clouds of jupiter

 

sunday with nicole

I think that I was due for a short entry this month. Besides spending most of yesterday in bed sleeping didn't give me that much time to think or react to anything.

...

I am always amazed at the amount of truth that I get from watching an episode of The Simpsons. For example in tonight's show we learned the cause for Homer's stupidity. It seems that years ago when he was a child he had shoved a crayon up his nose until it was lodged deep into his brain. Once the crayon was removed he could think and act like a reasonably intelligent if not a slightly more advanced person.

Naturally everyone who knew Homer reacted differently to this new version of him. Generally speaking no one could stand him except for his daughter Lisa. Try as he might, he just couldn't seem to fit in anywhere. Springfield didn't know what to do with the improved Homer or to put it another way, he confused, angered and frightened them. In the end he gave up and had another crayon put back into his brain by his unlicensed doctor friend, Moe the bartender.

Now maybe this sounds arrogant, but there are days when I am convinced that the world is populated with people who have a crayon lodged in their brains. Somehow the lowest common denominator always seems to win in society. People often settle for so little and I don't ever want to be one of those people.

On the other hand there are some people who I think need to have a crayon shoved up their nose or some other orifice.

As silly as it sounds, I was moved by what most people see a simple cartoon. For a small amount of time, Homer and Lisa understood one another. Lisa even explained to him about the alienation that comes with being intelligent. All of this made sense to me. There are days when I truly do not understand what motivates other people and I feel utterly lost. It's almost as though I were from another planet.

...

After some talking Nicole and I discovered that we both have the same approach to what we do at work. Both of us see it as simply being a job. We don't see it as anything more or less. Nor do we see it as something that should upset us. It isn't worth the time. This doesn't mean that we don't do our jobs, we just don't see them as being the primary focus of our lives. We both thought that this was a healthy attitude to have in life.

Now maybe if we were saving people's lives or putting people into space we would care some more about what we do, but we aren't. We simply provide a service through technology that can just as easily be done by someone else. What we do isn't that unique or challenging, but it pays our bills and doesn't make us sweat. For now that is enough for both us until we find something else somewhere in the future.

Nicole and I also have another thing in common. We do a good job of harmonizing on the washtub song.

 
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