Brettia

As some may know, I’ve been working for Trapani since October of last year, and back on Thursday I started working with him at the school again, but for many more hours. I was perfectly ready to work diligently for two or three hours, but this quickly became five hours, and by the time I was home, I was ready to flop down on the couch and read something. That something ended up being the fourth Harry Potter book, which happened to be the first thing I saw. More on that later.

Anyway, I was pretty tired Thursday, and we had had a long and somewhat frustrating chat about how the school website should be run and such, so I wasn’t entirely happy about the whole thing, either. On Friday the school was closed, and I got to spend my day off cleaning house without my little brother’s help (he was off at a friend’s house sleeping over). Woo. I forget if I talked about all this already, but bear with me.

Saturday was okay, or at least it must have been, because I no longer remember what occurred that day anymore. Sunday, however, was a bit more exciting, as my family and I went to a church potluck to say goodbye to the outgoing pastor, a big, friendly man named Doug. (We all just call him Pastor Doug, though he does have a last name, I think.) The food was good, and Zachary (my brother) street-luged down the church’s driveway on his skateboard. He almost crashed when shooting a narrow gap between cement barriers, but he made it, much to my disappointment. No, I didn’t really want him to lose his teeth in a tragic skateboard accident, but he’s been increasingly annoying lately while I have (in my opinion) antagonized him less often than usual. It’s a bit one-sided, since we usually feed off of each other’s taunts and pranks, but I find that I don’t really care anymore about revenge.

On Monday it was back to work, but this time, doubly so. The family friend, the one who owns a golf business, called and asked that I come over and fix their computer, which was generating dozens of pop-ups per hour and becoming an increasing burden. I agreed (for a price) and was picked up around 9:30. I worked steadily on the problem until about 1:45, using such various weapons in my anti-spy/ad/malware arsenal as Ad-Aware, Spybot Search and Destroy, and Norton Anti-Virus. Finally, everything seemed to be in working order: Ad-Aware and Spybot had taken out about 900 infected objects among them, and Norton had discovered a Trojan virus (one that acts like a legitamate program, and is not at all affiliated with the famous product which I won’t name).

Norton was unable to clean the virus in the beginning, but it did it without any problem once the spyware/adware/malware were gone. I ran LiveUpdate, the Norton virus definition list updater, and was asked to reboot the computer. This seemed normal, so I rebooted. However, what occurred after the reboot was anything but normal. The Windows XP setup program came up, asking me to enter information that the computer should have had already. I complied, faced with no other option, and went through the entire setup program. After clicking Finish, the computer sat and thought about things for quite a long time, and the friend and I were beginning to get nervous. He suggested that I call HP (the maker of their computer), and I did.

While I was on the phone, the computer did whatever it was doing and went to a countdown screen, where it stated that if it was restarted before the ten-minute countdown was over, something (who knows what) would go horribly wrong. And at that exact moment, a voice on the phone (prerecorded) came on, and the elevator music stopped for a moment. It said something to the effect of: if you’re calling about a new virus that displays a countdown screen, go to the HP website for more information, or stay on the line if you don’t have Internet access. The elevator music continued, and it was then obvious that I wasn’t likely to speak with a human anytime soon. I hung up, and we let the countdown continue and finally finish. The computer finally got to the desktop, but all the settings were messed up, and it took the friend six hours on Tuesday to get his email back in order. Luckily, no files seemed to be missing or out of place.

The scare was over, but it still left behind some nasty problems. We assumed that the whole thing was caused by the Trojan virus that we’d found earlier, and that somehow Norton had triggered somethng when it tried to remove it. I needed to get over to CSHS at this point, so it was agreed that I would come back on Tuesday, and that Ray would call or pick me up at 8:00.

I finally made it to CSHS at about 2:30 that afternoon to be greeted by about ten pages of a packet that needed to be scanned and PDF-ed. (In other words, painstakingly scanned using the lab’s ten-year-old scanner and then touched up and rerendered using Macromedia Fireworks MX, then finally exported as a grayscale JPEG and imported into a Word document, which was finally converted to PDF.) This in itself took most of the afternoon (at least until 3:30 or 4:00), and I had to wait longer while a teacher (Metcalf, I think, though I really don’t know teachers very well beyond those that I’ve already had) printed some document or another. Then Trapani had to do some things, and I had to wait longer. Normally, I wouldn’t have minded much, as I have nothing better to do, but the frustrating events of the morning had taken their toll on my mood.

I arrived home tired and ready to read some more, which I did.

Tuesday was worse than Monday, at least in the morning. The family friend that I’ve mentioned has a knack for not coming at the right time, and it was more than proven on Tuesday and today as well that he still has that knack. I was ready to go at 7:30, after having stayed up until 12:30 the night before, engrossed in the Harry Potter book (they’re really addictive, even if you don’t like them all that much). Sleep-deprived and still tired from working so much over the past few days (it might not seem like much to someone who has a job, but for me, having never had to work steadily for so long, it was exhaustive), I awaited a call from the family friend or the sound of a car in our driveway, come to pick me up. I waited. And waited. And soon it was after 9:00, so I called the family friend myself. No answer, at either of his numbers. Feeling cheated of a solid night’s sleep, I flopped down on the couch and dozed until Trapani came to pick me up and take me to CSHS.

Once there, I was greeted with a mountain of things that needed to be put on the website. For a brief moment, I felt like a secretary, but then I decided that what I was doing would free up Trapani, which would in turn be beneficial for me, so I set to it. It took about an hour and a half, but I got it done, and the homepage got a little reorganization as well. We talked some, and I worked on fixing a weird network glitch that was causing the desktop to turn off and on when someone was logged in, and I got home at about 5:00 again, still tired from not having enough sleep the night before.

