With each sunrise and sunset, I move further away from the person I don’t want to be anymore and toward someone I can’t even imagine; yet, I will always keep dragging the weight of my past behind me while chugging along into the future. Time never changes down here on earth. How I spend my time is how I choose to live my life. Time shaped who I am right now, and only through time can I live the type of life I want.

I keep chipping away at improving myself, and with all the small victories I’ve racked up over the past 160 days, I’m at a point where I feel confident enough to do anything. For the past few weeks, I’ve been attempting to rearrange and rethink how I live my days, and for the most part, that meant focusing more on my writing and all the peripheral tasks that can improve it and less on those things that are either unproductive — watching TV, surfing the web, etc. — toward more productive things, things that I love to do but haven’t focused fully on, things like writing, reading, and learning.

I want to be published. That’s it. That’s my goal. I want to write something good enough that somebody with the power to publish it, will. That’s the simple truth of it. But to be published, I have to write. Not only do I have to write, I have to write well. Not only do I have to write well, but I have to finish something, and I have to improve it and improve it and improve it until it becomes better than good enough. In fact, it has to be better than even that. It has to be the best thing I can physically produce at this moment in time. And to do that, I have to keep writing, to keep doing better than my best, and to keep doing all of that every day.

My novel sucks right now. It started off with an intoxicating energy that propelled the first three chapters forward and gave me a false sense of confidence. Six chapters later, though? I want to throw every byte and printed page into an incinerator and pretend I never wrote any of it. Hell, I kind of want to do the same thing to this blog. There’s something about fires that I like. It purifies every thing in its path. I feel like I’m in need of some sort of purification. Catharsis, maybe. Maybe that’s what the past few weeks worth of focus have been about.

There’s something about starting over that feels good, but once the beginning stares at me and taunts me and laughs at my own incompetence, I feel the drench of fear raining on me like some sort of hell-cloud. Then I realize I don’t have to start over. That I don’t really want to start over. That I’m just afraid that I might be a failure or that I will fail. Fail at what, though? Somebody else’s expectations of me? But what about my expectations of myself?

That’s why I keep moving my feet. I keep moving forward because there’s no where else I can go. Time will keep pushing me forward, regardless of how I feel about it. All I can do is take the damn reins and control my own destiny.

I’m resolved to focus my days more on my writing from this day forward. There have been things I’ve been doing that don’t really help my writing out in any way, and I’m going to see how I can either sprint through completing them or deferring them to some far-off future date. There’s this block of time in the middle of every day that I can use to spend some time improving my writing in some way that I’m not using in a productive way, and that’s the block of time I want to focus on. I write every morning and night, so it’s only fitting I write every day, too.

I finished transcribing the Great Gatsby today. I’ve been chipping away at this project for way over a year, and I’m glad I’m finally done with it. The last two pages were the saddest to write because this book has been a part of my life for a few years now, and now it’s over. But when one thing ends, another thing begins. I’m going to start transcribing Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms tomorrow morning. This is a much longer book, and it’ll probably take me a lot longer to complete, but that’s okay. This is not a sprint. The point is to learn, and I learned a lot while transcribing the Great Gatsby. I’m sure I’ll learn something from Hemingway pretty quickly. I finished re-reading this book tonight for the third time. It’s a sad story, and there’s way more dialogue than I remember, and Catherine can be kind of annoying, but I like his style. It matches my temperament, I think. Simple. Honest. Unflinching.

I compiled my novel — what I’ve written so far — and printed it at work today. It was over 49,000 words, or 242 manuscript pages, and I’m only halfway done. I want to spend not only this weekend, but every day, revising and rewriting and revising and rewriting and revising and rewriting until the story, the characters, the words are just right. I want to be proud of this novel, even if it won’t change the world or anything. It’s changed mine, and I’ll be eternally grateful for it. I know it can be better, and I’m both afraid and eager to get started. I’ll see, right?

