spending a week in space
I have been on holiday all week. This week was a twofer of Children's Day and 清明節 Tomb Sweeping Day, so i took a couple days annual leave and made it a full week off. My plan was to do some traveling, although i was discouraged a bit when colleagues told me it'd be even harder to find a hotel over 清明 than it was over the 228 holiday. Well, i would
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I am semi-obsessed with a novel I picked up because it was reviewed by William Gibson ("Neuromancy") and Edward Snowden (hero) and they both were like, "Fuck yeah! Read this book!"
I think you'd really like it.... "Walkaway" by Cory Doctrow.
It's like a sci-fi hacker near-future dystopia where utopian thoughts/dreams/actions/communities are highly illegal because they are not corporate/profitable enough.... and of course because they destabilize the current dystopia, which incidentally is A LOT like the world/culture we are **currently** in.
It's not a perfect book... but it is philosophically fantastic and did a great job world-building. But really the crux is debunking control and organizational social myths like meritocracies, autocracies, plutocracies, competitive advantage, body shame/shaming, reputation scores, safety, freedom, and what anarchy looks like.... all laid on a background of network security protocols and the infrastructure of digital information and power as it plays out in real life/real lives.
Apparently his personal ethics make it so it is available and easy to download for free where such things exist if you're interested.
Anyways... I love hearing that you're just... chilling. Play some video games. Get sleep. Let your brain melt. I think our productive/production culture pushes us to feel guilty or weird about... having bodies that need to relax, having minds that need to relax, having lives... that need... us to relax. Not necessarily drink (but not NOT necessarily) or socialize or exercise or travel or work on "hobbies" or whatever... but just... fuckin.... BE. Just... be allowed to BE.
We need that.
And you (and billions of other humans) deserve that.
A release from the pressure to perform life... and just live, even if it is sorta... just a blank spot. That's okay. And it's... important, actually.
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Currently i am "reading" a book by China Miéville called The City & The City. I put it in quotes because i have been reading it for a couple months now, going less than one chapter a week or something ridiculous. I can barely remember the story from one stint to the next. I used to read several books a week, every week, and now it's a struggle to just get one page in. Anyway, it's another book that was on my radar for years because it was popular amongst lefties, but i never bothered to check it out because nobody ever gave me the elevator pitch, which is incredible. Here it is: it's a story about a two cities that exist overlapped on each other. Like, they occupy the exact same physical space, but at some point in ancient history the residents decided that they would exist as two completely independent states, each with their own language, culture, political structures and so on. It's a fantastic concept, and as far as i've gotten it's also a thoroughly entertaining read.
It's the last day of my holiday now and i have to say i do feel very rested and happy. I wish i had longer. But i don't regret not "doing" anything. I really needed it.
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I read the setting like it was somewhere between the movie Dark City, and like the Israel/Palestine or East/West German disputes where you can SEE watching people live another way, but you're supposed to ignore it.
It was a great concept and worked well for the story.
I'd never read Doctrow, but by the time I was 1/4th of the way through "Walkaway" it was clear that he was a VERY proficient author, who wasn't just playing 'hacker' for a cheap premise, but that his knowledge of computer science/logic/philosophy was real, and VERY well-thought out.
A read you might really like is "The Long Earth" by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. It has an AMAZING premise that is SO beautifully simplistic, but unlocks a really fantastic story.
One day a famous inventor disappears, but before he does he seeds a 1-page schematic of an ultra-simple machine called a "stepper" all over the internet. It's a machine anyone can build in 10 minutes after a trip to the grocery store and Radio Shack. It fits in the palm of the hand, and costs almost nothing to make.
People start building the machines out of curiosity, because they LOOK like they should be inert.
But what happens is... people start disappearing.
Turns out the 'stepper' is a personal device that can take **most** anyone to another TOTALLY new an uninhabited Earth.
And actually, it's more than that.
Much more.
So there is a sudden abundance of Earths
and no way to control the boundaries between them.
People go crazy over the possibilities unlocked.
So do corporations... so do governments.
Plus its Terry Pratchett so it is a fast, effortless read.
I'm so glad you enjoyed your rest! It's that not YOU deserved it.. I think everyone deserves it, INCLUDING you!
But it's also strange how strange the guilt/doom feeling haunts you when you're enjoying *not working*. How... there is this feeling like it can't last forever... that you will *need* to get back to "normal" or terrible terrible things can/will happen... or that it is lazy or shameful... despite how hard you work at not-a-job.
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