On the Tedium of IT, the Meaning of Poetry and the Vagaries of Life

It has been a long week, sullied by the bombing of Marriott. I look forward to the weekend ahead to do some reading and research.

My work-related projects are also piling up. Looks like I will be kept pretty busy until the end of the year. The challenge for me working in the IT industry is maintaining sufficient interest in it to keep myself going. At times I find IT tedious and tiring; other times it is quite exhilarating.

When I'm working on an important IT project, I try to immerse myself in the subject matter and not veer my reading too much from subjects radically different from what I am doing.

It is often very difficult to pull oneself away from reading, say, The Sexual Perversions of The Marquis de Sade, to resuming work on that dull proposal for company XYZ on how to migrate their legacy software written in Cobol and VSAM, running on an MVS mainframe to one that runs on an open systems platform using a J2EE-based multitiered architecture and a SQL relational database.

I used to work on small proof-of-concept programming projects and they can be quite fun. But the fun vanishes after the concept has been proven and all that remains is the endless task of fixing bugs and adding yet another feature into the application.

I admire writers or artists who are able to keep a regular job and still produce great artistic works. The poet T.S. Elliot was working as a bank clerk when he was writing many of his poems. I have an audio recording of Elliot reading his most famous work, The Wasteland. Listening to the writer himself read his or her own works is often very illuminating.

I enjoy poetry mostly for its sound, rhythm and imagery. People always ask me what a particular piece of poetry means. I would reply by asking them if they know what a particular piece of song or music means. Music videos are essentially meaningless but we enjoy them nonetheless. Why? Sound, rhythm and imagery. I even think music video is an important art form--it is essentially visual poetry.

I have a college-mate who used to tell me that a computer program is like a poem: "Look at the code and see how we indent certain lines and group them into modules...they are like poetic verses and stanzas..."

I'm still in touch with this friend of mine. Nowadays he is more interested in starting up a charcoal and cooking oil business than writing "poetic" computer programs. Ah, the vagaries of life.