I’m staying at the house of a friend of a friend whilst they’re off on tour with Ariana Grande. I take care of Mabel, who is a 9 year old corgi, and Grimm, the random stray cat that lives on the porch. Obviously, the owner needs regular updates as to the state of their livestock. Obviously, I burned through all the small talk and “Mabel continues to be a dog today” updates a while ago. All I can think to do is to rip off @cleolonglegs:

Having been occupied with burdensome provincial pursuits described elsewhere for the first quarter of my life, and finding myself getting real bored of them, I decided in 2022 to try something new: full-time higher education. I hoped to meet new people, finish a computer science degree, and wend my way into the upper middle class. I took up lodgings at a nearby state college, acquitted myself reasonably well there (got decent grades, led a medium-sized student organization, worked as a research assistant and tutor for half the computer science department) and fell into the company of a few altogether quite singular and unique individuals similarly occupied; one of whom I had, whilst quitting the place, reason enough to prevail upon for a job.

Later, after a year and a half of trying to build an online retailer at a small, independent technology startup, I got outta there, as things had gotten a bit tense. This was my first foray into what’s commonly known as “white-collar employment,” and the first time anyone in my family had held such a position since my dad got laid off from his job as a switchgear designer during the Great Recession. It was a weird experience, and if that’s what white-collar work is like, I will happily go back to being a cashier at a gas station forever. But I don’t know that it is representative.

I quit, despite being offered huge piles of money to stay, because I knew that I was miserable and suspected there was more to life. A lot of things went wrong. There are a few ways I could tell the story:

Linus Torvalds is the legendary creator of the version control system “Git” and the kernel for the operating system “Linux,” which between them are used to develop approximately 125% of all software. He also gets mad on the Internet a lot. There’s a subreddit dedicated to his outbursts. He produces headlines like “Linus Torvalds on why he isn’t nice: ‘I don’t care about you’”. His feedback is often along the lines of:

So this patch is utter and absolute garbage, and should be shot in the head and buried very very deep. Please immediately delete it from the whole internet.

Or:

“Steven, stop making things more complicated than they need to be… You copied that function without understanding why it does what it does, and as a result your code IS GARBAGE. AGAIN.”

Back when I worked on the farm, when it rained, it mattered. I have a lot of memories of ducking into a barn, or into the truck, or going all the way back to the house for an early lunch just because the rain had come.

Most people probably think that rain is generally good for crops, but unless the topography of the land is perfectly mapped out to drain excess rainfall away from them, things get dicey. Plants’ roots need to absorb oxygen; in other words, they have to breathe a little. Roots can get enough air to respire from between the gaps in clusters of soil, but they can’t breathe through water. Too much rain will make them wither away. The only solution is to change the landscape so that the water won’t build up where you have things planted; the simplest way to do that is to dig drainage ditches.

Not all drainage is visible on the surface. It’s common to dig a ditch, fill it in with highly porous gravel or drain tile, and then let the dirt cover it up again, instead of fighting to keep it from eroding away season after season. In my time, we mostly filled in ditches with heavily perforated black drain pipe. The fields also had an ancient network of old, brown square porcelain tubes (yes, square tubes) that were laid end-to-end under the soil. No one quite knew where they were laid, which was exciting when digging or plowing. My grandfather remembered the burying of them in trenches as a kid.

Tonight, I went on a walk to the gas station to buy soda and got trapped by the rain. It’s been a while since that happened. I mean, it has rained in the last five years, but it hasn’t really affected my life. It’s surprisingly pleasant to get trapped like that: there’s nothing you can do, and there’s nothing happening that’s not supposed to happen. It’s free peace.

Once I was at Wendy’s with my friend when we saw a stray cat out prowling the perimeter of the parking lot at night. She lured it over, captured it, and we took it to a vet to check for a microchip. A week of “lost cat” posts on Facebook later, we discovered the location of its home: a place right next door to the Wendy’s, where its family and owner lived. “I wouldn’t have done this,” I told her that first night, as we anxiously drove a strange cat on the highway to the 24-hour vet in the dark, “but I love that you did.”

It’s funny, or perhaps a shame, how humor, once you realize it’s a tool to communicate, slides headfirst into seriousness: I find myself constantly exaggerating, in the manner of a joke: “I haven’t had a vacation since the late 1800s;” “no one outside of this university has used this software in 79 years;” “time to go home for Christmas and hear about all the orphanages my family members have burned down lately.” All with the fear that if I said a simple truth, people would take it literally but not seriously, and so I have to say something that’s a little bit realer (but sounds more like a joke) than the actual truth

Author’s note: I originally wrote this on a different platform (as the date says, in 2019), and am transplanting it here. I dug up the originals of all of the photos and wrote alt text for them, but the text of the post remains completely unchanged. As a matter of fact, I haven’t even re-read it.

This is a story about farming. It is quite long. I think it may be worth reading anyway, but unfortunately I have no way to prove it. I’ve also tried my best but I still don’t know if it actually makes perfect sense in every way? But it did all actually happen; so it all kind of has to make at least a little bit of sense, even if doesn’t really seem like it.