[621] Imperialist Inch

I think I'm perpetually in the wrong. I don't mean in the matter-of-fact way of just being a small-minded human who doesn't know anything. It's more that my perspective seems to lend itself to whatever is exactly wrong about any given moment, and then I find myself drowning either from my own blindness or, of course, small-mindedness.

I've complained about it for a while, but I never know what to make of it. I'm not over the top "woe is me" about my capacity or number of friends, but I do feel as though were I to stop insisting on being so "active" in sharing things I've read or writing bitchy blogs, it would take a rather long time for any of them to reach out to me for a drink or for lunch or to check in if I was okay.

I don't know how to feel about that. One, I haven't run the experiment, though I'm writing this here and not on facebook because I think it's about to commence. Two, I don't know what I, or why I, bother to expect anything from them anymore. It's like, for the purposes of remaining sane, I need to "calm down" and "remain normal" and just do stupid shit, share stupid pictures, and make every conversation about ingratiating ourselves towards some time passing activity. Hear that? I might finally be able to see the cum-your-pants beauty of the mountains after all.

Of course ironically, when I feel I should just shut up and be watching, I can't seem to clean out my head. I've written every day for like the last five, and I don't think any second of it has sounded particularly happy or suggestive that I'm living under anything but outright hellish conditions. I don't have a mind that lets things go easily. So when I get an idea and can't see it come to fruition, it eats at me. When I make a statement about who I am or wish to be, and can't see it manifest soon enough, I feel like a total fraud.

In reality, I'm significantly more concerned with "life in general" than I am myself though. The only reason I feel so dramatic is because I genuinely believe and expect people to be doing better than they are. I expect them to communicate. I expect them to follow through and be honest and real. It can't be "naive" or "stupid" or "pointless" to expect these things of people, despite, and perhaps especially because of these trying times. But I just get silence. I get likes. It takes a friend flying in from across the country to get 4 people in the same room together having drinks or watching a movie. I didn't see a ton of side eye and angry comments directed my way. It's not something stupid like, "Well, they just hate me!"

It easy enough for me to conjure a dozen reasons "no one would want to hang out with me." I rarely express an interest in the things they like. I just don't care about Rocket League or whatever the newest Halo-adjacent game is. I'm sorry, but I stopped caring about those things when I got a car. My opinion hasn't improved nor is my head stimulated. I can't rejoice in the office politics of the job you all share. I can't empathize with the drama of wasting my time around people I hate for less money than I'm worth. I've moved on from that level of connectedness. I want more to come from my money and effort than stress and cliches. I don't ever want the motivated edge to ever really be taken off. I want to remain guilting myself every day that I didn't inch forward. That's no fun when all you care to do is get-by and have a meager escape on the weekends.

But I watch myself too. I recall when we went to Colorado. I had one of my friends reflexively say I thought everything we did sucked or said something negative about the trip. I hadn't, and I specifically and deliberately hadn't because it's not a secret that I'm not spending most of my time wandering up mountains or getting eaten by bugs in the woods. No one needed to hear that, and I had a significantly good time just being around friends, which is usually my only point of seeing them. But just the fact that she reflexively thought and said that was telling. She retracted when I called it out, but still. There's a, not necessarily helpful cloud around me even when I'm doing nothing to contribute to it.

My concern for myself is the feeling of being trapped. I don't always want to feel stuck. And it really is stuck. I can do the math that says I can create a quasi-livable place in my field in a month or two where I'm likely still shitting in a bucket and waking up every hour to the sound of dueling banjos in my dreams. But every day I don't get pinged on to work, is another I'm literally waiting around to get pinged on to work. I can "research" things I'll have to look up again anyway. I can read soul-crushing world news. But it's mostly wheel spinning.

People say that when they have overwhelming anxiety or depression, it's like they aren't even them. They lose a certain kind of control. I have that same sense about me without all of the chemical fuckery. I haven't felt like me in a long ass time. I've felt like a bunker version of me. I've stockpiled a pragmatic philosophy and enough solipsistic proclamations to sustain me indefinitely, but what does that have to do with "me?" How is that living? It's not enough for me to get by or simply achieve. I excel. I crush it. I do it the fastest. I try insanely hard to never simply talk about it, but be about it.

I remember a final test in one of my psychology/history classes. I'd spent most of it like I usually do, dicking around on my computer and taking a handful of bad notes. I'd managed to spend the entire class doing this and gotten by well enough. The final comes along and I decide to actually study. I line up all the names we had to know and the things they accomplished. I played little memory games and made associations. It took maybe around an hour. The next day in class we sit down to take the test and I burn through it. I burned through it fast enough that I thought I had done something wrong. This was a 400 level class my senior year of something within my major, there were plenty of smart, engaged kids who were still working and not nearing the end. After looking around and doing a quick once over, I turned it in and felt like I did in elementary school.

