take it as read for the quiet patch: things and stuff and blah etc. that pretty much covers the most of it.

note: working in government and publicly admitting that you like filing is a silly thing to do.

but it is an easy job, in a nice air-conditioned space, i don't have to try to get people to buy stuff or give me money, i can stay clean, and it gives me time to ponder.

one of my favourite bits of trivia is about a feature of both Buddhist and Islamic architecture. A flaw is deliberately built in to any building -- the Islamic reason is that only Allah is a perfect Creator, so by building in a flaw you show due humility. The Buddhist argument is that everything is flawed, so if you build the flaw in from the start, at least you know where it is. (the flaw is fatalistically accepted)

filing is an example of one of the things i think is sweetest about humanity (as a bit of an anthropologist i do know i'm in trouble with this generalisation, but just go with me on this one): the creation of order, the sense of "should", rules, regulation, system, heuristics, the whole complicated extended mess that derives from the idea that there is a way that things should go.

it's such a positive and constructive thing. all of that effort to create what will only be washed away by the cold tide of entropy. shaking a fist in the darkness, we pop our blinkers on and infuse our world with whatever meaning we can in whatever time we've got.

as a species we do amazing things like producing Bollywood muscials or coming up with lots of different ways to remove corks from bottles, we can even explain why these things are made, and the real secret beauty of all of this is that we all think it's really normal. if we live in a universe that is so vast that it might as well be infinite, can there be anything more abstract and somehow splendidly absurd than the variety of toothpastes available in the supermarket?

[it's probably not a good idea to think about the expansive universe while filing. it makes it very difficult to concentrate on chronological order when all numbers easily comprehended by the human mind approach irrelevance]

and i wonder about the in-built flaw theory. i wonder if as far as our eyes have seen was perhaps all put together by the work experience student rather than the top cheese. i wonder if entropy is the flaw in our existence, or if we're the flaw in its.