The story of S

Once again, I have spent the last Thursday evening with Miss I. It came as a surprise, as she was supposed to have something else to do. Anyway, as usual, she came up with a conversation that acted like a long fuse, the kind that triggers the sudden realisation that you have been missing on something for years, waking you up the following night. 20+ years in this case.

She asked me about someone I went to high school with. She knew her from college, and found S quite distasteful. I told her that she once was a very good friend of mine, and that she indeed turned out to be a less than a sterling person.
S is very intelligent: math and language oriented, with a lot of people skills and a daring attitude. She had a supportive family, was quite popular, fun to be with and a great friend of mine when I had trouble adjusting. My surrogate A at the time.
Then her older sister died. Her older sister was just like her, really brilliant. I do not know, I cannot explain what happened. The only thing I know is what I saw: a family being transformed. They all stayed together, of course, but, in a way, they took her death as a failure. They lost something more than a loved one. Something good was broken, and replaced by the intimate understanding that life is indeed too short.
I'll leave it at that.
Things changed, we were still friends but not that close any more. Then we grew apart.
We lost touch a few years later. I heard of her and her family. And what I heard through different channels, some of them very public, some other informal and very private didn't really made me want to get back in touch.
I'll leave it at that too.

But, beyond some vague feelings and half formed opinions, I hadn't seriously thought about this episode and how it had affected me, even though it got me to adopt a very well defined and consequential attitude toward some people.
Thanks to Miss I and a funny dream, I now know.
Basically, I have found out what I already knew and had never formulated.

Two kinds of people get my attention: those who serve, because they believe in something bigger than themselves ; and those who hack, in a very broad sense, because they question systems that shouldn't be able to deprive us from basic dignity.

But only those who exhibit these two traits gain my respect.
Serving without hacking is being a mindless drone. Hacking without serving is being blindly self serving. You must have purpose and the means and will to question your purposes.
 
Motivation, intention, will and means. We always get back to those.

I don't like sex

Shocking, but true.
Well, not exactly true, but true enough for what I want to say ;-)

Once upon a time, a long ago, I had this undergrad philosophy lecture by some paedocommiescumtard, the kind to give you a D when you dared to bring Marcus Aurelius and Berkeley, with an ounce of Clausewitz and Bradley just for the humoristic touch to his Tom Wolfe dissertation. Yes, I do have the humour gene too. I mean, Tom f*cking Wolfe, what can you say to that? The guy must have thought something along the lines of "Weeeell, given this audience I will start it slow and looow.".
The guy was a moron, probably still is. He should be giving lectures on José Bové or Nicolas Hulot now.
But, anyway, he got one thing right. He had this metaphor he called "the window shopping effect". It went like this: "You are a child a few days before Christmas. You are in town with your parents and you walk along a toy store. In the window, displayed for all to see, you see the most wonderful toy ever, but you cannot touch it, you can only look and gape in wonder. So the next few days you go on pestering your parents for that toy. You really want it, but you believe you will never have it: it is too great a toy to be ever given, it belongs to the window. Then comes Christmas, and you finally get it. You play with it for a few moments, and it looses most of its appeal.".

I must be a child at heart: for me lust is still the better part of sex ;-)

Skydiving

Almost three years since I have jumped out of a plane, and suddenly it hit me.
Why do I like it?
I mean, there are better ways to prove yourself. I guess that, for many years, I was kind of blinded by what brought me to it: a bet between friends. So it must have been a question of dare, of showing, of practically demonstrating your worth to your peers.
Right. It may have been so for the first jump, but what kept me coming?
And I finally found out. What I liked most are those two or three seconds where you have absolutely no control, when you are being played by the wind, when you are in something bigger and stronger than yourself. Of course, the whole point is to get control back, I wouldn't be here to talk about it if it weren't for that. There is a huge sense on accomplishment there.
But still, the best part is losing control, allowing yourself to be at risk. Being alone, responsible for you alone, and letting yourself be blown away.
Survival is just a technical matter, the important part is to be willing to risk it ;-)

Generation ZX

Even though my education has been quite socially permissible, I am forced to admit that it conveyed extremely conservative values. Imparting this teaching must come naturally I guess when you are sincerely convinced that you are the best there is and that nothing comes to prove you wrong. Still, I wonder.
I wonder how it came to be. Surely, my grand-parents social outlook was progressive, for their own time. And my own parents had their own rebellious streak. Me, I do not have much care for social issues per se. Current global issues, like climate change or globalisation have little to no appeal to me. Maybe it is because I understand fully that there is a system that will take care of them, as long as there is someone to have faith in it. For me, they are merely management issues, not political choices ; purely tactical or operational questions, not a matter of strategy: we already know that the battle is taking place, where, when and how ; the only questions that remain are "implementation details", where the Devil lays ;-)
No, me, I am a generation ZX man. To exaggerate a bit, I would say that at nine I knew more processors intimately than people. That at twelve I spoke more machine languages than human ones. So it is no wonder if my very own rebellion takes place where "purely managerial" issues are encroaching on basic human dignities. Of course, giving everyone a single unique ID is a great facilitator of administrative matters. But still, the potential for abuse is huge, and we are not talking about just potential now. Yes, the Internet is wonderful media, but its commercial uses are increasingly threatening the freedom and anonymity that are making it appealing in the first place. I can go on for hours on these matters.
So, yes, I am a generation ZX man, the product of my time and education. My Geraderichtung, so to speak, may not be yours but I know fully well where my path is and how to tread it ;-)