The point of that story is only to highlight that school doesn't set the conditions for you to excel and that test wasn't particularly hard; I did get an A. It's that the feeling of being first, of finding the "cheat" to better remember something or do the work or put exactly the amount of time required without wasting has been a staple of my being since childhood. On paper, I'll look like that cliche "smart kid" "who just gets things easily or faster than others." No, I've played a game of wrote memorization my entire life. It's not enough to quantify whether someone has the capacity to be a wise or productive individual.

But moments like that make me look like an outlier. They make me feel different. No one else treated the class as callously. When I was in class, no one else even picked up their fucking heads and looked around the goddamn room. That being a phenomenon that still scares the shit out of me. You're in a room with 40 to 200 people, and over the course of an hour, sitting in the corner looking back at them all, not a single one will catch your eye? How does that not make you feel fucking weird or "outside" of something? I know there are hardly proper definitions of "normal," but I've ran that particular experiment in dozens of classrooms and haven't found the other person looking back.

Part of me feels like a giant portion of my life is a total accident. I found drug studies by accident and managed to accumulate more wealth than, at least what the statistics state, most people on the planet let alone my cohort despite all of the useless soulless jobs everyone barely survives. I found a job that let's me take indefinite amounts of time off and pays more than any delivery job should. I have the framework for my own completely owned livable space that costs me next to nothing that will allow me the freedom to explore my interests. Part of it feels like an accident, but a larger part feels like it's from my intense relationship to "reality."

It was real for me that I wasn't going to get that "normal" job and be able to save and create on the weekends. It's real for me that I don't want to watch my dad suffer like my grandma in my living room one day with mounting idiots and resentment piling on around me. It's real for me the utility of people who listen to what I say and mutually invest in ideas. I have concrete dollar amounts. I have concrete time frames. I have practical failings. I'm not a dreamer. I try in spite of myself every single day. I choke down the "wasted" time and "self-indulgence" of media. I poorly practice instruments and pray my car won't die. It's real for me the rot that sets in when you give up on being extraordinary. It's real how much faster I can still operate while the rest of the world doesn't want to even lift their head up.

And it hurts. And it's insanely lonely. Even the ones who believe in me and would cheer me on aren't "there." They aren't next to me. They aren't budgeting to help. They aren't weed whacking. I'm the "hands off creative A-type personality" that's either too intense or too guilt-inducing. Again, even if I go out of my way to avoid any suggestion of being as such. I don't know where I exist in the social space because I always have to either be inserting myself into one or find myself lamenting no one cares to invite me into the seemingly most obvious ones. I do have friends that come out and invite me to things, of course. Never let those kinds of sentiments ring too loud.  I think it's that we both know I want more than a beer though.

A big part of it is that I don't feel I contribute. I want to provide and no one wants what I'm offering. Moreover, I start appealing to "the masses" and they take what I have and find every way possible to denigrate it or me or reconfigure it to something not worth their time. That part gets so fucking ridiculous. I know it's a small portion of people who ever choose to open their mouths, but why does it always have to be the angriest and the dumbest? If you're not willing to translate what you're saying into "reddit speak" or "humble braggart" no one seems to understand direct explicit speech. Or, they don't want to understand it because that would betray the times. That might obligate them to take responsibility for the wrong "interpretations." The world is such a clusterfuck of ill-defined words and teeter-tottering between truthful self-respect and entertainment, how many people exist like me who just give a shit about accuracy and accountability? 2 politicians?

I don't want to be so pent up. I don't want the headache. I don't want to resent my circumstances when every other minute of my day is reading about someone else's who are dramatically, so dramatically worse. Again, it's not "me." It's not "my life" that is the problem. It's my audience, or lack thereof. I'm a comic whose constantly bombing, not because the jokes aren't funny, but because the audience is high on the fumes of social decay. They're in their smartphones looking for another distraction, not an opportunity to be bothered about all it is they aren't doing to fix it. And given that's all I seem to be able to offer myself, and you can rate my capacity to keep hanging on by reading the last 5 blogs or so, what sheer hell would that cause a "normal" person?

Part of the reason I persist is that I think I'm magic. I think consciousness is the most intriguing thing. I think the capacity for language and the ability to create are inexhaustible and undefinable until you capture then, somehow, in words, in dance, in music, and in the interaction only you can have with the people you surround yourself with. So every "arbitrary" day waiting around is me watching the magic die. Every moment I have the motivation to run into my next project or fixing an obvious issue, but can't, I feel helpless and crippled. Every fucking moment. This is the drama of my mind. All of this bullshit about "be in the now." I AM! I'm too in the now. Right now I want to be making the garage livable. Right now I want to be drunk with a dozen friends. Right now I want to be in a music lesson on one of my dozen instruments. Right now, every day right now, and instead I have to sit for 11 hours and take rich people their over-priced food, averaging $50 a day that in 2 months will set me up well enough to still have to shit in a bucket, provided my car doesn't explode, I don't get sick, or some other bullshit life thing kicks in.

