Devoid of Focus or Reason

You'll have to forgive me if I sound a trifle... angry, this evening. Take a glance over at the twitter feed on the right side of the screen if you're curious to know why. In the meantime (while I'm waiting for the site I need to load!) I decided it was a good time to update the ol' blog.

I mean, Jesus, really? The site's been loading for 23 minutes? This isn't 1996! I'm not trying to access somebody's personal home page with a million pictures on a 56k dial-up. Technology has moved on.

For some reason, I'm thinking about my desk. It's really messy at the moment, although it's usually always messy. Currently, though, there are no less than 15 assorted bottles, all empty, one wallet (it's mine), four different documents for a class, an old electric bill, my Nintendo DS, a remote control, a USB headset, a plate, a book about climbing Mount Everest, a digital camera, and I think that's a Comcast bill. I'm not sure. It's under a stack of bottles.

It's always been interesting to me how creative people relate to their workspace. Some of us treat our desks as sacred temples and take great care to keep them pristine, organized, clean and efficient; the idea of working in a cluttered, chaotic environment is anathema. Unthinkable! I'm not one of those people (obviously), so I'm not really certain what makes a person feel that way. I'd imagine an OCD thing?

For the rest of us, though, we don't care about the fact that the desk is messy. If anything, the messy desk is the mark of a well-used desk. It's the kind of statement that says "I don't have time to worry about this mundane shit, I'm working!" That's a bold statement, friends! People should be impressed by our dedication to our craft, not repulsed!

It's probably wishful thinking, at best; I very much doubt that anybody would look at a desk like mine and be impressed. Disgusted, certainly, indifferent, most likely, but impressed?

Since tonight seems to be rambling, unfocused blog night, I'll just move on to the next thought in my head. Do you ever get nostalgic for the "old Internet?" I remember what it was like when I first started logging on, back in, oh, 1998 or so. Now, I'm sure there are nerds out there who would scoff at the idea of 98 being the "good old days of the Internet." They might mention things like Usenet or a BBS. Well, screw those people. 98 was the old days for me, it was my first experience with cyberspace.

I'm not saying it was better. It wasn't. MySpace didn't exist, true, but you had instead a thousand different Geocities, Angelfire and Fortune City websites that were even worse, if you can imagine such a thing. Broken HTML tags, scrolling text, animated GIFs: such things make today's abominable teenage MySpace page, with its irritating music and tiled background that obscures the text look almost palatable!

It was weird before things like Wikipedia, though. Everything felt different, and I'm sure a lot of that was an internal reaction, because I was the newbie, coming into this new realm for the first time. I can still remember the very first time I ever posted on a message board. Which, of course, means I can also remember the first time I was flamed, which would be my first introduction to the fact that the anonymity and audience inherent to the Internet means that most people will be dicks.

Ah well.

Oh, look, the website finished loading while I was typing. How quaint.