The pressure to produce a new website everyday for 180 days while managing the rest of life can get intense. Sometimes, it can be helpful to have something physical that you can cling to. For little kids, just the sheer act of living can sometimes be this intense, so they often carry around their favorite stuffed animal. But as a fully grown adult woman I would look silly carrying around a stuffed animal for comfort. Instead, I started carrying around a 22 inch flat screen monitor wrapped in bright green bubble wrap.
I have traveled from California to Pennsylvania and back three times in the last 55 days. On the first trip, I decided to just bring my laptop and use whatever monitors I could find around my parents’ house. Unfortunately, the pickings were slim.
I am still in the stage of learning where I need to look up a million things and this generally means my desktop has a million web pages open at any time. There’s Stack Overflow answers, jQuery documentation, design tools, visual inspirations, Gmail, Google Drive notes. And that’s before I even get to the windows open for actual coding! Nothing sucks worse than feeling intense time pressure and not having everything you think you need to succeed.
Before my next trip out to Pennsylvania I had a dull, aching feeling of dread. I didn’t want to fail because I was at my parents house coding on the dining room table and could have totally succeeded except for lack of screen. Thats when I decided to take one of my monitors along with me. At the time it seemed like a panacea.
But transporting a monitor to Pennsylvania comes with its own set of issues. I was super nervous about taking it. What if I broke it? What if it got stolen? Is the TSA going to freak? Where will I put it on the plane? Not only did I have to worry about getting my butt across the country, but I also had worry about this delicate piece of hardware!
While hugging a green bubble wrapped monitor to my chest made me feel better about the coding to come, clutching a monitor to your chest for dear life draws a lot of attention at an airport. More than a few people asked what I was carrying. When I replied, a computer monitor, each time I was greeted with a slight look of bewilderment. What normal person carries around a bubble wrapped monitor?!
I started to board the airplane and I was still feeling protective of my monitor, hugging it to my body while feebly trying not to whack anyone in the head with my laptop. As I headed toward my seat, I started to panic about where I was going to stow the monitor. TSA regulations strictly prohibit clutching a monitor to your chest during takeoff and landing.
As I jammed my monitor into the overhead bin, I had to let go. The stress level started to drop when I took my seat. I realized that I had been projecting my anxiety. I had transformed my fear about not being able to successfully crank out websites into concern for the safe passage of my monitor. I felt a little silly.
But did I feel silly when I was at my parents house coding? Heck no! Screen space FTW! A mental crutch or not, I now take my monitor wherever I go.
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