Boredom Inexpressible

Here I am at Austin's house blogging (synthesizing one entry while experiencing the content for another). My good host invited me to view one of the two websites he created this weekend. I was less than fascinated. He stopped.

After a few restful minutes passed in which Austin and I tended to our respective computer duties, then Alvin arrived. Eager to demonstrate his programming prowess to someone who might be more appreciative than his last victim, Austin says enthusiastically, “lemme show you the webpage I made.” Alvin's response? “Cool!”

“Cool”? “Cool”? In the vast expanse of my mind, from the huge array of words in my working vocabulary, I don’t think I would have selected the adjective “cool” to describe the process of creating a webpage.

That tiny, monosyllabic hipster reply has opened Pandora's box, and now I am caught in the aftermath. It's like that scene in Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark in which the villains open the Ark of the Covenant, and the spirits which guard its contents fly out and kill them for gazing upon it, while Harrison Ford and his friends remain protected because they keep their eyes shut. Except instead of guardian spirits, they're words about computer programming; and instead of coming out of a sacred vessel housing the Almighty, they're emanating from the mouths of my two friends; and instead of killing the villains quickly, they're tormenting me with boredom inexpressible; and instead of having been able to prevent this by shutting my eyes, there is nothing I could have done to escape this heinous fate.

OMG, their conversation was so intensely boring. I’m talking scales of magnitude more boring than anything else I have ever experienced. Time itself seems to be slowing down; I don’t think their “conversation” (if I can use that term to describe this travesty of dialogue) will ever end. Processes formerly imperceptible to me now move at a snail’s pace. I think I can discern the movement of photons from the lamp, as they leave the light bulb, travel across the room, and strike my retina.

I was trying my best to ignore the sea of words in which my poor cochlea were drowning, but to present the reader with a sample of what I’m experiencing, I will listen in and type what I hear.

“PSP,” “hacking Youtube,” “pipe the information to another site,” “web 2.0,” “images low in color,” “I like theory.” “Me too, but I’m into application too” [what theory? What programming theory is there? Isn't it all 'application'?] “BMP is the worst.” “How can I do this in one pixel?” “gradient something something,” “I know how to set up a server to serve a webpage.” Artifacts, flat colors, gif, deprecated, xml, css, css zengarden, compression, encode mp3, locksis compression, tagging…

Ok, I can't take it any more. [Sorry to those of you who are interested in that sort of thing and wanted more samples. You can talk to Alvin or Austin directly if you want to hear them discuss PSP and locksis compression.] Although it's difficult to imagine, I can just barely wrap my mind around the fact that there are people out there who not only would program for money, but might voluntarilly discuss it in their free time without the expectation or desire for financial compensation.

What is harder for me to understand is how their mouths aren't melting from spewing out such intensely boring discussion, or how my ears have remained intact even after exposure to their soporific babble. After a little contemplation, the only theory I have to offer is that although their prattle is unimaginably dull, it also rouses in me a strong response of disgust and dread, and these passions counteract what would otherwise be pure boredom. (I suppose my visceral response acts sort of like an acid-base buffer, which donates or absorbs protons as needed to maintain a relative homeostasis.)

Doesn't subjecting me to this programming-talk constitute a crime against humanity? Someone needs to get Kofi Annan on the phone pronto, and tell him to get the ICC ready to handle one of their most disturbing cases ever.