As for my blog, today marks day 159. I’m almost halfway through this journey, and I don’t know what I’ve learned, to be honest. I started it because of some girl, and now I’m pretty sure I’m over her now. It took me a good while, but I think I’m finally there. I’m working harder than I’ve ever worked in my life, and I’m making the most money I’ve ever earned in my life, and I’m in the best shape of my life, and I’m reading a book a week again, and I’m writing a novel and enjoying the whole damn process, and that’s more than I can say 159 days ago. Does that mean I’m good to go? That I’m done?

Hell no.

This is for life, bitches.

My body is tired from the beatings Insanity has given it this week. I wasn’t this sore at any time during Month 1, but now with Month 2, I’m sore and tired and cranky. I haven’t been able to go to sleep at 8:30 like I’ve wanted to. Every time I do happen to have everything finished by then and I try to fall asleep, I can’t. I lie in bed for at least an hour before I finally doze off. Last night, I couldn’t go to sleep until after 10. It was annoying. Insanity hasn’t helped me fall asleep any quicker, and instead, since I don’t get at least the 8 hours I want to get, I wake up sore, tired, and super cranky.

This week has been tough, and I’m not sure why exactly. It’s been pretty humdrum at work. No crises. The internet is up and running just fine. A few printers here and there have been causing me headaches, but that’s it. I’m getting along really well with everyone at work, and I’m really enjoying coming to work every day. My routine is rock-solid at home. My morning routine has helped me get my novel written, and has helped me transcribe the last few pages of the Great Gatsby. I finish it tomorrow. That’s insane. My nightly routine has helped me keep my blog updated with personal entries that have helped me learn more about myself, and it has also helped me to finish reading A Farewell to Arms tomorrow. I start transcribing that on Saturday. Really crazy. So why has it been a tough week?

I don’t know. My first reaction was that I was burning out, but my gut tells me that’s wrong. I don’t feel burnt out. I feel super energized, actually. I love what I’m doing. But I am tired. I am questioning my life right now. I want to do something crazy just so it shakes things up a bit. That thought on its own is crazy. I don’t really want to do that, but I am yearning for something. That quiet desperation I wrote about weeks ago went away for a bit as work got really crazy, but it feels like it has come back, and with a damn vengeance, too.

It’s Valentine’s Day at school tomorrow. All the kids will be giving their classmates cards and candy and other things, I’m sure. The senior’s are doing something with flowers. I saw a group of girls with pink and red roses in the office today, tying them up or something. They’re doing something. Some co-workers even bought candied hearts and other Valentine-themed candy for those kids who don’t get anything, which, they’ve told me, happens every year. That’s sad. I don’t have a Valentine and I don’t expect to get anything, but kids shouldn’t feel sad on this day. It’s a day to love and to feel loved. No heartbreaks allowed.

I don’t know how tomorrow is going to turn out. I don’t have answers to any of the more existential-type of feelings I’m having right now. They’re there, and I recognize they’re there, but they’re not going anywhere or telling me why they’re there. I’m not really asking right now, anyways. I’m tired, sore, and cranky, and I just want to go to bed. This entry made no sense. Sorry guys.

It was the middle of the day, and I was tired. I couldn’t fix the printer giving me issues, so I called the reseller who sold it to us. They tried walking me through all the steps I’ve already gone through, and I gave them even more steps I tried to get it up and running and they were stumped. I asked them to send a technician over to check it out because everyone needed this printer to work. They will. I was called over to the Elementary school computer lab to check out a computer that wouldn’t connect to the internet, but there was a class in session, and I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of it. I decided I’ll check it out later. I never did. I was tired, and I went to the District Office to make a cup of coffee.

The district clerk called me into her office to ask me a question about my paycheck.

“You’re getting about three hours overtime. Do you want me to put that on your next check, or do you want to apply it toward your vacation hours?”

