I’ve found myself in Starbucks two days in a row, a place I could never abide in Cambridge, in the heart of my coffee snob heart.

Where do I come form, where am I, where am I going?

Everything here is reflective. In the morning, light bounces from the bay to the ubiquitous glass paneling of the high rises. I imagine it is the light of a million disco balls, embracing, energizing, and sort of … jarring.

The brightness is infectious, I think. I went to a small cafe yesterday. I expected disaffected employees, charming decor. Not quite. It was small, and lacked the polished efficiency of Starbucks, but nonetheless, the concrete and steel motif reverberates strongly. In Cambridge, sometimes bookstores contained cafes. Tri… Bookstore on Newberry Street is one example. This cafe contained a bookstore. San Francisco is the synecdochic reversal of Cambridge. Maybe. Three business dudes sat to the left of me, and one guy in gym shorts and a t-shirt. No skinny pale girls with cigarettes. No guys in skinny jeans. I overheard acronyms, not French Surnames.

I feel out of place. In Cambridge, I identified with California. I lived in San Jose. I skateboarded. Here, I feel distinctly Cantabrigian.

Every eight months or so I feel alternately that a) school has made me less human or b) I am lazy and have wasted a lot of time and should be working hard.

Now I think I must be hovering somewhere near b). It’s so strange how different I feel. I read my old posts(and old journal entries) and I can’t imagine how it was to feel that way…always.

It is, after all, a luxury that I am at Harvard, fed and clothed by my parents. If I didn’t have them as a sort of security, if I were to face the world alone in six months, I’d surely be panicking now that I have no job and no serious academic prospects.

Basically, I am afraid that my idealism and maybe my personality is resting on some delusion — that money doesn’t really matter — a delusion perpetuated by my parents willingness to put up with my sponger tendencies.

I want my identity to be independent, so I need to be financially independent.

Perhaps that is best though; all that I would’ve said were negative, disparaging things. And I believe that is the nature of communication when anonymity is the default.

Over the past week, I’ve felt a real, tangible sense of accomplishment after completing a quest, or leveling my character. But I think (hope) I’ve played enough to tire of it for another two years. After killing some Harpies, I have a number to quantify my accomplishment, but this quantitative reduction is precisely the source of my discontent with math.

No, I decided, but it was a narrow escape. The price of a subscription checked my bloodlust, or I would’ve succumb to orcish wanderings for the weeks to come. These deliberations must’ve unlodged something in my head though, I’ve been thinking about IRC.

Between the ages of twelve and fourteen, I spent hours each night idling on IRC. I learned a lot of things, and overall, it was probably not the worst education I could have had. I could have read more maybe, wrote more, done math more, but chances are, I probably would’ve just watched TV more. I don’t harbor ambitions to be a programmer anymore, so that side of learning is useless to me now. But the things that I learned about community, well, those are things that I won’t forget, probably can’t forget.

I should say something about the structure of IRC, to encircle this landscape that I will soon describe.[ IRC is a sort of persistant chat. There are IRC servers and on the IRC servers there are IRC channels. A channel may be registered and then it belongs to the person who registered the channel. That person then becomes an "Op". An "Op" has the privilege to kick, ban, silence, op, deop, a long with an assortment of other less commonly used privileges. An op is sort of a bureacuract for chat harmony.

The people who ran the server are server admins. Their chief disciplinary power was the "k-line". Once a user was k-lined, they could no longer return to the server.

I should note, the method of banning and k-lining relies on server masks -- a regular expression for a DNS. A whole city could be k-lined, or a whole ISP, or a whole ip range, or just a username.
]

(to be continued tomorrow)

because I am captain nemo and the internet is my periscope.

I recognize that I take an especially anti-intellectual stance in this paragraph, denying the possibility of emotional revelation in academia, but, eh.

At the same time, it leaves me with almost no time to enjoy things. It’s odd, but now, after working for the last two weeks, even my favorite books seem bland. At this point, it is surprising to read about other people who place so much feeling into nonworking life.

Anyway.