2007-10-25 - 7:49 p.m.

Seven Months, Twelve Days

I was going to take this down, archive everything into an unlikely unlinked HTML file on the off-chance I wanted to look at it later; got to clicking, remembered pieces of things.

I think I phrase things better now in general. I can easily communicate with other people in a way that makes them feel comfortable, and I'm pretty good at instructing pretty much anybody at pretty much anything.

I had this thought nine or ten years ago, see. Imagined a machine that spit out random combinations of words in more or less grammatically correct fashion that, by careful monitoring, could produce fantastic and more-than-timely wisdom.

There's a story by Stanislaw Lem in The Cyberiad, by the by, regarding a cosmic robotic pirate of enormous size who waylays the ship of the two noble constructors, Klapaucious and Trurl. Upon learning that what he values above all else is the possession of knowledge that no one else has, they bargain for their lives and freedom by promising to construct for him a daemon of the fourth kind. A daemon of the fourth kind is a tiny being who instantly knows whether a given piece of information is true or not, I gather, and who sits on the lip of a barrel of air (it's in space, remember) and slowly allows molecules to leak out.

As they leak out, a given percentage of them will of necessity appear to form meaningful phrases, and the daemon will by virtue of his existence be aware of which pieces are true and which are not. He has a tiny diamond pen and an infinitely long reel of paper on which to write. They set him to writing and leave while the pirate's eyes are greedily devouring fact after fact, usually along the lines of what the prince of a particular minor country on a backwater planet would have worn in the way of footwear had sentient life ever evolved on that planet. Useless. The pirate takes long enough to realize this that he is trapped within an ever-widening swath of paper.

So granted, my idea wasn't a particularly original one; I just had the novel application of thinking that perhaps I could use myself as that machine. Throw the words at the paper, as quick and often as they come, and pull out the bits that are real, easy enough.

Sometimes it worked and I came up with things I liked, and even years later I am still humbled by what I accidentally managed to put down (there's really no avoiding the "accidental" moniker given its surroundings). This time I found, "And remember to treasure, while it is still yours, the moments when you are all of someone's world that exists, and when they are all of yours. The seconds when you are too much to take in and they have to pull away", and it perfectly summed up a piece of my understanding of the world.

So I'll keep it.

Sparta's "One-Armed Scissor" has a chorus that's always stuck with me, that I've no doubt typed out in here a dozen times in the eight years or so since the song came out. You're a million miles away / Will you get this letter? / 'cause I'm a million miles away / I write to remember. Five years from now or ten, I may have forgotten what it was like to be someone's world; I've no idea how life will go, and I've also a history of boldly making mistakes.

I work in a strange kind of hybrid IT support capacity for a decent company. I wasn't qualified for the job of an entry-level technician, but my boss is a guy who worked with my dad, who in turn speaks very highly of my productivity and work ethic. So I'm not an entry-level technician, because there aren't any in the company; it's just my boss and I, keeping track of four hundred or so workstations scattered over several thousand square miles.

It's been an interesting conflict with my personality. I'm given to finding complicated ways of giving up, usually by convincing myself that I'm operating outside my capacity. I looked up one day doing something comically unrelated, probably knitting, and said, "I'm living in fear." I worry constantly about consequences that would have no impact on the parts of my life that I value, the opinions of people I don't care about, and the nebulous stuff in the dark Out There Somewhere that could come careening out and knock down all the little scale models of important stuff that I set up in rows around me.

One of my long-running favorite authors, Dan Simmons, was an avid motorcyclist at some point in his life. He said, I think self-explanatorily, that death to him was not a man in a cloak with a sickle, but a bread truck with white sidewalls backing out of an alley. He was also the one who pointed out that, thanks to modern "black box" technology in aircraft, we can be certain that our last words will probably be, "Shit", "Fuck", or "Goddammit".

It was a distinct challenge, given this, to get into a relationship where it wasn't initially certain if she was going to repeat the Go Back to Ex-Boyfriend thing that she'd done earlier in our history together, while at the same time working Information Technology with no formal training and (I've come to realize) a really startlingly unimpressive grasp of the hardware and software involved. I have been studying for the certification I should've had to get this job while working away at this job, sometimes feeling overwhelmed and useless.

Well, usually not useless, and usually not overwhelmed, and very seldom do they overlap. Most of the problems people have with computers stem from a belief that they are magical and incomprehensible, so they don't read the directions, either because they don't believe that they could figure out something so arcane or because they figure there are professionals being paid to figure out things like that. My career depends on people being intimidated by something that gigantic multi-billion dollar corporate juggernauts spend millions on every year trying to make look friendly.

I've been here for three months now and I think I could handle this being a more or less lifelong career. It's not something I consider actual work; it's more along the lines of fixing things and keeping things running. I always wanted to be the magical gnome who popped out of machines at critical moments to fix them, then jumped back in. Hell, I always wanted to be a butler, but that's not really relevent to the career at hand.

On the down side, my boss is making noises like he might quit. He's an interesting fellow who didn't really want to be a supervisor so much as he wanted free reign over a network because he really enjoys working with computers. As a kid I will bet you just about anything he frequently set up his toys, watched them for a few minutes, and wandered away, leaving them on the floor.

Yes, I know. I am nearly incapable of playing anything but Lawful Good in video games involving alignment. Shut the hell up.

If he goes, things will be difficult. They will try to promote me, and whether I accept or not, I think they will expect me to do my supervisor's job. I don't want his job; he has to integrate programs written ten to fifteen years ago in languages that havn't been current in twenty-five with tech support that doesn't appear to be aware that anyone was actually silly enough to buy their products.

When I was in college, we quietly laughed at the computer science program for teaching PASCAL as an entry-level language, since it hadn't been a language of choice for a fair amount of time. I think you had to be around the 250-level before you started actually seeing classes in the C-family. We're not working with PASCAL. We're operating three mission-critical server-environment programs written in COBOL. COBOL was developed in 1959.

1959. We can't operate without it, and the chief financial officer of the corporate goes golfing with the president of the company that produces that most expensive of the products, and we're their largest customer. I doubt we'll be upgrading anytime soon.

It will be difficult, but relearning the piano has been difficult as well in more or less the same way: it's just the willingness to put in the time. Eventually, I will be good enough as long as I keep working at it, because it is within my capacity for growth.

Scratchvinyl: I saw your note after I sent mine. It seems unlikely that regular communication is in the wind, given history, but after years of seeing your diary as more of a phenomenon, an event, than a reflection of something human it was profoundly unexpected to see your name outside your own page. It was, not unrelatedly, also very welcome. Thanks you.

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