Just a person

years ago I had a roommate who worked as a door to door salesman for some shady company that sold everything. I was working the opening shift at the cafe. She wanted me to come along on her routes. Don’t know why. She had a creepy encounter with a guy on the route and I think she wanted someone to ward that off or keep an eye on things. So I’d go with her, dead tired, and she’d say I was ‘job shadowing.’ This made her look authoritative to the people she was trying to pitch. I’d fall asleep on the bus in the seat next to her on the way home.

years ago when I was scraping by in the northwoods, when some piece of machinery vital to continued survival broke down--which happened every day--I joked that “every day I wake up, and then something else goes wrong” as I went about the process of jury-rigging it back together. And then I’d laughed at my own joke. (the punchline, you see, was that I wished that I had died in my sleep.) No one else would laugh, because it perhaps was not funny. Looking back I can see that it wasn’t that funny at all.

one of the things that always helped me *a little bit* with asthma was caffeine. didn’t ever work as quick as a rescue inhaler but I always drink a little after an attack. not the best when it’s late and you want to go to sleep but it’s better than struggling to breathe while your lungs potentially begin to scar

went for a walk last night. saw some deer. wanted to see what happened to the prairie--I heard they turned it into tennis courts and wanted to see for ymself. cut through the woods, was nearly pitch black. felt like I was being followed, kept turning around but couldn’t see far, thought I could make out some shapes. finally turned on my flashlight on my phone and shone it behind me. three sets of reflective eyes. only reason I could tell they were deer was because what else could they be

think I might have caught it. had persistent asthma all week, on and off. would go away mostly with my inhaler but there would still be a heavy feeling in my lungs after. was afraid of catching it, because if I’m having asthma attacks it could be bad, but now I’m wondering if it’s not asthma at all. or if I caught it and it’s been triggering my asthma. was having a productive cough, but it turned dry today. was thinking of going to get tested but I don’t have money, and what if I don’t have it at all, then I’m putting myself at risk going to get the test. maybe it’s just best to stay in my room for two weeks.

So I’ve been going through free courses I’ve been finding online because the bootcamp didn’t teach me a whole lot. Right now I’m going through the assignments list for a cornell course on computer science and doing them in javascript. https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs1110/2017fa/assignments/assignment7/index.php I know that MIT has a free course and I’ve heard some other ivy league schools allow you to audit their computer science courses and I was going to look into that.  The thing that’s on my mind right now, though, is that in the curriculum for the space invaders game, they mention that the assignment actually used to be to create a breakout game, but they had to change it because “the number of Academic Integrity cases had gotten out of hand.” Rich kids cheat. What else is new. I can go through the material they go through, and I can do it without cheating. I can complete the assignments they have to cheat to complete. But I know at the end of their journey, they’re branded with a class status symbol, and I will be seen as less capable and less intelligent and less useful, because I will not have that symbol.

Attempt # ???

Attempt 37

Second attempt 

the invasion is going well

imagine meeting a space alien and it turns out to be a dumb asshole

I’m putting together a space-invaders game in Javascript. I want to do something original, but am having trouble coming up with ideas.

One of the software engineering coaches said to find a problem in my own life and solve it with code. That can be my next project.

Months ago, I was watching Star Trek or something with someone. They said something about how life in the universe would be more diverse, and the aliens are so obviously just people in costumes. The universe is vast — near infinite. Therefore, the possible combinations of life seeded across the galaxy would also be near infinite.

Usually I just say, “uh-huh” to stuff like this. “Sure, whatever.” I don’t know why that day was different but I said convergent evolution is a concept that exists. Our nearest ancestor to cephalopods is a sightless worm that existed six hundred millions of years ago, but our eyes are similar in design and function. Animals evolving in similar conditions from different roots will lead to similar designs sometimes, because they work. Also, for the sake of telling fun fictional stories set in space, it’s cheaper to put people in costumes than it is to create entirely random alien designs.

They replied that what I’m saying can’t be right, I must be too small minded to imagine the infinite possibilities. They hadn’t heard of convergent evolution, and kept cutting me off and telling me that the universe is big. It was a supremely dumb thing to argue about, but there we were.

Weeks later, they started talking about convergent evolution, parroting back lines to me that I had said to them myself. They’d happened to hear some other grad student talking about it or saw a documentary or some shit. And they marveled at the concept as they told it back to me, and it was if we hadn’t ever argued about it in the recent past.

The reason they were cutting me off was because I am not a grad student. I’m not from wealth. I have no status. Same reason I’m not going to find a job that pays 50k.

There’s no solving that with software. For all the ways people talk about software engineering tech solving everything, pushing humankind into a new utopian era, the only problems that we truly solve are problems of capital and automation. We find more efficient ways to consume. That’s it. Perhaps these are the only kinds of problems that tech bros are familiar with, and this is why they think big tech will solve everything and save the world. They are not the problems in my life.

