Sunday of my Life

(now, you know, I swore when I first started blogging that I would find a credible excuse to use that for a blog title… and here it is!)

Now… Bill Gates. We all know of this Sp4Vvn of Satan. The CEO of Microsoft, and arguably the most evil man in IT. Multi-multi-multi-Billionaire, instigator of such privacy-violating moves as Palladium, blah blah doom. There’s a very famous video of him demonstrating Windows 98 and it’s ’speed, power and stability‘ to a big ol’ meeting of shareholders and other interested minions. What’s famous about this meeting is that as he was demonstrating a trivial part of the OS a very big, very obvious BSoD (Blue Screen of Death) crash occured, right up on the jumbo-ego-widescreen monitor all this was being demonstrated on.

Well, the man himself has gone and done it again… twice in 90 minutes! That’s right boys and girls, Bill Gates has managed to make an ass outta himself twice in 90 minutes demonstrating the Digital Lifestlye in his keynote speech at a tech conference. And I must say that this bodes well for the future. We can count on the fact that one day we’ll hallf fly digital planes, drive gitial cars, eat digital food, look at digital landscapes, and then whenever we try to tell someone how good and wonderful and stable they are, they’ll crash. Go Bill Gates, j00 rawk!

When someone calls you a hero, sometimes it take a little bit to sink in…

At least, it did with me. Dorothea calls me a hero, and I could never quite fathom why. I hadn’t gone out there and saved lives, or averted disaster, or done any of those things one normally associated with the title ‘hero’. A day or two back we were roleplaying a small piece that we had been wondering about our two characters in the Dragonhunt, and such an issue came up, except the situation was reversed. Renate was being called a hero (and she had, in fact, done many actions that constitute the classical definition of a ‘Hero’), and she really couldn’t take it. She didn’t think she was a hero, and that all these people who called her one were wrong wrong wrong. She thought that becuase she didn’t have hope all the time, that becuase she didn’t always know what to do, that becuase she had faltered and failed in the past; that she was disqualified for the title of ‘Hero’. Rien pointed out to her that she was extremely wrong, and that she was more fit for the title of Hero than that world’s mythical equivilant of Hercules.

She was a Hero becuase she stood up against impossible odds and didn’t back down, becuase she would stand for those who couldn’t stand up for themselves; and, most importantly, even when everything seemed to be going to the dogs she’d carry on with her life and simply live it as well as she could. He pointed out to her that these actions were Heroic, and that Heroes are human too, and they falter on the bright path sometimes too. Heroism is all a matter of perspective. As Rien waxed lyrical on the subject I finally fully realised why Dorothea would call me a hero… because I was one.

As most of you may know, I have faced some tough obstacles this year. Dealing with my depression and my Panic Disorder, and other things cropping up, the deaths of friends so on and so forth. Dorothea would remind me that I was a hero throughout all of this, and I never quite got why until that moment. She meant precisely what Rien was saying, I was in a hole, and everything seemed huge around me, but despite that I tried to make the best of my life, and carried on, living one day at a time, doing what I had to do. I couldn’t see anything special in this at the time; I was doing what I had to do becuase, well, because I had to do it! But carrying on and doing what i had to do in the face of what seemed to be insurmountable problems is a heroic act. By that definition there everyone has a hero lurking inside them, just waiting for the right time and the right stimulus to come out and shine for the world. So, on that note, i’d like to leave you all with something that Rien said to Renate:

“We, each of us, harbour a hero inside. When that hero decides to rear their head and make themselves known who are we to deny them?”

That’s right boys and girls, Melbourne Grogblogging is on again, for the first time ever! I’ll certainly be trying to get my arse down there to Little Lonsdale St. and kicking it up with the who’s who and who’s huh? of the Melbourne Blogging scene. If you’re a blogger in melbourne, or a non-blogger in Melbourne, or a blog-reader in Melbourne, or a blog non-reader in Melbourne, or just someone who wants to come along and have a few drinks and laugh at all the nerdy bloggy people then meet as at the designnated time and place. We’d love to have you there.