The Week of Too Many Things

I just started an enormous project at work. It is blisteringly, gob-smackingly large. The biggest project I’ve ever worked on by far, and just the sort of thing not to be measured in sprints or seasons but whole dang years. And yes, despite my overwhelming charisma and my handsome dashing-ness etc. etc., of course I’m worried I’ll mess it up and make some half-baked decision that sends the whole thing crumbling to its knees. But sometimes anxiety is a good sign!

And sometimes it’s absolutely not! If you’re not careful—THEN!—the anxiety can become so overwhelming that you feel like a bowl of cold pudding trying to grasp the heat death of the universe. The problem being so vast, incomprehensible, and foreign to you that it’s impossible to know where to begin. Is this the right problem to tackle first? What about this problem? Or that one? What if all the problems are really just one big problem and you need to sit back and try to understand an interstellar group of quantum possibilities when you’re just a barely functional bowl of cold pudding?

Anyway. That was my week.

In order to stop this project from hijacking my whole personality with anxiety, I stopped playing all the stressful games I’ve been playing lately and sat down to do something impossible: watch a whole movie from start to finish in one sitting. But oh boy what a movie it was! If you are currently overwhelmed with everything then I would highly recommend After Yang. There’s no violent plot twist, no evil villain, and no impossible problems to overcome until the next episode.

Instead, After Yang is the textbook definition of cardigan sci-fi. It is slow and warm and everyone is wearing soft colors and fabrics. They drink tea from the safety of their luscious gardens, and the outside world feels…safe. It’s a very calming and bittersweet movie which I refuse to say anything more about it in case I spoil it but in one montage I confidently, heroically, wept like the bowl of cold pudding that I am.