I thought about it for a moment. “Last year, I flew down to Los Angeles for my friend’s birthday around May, and I was thinking of doing that again this year. I’m not sure, though.” I paused for a moment. “I really don’t have a life, so I don’t know if I’m ever gonna need vacation hours for a while.”

“What do you do? Are you like a gamer or something?”

“No. I write. I’m a writer. I’m writing a novel right now.”

“Oh really?”

“Well, I wrote one already, but I threw it away. I’m on my second draft, and I think I’m going to throw this one away, too, and start over again. Other than that, though? I work out.” I didn’t know how to answer the question.

“Oh, do you lift weights? Have you ever thought about working out at the gym here?”

“No. I just do like body weight exercises mostly. I used to weigh like seventy pounds more than I do now, and I’m kinda freaked about gaining any of that back, so I work out a lot. Like an hour a day.”

We went on about this for a little bit. We talked about my diet, her diet, and found we shared the same philosophy about food. I never knew that about her. The whole time we talked, though, I kept coming back to her earlier question: What do you do?

I didn’t know how to answer that. I write. I work out. I watch TV. I go to work. She asked me if I’m seeing anyone or if I’m interested in anyone. I told her no, I’m not. It’s complicated, I lied. I have no one. There’s no one.

I didn’t tell her about my blog or that I’m transcribing the Great Gatsby or that I read or that I’m on this journey to just be better. Later, after our conversation was over and I was thinking about it, I wondered why I didn’t just say I was trying to focus more on my life, to settle down, to focus, and to just be better. I was shy, I think. Maybe a little bit of humility held me back. I don’t know. This was the first time I could’ve actually talked to someone about what I’m doing and going through, but I chose not to. I don’t know why.

I need a life. I’ve been thinking about that all day. I told her I wake up at five every morning, and she scoffed at me and said she has trouble getting up at seven. I have to write my novel, I said.

I have to do what I have to do, is what I should’ve said. My life is doing what I have to do to live a great life. I want to live a great life. That’s what I should’ve said. Maybe next time.

I’m 28 years old. I don’t feel 28 years old, but I’m aware that most ages don’t have a feel to them. I feel young. I feel old. I feel like a lot of my past years were wasted, and I feel like I’m making up for a lot of that, even though consciously, that’s not why I’m doing it. I’m spending my time as strictly as I am because simply, I want to be better. This is a continuous process that will only end with my grave. At least that’s the hope, except for the dying part. That part can wait.

I turn 29 in May. I’m almost 30. I don’t know how to feel about that. I think I’m not going to feel much of anything next May. 30 will just be another age I have a year to live with. Sometimes these numbers give me a sense of urgency to merely do more. I haven’t done this, or I haven’t done that. What am I waiting for? I ask myself. Just do it. Obviously, that’s easier said than done, especially when the things I want to do would span across many lifetimes. So I pick and choose what I want to be spending my time on. Transcribe the Great Gatsby? Yes. Organize the notes in my Commonplace book? No. Well, not yet. Write my novel? Yes. Travel to Europe? Not yet. Ask a girl out? Well…

Life is short. 28 came by fast. It feels like I just started freshman year at USC. It feels like I just graduated from college. Hell, it feels like I just graduated from high school. There’s no blueprint to how to live a good life, but many writers have recorded their thoughts in timeless books that try to help us live better. It feels like I’m learning how to live every time I wake up. Every time I repeat my daily routines, I feel like I’m doing them for the first time. But I don’t, and I have a long history of progress I can reflect on and be proud of.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. I didn’t have an introspective type of day. It was a very normal day. It’s been a past couple of normal days, as evidenced with last night’s entry. I guess my mind is on the vicissitudes of my life. Maybe I need to change it up again. Maybe I need to take a few more risks. Or maybe I’m just right there on the edge, but I need to do just a bit more to feel better. I don’t know. All I know is that I don’t know where I’m going.

