Escaping the Black Vortex of the Internet

It's like "Escape from LA," just the only switch is on my computer...

From left to right: My best friend Tom, myself, and my husband Peter.  This photo was taken on Peter's mid-deployment leave from Afghanistan.  We've been best friends forever.  Peter's giving Tom a playful jack to the stomach (I hope it's his stomach...)

I have a little problem with the internet.  It's connected to my argument problem, which I discuss here, but a touch more generalized than that.

I like The Real World.  A lot - I'd rather be in it and participating in The Real World than stuck behind a computer.  I actually hate computers and have a hypothesis about how they play a role in depression and anxiety in modern culture.

And I do.  I genuinely do participate in The Real World at every opportunity.

Peter's mid-deployment leave last October, when he, his parents and I visited a petting zoo at a pumpkin farm.  

Another shot at the petting zoo, this time with my mother in law.  It was sweet for everyone to go because I realized as we were looking at all the animals I was the only one really feeding them and petting them. 

Halloween with my nephews.  I dressed up.  The one on the left is Alex; I'm holding Nicky.  Nicky plays a surprisingly large role in my life.

My problem is, as I see it, that I worry that people find me uninteresting.  The idea that there's billions of people on the internet and the vast majority really aren't interested in anything I have to say is disturbing.

I don't have a whole heck of a lot of friends.  I mean, I have friendly colleagues, my friends from church and people from high school I see sometimes.  But, at the same time, I don't have a lot of "real" friends: people I see every week who really, really know me.

But I do have some.  Tom is one of them.

Yesterday Tom and I went for our weekly coffee.  We do it literally every week; sometimes with my father in law, but usually alone.

This week we added a new dimension: chess.  We talk about everything over coffee, but chess was particularly fun because we both love to play games.

Tom - like church, like my nephews - gets me away from the computer and out to where I'd rather be.

But I get lonely during the week.  Maybe that's absurd; I don't think so.  I also want to talk about things that make me really think.

While you might think a scientist gets to think a lot, in reality it's mostly just like every other job: a beancounter sitting in front of a computer organizing and plotting things like databases.  Maybe 5% is actual thinking, and I've found that 5% is the worst bit because it can really get you into trouble.

Me in my old office with the broken whiteboard.  This was before I got my new office with a window.  It was taken last summer, which is why I'm not wearing nice cloths.

I don't think science is going to work out.  Not just because the actual work of it makes me unhappy - and it does - but because funding cuts and the sheer number of people who now have PhDs in relevant disciplines make finding a permanent, well-paying (>$35,000 a year) job virtually impossible.

So I tend to use the internet as a distraction as well.  I keep looking to it - like I look at religion - as a solution to a problem.  When I don't know what to do, I go into Information Gathering Mode.

I could ramble more like this, but I think I'll just stop here.  It may become a regular blog post: Escaping the Black Vortex of the Internet.