In the "About" section of my website, one of the introductory sentences reads "during my free time, I maintain a blog", and above this segment of texts hangs an avatar, in which a generic anime .png of a blonde guy, who's not me, sits smilingly in front of a laptop. I know the reason I put up that picture - it is an anime figure, thus more approachable, and it is a static image of a person, so no effort is required for it to project a sense of optimism through an impeccable smile and wide gazing eyes. I'd like to look at the "About" section quite often, not to be impressed at its adherence to material design nor to polish up its terse, corporate speak, but to look at the website as how a constrained shop window would look to a passer-by. Its décor of colors, lights, and softened edges blend into the techno-selling-points of most things today, and mask everything that was left behind.
In the past I would be quick to ridicule this. But then I realize that such a reaction is illogical - I am typing on a keyboard, in front of a screen, on a chair, under a warm rooftop in the pre-winter cold, all of which are incremental results of a bullet point here, a punch line of a joke there, and the fonts, wording and colors used in some copies of .pdfs whose ultimate printed forms I do not see. By day I am that anime guy with a smile trying to project the same sense of the same things with a more spotted skin and a less styled haircut. By night the smile wanes and I start pacing around in a room which is desolate weren't it for me and a few scattered-around things. And in these gaps between working days something sometimes finds room to exist very briefly like faint glitters finding the dark how amidst the darkness there are lights being turned on in my neighbor's bathroom - I don't know what it is. I used to describe it with phrases like human willpower, nostalgia, etc., but none is accurate because of it being rather sentimental and anthropocentric. It is something statistical and universal, similar to a trough of a wave between peaks that very soon oscillates away. In these constant back-and-forth transitions, I end up feeling like how a dung beetle, who can bury dung 250 times its own body mass in one night, would feel like, if it takes a pause and examines passingly the fact that it is moving dung around. And by all means the dung beetle wouldn't stop after the said examination, at the maximum it'll perhaps move the dung a bit more half-heartedly, because evolutionarily that is how the parameters are set for it.
And in this sense the order of events that kicks off with me logging into the computer in the morning as "DE2FEA" and ends with me lying horizontally in bed in the evening starts to make sense, in the same way that the projected optimism in the avatar of my website morphs into a more believable version given enough time and a flashier design language. The nuances of each day and the pursuits of each era are different but on an aggregate level, they involve food, mating, and some play, nothing more and nothing less. And at the end of the day some of these aspects are just commemorated by either a website, or a piece of paper, or spoken words, or muscles and girths; many are just not.
So yes, a beetle, buries dung 250 times the body weight one night every night, and rolls some of the more okayish balls, under the Milky Way.
