Three anecdotes:
On the way to work the other day I saw a very pale girl with very long purple hair and a tiny tiny black dress walking up the street. I wanted to stare but the light turned green. I wondered where she was going.
At work I saw a red bumper sticker that said “If this sticker is blue you’re driving too fast.” Get it? It’s a joke about the Doppler effect. See, if you approach the sticker at close to the speed of light, it causes the red wavelengths reflected from the sticker to appear blue, so if it’s blue, you’re going about a hundred eighty thousand miles an hour too fast, and… let’s just say I work near MIT.
Last night at around ten I was on Mass Ave and I pulled up next to a man and a woman on heavily-customized Harley Davidson motorcycles. I said nice bike, and the guy looked over at my scooter and said “… thank you.” The woman looked over and laughed and then we all laughed and she said “that is a nice bike.” I said, “It works.” They roared ahead but of course we were all in traffic so I kept up with them all the way from Harvard to Porter, the three of us taking up both lanes.
That’s pretty much the highlights of the week there.
Sometimes, in difficult circumstances, people are at their best. Something bad happens and people rise to the occasion. They suffer, but they overcome, and it is a tale of triumph and beauty. Other times, people suffer and overcome, and it’s not beautiful at all. It just sucks. They don’t see things in a new way, they don’t learn an important lesson, the stress doesn’t inspire them to new heights of creative achievement or heroic endurance. They keep plugging away until they drop, and then they rest a little, and they get back up and plug away some more. We all know there’s no point to anyone pushing this rock up this hill, but what the fuck else are we going to do? You can’t just leave it there and go back to bed. Can you?
I guess what I’m trying to say is that every day for awhile now I’ve been waking up and wishing I hadn’t. And every day I get up, with more or less prodding from my girlfriend and the hungry cats. And every night I lie in bed and try to make my mind shut the hell up and it won’t. I’ve been playing World of Warcraft, and it’s not that I enjoy it all that much, but it makes everything else go away for awhile.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, I hate this feeling, and it’s not inspiring, and it’s not pretty, and I’m not overcoming or triumphing. I’m just slogging through and I’m fucking sick of it. Eventually it will go away and I’ll feel better. And then eventually it will come back. Things will go on like this for fifty or sixty years, and then I’ll die, and someone else will have to deal with the design-win pipeline spreadsheet and the hosting invoices and the cat hair clogging the radiators. Circle of life.
Secretly Ironic 