I turned thirty in my time zone about 48 minutes ago, so I will allow myself my yearly luxury of penning a day log all about myself and my self-indulgent obsessions.
The first thing is actually about the calender year as opposed to the past year of being 30. When this year begin, I was quite honestly expecting the future to start. I was actually expecting, in some ways, the end of history, when everyone was on the same page, and we could move forward past prejudices of the past, etcetera. That is one reason why I started this calender year with the writeup hovercar: I thought it was the perfect writeup to start the decade. And for those of you who can't remember four months ago, something quickly happened on e2 that poisoned my thinking. That was the entire Ush debacle, which honestly I can't make heads or tails of. E2 has settled down over the years, probably because we all got to know each other a lot better in real life, and thus it was harder to be keyboard cowboys. And then over a couple of weeks, e2 was blasted back to being a turn of the decade chat room. Not to say that I sympathize with Ush, or even understood the reasons for the conflict, but that woke me up to the fact that the future isn't quite here yet. There is still going to be a lot more conflict, of many different kinds, before humanity makes whatever steps are necessary to save our own skins.
And I am okay with that. I would have preferred riding off into the sunset, but it looks like we have years of arguing ahead of us. I hope internet unpleasantries are the worst of it.
At the same time as I am getting used to the fact that the future may be more struggle than reward, at least for a while, my own life is slow paced and relaxing in a way that is probably outside of the norm for most of American culture. I am unemployed, I live with my mother, and I volunteer and ride my bicycle. The reasons for this are many, but it is not a permanent surrender on my part, rather a strategic withdrawal in the face of new economic realities about what the prospects are for a young, educated person. I left Portland, a city where everything was happening, to move to a small, rural community. I don't regret it at all. I am almost afraid at how happy I am to have the high point of my week be a volunteer shift at the library, and how I really don't quail at the thought of continuing such a seemingly-boring lifestyle for a long time.
And one final note: over the past year, I have continued the pattern, first started in the fall of 2008, of being one of the most frequent and regular contributors to this site. I became an m-noder a year ago, and over the past year have written over 200 nodes. I honestly don't know where the impetuous from this came from. I also don't think my own contributions are that extraordinary. I wish that my writeups wouldn't stick around for days on the New Writeups nodelet. But I also don't know what, when and why E2 will find a new roll in the internet.