[2296] in Depressing_Thoughts
Hey, I miss the place too sometimes
paul@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (paul@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Thu Sep 5 08:15:45 1991
California and Silicon Valley certainly have their impressive
merits, especially on long weekends and paydays, respectively.
Nonetheless, I find myself missing the Nerd Farm this week, not
because I want to be registering for 6.111, but well, because it's
September and I'm supposed to *hack* something, or at least warn a few
bright minds born well after _Star Trek_ was cancelled that if they're
not careful they'll end up working for IBM just like Mummy and Daddy
want them to, or worse yet, they'll end up in grad school.
MIT is certainly the only place where you can lovingly
complain about MIT, or lovingly complain that MIT is the only place
where you can lovingly complain about MIT for that matter. And
elsewhere, jokes about recursion and references to the Holy Hand
Grenade scene are *right out*. My family still thinks that I had a
disastrous traumatic experience in college and was unable to get a job
anywhere else for six years "because all you ever did was complain"
whenever I visited them. Of course, they never caught on that I spent
362 days a year at MIT complaining about *them*. See what I mean?
Your 6.170 partners would never be so clueless.
Which brings up another point: Irony and the sort of
self-deprecating *faux* pessimism that every self-aware little genius
learns to cultivate in Cambridge to avoid being compared to Hal from
_Nanny and the Professor_ don't do too well elsewhere, especially in
California. I think the Institute may be the most ironic culture on
earth. It's quite a transition to learn to speak Californian, where
"Hi" and "Ok" are two of the eight parts of speech, and the mix of
artfully convoluted run-on sentence structures interspersed with
information-compressed single-word blurts that pass for the normal
banter at Mary Chung's are regarded as possible signs of mental
instability. I find that when I cruelly pretend to the locals to be
dull, boring, and slightly asleep, they like me much better.
Still, I think that the next unrepentant Normal Person who
responds to a friendly well-intentioned observation or comment of mine
with a condescending and yet vacuous "Uh, right Paul" or "I'll keep
that in mind" is going to receive a free "Unclear on the Concept"
T-shirt in yet another reflexive fit of recursive commentary. Or
maybe I'll just take after that friend of sethf's who asks people
bluntly, "Why aren't you a vending machine?"
