The Road Goes Ever On and On—Revisited

Sat May 31 2003 08:35AM -0600

Tech note: Strange. I ran into bizarre difficulties trying to implement comments on the mini-blog sidebar (if you click on a comment link, you will see that I am running dotcomments). For some reason, it was working in IE and in Safari, but not in any Gecko-based browser (i.e., Camino or Firebird). After some code voodoo and waving the magic mouse around a couple of times, though, for some reason, it now works. Praise the Architect. (Sorry. I promise I'll get the Matrix out of my mind soon.)

In other news, yesterday was another strange day.

I think that I have poor stress management skills. A behavioral psychologist once noted that the average life expectancy of a physician is 12 years less than the average life expectancy of the average person, mostly because of poor stress management skills.

On to more vagueness: I am having social difficulties as of late. What with questionable friendships (don't get me started), and the fact that I detest one of my roommates, it is not surprising. I spent most of Friday afternoon sleeping and trying not to think of things. I keep saying to myself that all I need to do is go home for a little while, but I know it's not going to solve anything. Despite my mantra of "There is no problem so big you can't run away from it," I have found out the hard way that these things will always, always, bite you in the ass somehow. A psychiatrist recently explained to me that this is how Post-traumatic Stress Disorder comes about. You try to ignore some traumatic event, and eventually—maybe in 20-30 years—you are suddenly insane, thinking that the VC are swarming all around your suburban home. Not that I've seen live combat or witnessed any crimes against humanity, but my own little private tragedies have a way of coming to the surface in the most inopportune moments.

But yeah, maybe going home will make me feel better for a little bit at least. I'm tired of being mostly alone, in a somewhat hostile environment, trying to figure out what to do with my free time, and having only work to turn to when I'm tired of gnawing the loose ends of my deranged thoughts.

Some random quotes spring to mind: "To oppose something is to maintain it" —Ursula K Le Guin, from her book The Left Hand of Darkness (which is a science fiction novel about a race in which each individual switches gender in a cyclic manner, and where there is no distinction between "he" or "she." This causes some interesting linguistic difficulties since the book is written in English. But she also discusses a lot of political science and sociology, and a lot of my feelings about patriotism and nationalism are influenced by this book.) In a way, this quote can make the traditional Borg greeting read as true: Resistance is futile. In her book, Le Guin further illustrates what she means by using the analogy of a road. On the road, you are either going towards the capital city, or you are going away from it. This is symmetric to the dichotomy of being a sympathizer or being a resistor, respectively. But either way, you are still on the road. True change can only occur when you step off the road, and, to use a cliche, make your own path. There is always a third option. (My thoughts stray to Catch-22 and "Dead Poets Society." Ah, high school. Can we say "flight of ideas" or what?)

So yeah, back to my point. This is why running away is ultimately useless. But then again, there is such a thing as "Retreat to live and fight another day."

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