It goes without saying that in retrospect the optimal career path, for persons of my age, would have been in computer science.

It probably goes without saying that anyone reading this knows that my own personal career path has been, for most of my adult life, simply dreadful and that at present it is satisficing at best.

So here’s the thing I’ve never shared, and that at most exactly one person (Kendrick) might know: Early on, at the point major decisions were to be made, the Universe went out of its way and bent itself out of my shape to shuffle me over into computer science studies.

My student-worker job was in a lab, and I certainly wasn’t the star of the place. I was apparently good enough, though, that I got the call from the more prestigious lab across the hall to come in and work on some pretty serious development. They were devoted to AI, which now appears to be pretty much an enthusiast’s field, but they were also the first lab on campus to get seriously interested in Web development in late ‘93/early ‘94.

I turned them down because working there would have required that I learn C++ (or maybe there was only one +, or none, at the time, I don’t recall, it was spring of ‘93) without any financial incentive to do so. They wouldn’t have paid better, they wouldn’t have covered the cost of a C(+ or ++ or no-+) course, but they would have provided an easy entry onto the optimal career path. I was a fool for turning them down, and I couldn’t have known it at the time, but even then I did sort of feel like I knew I was behaving foolishly.

If I’d bit the bullet, turned my mind toward learning a new language, and settled in…well, things would have gone much differently, I’m sure. But I didn’t, and they didn’t, and now…well, there was a post recently to the LLL from a code-writer with Microsoft that made me literally sick with envy.

It’s one thing to say things could have gone differently. It’s a thing entirely other to know when one could have made a choice that would have let to difference, when one was perfectly aware of the fact at the time, and when one made what one knew was the wrong decision.

I hate New Year’s Eve.

So I was sitting around with the (considerably younger) neighbors last night, and an even younger friend of theirs offered up the basis of his faith:

When he was a young teen, he had made his own heart stop once. And he had declined to start it back up himself, yet it started beating again anyway. And when it started beating again, it hurt. Therefore, God exists.

Is there a word for an anti-syllogism, for an argument that is neither valid nor sound but which is offered up as if it had evidentiary weight anyway?

In my toilet, right at the highest point of the little standing pool at the bottom, there exists a very thin and very ugly ring. I can scrub it away if I apply enough cleanser and elbow grease (it usually takes about three iterations of solventing then scrubbing), but within a couple of days its always back.

So, really, what gives? Is this the “hard water” stuff I’ve heard about or something different?

If you do, you need look no farther than this comment posted in a thread at Sadly, No!:

I remember asking a friend at Logo [the USAn cable network targetting the GLBT audience] how exactly they expected it to succeed. She answered, ‘We’re urban, educated, wealthy and have ready money that we don’t spend on kids–name me a better demographic.’

OK, class, who can tell me why that poster and hir friend at Logo need to be bashed upside their respective heads with The Brickbat of Socioeconomic Awareness?

That’s right! While GLBT folk may be proportionally more likely to reside in the larger cities (or may not, I haven’t seen the numbers), we are certainly not all, or even predominately, upper-middle-class cosmopolites. But, thanks to people like the commenter above and the TV person sie quotes, the rest of us (likely the majority of us) are invisible even to our fucking allies. Worse–much, much worse to me, I think–is that we are not only unseen, we are pretty much explicitly told we are unwelcome.

Even people who are generally aware of class issues seem to have a blind spot when it comes to GLBT people. Pam Spaulding, an out lesbian who is both one of the most prominent GLBT bloggers and one of my favorite blogwriters overall, seems to work under the assumption that queer folks have disposable income and mobility opportunities; after seeing a documentary about rural Bible Belt gays and lesbians, she writes:

You may ask, why on earth do these gay folks stay in these tiny towns? They are subjected to the possible loss of a job if someone outs you, shunning by family, or worse, you end up like Scotty Weaver. Kate and I talked about this for a while, but it’s pretty clear that for many gays in rural areas, their fear of living in a hostile world like this is actually less stressful than the thought of living in a large, urban environment. [emphasis in the original]

See the assumption there? Non-urban gays could pick up and move to the city, where our lives would be a lot less shitty, but we’re just afraid to do so. It’s not that we don’t have the cash needed to up sticks and go; no, we’re queer so we must have well-paying jobs, the ability to find a job in our chosen urban environment, and enough disposable income for deposits, two months of rent, and enough cash to tide us over between the time we leave our rural job and the time our first urban paycheck comes through.

