My blogging career started on Livejournal, oh so many moons ago. I no longer use Livejournal, but I have archived all of my entries and occasionally check them out. This is a piece I wrote almost 17 years ago entitled Boring and Interesting, in which I reference the 80’s British show The Young Ones to talk about life.

Monday, December 2nd, 2002

The Young Ones is one of my favorite television shows. It’s an old British comedy from the 80’s about a bunch of college students living together in the same house. It’s probably the one television show that most resembles my life in the 80’s.

There was one episode called Boring, where all of the characters were just hanging around their house, bored to death. They yearned for something interesting to happen to save them from their boredom.

This was contrasted by a parallel universe where only interesting things happened. The residents of this universe pined for something boring and uninteresting to happen, having grown weary of exciting and fascinating things happening all around them from one moment to the next.

Sometimes I feel that’s the way my life has gone. Right now I’m a full time student, immersed in the world of heuristic programs and compiler design. Just this morning I was having a discussion with some of my fellow classmates about an expert system were supposed to design by the end of this quarter, talking at length about discrete math production rules, Context Normal Form, and nested loops.

Even though I enjoyed my conversation with my colleagues, and I enjoy talking about math and theoretical computer constructs, I sometimes refer to this side of my existence as my boring life. Most people I know would be asleep in two minutes if I dared bored them with the finer points of Alpha-Beta depth first search algorithms.

That’s why I never talk about this stuff with many of my friends on the “outside”. I have many friends at my University, but I still have plenty of friends from my old days, when I was not so productive and disciplined. Even if I’m jumping up and down on the inside about a really cool search and replace algorithm that I’ve successfully debugged, I keep my mouth shut about it around these people. They really wouldn’t want to hear about it.

My older friends are from what I call my interesting life, back in the old days when I hung around clubs, bars, and funky slums with hustlers, drug addicts, musicians, and all manner of eccentric artists, activists, and alternative life stylers of all shapes, colors and lunacies.

I’ve seen and done things other people only wonder about. Sure, a lot of my tall tales of the 80’s and early 90’s are old hat and unimpressive to my old sidekicks from the glory days and their brethren. Harrowing tales of all night benders with a car full of drunken teenage throckers only gets a yawn from many an old compatriot, but these are the kind of stories I tend to keep from my academic friends. Basically I feel that these stories are much too interesting, that the revelation about my inglorious days of misspent youth might cast too much of a bent light on me in relation to my much calmer higher learning colleagues. In a nutshell, that part of my life is too interesting for them.

So there you have it. I am bordered between my boring life, and my interesting life. That’s what I call it, even though my interesting life got too boring at times, and my boring life can be quite interesting, at least to me and my math/computer geek friends.

One thing I can definitely say for sure, I certainly do get around.