What I Pretend to Be

Today I have spent the last hour of my time running mundane attendance reports which mostly require me to hit a button on the computer screen and then wait 10 minutes until the report is finished, at which point I quickly check it and hit another button. It's a lot of waiting around.

While waiting today I decided to check on our web filtering software. Federal and state laws require my school district to filter dangerous and offensive materials on the Internet to protect the district's children. I have a program that does a pretty darned good job of that, but every now and then I have to go in and tweak it. To tweak it, I have to basically think like a student trying to get around it. I do searches for inappropriate materials and when I find that I CAN access them, I analyze WHY I'm able to access them and try to plug the holes. I actually enjoy the figuring out of where the gaps are.

So what's the problem? About a year ago I wrote a short post about a passage from Kurt Vonnegut's book Mother Night. The post discussed one of my favorite sections of the novel, but it's not that section that I think about when the novel's name gets mentioned. The sentence that sticks out in my mind is one that Vonnegut says is the moral of the story:"Be careful what you pretend to be, because you ARE what you pretend to be." Everything sounds so clinical in my description above, but when I do find those holes in our filter, it means that I've successfully accessed an adult page. And when that happens, I always see things that I DON'T want to see, but sometimes I see things that I REALLY don't want to see. And it begins to sap at my spirit. I almost feel like Harry Potter in The Goblet of Fire when the evil ghost like thingies (Sorry, I'm a Muggle. I don't know those kinds of names) are pulling at him. I imagine that's how people who are addicted to pornography must feel: spiritless. I can only take it for so long.

And that's why I'm writing this instead of looking for more porn. I just have this sinking in my stomach, and I needed a break.