I have it that I don’t have anything to teach anyone in terms of life. I can help you tune your web server, or set it up for better performance; I can teach you some music theory and help you write better songs; I can teach you some things about sound engineering, recording, woodworking . . . I can tell you all about being a gay Mormon–I spent a long time and got really, really good at it! Look how useful that is.

(Warning: whiny blog post follows.)

As far as making a difference in peoples’ lives, people tell me I do all the time, but how? What am I doing that’s making things better for the people around me? What am I teaching people that actually matters, that’s actually improving their quality of life as a result of my having shared with them? I was beginning to feel sure that what I’ve developed here an on the wiki was going to be my biggest contribution. I want it to be, at least, if I can explain this . . . I have a picture in my mind of what it could be, and I want it to be that, and the gulf between reality and the image in my head seems insurmountable.

There are so many people doing so many things in the world, and at least in the United States, it seems like everything we do is at cross purposes with what someone else is doing. White tries to make the world a better place by lobbying for gun control. Black tries to make the world a better place by lobbying against gun control. An so on.

How do you . . . what . . . is there . . . some kind of . . . what’s possible here? Isn’t there some kind of paradigm shift, or possibility I can invent, that could create something that’s . . . how do I even explain this? There has to be something else, and I felt like I had a pretty good idea, and I’m no longer convinced at all.  Right now, I think (for what that’s worth) that the realm in which I want to make the biggest difference is inaccessible to me; that there’s nothing I can do to get above the noise, or filter or re-shape it in a meaningful way.

Help me out here people. Let’s get outside the box. What is there outside the paradigm we’ve got now?