Struggling against the almighty tides of eventuality

Well it’s a sad picture, the final blow hits you
Somebody else gets what you wanted again
You know it’s all the same, another time and place
Repeating history, and you’re getting sick of it
But I believe in whatever you do
And I’ll do anything to see it through

Because these things will change, can you feel it now?
These walls that they put up to hold us back will fall down
It’s a revolution, the time will come for us to finally win
We’ll sing hallelujah, we’ll sing hallelujah

So we’ve been outnumbered, raided and now cornered
It’s hard to fight when the fight ain’t fair
We’re getting stronger now, from things they never found
They might be bigger but we’re faster and never scared
You can walk away, say we don’t need this
But there’s something in your eyes says we can beat this

‘Cause these things will change, can you feel it now?
These walls that they put up to hold us back will fall down
It’s a revolution, the time will come for us to finally win
We’ll sing hallelujah, we’ll sing hallelujah

Tonight we standed on our knees
To fight for what we worked for all these years
And the battle was long, it’s the fight of our lives
But we’ll stand up champions tonight

It was the night things changed, can you see it now?
These walls that they put up to hold us back fell down
It’s a revolution, throw your hands up ’cause we never gave in
We’ll sing hallelujah, we’ll sing hallelujah

Having spent a decent portion of today talking about programming with rakaur and dKingston, I feel I have the urge to actually do some programming.  I do that for my job, of course, but that’s not really what I’m talking about.  I’ve been doing that all day today, and while it’s nice to get a task done, writing database interfaces for government processes isn’t exactly illustrious.  I don’t hate my job, though the people I work with can be, shall we say, frustrating; I just want to do something other than this.

Recently, I went off the deep end and acquired an iPhone, which I’m almost certain heralds the apocalypse in some way.  However, it presents an interesting opportunity: I could learn another language and actually write some interesting things.  I’m assuming the ideas for those things will come later, after the learning part.  The more important thing is to actually do something new, while I have the vibe for it.

Also, I never posted those things I promised I would a week or two ago.  Turns out, I had no Internet connection.  Of course, now I’ve totally lost interest in them.  One’s written up, but it’s terrible, so I guess I’ll post it, and just trash the other.

There seems to be a movement afoot to promote animal research; I saw this the other day, and now get to see a copy of that billboard every day on my way to work.  The thing I don’t understand is: are these people high?

I don’t particularly like animal research.  It’s not that I don’t understand that it advances medical technologies that help human beings.  It’s not that I want more people to die horribly from cancer.  But you’re still breeding animals specifically for the purpose of injecting them with or otherwise inducing horrible afflictions (or doing various other experiments to make their lives awful).  Does this mean we should stop doing it?  Well, I don’t know what alternatives there are that people will be satisfied with, and thus there’s no response I could give that is even remotely close to “yes” which won’t get me labeled as a monster; and that’s weird, cause I’d be advocating not torturing animals for our personal gain.

So, we’ll accept animal testing as a given, if only for the impossibility of stopping it.  However, I do think we can agree that it’s not something we should all be happy about.  If we suffered some horrible nuclear winter down the road, you’d probably eat your dog.  It’s unlikely you’d be overjoyed at the prospect.  As such, I don’t think it’s a good idea to make a whole god damn ad campaign extolling the virtues of dog meat.  Guess what?  You’re still eating Rex, you jackasses, and he was a part of the family.

My point is this: you shouldn’t spend time advocating a “necessary evil.”  It really makes you look like you enjoy the suffering. Ultimately, that just makes me wish you would wander in front of the nearest mass-transit bus.  Meanwhile, I’ll still think animal testing is something we put up with as a society because we don’t have better choices.  If only someone with an interest in saving more human lives had some spare money to throw at such an issue…

Been feeling down lately. Wait, what am I talking about? I’ve been down for a long time. Every now and then I’ll get into a little episode of depression, just like most of us humans. It’s normally inexplicable, and equally harmless. Most times homoeostasis is returned within mere days, but I’m starting to think I may actually have a depression problem.

At first, I thought it was just a bout of homesickness. I don’t particularly care for my life at the moment. So far I’ve managed to convince myself it’s merely a transition–I must simply “hang in there” as it were, while my beloved girlfriend completes nursing school, which will allow us to move anywhere we please–or so the theory goes. The problem with this is I can only convince myself for so long. The cold hard truth is that there is a big difference between plans and reality, and reality has never seemed to have much of a predisposition for conforming to my plans–in fact, it seems to almost have its own plan for my life. I would prefer it left it to me. I find that reality is almost always wrong.

My friends from back home ask me what I’m doing in Baltimore, and when I tell them I work for an engineering company that has me write computer software for the government they’re pretty impressed–if only I were also. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’m no longer particularly interested in it. In fact, when I coded as a hobby I vowed I would never rely on it for a paycheck, simply because I cannot maintain an interest in some arbitrary project. I have the “open source itch,” as it’s come to be known. That is, I have an urge to code particular things I’m interested in, and not something that a project manager tells me to code. Fortunately I’m not in that situation–I get to code however I want, with whatever method, style, or language I prefer–but I still don’t get to pick what I code. When I first started this job I ran at full speed; I completed two major projects in the first three months, one of which had been in limbo for nearly three years. I am good at what I do, I just don’t like what I do.

So what do I want to do? Due to various encounters–positive and negative–with the healthcare profession, I would very much like to attend medical school and work as a pain management physician. I don’t know if I’m smart enough, and I don’t think I’m young enough. If I wait until my girlfriend has finished nursing school I will be–at the minimum–three years shy of thirty before I can even start pre-med. I just can’t convince myself this is a realistic thing to do, especially seeing as how we have plans to start a family around that time.

I dreadfully find that I have fallen into the exact same predicament most members of our society do–one that I promised myself I would never be trapped into: not achieving my dreams. Most of us have something happen in their early twenties, and you think “oh, I’ll just wait a year until I can figure this out,” or “I’ll just take a few years to get this right,” and then you turn around and it’s been five, seven, ten years. I’ve spent a mere twenty-three years on this planet–four of them taken away by intractable pain that isn’t stopping anytime soon–and already I feel the pressure of time slowly pushing me farther and farther from my dreams.

I see my friends saving money, buying houses, having families; I see me stuck, as if running in a dream: never quite able to catch what you’re chasing. No matter how hard and fast you run, it only gets farther anyway. I’m very afraid that I’ll become like so many blue-collar families–like my own parents: spending their entire lives attempting to ensure a better one for their children. That’s simply not what my life was made for. It was made for greater things than these.