Eccentric Flower:199808/wistful thinking

twenty-seven august ninety eight eleven a m

Wistful Thinking

I'm in the process of adding a new site to my little bitty webring. The odd thing about Anita's journal - as I said to her in email - is that normally I wouldn't put a site like hers on the ring. And since that is not intended to be in the least bit insulting, perhaps I'd better explain.

You see, I like sites which venture off into speculation every so often. I like woolgathering about the Nature of the Universe or the War of the Sexes or where Clinton went wrong - things like that. I like random topic drift. I like reading about someone's ordeal with voice lessons one day and the same person's speculations on solipsism the next (hi, Di!)

There is absolutely nothing wrong with journals which mostly talk about what's happening in their own day-to-day world (many people would even say that's what a "journal" is supposed to be!) I do read sites like that and enjoy them, but I tend to read them in large chunks - a week's worth at a time or more.

In Anita's case, though, the more I read, the more I felt like I was watching an alien universe through a porthole. And I must make this clear right now: This does not reflect badly on Anita's universe.

It reflects badly on mine.

I will have been in Boston for five years in October. I currently socialize on a regular basis with exactly four people: 1. my significant other 2. my best friend (who followed me up here from Lousiana) 3. another old friend (who preceded me up here from Louisiana) and 4. her fiance.

That's not a gripe exactly - I'm not looking for sympathy, I'm just stating facts.

Lest you think that I am still recovering from the change of locale, things were not much better in Louisiana. Maybe another two or three people I did things with regularly. And I had been there basically since birth. I was something of an outcast during school, and since we were all smartass kids, when high school ended we had scholarships all over the place, and we scattered to the corners of the earth. I didn't really go to college - a few furtive semesters in different places.

It's tempting, then, to blame circumstances - lack of venue, and so forth - but the truth is I am not a social animal. Or so I tell myself. Obviously there is something wrong with this picture, or I wouldn't get wistful when I read about Anita's life.

And now let us talk about Microsoft, and the Seattle area in general, for a moment. This will seem like a digression, but it's germane. Trust me.

I used to dislike Microsoft for several reasons: 1. They were a giant sucking monopoly 2. They wrote lousy software 3. Their working facilities, worker treatment, living arrangements, et cetera made me itchy.

Re the last: I felt - and had anecdotes to prove it - that Microsoft grabbed kids fresh out of college, dropped them into a quasi-communal-living situation, with an instant pool of friends who did the same things and thought the same things and laughed at the same jokes, put them at ease, and then burned them out through complete overwork - leaving them, when done, completely exhausted and having virtually no real-world job skills, having been basically moved intact from one campus to another. Joining Microsoft looked to me little different from joining a personality cult.

I still think Microsoft is a personality cult (see Accidental Empires for more on that), but just as it gets steadily easier to find a MS employee who'll criticize The Boss, so have my reasons to hate Microsoft undergone some erosion.

Yes, they're still a giant sucking monopoly, but one which is being undermined by the unmanageable size of its own organization and its own products. Yes, they still make lousy software. Unfortunately, so does everyone else - which is one reason why I'm no longer in commercial software after ten years. And although the Microsoft campus still makes me shiver a little, I'm having to rethink.

I am sitting in an immense pool of people with the same interests as I have - people whom I could probably socialize with very well, share jokes, have a drink, maybe play a game or two. I am in the hotseat of the northeastern technology corridor, in a university so incurably geeky that it has an entire class A IP address to itself. (True. You know how IP addresses consist of four numbers? Anything where the first number is 18 belongs to The Institvte. That's a lot of addresses! But I digress.)

Nonetheless, I don't socialize with these people. For one thing, I'm the wrong age - older than the students, younger than the established permanent residents. But mostly it's because I've been trained to shun some of the activities I like. I grew up with the geek stigma.

Perhaps ... perhaps, I think, reading Anita's site, if I had gone to Microsoft when I was twenty, and been immersed in an environment where it was considered acceptable to dissect SF films all night and play weird board games and so forth ... perhaps if I had been in a place where the stigma didn't apply, a community where even if you're not involved with Microsoft, the culture is very loose and forgiving, and technology is appreciated (unlike Louisiana) ... perhaps everything would have been different.

Would it have been better? Dunno. For all this soul-searching, I'm not unhappy with my life now. I have a good job and lots of leisure, domestic bliss, cats, and plenty of coffee. And Anita's life isn't perfect. I gather that she's looking for love ... and her jobs seem to often be temporary and changeable, something which would make me crazy.

Ultimately, I don't want to trade for Anita's life. I'd just like a little taste of it every now and then.

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