It's never been about "can" for me. It's always when. When is it my turn to shine as bright as I can? When do I get to set pinnacle examples of what's in my head? When do I get to work efficiently and methodically until I'm lost in the task having exhausted any further thought or tweak to it? When can I stop writing because I'm doing such a damn good job doing? When can my statements stop being these tepid hopes and dreams and again return to actionable consequences. "Would you, maybe, kinda, like to come out to a fire sometime?" Fuck that, I've got this dope ass fire everyone should be at, fuck you if you can't make it. That's how the party house was. That was the pride I took in creating the coffee shop. That's the rush I'm using to cope with picking ticks out of my hair and the foreign landscape that is a field in cousin-fuck Indiana where I'll be able to build any number of things and experiment indefinitely.

Why am I the only one that finds that exciting?

[350] Bad Title For A Bad Blog

I wish it didn't, but age matters. Not the mere fact of the number, but the total amount of experiences that have rounded out your character. As a lover of house parties, I'm still aware that a scene where the median age is 20 is not really where I'm trying to be. You just get people who are at different places. They want to force conversation or, much like a child, say “hi” even when they don't know or care who it's to. It's not the same thing as nodding to a person you walk past at the park, it's like a cry out for acknowledgment. It's...unsettling.

It's worse when you go into a setting where everyone is supposed to “fend for themselves.” Sure, I can strike up a few random conversations. But it's with 20 year olds. When you tell me that you're into reading about human rights and are going into journalism to report on said issues, when I reference Nelson Mandela and apartheid, particularly now, that shouldn't confuse you. It's not their fault, but it's hard not to hear the superficiality a million miles away.

My problem is having a sense of feeling “above it all” even before I got into it. When offered a shot of Kamchatka, I laugh at your paltry disposition. I remember the first time I drank that shit as a shot. Not coincidentally, it was the last time I drank that shit as a shot. Fitting in isn't worth a hard fought lesson like that. I just go back to, how can kids who are spending $800 a month to live in, frankly shit, apartments, not afford better than horribly cliched and terrible alcohols? Technically, I don't have a job, but I find that common decency does not allow for Hamms to even enter my house.

It's kind of fun to talk like a pretentious rich person. I think it has more to do with how you conceive of yourself than you do other people. Like, it's painful to drink shitty alcohol. I wake up in pain and regretting my life. It's not uppity to acknowledge that message. It'd be great to be like an ambassador, and when they rudely assume you'll go out and buy alcohol for them, maybe there's a moment where they sincerely look at you and hope they can trust you not to undermine their stomachs. But they never do and that's why they pay the "fuck you" tax.

I think my biggest problem is trying to relate. I can't think of a time when I was gung ho about fucking my night up and getting incredibly drunk before 11:30. I can't recall being a “dumb freshman” who pounded whatever was put in front of me and was desperately telling people how cool they were so they wouldn't overly judge my dance moves on the fledgling floor. Don't get me wrong, I'm extremely happy to have missed that boat. It's just, I feel even more judgmental being even a couple years older and a few degrees removed from seeing people do it at any party I've thrown in the last few years.

The old cliché is that they're just kids. They'll get better. They'll learn. See, but they won't. That's what bugs me. I've known plenty of super seniors who are willing to shake your hand and pat you on the back because you brought Hamms to a party. That's just bad research which I can't respect. Maybe you have a stupid tongue who likes that shit, okay, hard to blame you for genetics, but it's truly hard to classify it as beer based on their own labeling of alcohol content.

Maybe I should stick to kind of dumb “kids and their stupid party”-esc blogs for while. I haven't done anything of merit in a minute, so this is what I get at the forefront of my mind. I'm sorry if you thought it as stupid as I kind of do.

[284] Caution: Road Map on Fire

Let’s see if I can bring down the mood.

I want everyone graduating to pay close attention. I’m extremely intrigued by your prospective futures, and if you could do one thing, it is to focus in on how you feel and think as the years pile on quicker than you thought they would. I’m asking this because of how many “old people” I hate. I’m asking so that maybe I can do two things; either figure out why so many clichés exist about life, “I gave up on trying to save the world,” “it’ll be over before you know it,” “that’s just how such and such works” and/or devise what it takes to escape those clichés.

You see, fundamentally, I’m worried. I’m bugged that you’ll end up saying things like the rest of society or feeling as lonely or complacent as the millions of match.com members. I lucked out in my cynicism and hated college and what it stood for two weeks in. This whole “real world” thing has had too much of my commentary and scorn, so graduation for me was just another day. I already expected the worst and low and behold, it can get even worse than my approximations. I think you’re all generally more optimistic about life than I am, and if you go from higher than where I get, to as low as I can go, that’s unsettling.