I can fill my days with all the most productive things a man can do in 24 hours, but what’s the point if there’s no reason to it? It feels like some of the things I do have no reason to them, but they do. I just can’t see it yet because they’re incomplete. At least I think so. Well…

Writing is hard. Writing is long. Writing really has no external rewards, at least not for me. I’m not earning any money writing my novel or writing my blog or transcribing the Great Gatsby. The internal rewards are vast and priceless, though, but is that enough? Do I yearn for more? I don’t know. I’ve only lived for 28 years. Maybe I need to live another 28 before some of these questions have answers. Who knows?

Wake up. Start boiling water. Brush my teeth. Shave. Put dishes away. Prepare my Aeropress. Brew coffee. Sit down by my desk. Start writing my novel. Drink my coffee. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Bake bacon. Tell Siri to start timer for 15 minutes. Take vitamins. Plan my day in OmniFocus. Write down three big things to do today in pocket notebook. Study Anki flashcards. Cook breakfast. Eat breakfast. Wash dishes. Transcribe the Great Gatsby. Meditate. Dress for work. Start car. Make bed. Go to work. Listen to podcasts. Clock in.

Fix issues with one of our servers. Make coffee once I do. Walk to my office. Setup MacBook Air with power supply, lightning cable, and headphones. Check out another one of our servers. Research why an adapter can’t access the network. Try a few things. Fail. Walk to High School and try to diagnose why a printer won’t connect to the internet. Try a few things. Fail. Get stopped by the librarian. One of her printers disappeared from the network. She writes down a note about which one that is. Go back to my office. Install printer on server. Update the Printers Group Policy. Target it to just affect all the library computers. Try a few more things on problematic network adapter. Fixed it. Write down process and solution in notebook. Did it fix the printer that couldn’t connect to the internet? Investigate. No, it didn’t. Get an email from counselor. Her printer is printing pages with black streaks all over them. Walk to her room. Take printer apart. Clean it. Test it out. It works. Go talk to the elementary special ed teacher. Teach her how to print confidential documents. Rearrange her room to take a problematic PC back to my office. Try to help her with her spam in Gmail. Succeed. Walk back to the High School building. Make coffee. Walk back to office with PC in one hand, coffee in the other. It’s noon. I’m tired. Get back to my office. Research problematic printer some more. Can’t find anything. I quit. Watch some videos on YouTube. Read a little bit on my iPad. Get a call about an Infinite Campus issue. Investigate issue, but can’t figure out the problem. Will wait for tomorrow to investigate some more. Pack up my things. Clock out. Start car. Drive home. Listen to podcasts.

Two packages arrive. Primal Fuel. Death Over Decaf shirt. Grab blender. Pour coconut milk in it. Two scoops Primal Fuel. Two bananas. Strawberries. Blueberries. Raspberries. Scoop of almond butter. Blend. Put dishes away. Turn on burner. Turn off blender. Pour shake into two cups. Pop popcorn. Lie in bed. Watch the Walking Dead. Eat popcorn. Drink shakes. Take shirts off. Take pants off. Put workout shorts on. Play Max Out Cardio. Work out. Sweat. Sweat. Sweat. Drink lots of water. Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees. Peel sweet potato. Cut sweet potato. Place inside oven. Tell Siri to start timer for 35 minutes. Shower. Dress. Plug in Foreman grill. Season steak. Cook steak. Wash dishes. Listen to podcasts. Watch the Good Wife. Timer goes off. Plate steak and sweet potatoes. Eat dinner. Finish the Good Wife. Read A Farewell to Arms. Open Good Habits and check off every habit I accomplished today. Clear my tasks from OmniFocus. Write three things I’m grateful for in Day One. Play some Arcade Fire. Start writing blog entry. Publish entry. Go to sleep.

Rinse. Repeat.

