In which there is a discussion of the multitudinous frustrations of Modern Life, and the pronoun "I" is overused

I am now 24 years old. I've traveled all over the world, read thousands of books in multiple languages, both extinct and otherwise, excelled at a top-tier undergraduate school and graduated with not one, but two degrees (in two different languages) while playing four years of varsity soccer - and somehow finished my last semester, which included graduate-level written and oral exams, while dealing with a death in the family.

I had thought that perhaps nothing would be harder than what I've already vecu. I had not, up until 2010, experienced Microsoft Excel.

I would rather be faced with a thousand unanswerable metaphysical questions than an infuriatingly complex task that focuses on that draconian torture device we know as the "spreadsheet." I consider myself an intelligent person (you may have gathered this from the last two years of intermittent, masturbatory blog entries). I learn and adapt quickly, and usually find it both easy and enjoyable to solve problems.

Conceptual problems.

I know enough about Excel at this point in my short-lived career as an environmental consultant to know what needs to be done when I'm confronted with a diabolical worksheet containing thousands of rows of data. The problem is that I simply don't know enough about the inner workings of the infernal program to make it do what I want it to do. If I could write code in English - proper English, mind you - nothing would be simpler. However, writing code in Visual Basic for Applications requires some obscure knowledge of what is, in my eyes, the language of the damned. Not Baudelaire's damned; but the true, howling, angry damned that will burst forth from cracks in the earth at the end of days.

All I want is this: Select a date. From a separate worksheet, grab a series of values and insert them under said date, so that every value from the separate sheet shares the same date. Then, select the next date and perform the same task (you'll excuse me if I don't go into exasperating detail) until it ran out of dates.

Fuck me, I almost put my fist through the computer monitor.

First, the simplest of commands - copy and insert 70 blank rows - utterly failed me. Then, I decided I would record a macro of inserting said number of rows, selecting the next row down, and repeating. Brute force, if you will; my code was nothing more complicated than 70 repetitions of the "insert row" command. Except, I couldn't select the next row down - only the next cell, which created an absolute mess of my spreadsheet.

I didn't make it to pasting the outside values. Instead I limped, shamed and beaten, down the stairs to a co-worker's office where I described my desires in excruciating clarity. Together, it took us approximately an hour and a half to work out a solution. I'm not sure if I ought to feel good that he wasn't able to instantly solve all my problems with the flick of a mouse-wand, or frustrated that I could explain exactly what I wanted but was completely helpless to see it to fruition myself.

It has been a long time since I've felt so completely impotent - at least a year, probably longer; and, in fact, I can't remember the last time. Wait, that's a lie - last Halloween I couldn't seem to get a colored costume contact into my eye and put two holes in the bathroom wall. Yeah.

Regardless, I never imagined I'd be put in my place by a piece of software. That's probably because I never imagined I'd work with any software more complicated than Starsiege: Tribes (which, if you've ever played it, takes years to master - and a master I was, without a doubt). It's probably because I never thought I'd experience the word "spreadsheet" on a daily basis - and it's definitely because I hate numbers. They infuriate me.

On Wednesday I had an hour-long discussion with a colleague of my father's on the relationship between Nietzsche's will to power, existentialist authenticity and self-awareness. That's where I want to be; seated upon my throne of obsidian as pathetic minions grovel at the feet of their philosopher-king.

There are things I can't do. There are things I don't want to do. I'm not always sure how to approach stuff that I can't master in moments; and for better or worse, I often don't want to bother with an effort. I'm not sure what that says about me, but as of right now I definitely am sure that I wouldn't be a computer programmer for all of King Midas's Chocolate Coins. Fuck that shit.