Love and Information Technology in the City of Fury

It is only occasionally that i return to my parents' place during the semester, and i am always foolish enough as to leave my journal in my university apartment when i do so. i tell myself, surely nothing of note will occur, and i am wrong every time. i can just open notepad and write a blogpost for this website now.

before we immigrated from our home country, my mother was the ceo and founder of a business and my father was simultaneously a dentist and her IT guy. i owe a portion of my interest in computers and zero of my disinterest in hard-sciences to him.

in the car with my dad on the way back home for the weekend, i thought to ask him: how is it that you learned all these things about networking and information tech in the 90s-00s while being a dentist full time - and eventually a father?

he told me, with a warm smile: for your mom.

i found that indescribably beautiful. the childhood memories of his towering server walls in the office, all of the brightly coloured and neatly labeled cables, the teeny screwdrivers and funny green rectangles with pins shining inside unscrewed devices, my dad hunching over people's computers and clacking on their keyboards into terminals. they all flooded into my vision as they sometimes do. it was with a new softness this time.

when my mom ambitiously established her company, my dad jumped at the opportunity to aid in the one of a million skillsets my mom didn't have.

their project crumbled apart under our country's brutish regime.

there came a point where leaving the house long enough and late enough meant coming to terms with the risk of being mugged or kidnapped, so my dad could not finish his associate degree in the interest of our maintaining our family unit. Internet Service Providers left the country in droves until the only ISP that remained was that of the regime itself. This complicated things tenfold, as it was a disgustingly primitive ISP even for its time and incorporating it into his system would be to cede all of his, my mom's, as well as the employees', clients', and stakeholders', private information to the government. only god knows what consequences that would yield. he stressed that he kept up his efforts for my mom.

we left the country for greener grass eventually, and in my dad's words, that whole operation faded into the obscurity of the past. there are supercomputers, linux discs, state of the art processing units and motherboards collecting dust down there right now, all of which i got to see when we briefly returned. his love for this woman manifests under that dust, lives in between their pins and gets churned into networks and servers that her dream enterprise thrived off of.

There is a Soda Stereo song by the name of En La Ciudad De La Furia (translates to: In The City of Fury). it's about Buenos Aires, Argentina, and its social and economic turmoil in the 80s. While we are from elsewhere is latin America - it applies.

more accurately, it's a song about passionate, burning love in a city that is burning down with it. i think about this song and its topic often, because it is the sort of love that i grew up around, and the style of love that ive adopted even now that i live in a cushy first world country. it's the sort of love that my dad poured into IT just for my mom in spite of it all, as i'm finding out today.

to conclude, here's an interesting pattern that has followed me closely all 20 years of my life: