For the past three years and the last year particularly, the activity at deninet and my creative output has dwindled. I've whined about it, justified it, unjustified it, and reasoned with it to no avail.

So what in the hell is going on?

Ever since I was a little kid, I understood I had a rather uncommon medical problem. Treatment was available, but at the time impossible. My Mother did not trust doctors and I went untreated for most of my life. Coverage was possible, but difficult. Even so, at the age of nine I set my mind toward what I hoped to be a better life through modern medicine.

In the last three years I've been under enormous personal and professional pressure. While building a career in the IT field, I saved whatever money I could in order fulfill my ambition. I began exercising regularly, then damn near excessively. I dieted. I lost weight. I jumped through all the other hoops placed in front of me -- all to reach the final goal.

Surgery.

Surgery is a stressor in it's own right. First it's an abstract appointment consisting of doctors, locations, and costs. Then all to quickly it becomes frighteningly real. Flights need to be booked. Calls exchanged. Schedules drawn up to the hour. Money changes hands. Doctors are seen to assure your safety.

When it's not a flurry of activity, it's a grinding, intolerable wait. I found myself wanting it to be fucking over already. You hear stories about how many brain cells die for each minute of anaesthesia. And then, I'm in a hospital gown, fitted with sensors and tubes, splayed on a stainless steel table in a sterile room. I stare upward at the OR lights...

...and find them replaced with the low florescence of your hospital room. I struggled for consciousness, clarity. I ran through a quick list of cognitive and acuity tests. After a few minutes I was sure I was fine, if exhausted and drowsy with pain medication.

That was six days ago.

I was discharged on Monday after a very long weekend. Since then I've been recovering at a local guest house, watching far more television, and engaging in more hours of unproductivity than I otherwise would prefer. Being away from home, it's a bit like sick leave and a bit like vacation. The physical scares aren't then only ones healing.

I always feel disconnected and surreal whenever I return to the US after an international assignment.

The first thing I notice is the change in sound. After three weeks in Germany, the sound and rhythm of American English sounds oddly foreign. I found this welcome on my previous trips, but this time I found myself missing the distinctive pattern of German before boarding my first flight home. Even the sound of my own voice seems oddly out of place.

The second thing I notice is that my phone works. When abroad, I have three phones with me at all times. I have my personal blackberry, my work blackberry, and often I have a standard mobile native to the country. It didn't occur to me until the last week that I could pop out the SIM card from my native phone, and pop it into my work blackberry to reduce my technological baggage. My personal blackberry typically has the mobile network switched off for cost reasons. It only becomes a useful network device when entering into the range of an open Wifi access point. Once connected, it furiously downloads a backlog of emails, tweets, facebook status posts, and podcasts.

The third thing is money. When I landed state-side, I stopped by a Starbucks and ordered a blended coffee drink. I baulked when I first saw the price -- 5.30 -- which I had assumed as in Euros for the moment. The cognitive dissonance was even more pronounced when I realised I could use my bank card to pay instead of putting down a pale blue five Euro note.

My fingers still entangle themselves on special characters when typing on an American keyboard, expecting the needed keys to be in a different configuration.

I can't say that this isn't unexpected. When I first heard I would be working on this assignment, I made the decision to open myself to the experience. Instead of fighting against the language -- or analysing it mercilessly -- I chose not to think about it. Instead of trying to translate what I heard, I would listen and pick up what I could. This unconscious method has little in the way of control, but oddly, seems to work better than anything I've tried previously.

The net affect was the creation of a new headspace in which German sounded normal -- even if I didn't understand everything. Likewise, cultural artifacts like money also seemed normal. When I return to the US, this headspace persists, making my own native culture seems oddly foreign.

Eventually, it'll wear off. Green money will seem the norm. The flat, monotone of an American voice will seem customary. The only problem is that I don't want to let go...

It's been hard to say why I haven't written all that often lately. There doesn't seem to be a single reason.

I have been traveling internationally as of late. The demands of the assignment and the timezone change made my free time in the evening a rare occasion. Energy was equally difficult to come by. After a long day of trying to parse bits and snatches of a language that I can't quite understand, and composing a complex middleware solution, I barely could manage to hit the hotel gym each night.

Furthermore, the little company I worked for has recently been merged with a larger company. While I don't want to get into details on a public forum, you can imagine the effect.

Sunday afternoon I decided to purchase a new system, after more or less living out of other people's systems for almost a year. Like always, I had done extensive research into the matter. I wanted a laptop that was light, smaller, had visual style and a proper amount of power.

Of course, it also had to run Linux.

Laptops and Linux are often a hit-or-miss experience today. Compromises made by the manufacturer during the design process often result in "soft hardware" that requires special drivers to function. Some critical pieces of hardware fail to run at all under the open source OS. Thankfully, there are some vendors that know better and are willing to make at least one Linux compatible model.

