A while to go

I spend my days working in a cubicle, labelled as the 'junior technical writer' of the office. I've spent 4 years studying technical writing. My bookshelf is full of technical communication text books, reference books, and commentaries. I'll be joining the Society for Technical Communication sometime this summer or fall.

But yet I come home, read the blogs of my friends, and am immediately struck by the inherent quality present in their writing, a quality sorely lacking in mine. I can chunk information, reverse engineer documents, manage corporate knowledge-bases, but when it comes to writing convincing, compelling, and enjoyable text, I fail.

I was getting very depressed earlier. Reading a blog which was closer, by leaps and bounds, to C.S. Lewis (my literary and stylistic idol) than I have ever achieved. "I'm supposed to be the professional writer of the group!" was what crossed my mind. Then God hit me.

Greed, pride, and rebellion all were large parts of my life during my first years at the college (and the preceeding secondary-school years) and now it is showing. People ask what I do for a living and I respond, out of habit, that I am a technical writer. I've usually had enough verbal eloquence to convince them that it might actually be a possibility; Thankfully, they very rarely ask me to write an article or report. I'm not good at it. I could pull up a page and stare blankly at it for hours, at a total loss for how to start it. If a piece is completed and I think it's good, I'll usually come back later at a time of humility and see a page pockmarked with horrific grammatical and spelling errors. This is humiliating in personal life but it is damaging at school and downright dangerous at work where my employment hangs in the balance.

The point, finally, is that I've got a long while to go before I will be what I claim to be. God's given me other skills and many opportunities to put them to use but I remain determined, until He tells me otherwise in our discussions, to improve my writing abilities until I am a capable technical writer.

(How's that for an uncommentable blog post! haha)


[Edit: Yes, this post was regarding a post by Faye. I thought I had linked to her previously. Needless to say, she's the one making a reference to Rodin's "Gateway to Hell" in a comment, haha (note: I intend to have a cast of "The Hand of God" somewhere in my house when I move out).

Welcome to the Game! (alternate title: "Ooo Boobies!")

What you are about to read will illustrate, beyond the shadow of a doubt, how nerdy I really am.

I was watching Star Trek this afternoon (nerdy) and thoroughly enjoyed the episode as it was one of the rare ones with Wesley Crusher (played by Wil Wheaton, +2000 nerdy points). It also included a love interest of Wesley's, a rather beautiful young lady who looked oddly familiar but I couldn't put a name to.

So I went on google (nerdy), entered a multi-string search function incorporating everything I new about the episode (including the name of the planet where Riker was vacationing... nerdy) and proceeded to look through the first few results, all of which were Star Trek [The Next Generation] episode banks (NERDS!!) until I found out what I needed.

Turns out it was Ashley Judd. (Who apparently is also an etymologist... hot! [and nerdy!])


Now we come to the source of the odd title for this post. I went to google to look for information about her. After perusing IMDB.com, I figured I see what she actually looked like more recently than 1987 (when the ST episode aired). A click on the Images link presented me with page afer page of Ashley, scantily clad in 'revealing' poses. My reaction (weird by worldy standards) was one of disappointment at the lack of photos showing this clearly beautiful woman in clothing and poses which one could classify as 'appropriate'. I want to be a most vocal rebel against the "Ooo Boobies!" mentality of, if Google tells me anything, the average person. This kind of focus disgusts me. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the female curves as much as the next gentleman, but I also believe that we've gotta be held to a higher standard and it bothers me when I stumble across such clear signs of the low standards of this world.

To further emphasize the nerdiness, I'm going to refer back to the story line of the episode. Riker, the 'mans man' of the crew, was vacationing on Riza, a party world of sorts, and was being... himself with an alien lady who was there. She introduces him to a game which is relatively pointless and boring apart from the fact that it directly triggers the pleasure centre of the brain. It turns out that she is an evil alien and is seeking to enslave all of Starfleet. Riker, on her suggestion, replicates and shares the game with everyone on the Enterprise (and makes plans to share it everywhere else). In the end, all but one member of the entire crew is addicted to this. He walks the corridors, walking past people staring blankly in to space, moaning and gasping in their own pleasure, totally ignoring interaction with others and their duties to the ship. Wesley Crusher is the only one smart enough to question this and proceeds to analyze the device and figure out how to avoid it through some elaborate plot twists (not worth going in to).

A highly addictive, mind altering, and will-bending influence being pushed by a malevolent force in an attempt to enslave the population by appealing to the pleasure seeking desires common in people by providing a poor imitation of the real thing, in an immediate, accesible, and no-responsibility form... Pornography, masturbation, homosexuality, pre-marital sex, etc. Welcome to the game!

I want nothing to do with it! I want total and utter seperation from these damnable mindsets which pervade so much of the world around me. Zombies, walking mindlessly yet persistently towards the lake of fire (however literally you want to take that).