We are capable of destroying the world and profiting and consuming at levels never before seen in human history — but we still have to live with each other in a world without community. We still have to deal with each other. Nothing solves that.

So I’m putting together a space-invaders game in Javascript.

applying to software engineering jobs constantly. no interviews, no responses. I didn’t expect anything different. noticing however all of the rich kids that I went through the bootcamp with are talking about all the interviews they’ve been getting. they’re getting them because they have class signifiers on their resumes, and I don’t, and it’s truly as simple as that. their degrees may not be in cs, but they do show they come from a certain income level, and that matters to the people in charge of hiring.

I told the job coach weeks ago that I doubted I’d get anywhere because I’m not from a wealthy background. I don’t come from a ‘middle class’ background, whatever that even is. I don’t have a degree. I come from years of customer service and jobs paying the minimum wage, or near it. she basically said that’s all in my head. “whether you think you can or think you can’t, it’s true.” it’s tiring. everyone else is an expert on how to break into the class they were born or married into.

don’t know what to think about lovecraft country. the hype around it feels very ‘emperors new clothes’ to me. I see people fawning over it, but the writing feels sloppy in places and I find the subplots more interesting than the main one.

most recent episode is set in korea. there is lip service paid to imperialists destroying korean culture and replacing it with their own. but I feel like the fourth wall breaks in a kind of bad way. the main monster absolutely butchers the korean legend its based on, and this is in an american tv show. so that line about american propaganda/the destruction/commodification of culture seems unintentionally apt and makes me wonder how self aware the show really is. 

there’s also a scene where the protagonist gets a ‘love is love, it’s okay to be different’ speech from a character that’s coded to be bisexual, and then in the very next scene she is arguing with her mother about how her pedophile father ‘loved’ her and she ingenuously asks ‘what’s the difference between that love and other love,’ which brings back memories of slippery slope straw-men that right wing politicians kept drawing as a justification to ban gay marriage. I’m not sure what their intention is with that particular scene. ultimately the show just seems kind of bad to me, with moments that feel well intentioned--but it feels like the writers don’t care deeply about the subjects they take on. it points out that cultural destruction and commodification in colonist media is a thing that happens--but if it *cared* about the issue it wouldn’t dive headlong into it and get so much wrong. In one episode it centers a subplot on fetishization, and in the next it fetishizes. In one moment, they seem to care enough about the representation of transpeople in media to add a trans character, but then kill the character off as quickly as they appear. Such gestures feel so hollow. am I the only one that feels this way? I think jordan peele attaching his name to it as producer has been the reason behind all the fawning over it. he made some great hits, but now perhaps the hype around him has insulated any works his name is attached to, and subsequently everything that comes out of his studio, from critiques. not a good situation for an artist to get into.

Linkedin posts are insufferable.

I saw one yesterday that’s still on my mind. The guy was saying that he learned to code while working at a gas station. His coworkers told him to stop, he says. They said, “coding is for smart people, not people like us.”

“Well, they were right,” he says. “It wasn’t for people like them. It was for ME.”

It ends with him saying that Today, he is a senior software engineer for an awesome Memphis based company.

All the comments are from white collar people talking about how inspirational he is.

The dude looks like he’s 30, and his job history places him in a “Director of Operations” role from 2009 to 2019 for a non-tech company.

I don’t doubt that he was at a gas station for some period of time, but it was likely a ‘character building’ summer job that he had to take at the behest of his wealthy parents when he was a kid, it certainly wasn’t a role he was stuck in. There’s a world of difference between working a shitty summer job that you know will end, that you know you have a way out of, and working a shitty job and knowing there isn’t a realistic way out. 

And the “that’s not for stupid people like us” line sounds like a caricature of something a working class person would say. I doubt it ever even happened. When I told my coworkers at Starbucks I was learning to code, they were generally supportive. I’ve worked in some toxic, shitty environments in retail, and even in the worst of them I don’t think the “we’re too stupid to get out” response would be the norm. It’s largely unspoken, but most people know economic success it isn’t about how ‘smart’ you are. Most working people do, anyway.

Why do rich people so commonly pretend to be from a working class background that they actually have no experience in?

It feels related to the story that’s broke out recently about the white professor who pretended to be black. People pretending to be something they’re not because they get some kind of credit in a small, insular bubble for it. They pretend to be from a status that comes with obstacles in our bigoted and classist society — and within their bubble they get respect, but they never experience what it’s like outside their bubble. They never suffer the general bigotry or obstacles that having such a status brings in wider society. They only get a narcissistic ego boost from colleagues complimenting them on overcoming adversity that they never actually experienced.