed to pass 3 courses already, and I’m hoping to pass 3 more from now until July 16th, when I’ll take the last of this set of exams, if I can manage to pull that out. But then there’s the Debian stuff too: these past days I’ve been having a Debian crisis of sorts, coincident with my return from the Release Team meeting in Cambridge on June 1st, and evidenced by my lack of interest in procrastinating studying for my exams by doing Debian work.

I came back sensibly disenchanted from Cambridge, mainly due to the realization of a couple of things. One, that I have a vision of management that is not globally shared by all members of the team, or at least one wouldn’t say so by looking at some of the courses of action proposed there. And, two, that I lack the strength to impose this view of mine upon others, and that I’ll prefer to back off and concede rather than fight for it (but, sadly, this is nothing new in my life). This, combined with the constant feeling (promulgated by myself, mostly) that I’m never performing well enough in my role, and the accumulated abundance of tasks, have contributed to a rather stressful couple of weeks, and made me end up out of stamina for Debian.

Now, I think I’m fortunate enough that I can be conscious that this “paint it black” mood is probably playing an important role in all this, so I’m not despairing. It’s only natural, I think, to go through low-stamina periods at times. It has certainly happened to me in the past already, and slowing down for a bit and spending more time in other activites did serve me well in such occasions. However, it’s been already more than a week off this time, and things are not really improving, so that’s why I’m going to go VAC for some time; it should also help with the studying, I hope. There are some tasks, like training new assistants, for which I would like to say, “No, I’ll still be taking care of that”, but that would miss the point, since the point of this VAC for me is not feeling guilty at all if I feel like doing exactly zero Debian stuff throughout all of it. But well, I’ll try to prioritize that should I find some time and energy to spend in Debian.

I’ve felt tempted to cancel DebConf, but I’m not letting that get painted in black too, at least not yet. Even if Debian is not joyful for me at the moment, it has been fully so in the past, and I’m hopeful it’ll be again soon.