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Saturday, June 14, 2003
I'm going to a wedding next weekend. My friend B, after years of being not quite ready, met a woman, fell in love, and proposed, all within the space of a month. A whirlwind kind of thing. Which reminds me of how he and I met, in a different kind of whirlwind: a high-tech startup. It's accepted wisdom these days that the dot.com boom was a period of wretched excess; arrogance and flim-flam in equal measures fueled by pure, unbridled greed. And, to be honest, there was some of that.
But what that misses is how much fun it was. During my job interview I asked my interviewer why he was doing this, working long hours solving recalcitrant problems, when the truth was he never had to work again in his life, having been part of the team that invented the graphical browser, and having made a pile of money doing it. "Because I was part of something that changed the way the world works, and I want to see if I can be part of something like that again." Now there's more than a touch of hubris in this, I suppose, but if so it's a hubris that brought together an extraordinary group of smart, dedicated people who worked hard to create, in the space of a very few months, something difficult, and complex, and ingenious that actually functioned exactly the way it was supposed to.
And that's what made it fun, not the scooters (oh, we had them) or the pinball machines (B was a champion) or even the promise of substantial sums of cash (though I did have a desert island all picked out): it was the sense that we were, altogether, part of making something new, bringing something that didn't exist before into existence, changing the way people did things in their daily lives.
And that, I think, is why, two years and more after everything fell apart, and the world went back to the stultifying routine of corporate business as usual, we still feel, somehow, connected, dispersed though we may be. And why, despite the fact that I am not much for large social gatherings, I am very pleased to be going to a wedding a week from tomorrow.
posted by jeev |
1:07 PM |
 
Wednesday, June 11, 2003
Fenton's has re-opened. And it's already packed.
I went yesterday. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, this is what I'm talking about.
posted by jeev |
10:10 AM |
Sunday, June 08, 2003
I'm alphabetizing my books, poetry first, then fiction, biography, film stuff, computers, then general non-fiction. When I moved here, five years ago, the mere act of unpacking was so daunting that order was sacrificed, under the ego-salving guise of a giddy spontaneity - look, see the juxtapositions, who would have thought?
Unexpectedly, there's a deep, almost hypnotic pleasure in just handling them, stacking them, shifting a set down a shelf to make room, their sheer physicality testifying to a peculiarly layered past: not only that of the distant writer who produced them but also of my own, the sometimes very long ago me who bought them, and packed them up, and carried them around on the irregular travels that have made up my life till now. A kind of indirect autobiography in acid-cracked paper.
posted by jeev |
8:19 PM |
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