My Old Blog

This is the second time I’ve installed Linux. The first time, about 4 years ago, I admit it was too much for me. I knew just about enough to install it, get confused and uninstall it without screwing up my MBR or my Windows partitions.

I tried Red Hat 8 this time. In fact, I am posting from linux for the first time ever. I’ll include a screenshot of my KDE desktop.

This is all pretty amazing considering. I have access to my Windows partitions, can connect to the internet, know how to take and edit a screen shot, uploaded a file by ftp to my web host and have managed not to destroy anything…yet. I find permissions very frustrating. And I can’t figure why you have to unmount your vfat directories to get the file system to update. I’ve had problems with disappearing files when I boot to Windows.

I don’t think I’ll ever be very good with linux. I hate the command line. I realize it can be more “robust”, but it can also cause you to spend time remembering a garble of syntax when you could be doing something useful, like basically anything else.

I’ve heard a lot about the linux community and was excited to participate. I’ve found the folks in the #linuxhelp IRC channels to be complete jackasses. They join the channel, talk arcane computer jargon with their buddies and flame all newcomers that ask questions.

I don’t have a problem with computer snobbery. I am a travel snob (though I hide it much better than they do). But if you’re gonna hang out in the #linuxhelp chatroom…be willing to help, or get out. Isn’t there a #linuxsnobs channel or something?

I don’t wait in the #traveladvice channel for college students planning spring break to ask about hash bars in Amsterdam and topless beaches on the Riviera.

Their idea of help is telling me to go find out for myself. Apparently I will never learn anything if they keep telling me how to do stuff. Well shit, there goes the whole concept of school.

You want to know the real reason Linux isn’t accepted as a desktop replacement for Windows? Not because of its user-friendliness, lack of common GUI, office productivity suites, or anything bordering on that. It is because their user community is a bunch of non-supportive, computer-elitest fucks that never got laid in high school and were excluded from every functioning social group. Now they have their own group and are determined not to let anyone in. I guess they feel its payback time for all those wedgies in gym class.

I realize my questions are stupid, but asking them does not make me lazy. It simply means I have more interesting things to do with my time than reinvent the wheel.

All that being said, I hope my opinion improves, because I really like learning new things. If you know something about linux are are willing to endure my questions, please contact me: kelliottdykes@yahoo.com.

Most people know I want a career helping make work more meaningful for people.

I had a conversation last night with one of the camp directors about our warped sense of work. I have several points I would like the world to accept so that we can get on with life and out of the vicious circle of work, consume, work, consume.

• Work has no intrinsic value. It is only valuable in as much as it serves to better our lives. It is a means, not an end.
• Work success has a weak correlation with success in life. They are often antagonistic. People are happier with more money up until the point they can provide food, clothing and shelter (about 15,000 bucks a year). The rest of the money is simply to keep themselves from feeling inferior because other people have so much more. Gross wealth inequality between rich and poor causes anxiety and resentment.
• The role of the government is not to promote finance or generate wealth. The Preamble to the Constitution says the United States is meant to promote the general welfare and ensuring the blessings of liberty. The Declaration of Independence states that we are guaranteed the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Money is not mentioned anywhere. As a people we need common goals, such as sending a man to the moon, curing AIDS, making ourselves a healthier country, improving education or caring for our sick and elderly. The government’s obsession with the economy needs to stop.
• Gross Domestic Product is not a surrogate for Gross General Welfare. We are using the wrong measuring stick. Why is there not a General Welfare Index? The purpose of the United States is to promote general welfare, not to promote an environment where we consume ourselves into oblivion.
• A man is measured by the value of his human relationships. On your death bed you will remember those you cared for and what you contributed to their lives. Money will be all forgotten. All action that doesn’t move toward increasing the value of your relationships is wasted.
• The purpose of business is not to generate profits. Profits in business is like blood in people. A company needs blood to continue to live, but the blood is not the purpose of its life anymore than it is the purpose of ours. A business needs an overriding concern that makes it worth doing: Invent new technology, serve yummy food to people in a cool environment, make cars for people that like cars, help people find their calling, etc. Making money is empty and will never warrant people giving the effort that will make them connect to something larger than themselves.

I believe the true measure of a business is not found on the income statement but in the quality of life of its employees. Work should be a journey of self-expression, a way of sharing your best with the world, not something you go to because you’ve forgotten what it is like not to go and hollowed out the rest of your life in the process.

How do you turn the word ‘happy’ into a noun? You drop the ‘y’ and add ‘iness’ to make happiness. How do you turn the word ‘busy’ into a noun? You drop the ‘y’ and add ‘iness’ to make BUSINESS. See any connection?