That’s what’s crazy-making, though: I’m sure that if you were to ask Pam a question explicitly grounded in socioeconomic issues, she would of course be very aware of and sensitive to the fact that GLBTs are at least as likely to be poor and opportunity-less as straights. When the question comes framed solely as a GLBT issue, with the room for consideration of economics not intentionally foregrounded, the assumption of middle-classedness is simply not questioned.

It’s crazy-making, and I’m sick of it, and I have no idea what I could do about it. Grr. Grr grr grr.

Not something I ever expected, or particularly wanted, to see.

I’m not complaining, mind you, but…well, I guess he must’ve gotten screwed on his Buffy residuals or something.

1. Little Britain, while often enjoyable, demonstrates that stereotypes concerning the dryness and relative high-mindedness are no longer in play. Not that they ever where, really, but the undeserved reputation persists.

2. Dermot O’Leary hits all my buttons at once. Yum.

It is a commonly held truth, and as such may be entirely false, that scent is the key to memory.

I just wrote that CK1 was the scent of Christmas to me. I wrote that because I was pulling up Christmas songs to get maudlin over and was suddenly overwhelmed with a memory of that fragrance, so hard-struck that I instinctively posted it. I mean “instinctively” almost literally here because the posting actually did precede rational thought and consideration.

After posting, the questioning came. I realized why the scent and the time and significance are all so commingled.

Christmastime 1994 was when I went entirely over the edge, when my lost decade began in earnest.

I had been “in a bad place” before that time, and I didn’t hit the deepest darkness until a month or so later, but the time after the end of the Fall ‘94 semester and the beginning of Spring ‘95 marks the period in which I totally, truly transitioned into madness. I wouldn’t genuinely be back on what could pass for solid ground until sometime in, I think, spring of 2004.

The year 1995, god. It’s like someone has taken a big black marker and, pressing hard, censored the portions of my memory concerning that year. It’s totally gone, man. I have a few memories, all of them fleeting and bad, but mostly it has been buried. Ditto most of the next several years. Continuity really doesn’t start emerging until maybe 2001, and even then it’s mostly bracketed until we get well into 2004. (The year 1997, as near as I can tell, does not exist.)

I fell apart at the end of 2004, totally lost cohesion. There are reasons and circumstances and various other things that can be pointed to, but none of that really matters. What matters is that that’s when I lost structural integrity, which I wouldn’t regain for a full ten years and which I still find myself often struggling mightily to preserve. And even when I’m not struggling, I’m still battered, still marked by that long, awful time.

What sent me down? It’s not worth commenting on. The proximate causes were as arbitrary as they were significant. And here’s the thing that seems like irony but likely isn’t: Christmastide 2004 was the time in which, in the darkness that had been gathering for years, I was ensconced in the best and brightest and most pleasant situation I had experienced until that point in my life. It was in that season that I stood on the quivering edge exulting in things almost, but very much not quite, being what I’d always wanted them to be like. Then the quivering turned to crumbling (but wasn’t it always crumbling already?) and I fell so far, and so hard.

That was when I lost my life, or when I realized I’d lost my life. I’m still trying to get it back, but god it’s hard and so, so unlikely.

…is CK1 for me. I know why, too, but it kind of scares me.

The “watchmaker” argument for special creation falls apart under the weight of its own analogy.

The argument, if you can call it such, is the one that asks, “If you were walking along a deserted beach and found a watch, would you assume it had grown there through natural processes or that it had been built by some unseen, distant watchmaker?” This somehow demonstrates that humans were built like watches, not grown like animals.

It’s rooked a lot of people, but its form is such that it’s self-defeating. The question demands that one ask, “If you were walking through Tiffany’s and saw a poodle sitting on a countertop, would you assume it had been built by one of the watchmakers or that it had been naturally birthed by some unseen, distant mother?” This, I guess, somehow demonstrates that poodles are cobbled together Frankenstein-style, not resultant from hot dog-on-dog action.

It’s the exact same argument (if, again, one can call it such). It assumes the observer can distinguish between born things and made things and then proceeds to (somehow) use this ability to make distinction to suggest that the two cannot be distinguished. Or something.

How do people fall for that one?

You’d think you’d be tired after so many trips around the sun, but not really.