Writing alone is like alcoholism

It just occurred to me that writing is an essentially solitary act. Enjoyable, a kick in and of itself. Medium as opiate of the individual. But, there is guilt associated with this. Should I be doing something more useful? Does anyone really care about what other people write, still less me?

The analogy with drinking is clear. Enjoyable in and of itself. Damaging in excess. Guilt.

Somehow, people don't seem to mind about drinking as a group activity. It legitimises the act -- the social interaction involved offsets worries about its self-destructive nature. Likewise, LJ allows the process of writing to become shared. It's not email. It's not a BBS, or anything resembling IRC. It's not communication in the strictest sense -- it's instant gratification, click-here vanity publishing. No guilt required.

I love it.

Laundry and Parallelism

Braved the St. Edmund's laundry for the first time this morning.

Did the obvious thng: took washing to laundry. Machines need cards. Cards are 5 pounds each, with 20 credits. 5 credits = 1 wash, 1 credit = 10 minutes in the dryer. No card dispenser present, however. Notice saying that one can be found at the foot of A staircase in the main building. Fair enough. Go to foot of A staircase. Find photocopier, coke machine, fire escape. No card dispenser.

Wander around for a bit.

Find someone to ask. I am shown to a locked cupboard at the bottom of B staircase, containg many and varied items of junk, a payphone, a condom dispenser, a machine that sells cards for the photocopier and (gasp) the prized laundry card machine. Which claims to like 2 pound coins (with which I was well endowed), though on experimentation proved not to in practice. Some fumbling for smaller chang later, I scraped together the requisite funds and was soon the proud owner of a laundry card.

From here, the news gets better. The laundry contains three big industrial washing machines and twe enormous dryers. I soon realised the concrete advantages of parallelism -- 'waiting faster', as Prof. CAR Hoare liked to put it. I found the simple pleasures of being able to do all of my washing, all at once, rather than spreading the pain across most of an otherwise wasted day.