Idiocy

I am currently in a totally unnecessary, stupid, useless, timewasting rage of frustration. The reason for this is so embarrassingly pathetic I can barely bring myself to reveal it, but the fact that it's so pathetic just makes things worse, resulting in a kind of positive feedback loop: I can't believe I was so stupid as to X, that makes me so mad; X situation reveals some fundamentally frustrating feature of the world; that feature is so obvious, I can't believe I'm getting het up about it; see how fucking stupid I am, that makes me so mad!

Lather, rinse, repeat.

The starting point for this particular rage is the conflict between fixed TV schedules and the other obligations one has in life; and the multiplicity of not-entirely-cooperative devices now attached to our TV; and the fact that I'm too fucking dozy to have correctly set up all three of the points in the chain to video tonight's second half of Silent Witness before rushing out to dinner at my mother's; and the fact that unlike all kinds of shite like EastEnders, the BBC don't see fit to repeat their "quality" dramas (read: manipulative Sunday night ratings fodder) despite now having more channels than they know what to do with.

Of these factors, obviously the third is the one that most irks me. I mean, the initial source of frustration is not being able to see a programme I want and being left dangling as to how it turns out, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. The nature of the failure makes things so much worse. I'm a techie; it's a matter of pride to be able to make electronic gizmos do my bidding without a second thought, and yet it turns out I can't even tape a fucking TV show correctly!

I could probably construct an argument that the real reason why this whole thing is so frustrating is that it provides a practical demonstration of the irreversibility of time, and thus an intimation of one's mortality. But that would be pretentious, so I won't. Still, there certainly is that sickening feeling you get when you realize you've done something wrong that you will never be able to undo, and even though what you've done is as trivial as missing some dodgy thriller rather than, say, tripping over on the edge of the Grand Canyon and feeling the yawning chasm open up beneath you as you start to fall, well, it's still done and dusted, and you still can't go back.

And in a culture that strives constantly to deny that irreversibility, that constantly clings to the present, to youth and to life, that's always a bit of a slap in the face.

On the plus side, writing about it seems to have calmed me down, so maybe I'll be able to sleep instead of just lying there seething at my own stupidity. And in the meantime: if anyone caught tonight's ep, do please tell me what happened, as I'm clearly never going to see it now.
Posted by matt at October 13, 2003 12:12 AM