I read a lot this weekend. By a lot I mean a lot. Over the past month, I saved probably over 100 articles in Safari’s Reading List. I usually don’t save much of anything in there, but these were articles I used to get to during my daily reading, but because I started to get a bit more strict about where I spend my time, I hadn’t. I didn’t really plan to get through all of them this weekend, but once I started, I had to get to the end. I needed to get through them because I wanted to be better about this. I wanted next weekend to be free of this burden, in a sense, so I could spend my time doing things a bit more meaningful to me. Stuff like spending more time on my novel or learning something new or improving some aspect of my life I would love to improve. I read some great articles, some mediocre ones, and others I didn’t even bother because I wasn’t interested in them anymore. I think the reason I got through them all this week was because I used the Pomodoro technique again, and because I wedged in other tasks in between my reading sprints. At the moment, though, my head is woozy with the sight of these words because pretty much all I stared at in the past 48 hours.

It didn’t help that I started a new book today. I’m re-reading A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. A bought the paperback copy of the book a few months ago during my shopping spree because I wanted to transcribe that book after I finished transcribing the Great Gatsby. If I keep the same momentum transcribing that book, I should be finished with it on Friday. My plan is to start transcribing Hemingway’s novel on Saturday. No stops. I want to keep moving forward because I set up a daily time block in my schedule devoted to just transcribing. I’ve learned a lot by transcribing the Great Gatsby. Every time I go through a few pages, I pick up something new, not only about the story but about the process of writing a novel. A way a sentence matters or how a certain scene is structured. The way Fitzgerald shows his command of everything he’s doing is simply inspiring. Each time I finish one of my sessions, I feel a sense of disgust toward my novel. I want to throw it away again and start over. Fortunately, I know how wasteful that is, so I just keep my head down while also moving my feet as much as I can.

A Farewell to Arms is also the first paper book I’ll be reading in years. It felt so strange reading with the lights on since I’m so used to the backlit screen of my Kindle Paperwhite. It was a great feeling, though. I pulled out my mechanical pencil and underlined a few passages, and I loved the sound the lead made against the paper. I love the feel of the pages, and I loved folding the paperback cover behind the book while reading. All these things just can’t be replicated by the Kindle. It makes me wish I spent some of my money on paper books rather than the Kindle copies I bought. In the end, though, I’m grateful I read period. I remember a time when I didn’t read at all and how blindly oblivious I was about the world.

Tomorrow I start the second month of Insanity Max: 30. I’m not sure what to expect. The first month was tough, and it really didn’t get any easier as the days went on because each workout forces you to push harder and last longer than last time. This time around? God, I don’t know. This was the first full week where I broke down every hour of my days and actually succeeded in following the plan I set for myself, so this new week with this new workout and this new book to read and transcribe means a lot. It means I’m pushing myself out of my comfort zone and doing more with myself while still living the same 24 hours as I have before.

Life is short. Life is also what I make of it, and this is how I want to be spending it right now. This is not how I want to live it forever, however, but I just hope I’m preparing myself for when I do jump all in and start living it as crazily and as fulfillable as I can. Those walls are slowly coming up.

Back when I tried to pare down my possessions to just the essentials, I had a strong desire to digitize everything that could be digitized and toss their analog copies away. I went from lugging around thousands of pieces of paper to just a few select pieces. I spent months and months scanning everything I could scan and organizing them with complex names and deep folder hierarchies on my computer, and after years with this system, I realized I almost never refer to these scans. So instead of lugging around physical crap, I’m lugging around digital crap that I may or may not need. When I moved up to Montana, I left behind my physical library of books. That was okay, though, because I had my Kindle, and I could replace this physical library with an entirely digital one. And for years, that’s what I did. Every new book I bought, I bought on the Kindle. I haven’t read a paper book in years, and I’m kind of sad about that. Digital is great for some things, but sometimes there’s something about paper that provides that intangible something that digital will never replace.

