When I feel sad, I just update

No, seriously. I know people do all sorts of things while angry, sad or frustrated of life. Of course, I’m no different from any other human on this planet so I have to throw out all these negative emotions. The way I like to express my feelings are different.. kinda. So, when I feel sad, I open up my terminal and type:

pacman -Syyu

It’s refreshing and fun to see all these horizontal lines appear on my screen and slowly getting full (I don’t have a fast internet connection anyway…) for several times, until a message pops-up and says there is nothing to do.

I take some seconds to contemplate the fact that it’s now the fifth time in one minute that pacman screamed me to stop this torture

Bored, I take out my phone, unlock it and open the App Store. I reach the small profile icon in the right-top corner of the page and open the updates page. With only a small force applied, I reach the top and drag the window down, waiting for that juicy moment of the new updates page to appear. A small, circular loading icon appears only for a fraction of a second, then it gives me the same page as before. Nothing changed. No updates.

Other times, when updates are to be found, I just feel happy contemplating the blue “loading update” icon on the phone. Seriously. This is not madness (I hope). Everybody has something repetitive and cringy that does to express these feelings.

It’s just part of being alive and being a computer scientist.