you can sit in the middle of the stream and have all the water rushing past you, so to speak, but if you aren’t the destination, it just keeps on flowing by…
so, as I sit here I have 773 unread RSS fed articles on my aggregator, and 162 unread messages in my email client that aggregates three email accounts. I have one available person, one ‘away’ person, one ‘ignore’ person, and four people in my IM buddy list that are off-line. I have 23 names in my cell phone, many with multiple numbers. I have 36 names in my address book. I have an Orkut account with five friends, accounts on several ‘match-making’ sites, and accounts on many web sites where membership has it’s privileges.
I’m bored and lonely.
I’m also unemployed and essentially homeless.
My point in all that, is not to express how pathetic I am, but rather to say that if you aren’t a destination for someone, then you are lost in the continuum. If people aren’t looking to interact with you, all the connectivity in the world won’t make you more connected to people. Having the facility for connection is different than having the connection itself, and having the connection itself says nothing about what is transferred across the connection. Quality is all about what rides on the network, not the network it self. Strictly speaking, I have a fairly functional network, but the signals that are incoming relative to me are automated – RSS feeds and mailing list emails are means of gathering data, but they aren’t a conversation. Automated input is no salve for loneliness. Computers aren’t neurotic (yet) and until they are, they cannot compensate for quality human conversation. furthermore, they are such a sterile instrument, that they do a pretty poor job of facilitating human conversation. IM, email, blogs, and list-servs aren’t yet at the place that telephones have reached in terms of approaching transparency during a conversation. We have found a nice place with telephones, where the nuances of conversation have been learned-again around the constraints of not being able to see the person. That learning-again might have happened for a teenager, but I haven’t gotten comfortable with it. Don’t get me wrong, I think that these are wonderful means of communicating information, they just lack the ability to communicate high quality feeling. They lack poetry.
The second part of this, is that I’m having trouble leveraging my friends to get a job. Primarily it is because I’m so burned out that I don’t want a job, and because just saying ‘leverage my friends’ makes my skin crawl, but also it’s because there is no way for me to know what is out there without asking. Asking is imposing, and it’s hard to impose on your friends when you don’t really want to be helped. but even if that weren’t true, and I was ready to play the game again, I don’t really know how to have what I want expressed in the way I want it, to the people I want.
I’m still pretty damn tired of ‘saving organizations from themselves’ while trying to pretend that I have an actual role within the organization. That was my experience at St. John’s and in the Marines, and it really isn’t what I want. I’m fine being a clone, as long as being a clone includes being isolated from all the structural and foundational stupidity that is guaranteeing our ultimate failure. I’m also fine being the renovator, as long as the renovations are all I’m doing and everyone knows that and I’m not pretending to have some sort of responsibility to make them happy. Unfortunately for me, neither of those two options seem to be in the offing as of late.
So instead, I sit around and think and ponder and reflect, alone. It’s all pretty frustrating.