One of those things is the simple act of showing my work. I love paper notebooks because they keep a record of every detail I marked in their pages. The slant of my handwriting, the compression of my words, the hurried nature of my writing, the crossed out words, the neater than neat penmanship, the ink smudges, the yellowed paper, the erasure marks, the notes of my life, are all faithfully recorded in these notebooks. Back in the early days of my blog, I wrote about my discovery of the Confidant notebook by Baron Fig. Before then, I was a Moleskine guy through and through. Then I tried the Field Notes. But I liked the look of the Confidant, the fact that it was hardcover, its pages were wider than most notebooks, and that it had an attractive yellow ribbon bookmark all pleased me. Unfortunately, I didn’t really use it once I got it. In fact, once I stopped writing my journals in my Moleskine’s and instead wrote digitally for this blog, I stopped writing period. Slowly, though, I wanted to bring it back.

Every now and then, I would transcribe the Great Gatsby in my Moleskine, but it was never as regular as I would have liked. In effort to find an excuse to use my Field Notes and Moleskine Cahier notebooks, I began to spend about five minutes every morning writing the three biggest things I wanted to accomplish during the day. Sometimes all I would do was write them down, put the notebook in my back pocket, and not open it again until the next morning. I just wanted an excuse to write again. Slowly, though, I began to rely on the notebook. I would write down notes about my tasks or notes for new tasks or just notes about something important in general. As for my Confidant notebook, I began to use it solely for my novel. I would write my thoughts on how crappy my current chapter was or notes on a specific character. Recently, I bought the Apprentice series of notebooks from Baron Fig and began using that for notes on all the computer stuff I do at work. I wrote down notes for specific tasks on a certain printer that I was having issues with, and in the past week, I would write down all the issues the servers were causing me and all the changes I made and my thoughts for why I made those changes.

I have all these notebooks now that I can quickly refer to and simply see the progression of my thoughts. I could see how I got from point A to point B, and I could retrace my thought process to help me get to point C. Digital notes can’t really replicate that. When I first got my books back last month, I flipped through many of my old favorite titles, and I saw all the pencil notes in the margins and underlined passages I made years before. I would flip to one page, read a note or a passage, skip to the end, and read another passage or note I made, and I would instantly remember why I wrote that or underlined that passage. The Kindle makes it easy to highlight text, but it doesn’t make it easy to go back and just read something I highlighted on a random page.

There’s this whole philosophy of simply showing my work that appeals to me a lot. I can go back a few months in my pocket notebook and see how productive I was or what I wanted to commit myself to in a specific week. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to replace OmniFocus or nvAlt or anything like that in my life. I’m just here to sing the praises of analog tools because they provide something that digital can never replicate, and that’s the simple pleasure of seeing your thoughts and following the progress they made from day to day.

For the past two months, I’ve been spending about five minutes every night writing three things I’ve been grateful for during the past day. At first, I wrote short sentences about some obvious things: writing, reading, working out, going to work, etc. But as this habit slowly grew into something I loved doing every night, my entries grew longer and more personal. Sometimes I would choose something so small and seemingly insignificant, but once the words came out, and I saw some meaning in the little thing I was grateful for, I really began to love this process. Even when I was having a bad day, or a bad week, I would force myself to find three things to be grateful for during the past day. This whole process has made me appreciate life much more than I’ve ever appreciated it. Every day consists of a series of small battles, and by focusing on the victories, the defeats don’t seem so bad, and in fact, fuel me to learn from them and be even better next time.

I was lying in bed listening to some music for a good ten minutes trying to figure out what to write about tonight, and I didn’t know. The past week has been full of events and things to write about, so I grew used to quickly getting started on my entries and writing something good enough to post. Tonight, though, has been tougher. The day was standard. No crises at work, nothing eventful happened in my personal life, and I’m lying in bed right now simply content with life and where things are going.

