Week 7: Namaste
Dear Readers,
After last Friday's Udacity-induced doom and gloom, I woke up today dead set on not letting the same thing happen again. I even took a yoga class this morning called "Relaxation" to be safe. And apart from one stressful moment where I let myself get overwhelmed by the fact that Tom and I are moving in three weeks (and there's still so much to do!!), the deep breaths seem to be helping.
Now that a week's gone by and I've had a chance to reflect and talk about the stressed-out state I let myself get into, here are a couple of things I've learned:
imposing a tight deadline on myself to complete a new programming task with lots of unknowns is not a good idea (shout out to Alper, my manager, for pointing this out!)
apparently Apache airflow is quite popular, but according to a data engineer friend of mine (Hi Ellen!) data engineers tend to offload a lot of the tricky configuration stuff to the infrastructure people in their organisations so... thank god for infrastructure people!
You might be wondering if I've actually submitted the damn project. The answer is no, I wanted to make sure I had time to write this newsletter first. I did re-watch some of the course videos earlier today -think of it as a warm-up before the main event- so wish me luck if you don't want every newsletter to be about my data engineering struggles. 😬
Now is about time I mentioned the series Love Is Blind again. No, the second season isn't out, but if you're missing Jessica and the gang, I can recommend family therapist Dr Kirk's analysis of the series on youtube. Tom and I watched the whole thing in a few days. You watch Dr Kirk as he reacts to the show in real time and pauses and replays scenes to illustrate different types of relationship behaviours. That all sounds very educational, and it is, but what makes his videos even more watchable are his expressions as he watches some of the scenes for the first time (look at him cringe at Mark and Jessica in episode 5!).
Now that I've watched all his videos, I've moved on to his Psychology In Seattle podcast series. Despite being a bit of a rambler, he manages to be funny and teach you something about clinical psychology at the same time. Like the concept of differentiation which he brings up a lot while watching Love Is Blind. Differentiation, a theory invented by family therapist Murray Bowen, describes the process of differentiating ourselves from our parents and, later, the people around us. The stronger our sense of self, the healthier our relationships with our partners and other people in our lives. ⚠️Spoiler alert Jessica does not exhibit high levels of differentiation! ⚠️
Talking about relationships, today is my parents' 33rd wedding anniversary. Raising a virtual glass to you both! 🥂
Take care,
Alicia