I swear that wasn’t a publicity stunt

I’m having trouble relating my current experiences to reality. It’s not that life on the ship is surreal, it’s merely that life on the ship is so completely separate and different from the activities to which I am accustomed. My job doesn’t really present insurmountable challenges (what I do is really quite mundane), but I find it difficult to apply great effort towards achieving success, if that is at all possible or desirable.

It must be common to our kind (and I use this in the most restrictive sense you will accept) to do poorly at that about which we do not care much. Math, at least in the form presented in school, did not excite me and therefore my grades were mediocre. Standardized tests suggest that I have as decent a grasp of numbers as I do of words, but, if I may flatter myself, I am better at writing than calculus.

So I appear set on getting by, surely an undesirable location. I sadly and secretly envy my friends who are either still in school or are working in fields that are fulfilling and for which school prepared them. Work sucks, I know, but only because most people have a outside life that compares favorably. I feel I am losing touch with that outside life, and that my personality will atrophy as a result. I’d like to not settle for going numb, if I can, so I can remember how to have fun once I get out.

I succumbed to inertia surprisingly quickly. After joining the division I had several ideas for improvement — there are so many small things that would make our lives easier, if only we had the sense to see the true cost of the status quo — but now I’ve taken to fixing only what is overtly broken; individual symptoms may lessen but the disease remains.

Self-consciousness is such a useful concept, but most use it to describe other persons. Of course we are self-conscious! We are aware of ourselves on both the most primal levels and on the dimly esoteric. What is truly self-conscious is the media we create, especially the postmodern. You can’t just point a camera at a moving train and entertain the masses anymore; any work must be acutely aware of it’s own shallowness and discuss it’s shortcomings in depth to be taken seriously. (Here I hope I have succeeded.) After all, there is no pure idea; language colors and limits ideas, instruments shape music and the myriad visual media contribute to the experience of art. And what is art but communication without the trappings of purpose and the constraints of time and space?

I’ve been painfully nostalgic recently, but this does mean that I’d had a really enjoyable time so far. Life truly is too short to spend it all working, but it is too long to spend it all on oneself. I seek the philosophical center, but I do hope that some day I find work that I enjoy (as opposed to merely finding work enjoyable).

Scale is an odd and capricious thing. I am always reminded of this when I fly, as objects on the ground become railroad-model sized, then cease to be three-dimensional at all and then finally fade into a map with only hints of humanity’s alteration. Rarely does one get to experience transitions from micro to macro like this. Normal perception guides the understanding of the human scale, and science and theory fill out the miniscule and the massive, but the motion of subatomic particles or planets really have no bearing on how I live, just that I live. In a jet at cruising altitude I have no apparent connection with the persons over whom I fly. To each the other doesn’t even exist, really. This sort of reduction of existence to that which immediately affects us is a strange but necessary mechanism. Not that we truly comprehend the complete scope of influence; we merely appropriate convenient gestalts to further reduce the computational load.

Venting is part psychoanalysis and part housecleaning. I’m using the pensieve to store excess thought and find patterns and trends. That anyone else cares is heartwarming, and I do apologize that any useful information to be gleaned is hidden under piles of maudlin introspection. Until we meet again, adieu.