Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Rattling the Cage

The weather has taken a turn for the worse, in reflec­tion of my sour­ing mood. Oh, what happened to the care­free optim­ism of yes­teryear? Every day I find myself think­ing of the future, and every time I think of the future I am filled with fear and anger.

So many par­al­lels to school. Now as then, our sta­bil­ity is to be uprooted. I find myself think­ing of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” and as the song describes its answer, I know mine is also “yes.” Right now, the only stable circle is what’s left of those I knew from school — and those rela­tion­ships seem so much truer than these. We have been here two months and already talk is of next year and liv­ing plans — and the fore­cast is for more unrest. Last year’s decisions made anew; another search for solid­ar­ity among dwind­ling numbers.

I have lost the plot here. What I am doing is becom­ing less and less rel­ev­ant — I have stopped exist­ing from day to day, com­pletely lost sight of the object­ive here because the object­ive has lost all mean­ing, because with every day my loath­ing of the stuffed-shirt busi­ness world grows, and all I am doing here is hard time on a degree that will put me into just that, unless I can come up with a solid altern­at­ive plan. That is why I fear the future, becase I can’t yet see a valid, self-sustaining path that doesn’t involve work­ing to the bone in a shitty office to make enough money to live.

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Already I’m hav­ing twis­ted fantas­ies about get­ting up and leav­ing this house, tak­ing all my stuff, and clos­ing all my util­ity accounts, just to show the rest of them how much I take care of here. Every time I tidy up tossed-aside shit down­stairs, empty the trash, wash up, sort out bills, fix the net­work, drive them to the super­mar­ket; every left-on light, oven hob, shower, and TV I turn off reminds me that I do this without ask­ing for thanks, just out of a basic desire to improve liv­ing stand­ards for all of us — and, in most cases, because if I don’t, noone else will. I do these things unasked, yet the moment I try to ask for a little sup­port in return, I am shouted down.

We received an elec­tri­city bill yes­ter­day for £135, for the last two and a half months, so I took the time to write a friendly note to the rest of the house high­light­ing a few ways in which energy could be saved, to ease our col­lect­ive wal­let strain. Coming home in the even­ing to find lights on in empty rooms, and the shower empty but switched on, I asked Josh if he had read the note, which res­ul­ted in another hitting-head-against-the-wall argu­ment. He endeav­oured to set me straight on a few points, namely that I shouldn’t try to “nanny” the rest of the house, nor should I feel com­pelled to “tell 20-year-olds what to do.” Naturally my defences were worth­less — the very idea that I would do this for the good of the house, and not out of some sort of preter­nat­ural vaunt­ing of author­ity, was out of the ques­tion. And so I died a little more.

You can see the attrac­tion of this idea though, no? A quiet escape in the dead of night; they wake up to a house with no water, elec­tri­city, gas or Internet con­nec­tion (no ded­ic­ated fire­wall, media server or cabling through­out); to a kit­chen free of half its equip­ment, a fridge free of beer, and no car out front to shuttle them around. Not look­ing for praise or reward, just the tini­est hint of recog­ni­tion. A sav­age demon­stra­tion of my part in the run­ning of this house, but too late :-).

4

Tuber to the Rescue

Our elec­tric shower died at approx­im­ately 8pm on Friday, for no appar­ent reason. It wasn’t even in use at the time, but popped all the break­ers in the fuse box until I man­aged to isol­ate it. So hav­ing man­aged all week­end, I decided to go “old school” this even­ing and have a bath, before dis­cov­er­ing that in a fit of help­ful­ness Josh had thrown away the bathplug and not bothered to aquire a replacement.

So after the cus­tom­ary vol­ley of abuse in response so my ques­tion­ing the wis­dom of this, I wandered around the house look­ing for a suit­able sub­sti­tute. Scouring the rooms down­stairs look­ing for the plun­ger, I found the per­fect, if unlikely solu­tion: a potato. Selecting one of just the right size to smoothly cover the plug­hole, I went to try it out, and it worked with only minor leakage.

The only remain­ing chal­lenge was then to try to achieve some­thing like a warm bath using the kettle, as the hot water ran out fairly rap­idly. Isn’t hav­ing a water tank the size of a shoe­box fun?