The family friend had called just before I left for CSHS, apologizing for “forgetting” to call or come and get me, and asking that we do the same thing again today (Wednesday). With several promises that he would indeed pick me up, I agreed. So I was now obligated to get up at 7:15 again in order to shower, dress, and eat breakfast in time to call the family friend at 8:00. I read my Harry Potter book for about three hours Tuesday night, blazing through a solid 300 pages. I fell asleep around midnight, and I woke and got ready at 7:15, as planned. I called at the correct time, got no response, and called again fifteen minutes later, and again fifteen minutes after that. Never was the phone answered, though I was sure that one of the two numbers that I tried each time had to be right. At this point I was feeling thoroughly nettled, and so I called Trapani and said that I wouldn’t be coming to the school in the afternoon.
I didn’t exactly tell him why, but I did need to get some things done, as well as figure out if my web design client (the main source of most of my work, and incidentally Trapani’s brother) had forgotten about me or not, as I hadn’t heard from him in days. I still haven’t talked to him; more than likely he’s a bit annoyed at me because I’ve been gone so much lately and have been unable to return any of his calls. I finished my Harry Potter book this afternoon (734 pages in about eight hours, a personal page per hour record), during which time the family friend finally called. I let the answering machine get it, as I wasn’t particularly willing to talk to him at that point, and he said something about forgetting all about me and so on. I find it hard to believe that he didn’t remember until almost five hours after the appointed time.

And that brings me to where I am now, sitting in my black leather office chair, typing rapidly. I’ve been more eloquent today than usual, a side effect of blogging right after reading a book, as I have a tendency to copy the tone and style of an other I have recently read for a few days after finishing the book. Not entirely a bad thing, unless the author is a bad writer, in which case it sucks.

As you can see, the fates have transpired to make the first three days of this week suck royally. The fact that I’m ever-tired (reminds me of Everfresh…) is not because the work I’ve been doing was particularly strenuous or hard, or because I’m a spoiled middle-class American who’s never worked a day in his life, but because I find no value in the jobs I’ve been given. How can anyone consider making PDFs and updating an ugly website something to take pride in? How can anyone consider fixing someone’s computer without success and then being blown off by them something to take pride in? But then comes the hardest question to ask: if I could choose any job in the world, which one would I be most proud of having?

Certainly not President of the United States, which is probably the first thing to come to mind. Our political system is so screwed up with corruption and greed that I’d never want that job. CEO of a Fortune 500 company? Sounds great, but again, greed and corruption comed to mind. IT department director for a large company (or my school district, even)? No, I don’t want to spend my life in a server closet. Writer? Now there’s a better one. People don’t realize how hard it is to write something entertaining and of good quality at the same time…it takes a specific kind of person. Am I that kind of person? Who knows?

And there’s only one other job that comes to mind: owner of my own small web design/development firm. That sounds great, but how much time would I really have to work with clients? Then again, if the firm consisted of only one employee, myself, then I guess I’d work with clients no matter what. But do I really want to have anything to do with computers? As I see it, computers and the Internet are nothing: just air, electrons, bits of metal. They’re not real people. They’re just a fake world for real people to fall into, and possible become trapped in. That’s why you see so many gamer-geeks and programmer/computer nerds like myself. What would these kids do if they didn’t have technology? Play sports? Not likely. Read books? Maybe. Do nothing? Probably.

Though it may not seem so, I actually have some kind of plan in place before I write a blog entry. This isn’t all just a long stream of thoughts, though it does look like it is. Lately I’ve been thinking about philisophical things like the place of humans in the universe and where I fit into all that and such. For some reason, the Harry Potter book that I just read gave me the idea of starting with the basics, rather than trying to figure everything out at once.

First, one needs something to strive for, some kind of uber-long-term goal to try and reach before they die. For many people this might just be to have children and raise them. For others this might be to conquer the earth. And I have no idea what mine would be, which is why I’ve felt so adrift lately. This is not to say that I don’t want to have children or conquer the earth (heh), but rather that I regard other things as more important. (Then again, I’ve never done either, so who am I to judge?) To figure out my ultimate goal(s), I have to assess what is important to me, right? And what is important to me? Things like honor, friendship, loyalty, honesty, strength of character, etc. But what about material things? My cat. My family. My friends, of course.

But how do I somehow go from that to some kind of life-long ambition? Unlike Harry Potter, my parents weren’t killed by some power-hungry madman when I was a year old, so I don’t have anyone that I want to kill or take vengeance upon. I was never wronged by society, so I have nothing against the world. I’m not poor (or rich), so what reason do I have to strive for wealth? Is is possible that my generation (at least those who are American) are so pampered and sheltered that they have no experiences early in their lives to drive them forward in adulthood? My parents were both born to poorer families, and they have worked hard to have more money to provide for their own children than their parents had for them. To me, this makes sense: my parents don’t want my brother and I to have to work like they did when they were kids.

But what if, by trying to give to me what they never had, my parents are also cursing me with a life that is too easy? It must sound stupid, to complain of having things too easy, when others are living on the streets and going hungry and would give anything to trade places with me. However, what if these people are actually better people on the inside than any pampered American brat, because they’ve been through an ordeal so tough that they know what it’s like to feel real hunger and real pain. I’m not saying that living on the streets without food or shelter or adequate clothing is the key to becoming a better person…but who knows? It might be.

Supposedly Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama) was originally a rich prince with everything he could ever want at his disposal, but he gave it all up in order to travel his country and think and fast. And it worked for him. But wouldn’t it be ungrateful to give up riches and fame like he had, especially when others are working so hard just to get a fraction of that wealth? Or perhaps relinquishing his wealth was a way of trying to get people to see that it doesn’t matter, that it isn’t worth it, that they won’t be content, no matter how rich they are.

Satyagraha.