I, arch-villain

that's right, it's time for more information than you wanted about Lepht's fucked-up relationship with its ex. i write it down because it makes me feel better, so go 'head and ignore it.

i've been informed - and looking at his LiveJournal (yes), my source was entirely correct - that w3dyt has become rather obsessed with this 'beating me at grades' idea. i'm told he no longer even tells people who he means to 'win' against, or how - it's ingrown into his head that i, Lepht Anonym, am the academic equivalent of Blofeld, stroking my pet gimp as i hog all the best jobs and grades, laughing at him, surrounded by a cadre of cronies i've hypnotised into following me. in this scenario, w3dyt is of course James Bond, who is going to beat Blofeld because he is the hero and that is what always happens with heroes. it would seem that success on my part has been needling him ever since he decided that the break-up - which was a joint effort in failure - was to be my dain-bramaged doing.

this frightens me, and makes me sad. frightens me because there's more opportunities for him to be angry when i do well coming - the CSD welcome address, for instance, where i'll be up on stage in front of him recieving prizes i won and he didn't - or class, where i'm fairly sure he is going to find out about the forementioned pet gimp and try to do something about it. as we've seen, if he decided to, the question of who'd be crying in the back of the ambulance isn't a hard one.

it makes me so sad because this is so far from what academia should be about. i hear ya - how can someone who writes in all smalls possibly tell us what academia is about? - but i didn't get the idea on my own; it came from the open-source scene here, and from the University itself, and from the guys with doctorates i hang around with these days, of whom i ain't one yet. w3dyt says he's going to 'win' because he thinks of what we do as a contest, where if you didn't get the highest marks, you lost. but it's not like that - we're not here to fight. we're here to collaborate. we're here to help each other learn, get degrees, go out into the world and use that knowledge to help other people who have different knowledge, because in turn, they help us.

it makes me sad that a guy with so much potential - not to be top of the class, but to act as any smart human being can, as a collaborator to help other human beings - is wasting his energy on this futile, puerile inferiority complex. he's not going to 'beat me'. if he did, i wouldn't care - if he got a research job that i didn't, it would mean that he was the one who could contribute more to computing science in that particular post. if he got a first and i got a second-class degree, it would mean that he worked harder than i did, and in contrast to a year or two years ago, that would impact my self-esteem not in the slightest. i am less fragile, now, than he thinks.

i hope this obsession fades from his mind once term starts. i hope his friend on LiveJournal stops placating him by telling him it's OK to have a bitter commitment to tearing a person down, even one that will never work. and i hope he gets a boyfriend or girlfriend who really does love him, who'll distract him from thinking about me, because if it doesn't, the friend doesn't and he doesn't, i can't see that this is going to end healthily.

L

PS. i retract what i said about the novel. it occurs to me that having a literary penchant makes me a verbose, pompous motherfucker, and possibly isn't therefore all that 'sweet'.