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Vals Boston will soon be undergoing a cosmetic (and content) makeover.
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(photo from Boston.com)I had a "Matrix moment" today. I never liked that movie to begin with, nor any science fiction/machines-take-over type of flicks, but I must admit they do have a point. At some moment in time, machines stop being our slaves; instead, we will become theirs.
Maybe humanity hasn't reached that point quite yet, but we're getting there.
At 1:30 p.m. today, right at the end of lunch, the power went out in my office. Power grid down in half the town; computers, Internet, lights went off in a split second. I lost a 7-page translation I had been editing and the work I had to do for that afternoon was suddenly... unreachable, as the network went down with the office lights.
Usually, I like power outages. They (like sudden lightening storms or elevators that get stuck mid-floor) tend to bring people together unexpectedly -- because misery loves company and because nobody sees it coming. I bonded with some of my coworkers for a while, until human resources told us to do "soft work" or go home, because the power was not likely to go back up before the end of the day.
"Soft work," I said to myself. Just like the once-strange term "hard copy" (how can a piece of paper be "hard"?), "soft work" is apparently a new word in contemporary life. It means "work that can be done without a computer", which is apparently, um, malleable. Unsubstantiated "work".
I thought about everything I have to do in the next few weeks and everything I had wanted to accomplish at least before the end of today (because Friday, the 4th of July, is a holiday). There wasn't a single "soft" task among it all. Without my computer -- without any computer, I thought -- the majority of us become mere bodies unable to produce a marketable product. We can produce something beautiful, like a painting or a photo or a song, but nothing for the workplace unless we're CEOs. Isn't that strange, after all the years of education and being told that "you can do anything", once our computer crashes we feel helpless and useless?
So, we sat there, listened to someone's iPod and discussed random things, until HR repeated that all those who don't have meetings should go home, and I stayed for some more conversation and then left at 3:30, feeling guilty for not being able to produce something. The power will be back tomorrow, and all will be at peace.
But it did make me wonder about the dawn of the day when computers will control us without any pretenses at all. Could it happen? Maybe.
I haven't been good about writing here, but I guess my excuse is that I'm not traveling anymore. With today's appearance of yet another friend's travel blog (to Southeast Asia), I'm filled with nostalgia for my days in Europe; nostalgia for my unlikely adventures, the things I saw, my victory over shyness, originality amidst banality, and my then-newfound romanticism. It wasn't always a happy thing; traveling, at times, can be inherently lonely. But the complex of the loneliness and the happiness and the differences, for me at least, merged into a greater understanding of who I am -- rather, who I was -- at that time.
It was the end of a short but beautiful era, it seems, and all that seems long ago despite having been so recent. I came back from Spain a year ago -- that is, exactly a year ago I was spending the night at London's Heathrow Airport after the bomb threat. It's probably been nearly a year, then, since I've started this blog. [Edit: yep, almost... Check Wednesday, July 4, 2007, my first entry was me missing Independence Day and complaining about the London Airport's "refugee management" skills. Gosh, I was angry.
What is it about going away that makes us come out of our shells? Why the constant desire to go away, albeit wishing to go back once you are "there", wherever "there" may be?
It's all stuff I have theories on, theories for my eventual "next great American novel", about which I keep being reminded by high school acquaintances and which will -- someday -- be written.
I wish I could be more observant, as I was there, and write down the stories that I saw, and hoped for, and imagined. I can't really write about my daily life anymore, because I am working, and because I am dealing with copious "adult" things that everyone deals with and doesn't want to read about. (My whining about the apartment search in Madrid, for instance, was probably more interesting than my whining about my current apartment search in Boston.)
I am noticing a trend, though: writing less and less as my routine becomes prominent and unchangeable. I have a lot to accomplish at work in the new couple of months, I have stuff to do at home, bla bla bla bla bla, but the point is, I've stopped writing. Whether that be here or in a personal journal or poetry or whatever, I haven't done it for months. I guess I am afraid to start on the so-called "next great American novel" for fear it won't be so great after all, or not as I would have expected at my high school graduation when I got that prize and the name stuck. Like most things -- whether it be travel, or an anticipated book or movie, or, for many people -- careers, love... expectations that are too high often breed inadequacy, contempt, and ultimately disappointment.
Thanks, big parking lot.
My car's brakes gave out today in the parking lot after work. Somehow I had traveled the 30 miles to work uneventfully, listening to my iPod and the occasional fundraiser on NPR, National Public Radio. After work, however, I got in my Toyota, plugged in my 'Pod, and got ready to go for the next hour and a half -- only to find out that my li'l teal twelve-year-old sedan didn't want to stop, even at 10 miles per hour. I pressed on the brake -- and nothing happened. I slammed the brake really hard and only then did it make a half-hearted stop... with the momentum of a seventy-five-year-old snail.
Now I don't know much about cars, except for this: they're supposed to move when told, they're supposed to (hopefully) be safe, and they're not supposed to make start-and-stop decisions on their own. The Toyota was not behaving according to the protocol it had followed since I learned to drive it at age 16. I've never yet been towed or ticketed or any of that stuff that happens to mortals in the span of a normal American lifetime.
So I did the next most logical thing and called my mother, who is wise and all-knowing in these types of situations.
"Drive around the parking lot," she said. "See if it happens when you restart."
I restarted, and a little red brake light came on. Bad, bad. Maybe I can make it to the street, I thought, maybe I just pressed the brake too softly? (Could be the shoes!) I started driving around the parking lot but the Toyota still went all "free" on me, leaving black streaks of brake fluid on the pavement behind and refusing to stop at all. Marking its territory. Luckily there weren't a lot of other cars around, but I pressed this way and that way, and it just kept going at the very dangerous speed of 10 mph. But it's the principle of the thing.
I got to the center of the parking lot and, after trying to stop using conventional means, ended the little adventure by putting the car in neutral and using the hand brake to lock it dead where it was in the center of the parking lot. And there it sat for an hour while I, pissed off and flustered, hobbled back into my office and called triple A to come and tow my baby away.
As I waited for an hour for AAA to come rescue me in time for dinner, I tried not to think that if this had happened but two minutes later, I would have been brake-less on I-95/128 during rush hour.
But at least the tow guy gave me a ride to Lynn, Lynn, city of sin, in the span of two hours; with me $66 poorer, my dad picked me up and we left ol' T there at the mechanic's, for fixin' 'em brakes, so she can be 'er wild self again.
Every day's sure a ride, ain't it. Tomorrow I'm taking the Subaru.
