Frozen Transparency

I once promised a friend that I would write a story someday that featured an accountant superhero. They would fight crime by poring over spreadsheets and tracking and itemizing accounting-related things. This friend has graduated with a degree in accounting, and she felt that accountants were under-represented in the media (which they are). Someday I will write this story to attempt to rectify that. The accountant would, however, need a team, since superheroes always work on a team.

I think a psychiatrist would be useful: they can psychoanalyze the patient then determine what drugs to prescribe to attempt to fix (but not really) that person’s problems. The third member would be a musician to always be late but provide wonderful accompaniment at all the major battles. Of course, the fourth member, a physicist, would build all their weapons and contraptions by which they kick ass in physical battles.

The band would then be rounded out nicely with a fifth member who happened to be somewhere in English academia. They could spend hours in front of a typewriter (because real English majors don’t use computers) in order to produce a manuscript. Their primary role would be to provide biting social commentary. That is, after all, such a powerful weapon, it could crush entire armies with its might.

This team would likely be incredibly effective, if boring. But the stories don’t need to be entertaining: after all, we have the scathing social commentary. That should be all we ever need, right?

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with one of the cashiers at the cafeteria where I work, and a random personal choice I made came up, and we had the following exchange:

Her: “What does your wife think about it?”
Me: “I don’t have a wife.”
Her: “Well, what does your girlfriend think about it?”
Me: “I don’t have a girlfriend.”

And the conversation flowed on from there. I was struck by the expectations she had—which I would consider reasonable ones—that didn’t entirely come into play.

Namely, she first assumed that I had a wife, despite the definite lack of a wedding ring around my finger. But she might not actually look at it, and realistically, most of the people who work at the company are probably married.

Upon learning that such was false, she then had the expectation that I had a girlfriend. After all, I’m such a great guy, I’m clearly not married because of time or something. Again, many of the people who aren’t married who work at the company probably are in a relationship. As I understand the statistics, a majority of adults are either married or dating.

Now these are both fine and good, but here’s the thing that really got me: she didn’t ask what my boyfriend thought. There was an expectation on her part that I am a heterosexual male. In this case, she was right, but it’s not a guarantee (although—and I fully admit to possibly being wrong on this point—I think that there are fewer expressed homosexuals among older people than among younger). I find myself vaguely curious what her reaction had been if I had mentioned a (non-existent) boyfriend.

Mind, I don’t mean to condemn her. I’m not offended, and I would like to think if I were homosexual, I still wouldn’t be. I’m disenchanted enough with political correctness to really care, and it was a short conversation anyways. Trying to account for every possibility is kind of ludicrous (at what point do we consider polygamy?).

What I do mean to do is to point out her expectations, which were very reasonable given the circumstances. We all have these reasonable expectations, although it is interesting to sometimes go and reflect upon them and why we have them—and whether we need to have them. I find myself wondering just how many of these expectations would stand up to scrutiny.

I will continue to believe that neither science nor mathematics are inherently patriarchal or oppressive until someone can show me a digital computer created with matriarchal science.

I would then use that computer to calculate out the digits of pi, just to see at what point they diverged.

Apparently, change is good. One of the main points constantly made in the Obama campaign has been that he stood for “Change”. In this case, it is apparently a change in the political system, although I have my doubts that any politician that started in Chicago is really that different from other politicians. I also find myself skeptical that electing one person can somehow catalyze a governing system that’s worked for over 200 years to suddenly become something new. Or his change is more subtle, and won’t be as obvious to normal, everyday people. In either case, change is good.

Apparently, change is bad. The main complaint I hear leveled against Microsoft products whenever a new one comes out is “It’s different!” Office 2007, for instance, did away with the horrid convoluted drop-down menus that had cluttered up previous versions of Office (to the point where ninety percent of requested features already existed in the program). The first response? “It’s different! They changed it!” Windows Vista has also had similar charges leveled against it: “They changed the start menu!” Never mind the new interfaces being better (in general; some in Vista were pretty neutral), never mind the sudden discoverability of features (in a version of Word prior to 2007, take a 100-page document with headings, tables, and pictures and quickly change the margins, add a table of contents, add an index with index entries, reformat your body text and headings, and then create repeating headings on your tables. And then create a bibliography of sources—and halfway through, change your citation format from MLA to APA). Remember, change is bad.

Thesis: change is bad. However, chanting a slogan is no change from the past, even if such a slogan is, in fact, the word “Change”. Because we know it really won’t.

One of my compatriots in the blogosphere whom I like (if for no other reason than the fact that he and I share the same first name) recently posted an interesting entry in which he dug up an old burned CD of his. Having read it, the whole notion of old-burned-CD-as-soundtrack-of-an-era bubbled in my mind, until my recent re-organization of my CDs made me discover some of my old burned albums. I got inspired by the whole thing—to the point where I’m making a post totally out of order.

One in particular stands out; I called it my “Story Mix”, and it was the CD of my senior year of high school, really. My memories of these songs are tangled with the various drives around town I would have at the time, since driving is where I listen to most of my music. Interestingly, most of these were mp3s I had downloaded, as this was long before I began really legalizing my music collection.

The tracklisting is as follows:

1. Dreams of Leaving (The Promised Land from Final Fantasy: Pray)
2. To Travel Across The Seas (Voyage from Final Fantasy: Pray)
3. Arrival At The Island Of Glass (Schala’s Theme (Arranged) from Chrono Trigger 99)
4. At The Glass Palace (Au Palais Du Verre from Final Fantasy: Pray)
5. Spirit Of Adventure (Pray from Final Fantasy: Pray)
6. Softly, Beside A Lake (Mugen Houyou by Yoko Takahashi)
7. Beyond The Next Horizon (Yokan by Yoko Takahashi)
8. To Rest Beside A Brook (Hourglass by Liquid Tension Experiment)
9. Solitude Of Searching (Forbidden Gene from Evangelion Refrain)
10. The Wanderer (Toki No Hourousha from Final Fantasy: Pray)
11. Crystal Caves (Osmosis by Liquid Tension Experiment)
12. Subterranean Labyrinth (Genwaku No Umi Kara by Yoko Takahashi)
13. Endless Waves (Guitar, Flute & String by Moby)
14. The Snowfield (Death On The Snowfield by AmIEvil)

It’s relatively clear where my musical interests were at the time, I think. Many of these songs would get re-appropriated for future mixes, although not all of them. In time, I got an mp3 player, so CDs became pointless to burn, yet I still have an odd fondness for these songs being in this order.

Yet, it captures a point in my life to me. In a way, I’m glad for having burned CDs, just so that I can go back through memory lane like this.