September

Here again, decades since it meant back-to-school for me; but now my kids go. It seems a bigger deal than the New Year, and weighs heavier as the number to come grows smaller.

I Hate It · The green leaves and young women are still worshipping the sun with their flesh, and I haven’t had to put on socks yet. But those hours of sun are on the steep downslope of the seasonal sine wave, less of them every week and you can feel it, and we’re gonna have to turn the furnace on at night one of these days.

“Winter is coming”, like they say on BitTorrent oops Game of Thrones, and let’s all just not overthink that lest we pick up seasonal-prospective-disorder.

School · My son started high school; schedules and homerooms and electives, and he’s biking 25 blocks to get there, joining the powerful Vancouver cyclist culture. The load of child-rearing shifts — and becomes lighter! — in lurches not smoothly.

It took me nearly twenty years after graduation to lose that repeating-nightmare where exams are coming up and somehow you’ve neglected, for some course, to attend any lectures or do any assignments.

Technology · My TV and Internet are better than in previous autumns; as are my computer and cameras and book-reading options.

On the big Internet, I find the technology shifts remarkably sluggish; occasionally I see something like Bourbon Neat and think ”That looks better”; but not too often. Around the edges, the screens are bigger and brighter and lighter. But still, it feels like the people running the network are its enemies. That sucks.

Work · My new job is pretty groovy so far, except for we haven’t actually shipped anything I’ve worked on in months and months; so I’m feeling more than a little gagged.

But my patience is growing shorter. One of these years I want to stop caring about products. It’s the Net that matters, not any one product, and increasingly needs defenders and advocates, for its own sake.

Politics · The U.S. is putting on its every-fourth-year passion play and yeah, it’s great that we get to watch brilliant rhetoricians, but it’s impossible not to be sickened by the duplicity and stupidity of the American right wing.

And for the first time in years, I’m feeling seriously bent out of shape about my own country; our current government is demonstrably, unsubtly, offensively anti-science, and there can never be an excuse for that. We can’t have another election soon enough.

Thanksgiving’s Coming · My family are healthy and sane, mostly, and we’re not broke, and we’re not lonely, and we’re not bored. So whatever, September.

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