describe Breathing

I’m having this phase where I don’t hate my life, necessarily, but I’m not having a great time.

A consequence of this is that I keep having this feeling like I need to yawn, but when I try, I can only get that nice satisfied-yawn feeling like, one third of the time. (This, I am told, is due to anxiety. Although some part of my brain thinks I’m not getting enough oxygen, I’m actually getting more oxygen than I need, because of all of this heavy breathing. And the plot thickens: I’m not getting enough carbon dioxide up in my brain, because I’m exhaling it all away. The lack of carbon dioxide makes my brain think it needs to yawn again, and the cycle continues. #science!)

# breathing_spec.rb
describe Breathing do
  before(:each) do 
    me = new Person()
    breathing = me.respiration 
    brain = me.brain 
  end
  describe "with anxiety" do
    brain.set_status('anxious')
    it "gets all fucked up" do
      # note: do not write infinite loops into your test cases
      # also: do not live this way
      while brain.is_oxygen_okay? === false
        breathing.inhale()
        expect(brain.is_oxygen_okay?).to be(false)
        # again.
        breathing.inhale(force: true)
        expect(brain.is_oxygen_okay?).to be(false)
        breathing.hold(3000)
        brain.focus()
        breathing.exhale()  
      end
      expect(brain.is_oxygen_okay?).to still_be(false)
    end
  end
end

I used to write a lot, and now I pretty much never write at all. I had a real golden age of blogging. People were sending me free things (total garbage, mostly) so that I would talk about them on my blog. It was very much the dream. But the whole blog was about being a girl in college, and then I graduated.

Whoops.

Note to self: One mustn’t put an expiration date on one’s hobbies. If one enjoys a thing, one must carry on with the momentum of that thing.

But instead I became very busy, moving out into the actual world and getting a job and living in an apartment and paying utility bills. And I got all nervous that if I wrote anything, it wouldn’t be good enough, which was never a concern when I was writing shit like this.

Plus, there’s always that nagging worry that you have nothing new to say. Which, to be fair, I frequently don’t.

But I’ve been reading about Test Driven Development, and I like how the test code comes out like a real little story. And I like the idea of describing how things are because no matter how mundane, it might be worth getting on the record somewhere — what if it breaks later and you have to go back and ask, “hey, what’s that old thing supposed to do anyway?”

Like, breathing, for example. I wish I’d written down how to get myself to just do it properly.