This week I tried something new: I broke down my days to the minute with events for me to do — from 5 AM, when I woke up to 8:30 PM, when I planned to fall asleep. Every hour in between had something scheduled, and for the most part, I followed it to the minute. I started transcribing the Great Gatsby once more, which I’m almost done with, and I cut back an hour of watching TV, even though I really wanted to cut it to two, but the stress from work this week depleted my will power. If things go better at work next week, I plan to be a bit more strict about my TV watching habits. I want to read more. My backlog of books and articles to read from the web is weighing heavily on my mind, and I want to get back to that. I also want to go back to increasing my English vocabulary, which is something I haven’t been pursuing as seriously as I used to. I still have to submit my taxes, even though it’s pretty much done. Instead of expecting a nice refund, it looks like I’ll be owing the Federal government some money. Fortunately, that amount is less than the refund I’m getting from Montana, so I’ll still come out a few hundred bucks richer, but it’s not the $1,200 or so I was hoping to get back. Serves me right for making so much money from three different jobs last year.

I hit 150 days a few days ago, and I didn’t mention that then. I knew I’d hit this target, and when I realized I hit it, I told just one person and that’s as much recognition I wanted. I’m not so concerned about my day count anymore. This blog has become my life, and I love writing in here every night. Not every entry is good or anything, but each entry has helped me grow in some way. If not into a better writer, but into a better person, and that’s something I’ll always be grateful for.

We fixed the internet today. By we, I mean the network engineer Shawn and me. It was a long, somewhat painful process, but oh so much fun when we finally narrowed it down and found the problem. First thing Shawn wanted to know was where we received the internet. I showed him, and we began to run some tests. The main switch that receives the fiber internet from our ISP split into four different directions onto the main switch, and we disconnected all of them and plugged them in one by one until we discovered the problem. Three out of the four worked fine — they connected to the internet and everything seemed back to normal. The problem fiber branched out to the Middle School, and that was our next stop.

We went to the Middle School switch closet, and sure enough, we saw that one of our two switches wasn’t showing any network activity. Fortunately, that meant we narrowed it down. Unfortunately, this switch is the only one on the whole campus that has 48 ethernet ports; all the others one only have 24. Not only that, nothing was labelled, nothing was bundled together, and everything was messy and unwieldy. So what we did was take a pad of paper, follow each cord back to the patch panel, which luckily did have rudimentary labelling, and we wrote it down. All 48 cords. We then disconnected each one and started connecting them back one by one. He ran an infinite ping on his laptop, and we began with port 1. Then port 2. Then port 3, and we kept going until we saw which one locked up the network and gave us the problems. At around port 12, we noticed our first problem. We took note of it and kept the cord disconnected. A few ports later, we found another problem. Then around port twenty-something, we found another problem. So three ports were giving us problems, and we didn’t know why. We kept going. We reached port 43 when the power went out.

We were pissed and very disappointed. We were almost there! But instead of wallowing in pity, we decided to go investigate the three ports that were giving us issues. Unfortunately, each one was located in a different room, so we went to the first room that had the problem and we investigated. We checked out the computer, saw that everything looked okay, but we still marked the computer. We went into the next room, did the same thing, and marked that computer. While we went to look for the third room, the power came back on and we were back in business. We went to the third room and investigated the last port that was giving us problems. I found the right port, followed the cord out and noticed it plugged back into the port right next to it instead of to a computer. That was our issue. That was our loopback that was causing all our issues. Someone, instead of connecting that cord into a computer, connected it back into the network, and that loop buckled our switches, overloaded the internet, and brought our school to its knees. We corrected this error, finished plugging in all our cords back into the switch, and tested the network. Everything was up and running and working like it should.

This took us most of the day to figure out, and by dividing and conquering, we were able to trace our problem back to the source. It was so much fun and so enlightening and my plans for this network changed completely. I’m going to play the maintenance game, organizing everything so this doesn’t happen again. And, fortunately¹, I have the full backing of my superiors. I know what to do next time, even though I hope there’s no next time. I’m glad we don’t have to replace anything, that everything’s working like it’s supposed to, and we can all get back to our jobs.

What a fucking trip.