I re-entered the world for a few days after having been at camp for about 2 weeks and learned some interesting and important things.

The world is loud. Cars make lots of noise and so do people. Its like a bunch of flies buzzing around your head.

People always have places to go. And when everyone is going in different directions and some of them are in a hurry it adds up to a big mess, bad attitudes and little patience.

People are fat. I’d forgotten how big and poorly kept people can get. I know its sort of normal, but I don’t like it.

Its just a bunch of loud, fat people with no patience running around everywhere trying to do stuff that never subtracts from the total amount to be done.

My dad is working a lot these days. He said that business is sort of bad so they have to hustle to keep things going. But it is obvious that if business were better the work load wouldn’t decrease.

I know the strength of camp is in the community. But there is more to it than that.

There is nature: clean air, shade trees and mountain views.. The absence of cars eliminates noise pollution and forces you to be around trees, dirt, and birds. All that stuff is comforting.

And there is no sense of hurry and desperation….no rush. Your own stress is stressful, but other people’s stress affects you too, like second hand smoke.

And how nice it is to walk! The only place most people walk is to their car. Walking promotes talking to other people you pass along the way. Walking is exercise. It raises your heart rate and makes you feel better. Walking can make you tired. Driving just makes you restless.

Everyone is all about diversity these days. Its like some kind of mantra: Embrace Diversity. I say embrace it if you like, but never forget that there is strength in togetherness. Connectedness is achieved by common threads and shared values, not diversity. There must be common ground. At camp it is all common ground, literally.

There is a sense of place that speaks to you directly: This is good. That other stuff is distracting you.

Starting next session (this Sunday), I will be moving to the water ski staff. I am going to miss my fellow counselors in Mountain Camp, my connection with the kids and all the exercise I get, but I need some free time so I can begin my life outside camp again.

Utopia is short lived….probably by definition.

Not that water ski staff sucks. I get to ride around in a new MasterCraft ski boat all day listening to music and eating hamburgers off the grill. But it is much closer to the world than camp is. Camp is its own reality.

I almost broke my shoulder the other day. Was (accidentally) pushed into a concrete wall going full speed. Couldn’t lift my arm the next day and got a nice bruise on the back of my head. They thought I was knocked out.

I have over twenty chigger bites. They are huge red welts the size of quarters that congregate around your joints. Apparently they are near invisible and lay eggs that hatch under your skin. That is completely gross, but they are livable, better than mosquito bites…they just look worse.

I pulled a muscle in my leg learning to play soccer. My legs usually don’t move in those directions, but I promised a British dude that if he learned to play basketball, I would learn to play soccer. He says I have talent. I say my leg hurts and I have to play in the staff soccer game on Sunday at 7am. Yippie.

I have poison ivy all up my left leg from the cabin campout the other night. We thought it would be a good idea to raid the other cabins up on the mountain. My kids loved it, but now I itch and have trouble telling the difference between the poison ivy, mosquito bites and chiggers. I don’t know which I can itch.

I have tendonitis in my right arm from throwing football the first week of camp. It never goes away. It is the least annoying of my injuries and easy to forget about considering I have plenty of other pains to focus on.

This is besides and in addition to the chronic back and ankle pains I have had for years.

I live up on a hill. At the beginning of the summer I remember thinking how it would get easier to make the hike as the summer progressed and I got in better shape. I had to stop and take a break the other day.

Despite all this I haven’t felt better physically in years.

Today was my day off. I hiked down from the top of a mountain, saw my parents, listened to my headphones, ran from people that might ask me to bear some responsibility, fell asleep on a couch and went on a date with a girl almost 10 years younger than me.

Camp is a reality bubble. I love it. I don’t miss reality at all. There is no news, no newspapers, no media, no bills, no wallets…only a bubble of positivity.

It is odd that I came to camp to avoid being buried by the avalanche of non-events that make up a job search.

Not too smart really. I need a job to convince myself that reality is worth participating in, yet I get so discouraged just looking for the job (imagine actually having to do the work) that I need a three month trip to fantasy land just to continue.

Continue what? I’m only making it harder. The more I enjoy what I’m doing now, the more difficult it will be for me to work later.

Today I am taking my first hours off in over two weeks. I sit here writing as a free man.

Camp life is very fulfilling. I have all the makings of a truly satisfying life. There are good people, meaningful work, a supportive environment, constant positive feedback, music, exercise, spirituality and even a little romance.

Many people will live their whole lives and not experience something quite so perfect. I tried to make a conscious decision to stay away from this type of stuff for a while. This is the reason I have so much trouble wanting to find a “real job”. I have repeated a loop like this one probably a dozen times in my life, never finding a way to sustain it, but only to whet my appetite for more.

