Listening to Verdun this morning, there are three distinct sources of sound.  The nearest is my clock ticking beside my bed.  Immediately outside are water droplets falling onto the balcony.  It has been raining.  Further away is the sound of a dog barking.  I first noticed him about ten minutes ago.  He emits a sad woof about every fifteen seconds.  I imagine him in somebody’s yard.  A melancholy dog getting wetter and wetter. 

There was a drive of wind that flung the rain hard against the window… just for a moment.  And now, again.  I wish that this apartment had a hearth, and in it, a fire.  It is one of those days when a blazing fire would seem so idyllic.

I am not writing this on a computer.  I am writing it by hand for transcription later.  The absence of the computer’s whirring sound makes every other sound purer.  It is far more relaxing.

I miss writing by hand.  Computer work always seems too purposeful.  There is a goal in mind.  Sometimes, I despise the tyranny of goals.  This is why I crave holidays.  They are so cleansing for the mind.  It really is good to be bored sometimes, to be aimless, to think of nothing, to slow down to absolute stillness.  To not act upon the world, but to let it act upon us.

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And this was written on a computer.

One of the most frustrating things about the consumer age is the tendency of the providers of goods and services to say they are meeting our wants and needs.  Microsoft relentlessly updates its software in an apparent drive to make everything easier for us.  But in my opinion, they are failing.

I don’t know if I’m alone in this, but Microsoft Word stopped getting any better around 2003.  Every subsequent version has merely gotten worse.  Microsoft is not responding to my personal wants and needs.  It is thwarting them.

I have been working on translating a text.  In one paragraph, I have the French.  In the next, I have the English.  However, I want to keep the punctuation consistent with English norms, since this is going to be, when it’s finished, an English-language article.  But MS Word does not respect this wish.  Every time I start writing things in French, it switches its language preference to French (Canada).  This means quotation marks also get switched to French style.  I do not WANT this!  I want everything in English style.  I want the language to be English — for the entire thing!  But MS Word is just not cooperating.  About 20 times I have had to override its impulses and switch the language back to English.

I could provide so many more examples of the awful impracticality of MS Word’s latest incarnation, but I will stop there.  They are rather banal examples.  The bigger picture is more worrying.  The tension in modern-day capitalism appears to be between what WE actually want and need — as human beings — and what the oligarchy claims we need.  The oligarchy will forever find things we don’t really need in order to sell products at a profit.  The political problem is — as Heath and Potter argue in “The Rebel Sell” –who determines which of our needs/wants is genuine?