But, thus is my theory for many if not most dispositions. “I tried, I thought, I hoped, I prayed, I changed, and then it all went to shit.” After a while it’s really easy to want to find a rut. The idea of “settling down” is appealing, not for its truth about your nature, but for the prospect of even the semblance of stability. Or maybe it’s in climbing the ranks of a job; I’m all for loving what you do, I think it’s very easy to forget all the other things you love to do and sometimes easy to start hating what you love to do without even realizing it till things get hairy.

Now, you’re my friends because overwhelmingly you don’t tend to act or think like how I conceive of most people. BUT, you are not immune. I certainly wasn’t and I realize how hard you have to work and how deliberate you have to think in order to avoid “life as we know it” or “life as it is” and keep with “life that I want.” And at least for me, it’s what I hope for you, it just takes so much more time and practice than I think we as a society are even used to. We certainly don’t teach it in school and it’s not what we’re celebrating at commencements.

I know regardless of how things turn out, you’ll survive. It’s hopefully about more than merely surviving and that’s what I wish to keep working at. If/when the world our actual old people created goes to shit or has set us up to live a quarter of the American Dream as it was sold, I’m all for trying to work on something different. Be it a different kind of network or family or work structure or modes of thought or whatever to escape the “comfortable” ruts people find themselves in avoiding having to think about things too much.

Alone, you may be just another college kid with loans, maybe living back home, or maybe starting a job in your field, yet practically an intern to all the scared broke people who’ve been doing it 10 or 20 years longer than you. Just don’t become a slave to that paradigm. And if you start to feel trapped or isolated or bored, I hope you start to think about what can be done together. I see people screwing things up because they feel empty. They lost their ability to decide for themselves. They lost what it means to care. They’ve settled. Please don’t get comfortable. Don’t allow their excuses to become yours. Please don’t squeeze a pebble’s size of happiness for all it’s worth because a bigger rock is too heavy or you’re too tired. This is too important a stage in your life to let it get stolen.

[225] Courage Of Your Convictions

I can’t even sit and read.

For as much as I tend to rant or blog, it amazes me how little people can truly appreciate how I think or feel. I’d like to believe that when I say something a hundred ways a thousand times, it’s me refining my argument or building up the proper method of how I’m going to deal with something. My refinements never seem to be met with anything other than the same old tired ideas.

“You’re soooooooooooooooo close!”

Close to fucking what! I’m close to spending $70,000 fucking dollars for a degree in something I have no intention or desire to study further. Stop fucking telling me how close I am! Here, sit in a room with a paddle ball. Do it four just an hour a day. I don’t care how good you get at it. Just paddle, and don’t stop for four years. The thoughts you have after the first 10 minutes of this activity are the same ones I’ve had throughout these four fucking years. I can’t think of a bigger display of hating myself and woe than proving over and over again that I can learn arbitrary shit, apply it to arbitrary questions, and fucking hate everything about myself and the time I’ve spent doing it. What do you do to an animal that’s suffering? You kill it. I don’t even have to die to feel overwhelmingly better about what I’m doing with my time and money.

Maybe that analogy wasn’t good enough. Climb a mile high pile of shit. Every time you plunge your hand in, just think about how close you are. Ignore the smell and never mind your clothes. It doesn’t matter how many times you fall or slip, just keep pushing, digging, and fighting for the top. Once you get there, TADA! OMG YOU MADE IT. Covered in shit, cheering at the top of the mountain, please continue to explain to me how much better I’ll be looking like you.

“People won’t respect you if you don’t get a degree.”

I don’t want to work for or anywhere near a person who bases their level of respect on your grades or the titles of your classes. Tell me, theoretical future employer, you may have talked to some of my friends or can read my facebook notes. Can you respect what I’ve learned in the psychological field? Do you think my “skills” will transfer to balancing the books of the Sears or Kohl’s you want me to manage? Have I finally made myself worthy by proving that I could condition myself to hate every minute of my life and still perform a task? That’s what you’re looking for right? You want to make sure I’m so well rounded, rounded the point of an amorphous shell of who I once was so that you can dictate how I should fit into a company.

This goes further. Both my uncles have degrees. Both are unemployed. This notion that degree equals job is simply bullshit, especially today. A degree equals a job on shaky ground. A job that may or may not last till the next month. A job that is dictated by someone who may or may not have the best idea of how to run it or how to relate to you. I don’t want “a job.” I want my job. Something I’ll be actually good at for reasons dependent on me.  Anyone can crunch your numbers or follow a company directive; only you can maintain your relationships and foster growth or productivity from them.  I’ve heard enough of the horror stories of waking up dead. Dead to the world, realizing what you’ve become and where you’ve put yourself. How do I justify pushing myself closer and closer to such a reality?