True change stems from despair, dissatisfaction, boredom, or some other similar emotion. True change does not come from having all the makings of a truly satisfying life. There needs to be some kind of bottoming out or moment of reckoning.

And yet I can find no fault in the decisions I have made. It has been a life full of once in a lifetime experiences.

I am mentally committed to change, to at least try to live a relatively normal life for a while. That is semi-positive motion I guess.

But it is strange. It is like I am breaking up with a girlfriend with whom I’ve had no falling out.

I went camping last night. I played basketball and capture the flag today.

My kids and I have a great relationship…I learn as much from them as they learn from me. I just marvel that I get to play all day and make a difference in kid’s lives and I get paid for it.

And there is the relationships I have with the staff. They are terrific….a whole group of people dedicated to creating a supportive, caring, fun environment. We are so focused on being role models for our kids that it rubs off on our other relationships. It is sort of like an artificial utopia.

I run and play and laugh like a kid. I have a bit of a Peter Pan complex going anyway. I think some part of me has yet to be convinced that the next stage of life holds the same magic this one does.

I want to grow up and I know that there are great things to come in theory, but I am in no hurry. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Woe is me.

There was a time I had a strict policy of closedness. This was to avoid being judged for what I believe or fail to believe. I changed this policy because I found it rather alienated me from people and I find a certain comfort in sharing myself with people.

I began the policy in the first place because I have always been different and people don’t understand that. They use what I say to put me in intellectual cubbyholes that were designed to classify people that think in normal ways. That isn’t me. If you take filters made to work for the majority and use them on those that fall outside the norm you will consistently make mistakes in judgment.

I got tired of being misunderstood so I kept my mouth shut about what I believe. I just let people judge me on my actions.

This worked extremely well but people complained that I never told anyone my thoughts and I naturally want to share myself with people. So it was a good policy in practice, but not very fulfilling personally.

Of course I always shared with my best friends, but I came to share almost nothing with good friends and acquaintances. It just wasn’t worth it. I was, and still am to a large extent, one of the most self-policed people I know. I have to be.

I also dislike having to clarify myself. It always digresses into semantics and arrives at something even more muddled than you began with.

Then there is this website. I often write private stuff or at least hint at the things that trouble me most. It has worked out well because only my closest friends read it and the others are mostly so far away that their judgments are tempered by the separation.

Then there is camp. It appears that some folks are reading my website. This puts them a little too close to the fire.

Additionally…and I know I’m gonna get flamed for this one, we are at a Christian camp. I truly love the community here, but any group of very like-minded individuals tends to get judgmental. They get doubly judgmental because they are religious. It becomes frighteningly easy to judge right and wrong when God is backing your moral code.

So far I think only two people have found the website and they are very good folk. However, as a preemptive move, I will have to starting pre-screening my comments on the religious aspect of camp. I won’t say anything untrue…it just won’t be as true as it could be.

I hate to do it, but I can’t risk one of these extremely nice people here at camp misjudging me because of comments meant for people that know me better.

Besides, many of them look up to me anyway and I take the responsibility of being a role model very seriously. Just don’t ask me to explain my motivations.

I am like silly with exhaustion. Today was epic.

I schmoozed parents and shovelled mulch. I played capture the flag, went swimming, and led a devotion. There are eight 15 year old boys in my cabin and I tried desperately to build a positive foundation for the next two weeks with them. I have been going constantly from 7 to now….with the emphasis on going. It is almost midnight and I have to get to sleep.

Many times a day we ask ourselves an extremely important question: Is what I am doing making a difference? Today I answered it many times and it was always yes a hundred times over. Camp isn’t just fun and tending kids. Their parents send them here to grow, to be part of a community that supports life at its best, and to become men. I have read the letters parents send the camp directors speaking about their son’s experience here. It is literally unbelievable.

It is rare that we do work that is so obviously significant and meaningful. It is rare that we are so overwhelmed by the connection we have to a community.

My cabin devotion was about leadership and unity tonight. I wanted to give the kids something simple and powerful to set the tone for the week. I won’t share entire thing, but I want to share the Bible verse I read:

Ecclesiastes 4:9-10. Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falls; for he hath not another to help him up.

I must’ve read it like ten times. Woe to him that is alone when he falls; for he has not another to help him up.

Most people know that I’m not overly religious, but that is pretty good stuff. I’m not a sunday school buff either, but there was once a time when I read a lot of books and I actually read most of the Bible….so at least I have an idea of how to relate a message to scripture…otherwise devotions would be pretty difficult.

I am excited about the summer and hope I don’t run out of energy. Kids can eat you up. I learned that in Taiwan.