In my entire employment history, I’ve been someone’s assistant, a peon, with seemingly little importance beyond the organizational and clerical. That isn’t to say I haven’t learned a lot from jobs or that I haven’t had fun, because I have. But the nature of the positions I’ve held makes it difficult to perceive my own value to the places to which I’ve been applying right now. It’s difficult to envision ever feeling qualified for anything that isn’t entry level. And when I’m asked the question of what I would be doing ideally, I don’t really have an answer. I’d like to be doing music, really, but that’s apparently not a ‘realistic’ field to try to break into, or perhaps I’m simply not aware how one even gets his foot in that proverbial door. I’d enjoy writing, I think, but the issue there is my own lack of serious published work. That makes getting those sorts of jobs difficult, or causes me to shy from even applying.
I also harbor this fear that I’m acquiescing to the kinds of societal and capitalistic expectations that I spent my rebellious teenage years promising myself I’d avoid. Is this just the way life is supposed to go? You grow up convinced you’ll be in a touring band or doing art and never working in a cube for The Man, but then you somehow find yourself at thirty behind a desk in that very cube with short hair and a shaved face wearing patent leathers and a tie and a suit from Sears, worried about the cost of your mortgage payment and family expenditures versus your annual salary which simply isn’t nearly enough to adequately pay for it all, the irony of the situation naturally being that you’ve surrendered your grand and unrealistic dreams in order to make more money to live a more comfortable life, which comfortable life ends up being somehow still more expensive than the jobs you got in lieu of realizing said dreams will maintain.
I guess what I’m really looking for in all this is the assurance that what I’m doing or thinking of doing is right, that the decisions I’m making are the right ones or at least not the wrong ones. That I’m not crazy to chase down the promise of affection and a better economy and a stable job, even if only for a little while, or that doing all that isn’t any more or less crazy than staying here or doing any one thing over any other thing. That I’m more capable or qualified than I presently believe.
That I deserve to live a fulfilled life, I guess. Isn’t that the same elusive assurance, the same guidance that we’re all always hoping to find in a new home, a new job, in another person?
Next Stop: Skynet
I was in the Apple store this afternoon and while I was there I had the opportunity finally to play with an iPad for the first time. There is nothing new that I can say that everyone else and their mother hasn’t already said about the iPad (whether they’ve touched one or not), so I can only corroborate the assessments of other reviewers: it’s humanistic and it most certainly disappears while you’re using it. It’s comfortable and intuitive, as well as a perfect size and weight. It feels anything but awkward and nothing at all like a computer. It felt somehow simultaneously brand new and disarmingly familiar.
The reason I was in the Apple store in the first place is that, for the second time in two years, my laptop’s hard drive shit the bed. Now that I’m home after a miserable day schlepping over to the University District to get the thing looked at, I’m finding that the absolute worst part about this kind of event (apart from, of course, the risk of catastrophic data loss) is that it serves as a reminder that humans and computers do not work seamlessly with each other. It took only one hour to replace my hard drive once I gave the genius bar my laptop, but when I got it back home and set it up again I was disgusted with the thing. I felt betrayed and like it was a completely different piece of machinery. It doesn’t have any of my files; I instinctively opened iTunes and there was nothing there. It’s like a house I’ve come home to and all my furniture and decorations and appliances have gone missing.
This kind of event also serves as a reminder that humans and computers shouldn’t work seamlessly together. When you start to think about it, it becomes difficult not to worry about the overconnectedness of our lives and the loss of our own humanness we face with the use of ubiquitous social media, status updates about each moment of life (in lieu of actually living), portable phones that you can surf the Internet on, and so on and so forth.
Using the iPad also gave me a sense of the future. This is the direction computing technology is moving such that, in twenty years, I will be confused as to how it works and clumsy with it in ways that people that are being born now will not. Think about watching your parents try to send text messages or use computers; my own interact clunkily and non-intuitively with current technology in ways I don’t because I’ve grown up with it.
But I believe my curmudgeonly naysaying about new technology is due to begin soon. I fiddled with an iPad for ten minutes and I realized that my reaction to it was like that of a spaceship landing: I was fascinated, in awe and disbelief, but I was also afraid. I do not want my life, all of our lives to become any more mechanistic than they’ve already become. I don’t want us to rely any more on technology than we already do. I don’t want man and machine to become integrated like we live in some awful science fiction novel.
Some say the laptop will soon become obsolete and begin to disappear. Though my own hardware seems to chronically and inopportunely fail, I will continue to use my laptop if only to preserve the shrinking gap between myself and my computer.