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2006-08-10 - 6:19 a.m.
I'm tempted to write about how discouraging reading personal ads is again. Or about how lonely and horny I am. But that's getting old, even to me, what's livin' it.
I just started reading Douglas Coupland's new novel, JPod. It's a fun read. It's about a bunch of geeks working for a big gaming software company. Like Microserfs it's set in a very corporate office environment.
I've never worked in a large corporate office. I've worked in offices, but not big corporate ones. Most of my pre-academia career was spent in "shops" doing manual labor. Or the offices of small companies.
The last fifteen years is the closest I've come to that kind of world, but in academia. Which is decidedly not like I imagine the corporate world to be.
I always thought I wouldn't like, or fit in, in a corporate environment, but as I've gotten older, I realize that probably isn't true. Sadly, experience and age reveal things which in your youth you are ignorant of. Again sadly, it's too late to act on that insight.
For example: I would probably like living and working in the military. I would have been a great cop. I would have been a great doctor.
Yup. But when you're younger, especially from my background, you're pretty ignorant of your potential, and, I think, ignorant of yourself.
I don't think you know yourself, or feel comfortable in your own skin, pretty much, until you reach thirty. At least that was my experience.
Plus you go through that whole experience of thinking you know so much (when you don't, really), and being so sure of your ideals and convictions. The so-called idealism of youth.
Yeah, that's all a bunch of bullshit. If you're smart enough, or aware enough, as you get older you realize how little you really know, and how malleable ideals and convictions can be.
Then, just as you, through experience, and continued learning, and gained wisdom, start to figure things out. You die of old age.
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So, how do you like them apples?