Stream o' Consciousness (from the 'remember what you paid' file)
I get a kind of pleasure out of scaffolding Excel macros to do in a few minutes what used to take eons. For the lazy there's no better job fit (a co-worker once said that laziness is the programmer's best friend, inspiring one to make onerous tasks light). There's a joy in latching on to the correct solution, in figuring out, for example, where Microsoft hides the source of Pivot tables. (Who knew you had to go to the wizard?)
So I admit that there are intellectual pleasures in left-brain thinking even though the right-brain is where the action is, i.e. creativity. Computers can replace the left brain but never the right; no program could produce spam poetry. (Well,...perhaps that's not the best example. Ha.)
Surprisingly, over the years my lust for retirement has abated. Perhaps a function of not being over-worked. Primarily, I suspect, due to a decreased desire to travel, which might be due to a decreased curiosity. But travel also seems a form of seeking and perhaps in my 1998 return to Catlicker fundamentalism I see less reason to look for answers in other cultures. And there's also a greater need to be of service since, as Archbishop Fulton Sheen said, the purpose of life is not pleasure.
The itch to retire was mainly inspired by Henry Thoreau and Albert Brooks. Thoreau went off to the Walden woods and Brooks - in the film "Lost in America" - traveled the country in an RV. Were their choices so different? Thoreau argued that one could explore the world from a hidden corner in New England. Emily Dickinson traveled far from within her room. Brooks had something more literal in mind.
Ham of Bone is now in a kind of semi-retirement and plans on writing screen plays till he drops. In a perfect match of subject and writer, he's doing a "biopic" of Edgar Allen Poe, with whom he has always felt a deep kinship. He recently finished a sixty hour fast for "purgative" purposes. I'm chagrined to learn that he wants to limit his drinking to only St. Patrick's Day, though there is something amusing about an English Protestant drinking only on St. Patrick's Day.
I was reading Information Week the other day and they interviewed a 57-year old making do with temporary programming jobs until he can find something permanent. He says "I'd rather do something to keep my mind sharp than playing solitaire." Retirement sounds pretty lame if explained in those terms, especially if it doesn't include ingredients like volunteer work and poetry and daily Mass.
No comments:
Post a Comment