It’s never been about ability, and that’s the problem. No one puts on like they care about what I’m capable of. They don’t act like my specific knowledge is necessary or relevant. If the one person that has to care is me, then so be it. When someone talks about how important the degree is, to me, it’s like saying “you know, the 3 and half years and 3.3 gpa, that’s all shit and doesn’t matter, the degree, now THAT will stick out.” The irony of course being that, to me, it doesn’t matter, but the context they’re pushing for, the one that needs those things, is the one they haphazardly dismiss.

It’s all about your philosophy. Do you think it’s about fitting into a society you don’t agree with because “that’s life” or do you maintain the struggle to fight against things you can show to be inadequate, destructive, and soul crushing? Are you about progressing down a line or growing as a person? I’d rather abstain from something than be a hindrance. More importantly, I’d rather be the proper tool.

IF, IF and when I graduate, it will mean nothing. If someone starts a sentence with “because you graduated you’re so and so qualified” I’m going to go with “you’re an idiot.” If someone tries to explain to me how necessary it is for me to open and that college broadened my horizon and perspective, I’m going to go back to the chorus and proclaim you’re a fucking idiot. I’m not a person because I know random facts. I’m not qualified because I answer questions we already know the answers to. I should only garner respect and admiration for choosing to do things and choosing to do them well. Anything less, or worse, the complete fucking opposite (you know like I’m doing in school), should make you sad or pissed off at what’s being wasted. But again, I’m the only one that needs to care about me.

Do I wander around campus looking for a party with Kesha blaring and a fridge full of PBR? No, I create a party house. I play topless pong, experiment with sheesha flavors, build a relationship with a badass DJ and accommodate guests. Do I think noisy chains or crazy hair says anything about how well I can do in school or run a coffee shop? Fuck no, and for those who do, the idea of looking a certain way and doing even better than a “normal” person could, frankly, gets me off. The management skills I fought for working at a theater I’ll translate into how I  run a coffee shop or any fucking else thing I want to run. I’ll bank on the relationships I foster because I MADE THEM.

[224] Talk To Your Teachers

I had a fairly interesting conversation with my P466 teacher not 20 minutes ago. I’ve learned that teachers are pissed off at how the university corrals students who aren’t qualified or caring into their courses.

I hope I haven’t undersold the idea that I do believe that most teachers are trying their best to teach you and actually care if you learn something. A phrase that stuck out from my teacher was “it’s bigger than you or me.” She had to cancel a class that she spent 15 hours preparing each class for. I have to spend four months in a class that I’m barely interested in and don’t have much a clue how to understand. I think her problem is worse. The real point is that they are both bad situations and I don’t think we should both have to resolve ourselves to the fucked up nature of it all when there is a bigger problem that can alleviate both of ours.

I’m an advocate of as close to one on one teaching as possible. You get to have an actual relationship with the person you’re working with and find out the best methods to teach them. If you are really passionate about a topic you can get specific answers or focus on specific questions. You get to structure the goals and pace of the course to your needs instead of just taking in information and spitting it out piece meal. A refreshing thing to hear from my teacher was that this is how her classes used to be conducted. She used to have kids who really wanted to take her course and could handle the technical jargon and wanted to go on to study the topic later in life.

At least one significant problem is at the university level. This semester is special. The class had to open itself up so that enough seniors could graduate on time. You either take the only class available to you, or you arrange to stay another semester or the summer etc. Does this not seem foolish on its face?

So you want kids to graduate. Maybe it isn’t explicitly about money because, as my teacher pointed out, a few kids here or there dropping out or taking an extra course or two doesn’t really matter in the end. (I still think there is something to be said about the money, but she may have some insight I don’t know.) How can you say you care about someone’s education when you’re willing to put them in a class designed to be over their head and outside of their interests? How can you not see how many kids are enrolling and appropriate classes or requirements in a smarter way?

College is supposed to be the place where you can get technical and learn the things that you simply can’t learn on your own.

This line stuck out as well in our conversation. The technical jargon of biology or a medical field, you almost certainly can’t learn alone. The cutting edge experiments and new labels of genes, diseases, etc…isn’t going to be in your Google searches. If this is a ridiculously smart teacher expressing this sentiment, why does college feel and act like it wants to pump you full of random facts and requirements and kick you out the door? Yes, you can be “open” to all sorts of things and pull some form of potentially helpful information anywhere you go and from every teacher you talk to. I think every time I get told to just “be open” or “deal with it” people are missing the point.