While I could have gone to speciality vendor such as System76, I decided to go with the ubiquitous (and more cost-effective) Dell. Specifically, a Dell Studio XPS M1340.

Dell is a bit of a surprising choice for me. In the past I've considered their hardware generic and boring from a design perspective. Recently, however, they've put significant effort into changing that perception. The original XPS 1330 was a favorite of mine. The Adamo targets the "prosumer" with exceptional design.

The Studio XPS I purchased originally shipped with Windows Vista. My lack of experience with it resulted in a number of BSODs and eventually a factory reinstall once I had resized the partitions. After about 24 hours, however, I had a nicely dual-booted system running Vista and Kubuntu 9.04.

It's curious being alone in another country. You find you have surprisingly little distraction available to you. The television is full of barely comprehensible programs in a language you cannot parse. Those you know back home are now several timezones offset from yourself. You may even be terrified to step outside of the hotel for fear of being seen as strange, or worse, that you may become lost completely with no one to help you.

I had one goal today: sleep until the reading from the clock matched my internal sense of time. I've only been partially successful as it feels to be 8pm rather than the 11 displayed on my laptop screen. This apparent laziness is actually sound business sense; a well rested consultant is a productive one, productive consultants result in happier clients. Give a little, get back a lot.

Granted that I don't encounter a bout of insomnia later this evening, I feel I would be ready for work tomorrow morning. That may be delayed, of course, by the arrival of my coworker just before noon tomorrow. Now I have to decide if I am going to go in myself, or wait. If I go in myself, I'm unsure of how useful I'll be. Not knowing the language, as well as not being on the assignment for months may make me more cumbersome to the client rather than useful.

Meanwhile, I cannot seem to put the thought out of my mind that I should be doing something while waiting. Should I write? Draw? Bury myself in my hasty study of the German language? The latter seems the most accessible right now. Even if I manage to memorize one or two words, I'd make progress. What of writing or drawing?

I've been thinking about my skill as a writer and artist, and how that relates to the projects I want to attempt. Am I really at a skill level where I can attempt to tell these stories, and have them turn out the way I want? When I was younger, I thought I had a lot of skill and talent, today however, I see so many faults and inexperience in my previous efforts. My disdain of even basic grammar, the poor proportions, and the stilted dialog. As I began to realize how much I had to learn, I became more and more hesitant to produce anything subject to such criticism. My hectic work and private life provided ample excuse.

In that time, I've tried to make myself into a better writer. I've taken to reading not just for the sheer pleasure of it, but as an opportunity to improve my skills. Many a professional will say that a good writer must be a voracious reader first. While I've taken that advice to heart, I've been less successful at taking the second piece of advice most often given by professionals. You must write a lot.

My output the last year has been practically nonexistent. I could chide myself for this, but there doesn't seem to be a point. Further to the point I needed to set my own writing aside for a while so as to gain a more mature perspective. With that in mind, I now need to make the effort to write more often.

The hardest part is overcoming the unpleasant sensation of disuse. Like a rusty wheel, the words refuse to spin upon the axle smoothly, and only do so under protest with loud squeaking.

Two nights ago my vacation started. I've set aside two weeks of time away from work, away from software training and IT consulting. I'll be spending part of it with a friend in Seattle, and the other half at home. You would think that I'd be thrilled for this opportunity to relax, to unwind, to recharge for the next round of professional tasks. You'd think that.

Instead, I'm absolutely dreading it.

Years ago I would spend the days and weeks prior to a vacation imagining what I would do with my reprieve from the working world. I'd often use it as an opportunity to make a push in the development of one of my current projects. If I were lacking an "active" project, I'd start one anew. The end result was to work myself into a blissful creative exhaustion.

Thinking about this, there was really only one time this actually worked. Over a decade ago, after months and months of thought and design, I spent three wonderful days attempting to write a video game. 

It was early in what became a five year effort. At the time I was creating a MYST-clone set in cyberpunk world of virtual reality. I was coding in C++ on MacOS 7. I started with almost nothing, but ended in a small program that would navigate a single stationary node of the game world. It responded to interface events, displayed graphics with special effects. I can't remember if the program was able traverse multiple nodes, but it was certainly an accomplishment with my developing programming skills.

By Monday night of the three day weekend, I was exhausted yet nearly euphoric with success. I was amazed how much I accomplished in those 72 hours. With only a little bit more time, I thought.

I didn't realize how much more I had to do. I hadn't externalized the data in files. It couldn't play integrated video. There was no plot, no story, nothing but a few slides rendered in a consumer-grade 3D modeler. To call it a "game" at this point is quaint, maybe a bit amusing to me today. 

I'm two days into my vacation, and I still haven't decided how to spend my time. Mostly, I've frittered away each day watching videos, surfing the 'net, and wishing I were going back to work tomorrow. Instead, I'm packing a messenger bag and a new carry-on rollaway for a 1300 mile flight tomorrow afternoon. 

And I'm dreading it.