"The Computer"

Show me the world

Let it unfold

I’ll not say goodbye

Until the day I die

It’s hard to resist

When will I desist

This electrical screen

With all its gleam

One day I’ll fall to dust

For all it’s a must

I’ll be gone

Yet this computer lives on

      As finals week once again begins, I find myself glued to my computer producing papers, presentations, and other scholarly things.

Reflecting on all of this, one really does spend an extraordinary amount of time staring at a computer screen in college. I actually found the little poem above from my high school folders, but looking at it again, the poem seems to have more weight now than when I first wrote it.

As a prospective CS major, I already spend plenty of time working on computers for my coursework. But even outside of that, I've realized that much of my free time and energy are invested on the internet. Of course, I even wrote the poem on a computer, and the irony of that doesn't escape me. 

To be sure, we've created an awe-inspiring machine. But after a long day of typing, researching, and programming, I can't help but feel that a certain kind of fundamental energy is draining unnaturally fast the longer I spend staring into my computer screen.

And so I've recently been planning out my days and studies on paper as much as possible. It's going to be a long finals period. But among these student woes, there are valuable lessons to be learned: priceless lessons on perspective, and on where our time goes. It's time that we'll never get back.

Picture: The Bracelet

Today I'd like to try something different. In High School, my English teachers occasionally had the class look at a picture and analyze what symbols or meanings it had. These pictures were usually famous and deeply tied into our current period or theme of study. Thus fishing around for common "book answers" was easy, and by the end of the year, the exercise even became the subject of satire among my peers.

However, the exercise left a deep impression on me. Although we had often analyzed works of art of famous images in class, I was fascinated by a new idea: The idea that an ordinary picture could contain something deep.

The image above comes from Thayer Street, where I encountered this pretty bracelet just lying on the windowsill.

So here's the picture. Let's assume it has some kind of meaning to it. What do you see?

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To me, I immediately focus on and personify the bracelet as an individual. The environment around it is largely uniform. Solid blue paint. Concrete sidewalk. Dirty Glass. But the bracelet... It is multifaceted. It refracts light in different directions... Relative to the environment around it, it is magnificent.

But the dirty glass behind it acts as a mirror. We can see that with each iteration, the image of the bracelet becomes more washed out, and blends in with the surroundings it once outshone. The glass captures the side effects of reflection. Whether it is a mental or physical mirror, the more one looks inward towards the self for meaning, the more diffused the self becomes.

Thus the image captures the duality of the lives we live here in America. Each striving to be a special and brilliant individual, yet also walking a dangerous line in which we may simultaneously wash ourselves out. As in the image, there's a definite simple beauty in all of this, but we must be careful to look for a deeper beauty as well.

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There's my immediate impression of the image at the moment. Yet even as I write this, I've had lots of other ideas for what one could form from this image. What I enjoy about this exercise is the freedom inherent in its structure, as well as its potential to generate unexpected thoughts and realizations.

For example, that I focus on the bracelet as an individual already shows how deeply cultural and personal beliefs affect reflections such as this. Perhaps in other cultures, a person would take in the image more holistically, rather than define it in relation to the most eye-catching element. The mind is a mysterious thing isn't it?