When you dedicate your time, effort, and money towards something, especially something that acts under the guise of truly caring about your time, effort, and money, it shouldn’t be a “deal with it” or “struggle to get something out of it” relationship. I don’t mean that you shouldn’t work hard. I don’t think that you won’t have to adjust. I simply think there should be a higher standard that this institution holds itself to. It should literally be in the business of empowering and enabling. I really do think that the good will and societal philosophy that “education is good” get subverted by business interests. I think no matter what you think you are or aren’t getting out of school, it is in some way correlated with someone who’s got more power and more money than you do and how they think the school should run.

This is beginning to sound conspiracy theorist-y. Of course it could be something else. We could just collectively be too non-caring or stupid to identify the actual problems. Enough people could just be happy with how things are run, have their own excuses or explanations and would never work to change things. Maybe I’m one of a handful of people who’s really this frustrated about the topic with not much a plan or strict evidence to back up my claims. I tend to think that it’s actually a combination of every story you could tell, to some extent, and hardly anyone is qualified enough to sort through it all and decide a course of action.

I am glad though to hear from my teacher that she specifically structures the course and grades easily so that it’s more about you trying to get something out of the course than being lost and worried about failing. She, like most teachers, will beg you to come to office hours. They don’t do it for the money. I just think their efforts are being subverted. You’re vulnerable when you care and aren’t thinking about how to fuck people.

I don’t want to pretend like I don’t see a problem or would rather ignore it for the sake of my other interests. I don’t want to resolve myself to adages about how “that’s life.” I don’t want to think people are more evil than they are. I’d really hate to think I’m carrying on about something that isn’t a problem for the sake of knocking down some personal demon I’m hell bent on making everyone’s problem as well. But it’s like, every time someone complains about a bad teacher, testifies to how little they remember or understand in a class, recount all the time they spent on some topic to barely pass, go into thousands of dollars’ worth of debt, are unable to find a job, and can, without much prompting, get teachers to complain just as long and hard about what’s happening to them, is it safe to say there’s something to try and fix beyond their subjective experience?

[200] It's Kind Of Hard To Explain

 Friday, September 18, 2009 at 4:25am

Initial topic: Brainiac. There's a couple things I want to talk about if this seems without some overall point. First, I was told I was smart by my psychology counselor because of my demeanor about class and how I don't consider any of them particularly difficult. I felt compelled to tell her that I'm not that smart. Don't get me wrong, I am, but not in the way she was trying to attribute to me. I can't just read something, have it memorized, and ace the test the next day. I rush to read and put assignments together the night or hours before they're due. If I don't repeat something like math time and again, I'll forget I even took the subject in school. I'm not that kind of academically smart kid. If anything I think this is just a testament to how utterly dumb everyone else is. The amount of information I get on any given class day could be done no less than 5 times faster in a much more applicable and interesting way. The fact that I feel comfortable putting off studying for a test until the night before is because all I have to do is make ridiculous word associations for 30 some power point slides. Hardly that difficult if you can focus for all of an hour or so. If I go about "learning" this way in college and that makes me smart, what does that say about the people who "don't find it that easy," as the counselor put it....yaaaah.

New topic: trust. I already ranted about trust before and I just want to make sort of an aside here. If I've given you a reason to not trust me, I'd appreciate knowing what it was. I try to go out of my way to be trustworthy because I know what it's like to be fucked by someone who doesn't care if they defy your trust. Also, it's kind of an ego thing to think that I can keep secrets and be important to someone whilst the rest of the world is just that pathetic. When you don't trust me, and it's basically regardless of what's at stake, you're making a character judgment about me. If I've shown you something that would make you think I'd be tempted, or am incapable, or whatever else with regards to what you're trusting me with, then even I don't know what it is. So, pretty please, think about what else you're saying when you choose not to trust me.

New topic: Boys and girls. It will never cease to amaze me how eager we are to pussy foot around one another when feelings are involved. I probably shouldn't say much more from there ;). Well, aside from when I say "we" I mean, all you lil chillren who need to make up their minds and grow some cahones.

New topic: The future. Every time I try to explain what it is I want to do with my life, or what I'm currently doing to try and make that vague future come true, I'm met with pretty scant or, in my opinion, unfulfilling explanations for the people who've asked me. What it boils down to is this; I want to have fun, I want money for the purposes of freedom, not just because I get hard for green paper, and I want to be able to explore and work in areas that I have deemed interesting. In my naive little mind, I think that meeting a ton of people, learning about what they want to do, and then developing a plan for us both to get what we want is a good way to go about this. For whatever reason, I've decided that in order to avoid ever having a boss again, I need to learn as much as I can about the people around me, who they know, what they can provide and whatnot, and use that along with our friendship to create something we know we'll enjoy. Something even crazier tells me that almost regardless of what I do with my life I'll be able to make money. So, why am I in college? People are here, potential is here, I'm in a sea of people who just need to be prompted and lead. And if I get good at it now, then I'll still get to have fun doing it in the future.

