Mentalechoes

I went for a job interview last week, with some new tech startup down in Leiden. It was pretty much the usual kind of thing for a tech interview; I got paraded around from one group of geeks to another, all of them trying to work out how much of a geek I was, and in the end if I rated high enough on the geek scale, they’ll offer me the job. I don’t know yet if I was geek enough for them because they haven’t got back to me yet with a yes or no after the 5 hours I spent trying to convince everyone I was a geek too. Not that I actually consider myself a geek, I just like computers and online games and movies and stuff that’s fun. Geeks on the other hand take this online computer stuff wayyyyy more seriously, with the hardcore ones getting into religious debates over which editor is better, vim or emacs. (If you don’t know, don’t ask… trust me on this). Really that’s not me, I’m just in it for the money because I have to pay bills at the end of every month like everyone else. It’s not something that I do because it fulfils a dream.

But then again, what does? Dreams are tricky things because we all have them, but so few people actually seem to turn them into reality. When I was 32 I said that if I was still working in IT jobs by the time I was 35 then I went wrong somewhere. Well now I’m 38 and still working IT jobs and I feel like I’m definitely on a road to nowhere. I mean, where does it go from here? I wonder if this is what they call a mid-life crisis? I’ve always been fascinated by what people mean by a ‘mid-life crisis’. Is it just a general term for finding out that life in your late 30’s, and early 40’s kinda sucks compared to when you were 25, and there’s no going back?! I dunno, I wish I did, because then I could work out if I was going through one or not. My life actually doesn’t suck compared to when I was 25. I could drink more, that’s for sure. But I tend to be able to do more drugs now than I could back then, so I guess it evens out. I think maybe a mid-life crisis is realising that the road that your on is one that goes nowhere, but you don’t have room to turn around to be able to go back to somewhere that was somewhere and go again.

Where does a road that is going nowhere go though? It’s got to go somewhere. I’m pretty sure it does, since everywhere goes somewhere, but if it’s going nowhere to start with, does that mean it doesn’t move or it goes to some place you really don’t want to be? Heavy questions for the wee hours of Saturday morning, and I’m not even intoxicated. Maybe I should be!

A Turkish friend I had from a couple of jobs ago once told me an old Turkish saying - no man (or woman I would add for the sake of political correctness) ever travels down a wrong road that he (or she) can’t turn back. I suppose the mid-life crisis answer to that little gem of wisdom would be to say, that that man probably only had a donkey and couple of bags of carrots as his sum total of wordly possessions. I doubt he had a mortgage and a mobile phone account, and a bunch of other luxury things that Western Europeans all take for granted but have to pay for at the end of every month. If it’s just you and a donkey and some vegetables, it’s real damn easy to just decide to do something completely different at the drop of a hat. What the hell is the donkey going to care!

I do honestly wonder if there isn’t some cruel irony at work in the world, because the dreams that keep you going are like mirages, you never actually achieve them they way you see them, there is always a gritty reality that doesn’t have the shine of the shimmering promise that is always just out of reach. More often than not, just when you get to somewhere where you saw your dream, it has all but faded, and there is nothing left but the thirst which cannot be quenched.

Padwanna!