{"id":62,"date":"2010-06-15T10:05:10","date_gmt":"2010-06-15T18:05:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bracketthis.com\/blog\/?p=62"},"modified":"2010-06-20T10:30:57","modified_gmt":"2010-06-20T18:30:57","slug":"april-2003-alienation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bracketthis.com\/blog\/2010\/06\/15\/april-2003-alienation\/","title":{"rendered":"April 2003: Alienation"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s ironic that the month I lose all my real life college friends, and then some, I get an invite to Friendster<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“It’s hotter than yam…. cooler than icb. Check it out. How are you? What’s
\nup? Do you still hang out at the cafe on cole? I was thinking of dropping by
\nthere do some writing.” That’s what a friend wrote on my invite.<\/p>\n

March of 2003 began a pattern of losing friends in a negative way that didn’t really stop until 2008.<\/p>\n

Writing now, I see that I didn’t support all that killing. I was alienated and alone. I didn’t have anybody to really hang out with during the day.<\/p>\n

I was frustrated. I would go to all these cafes and talk to all these people and never really made a connection. I had been back for a year, and didn’t even have a girlfriend. I felt worthless, but seeing things philosophically made me feel invaluable. I felt a toxic combination of self-aggrandizement and self-loathing. If only someone understood me.<\/p>\n

All my college friends that I held dear no longer talked to me. They gave me a chance to recant, but I didn’t. Why? Because if I did, it wouldn’t change the alienation that I felt. It wouldn’t change the fact that maybe they weren’t real friends.<\/p>\n

In this depressed sort of mood, I took a job that I no longer felt beneath me, working at a copy center making copies of documents and CDs. Let’s face it. I needed the money. I had squandered the year pretending to be a writer and really had nothing to show for it except a few poems and one review of the Yoko Ono exhibit in print.<\/p>\n

Looking back, I sort of regret all the idealism. It was misplaced. If instead of pursuing philosophy and poetry, I pursued building the website of my dreams, I would’ve been rich now. But I am pretty sure I would have inherited a different set of problems….<\/p>\n

The new, menial job was the kind of place where you got hazed. I got spit in my coffee. They loved playing practical jokes on me. You’d never know that I worked with some of the best coders in the world when I lived in Italy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s ironic that the month I lose all my real life college friends, and then some, I get an invite to Friendster: “It’s hotter than yam…. cooler than icb. Check it out. How are you? What’s up? Do you still hang out at the cafe on cole? I was thinking of dropping by there do … Continue reading April 2003: Alienation<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bracketthis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bracketthis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bracketthis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bracketthis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bracketthis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.bracketthis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67,"href":"https:\/\/www.bracketthis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions\/67"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bracketthis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bracketthis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bracketthis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}