FIN

Updated about 5 months ago · Comment · LikeUnlike

Brandon Berk

It's all about having fun. Have fun and nothing else matters. NOTE: NOT quoting metallica...

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[170] Naughty Teacher

Friday, January 23, 2009 at 1:53am

I think the most disagreeable part of college is the range in caliber of teachers you can either enjoy immensely or loathe indefinitely. Take my Business G300 class. This guy is just another business major who, by way of pressure from his foreign parents, decided to focus on managerial economics. He doesn't necessarily need to know anything more about teaching than what you can read from the book. He isn't worried about how fast he talks or what he takes for granted as the previous amount of knowledge the class has. He doesn't realize that while you can get the bulk of what he's saying, when you so horribly pronounce a word that you've basically just translated it into your foreign tongue, it only serves to distract and confuse, which trumps the smirk you may want to crack. I keep finding examples of people who are, by all accounts "smart" in the field they are so affluently projecting, but don't even realize there is something to be said about the method in which something is taught. This I believe is true regardless of the subject or nature of the work.

It's one thing to give some equation, which in truth you can understand isn't that hard or confusing, but easy to mess up if you haven't seen it previously. One can always go into the book or even google something that fundamental if you miss a term or something. It's quite another when you hurriedly scribble the equation on the board, pointing to this and that, filling in terms seemingly pulled from nowhere, solving it, replacing values and making arbitrary erases and re-done scribbles, then posing the token question "any questions." All the while reminding us that you got your degree in Turkey. This might come as a shock to some of you, but I don't think myself too retarded of a person. So explain to me why I'm taking a class that would almost assuredly make more sense to me if I had Mr. Bowman teaching me? I don't care that he'd cost more and would want a handy in the bathroom, I just want a B and to get the hell out of this place.

Despite the previous teacher, I also have accounting, which is basically a class I never want to end. The teacher keeps things interesting by alluding to personal stories and tying them into what's on the agenda for the day. Everything is broken down to it's fundamental component before it's used in an example or further story. He even contributes numerous stick figures who live these exciting money grubbing lives on this chalkboard turned canvas. I simply wonder why more teachers can't be like that. It makes more sense to me why home schooled kids are generally smarter. They learn something, then move on. They get to do it in the comfort of their own homes and usually with the enthusiasm of the parent who's taken on the task. Here, we're forced into their schedule, their teaching "styles," and their abhorrently expensive books which have the wondrous caveat coin toss on whether they'll get bought back or not.

What still kills me, and has absolutely been confusing to me since I first started, is the logic behind assigning twenty or thirty pages of reading, saying "you'll be responsible for that" and then quizzing us on the information weeks later. First, maybe this is a key skill I lack, but the second I read something it isn't as if I just download it and store it to be recalled when test time comes around. Second, if your going to make us read it, and then not discuss 80% of it in class, it's who's guess as to what is more important or relevant when the questions roll in. Third, most of the time the assigned reading isn't from a Harry Potter book, meaning, it's foreign material, admittedly hard to understand, or almost incapable of being appreciated without the foreknowledge of how and why your suppose to read something some way. That said, the 30 pages I had to read and take notes on in law, aside from definitional things, I'm not going to have the remotest idea how to deconstruct some case when every other word is legal jargon. And yes, I go back and read, re-read, re-re-read, slowly try to interpret, and still take notes.

The problem isn't that I won't spend hours on something if it's relevant, interesting, and required(shudders), the problem is with the system and teachers that aren't designed or trained on the best methods for getting information encoded within the students. It's some kind of sick irony when my law professor can joke about students who've taken his class, and then worked as his tempts or assistants, who've said "huh, I never remember talking about any of that." This followed by a chuckle from both him and the class. If your not going to remember it, if the person teaching you can laugh at the idea that you didn't retain what THEY "taught," what the hell does that say about all the "learning" going on?

The only other class I have that could possibly be described as "hard" is philosophy of mind. This too has it's problems. I like philosophy, I like the idea of it, most of what I've read of it, and want to know more. What I don't want to do is try and decipher old English and mash it with some conjured, heavily misunderstood notion of what I take the text to be. Why don't I want to do this? Because it's been done, over and again, in many languages, and every question we have about the text, someone has a page devoted to it either online or in another book. It's great to hear about different schools of thought, and the reason some philosopher you at first took be almost too stupid despite his brilliance, now seen in a different light. I think it's utterly frivolous to struggle through and confuse yourself when the answers are already out there. Another tragic irony, my independent study of philosophy brought me to some of the highest points in my life, while my academic pursuit of it makes me want to kill myself.

