choice
I find the path of my learning curve takes me in zigzag fashion across a landscape of curiosities and enigmas. Either I never had the wherewithal to doggedly pursue a single topic into its very skeletal structure, and have simply imagined that history; or that part of me has changed with age (and as other factors have compounded the effects of longevity). Like the growth of my attention span is in reverse, getting ever shorter until, at the age of 50, I’ll hold conversations with all the deft wit of a four-year-old.
Every day brings a new set of handholds on a precipice, a new path to scale. I invariably happen across a handful of interesting concepts, explore them insofar as time allows, move on, and, over subsequent months revisit them in chaotic cycles, peeling away layer after ever-so-thin layer until I’m overwhelmed by a new grab bag of shiny trinkets. Today, I might fashion myself a web designer, tomorrow a science-fiction writer, the next day a user-interface consultant. On that fateful day to follow, I’ll be the firebrand who will for the first time synthesize the fields of mathematics, physics, computer science, psychology, and physiognomy to create an artificial intelligence engine capable of creating new topological structures which describe with arbitrary precision the entire space of possible human emotions and personality traits as defined by the shape of their heads and how well they managed to make it through Freud’s anal phase of development.
This variety keeps boredom more than an arm’s length away, but some days it feels not unlike connecting the dots of a fractal image, endless and with no discernible reducible pattern. I never feel I’ve developed a solid footing in anything, let alone mastered it. There is no field or discipline which I feel I’ve grasped fully enough to build a career around. That is, unless Acme Wanderlust is in the market for someone with ten unfinished short stories, who can clumsily program Excel macros or hack (X)HTML into a thing of average visual appeal, all the while waving his hands and shouting about how search theory is either a subset or an applicable cohort of artificial intelligence, with nothing but a frothy eagerness as evidence…well, I’m your guy.
The prospect of alleviating this frustration is a bridge with its own share of trolls. The only practical way to do so is to choose. Choosing is bad for people like me. Choosing is the thing that goes bump in the night, and threatens to work the contents of your bowels into your clean undergarments.
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