In truth, I think the teachers, students, questions, and answers should be transparent. Give me the final the first day of class. Tell me the entire paragraphs that will be wholly ignored this semester. Put me on a web cam if you have to to prove that I'm actually doing the work because at that point I would feel inclined to work knowing exactly what it is I'm working towards. They incessantly tell you they want the information to be relevant to you, they want you to be able to use it in the future, it will be helpful for jobs, etc, but at the end of the day, all anybody cares about is passing the tests. I'd say it's a foregone conclusion that you don't really need to have learned anything to merely pass a test. I think you shouldn't be allowed to have a school where one semester I'm taking a class in which the final is made up of previous identical test questions, which were made from quizzes, of which we were shown the answers next class, then onto business law where a mere quiz could be a random sampling of the panoply of information taken in from the reading and lecture.

I don't believe most people that excel in life have that downloadable information memory either. I think they simply know how to find information, implement their ideas, rinse and repeat. I think they know so many people that they are automatically best suited to make better decisions because of those contacts. Things get done, experienced and not just learned, because they are devoted to and excited about the people and subject they're dealing with. If this is all just "practice for the real world" why are pretending like we won't have the resources to get the job done? Why aren't we practicing all the social aspects of a business that can potentially make or break it? Why play like we'll be alone in some field with a book and given an hour to solve some company's salary crisis? Yes, you need a certain amount of knowledge to be in charge of anything, and yes you need specified and refined knowledge in areas to do even remotely well or handle unforeseen problems. You get these skills by practice, not memorization and tests. You learn from people who've took the time to learn how to teach to you instead of taking for granted the whole class is on the same page. Your shown the actual results and how they pertain to your life in particular. I'm going to overwhelmingly prove my theory is correct with Mystik.

 David M.L. Jaffe at 9:35am January 23

You have Schrimper, don't you? Dude's fucking sweet. And it's probably the only business class I'll ever find entertaining and informative at the same time. Sigh...

[57] When It Rains...

I don't matter.

If there's a more important lesson to learn in school, I've yet to find you. I don't matter. Your teachers don't care about you. Your friends probably change as soon as you change housing. Your "academic advisers" have your number. You and I don't matter. All that matters is what we can project to the rest of the world. There is no place for well-being, let alone happiness. Do as your told, file in rank, get "trainable."

I thought I finally had it right. I picked classes I thought were interesting. Went to my adviser happy and ready to look forward to something for once. To my abysmal dismay, NONE of the classes I gave half a shit about taking were being offered. Again I am plunged into a world of apprehension, stress, and utter despair. I'm so fucking distressed I want to punch things until I feel numb. Schools attack your very spirit. Your essence of life. You may find something interesting or cool WHAM! "We deem this too hard for you, this isn't allowed, this doesn't fall in line with your major, this would be more appropriate, this is a STANDARD BULLSHIT COURSE"

My friend accused me of being depressed a little while back. While I vehemently disagreed I can fully appreciate such a dark and low place that people who are clinically depressed may feel. If I honestly thought myself susceptible to staying at that level of compelling negative thought, I'd seek assistance mind you. I do tend to say all the mood killer practical and blah things. I always bitch about my situation in life. I don't know if that means I'm depressed or not. If I felt like I do right now all the time....If depression means always feeling like you never have something to look forward to and are not secure about your position in relation to your responsibilities, then yes I'm depressed.

I'm either a complete idiot by every stretch of the imagination or I really have something important about life understood at its core. I'd prefer to think the latter as no one is convincing enough to paint me as an idiot. I know I'm only in college because its the status quo or "those who cannot be named." I know I would drop out in a heart beat if I came upon a better opportunity. I know that I will sincerely make myself mentally sick if I continue to feign worry about classes while actually worry about what I'm not using my time for.

Why is it so easy for everyone else? How do they do h/w and never struggle over its value? How do they wake up every morning to download information simply because its being told to them? How do people justify interrupting their passion? Do they even have one?

For half the guys in my building the "fun" consists of w.o.w. and magic the gathering games....is that what they really are about? I mean its obvious they aren't spending 10-12 hours on homework each day. I can't seem to rationalize either method of staying sane even though one is supposed to get you somewhere and the other is supposed to be fun.

All I ever care to do when I know there is nothing riding my ass is read, sleep, play music, and hang out. College won't prepare you for a job like that nor will it tell you how doing those things can find you a place in the world. Unfortunately for me apparently those are what I like and what I have to work with if I'm to get anywhere that doesn't get me institutionalized.

I can't stay this angry all the time. Not "grrr I'm gonna kick ass" angry, but simply fed up and done with this way of life. Falling face first into a random test, boring assignment, or lack of anything substantial and profound. I don't know what I'm going to do. I had a plan, school killed that plan, where the fuck do I go now? Assuming my dad's really that cool, at least my living room has a comfortable couch.