Personal Notes

Basically, my philosophy of life hasn't changed much over the years.

I grew up in the rural northwest. I lived in a small town until I graduated from high school, like Clark Kent, except that I don't have a super alter-ego like he did. I daydreamed (still do, sometimes) that I would get bitten by a radioactive thing, that I came from a different planet, that I had a terrible, burning desire for revenge, that in short my life wasn't so drearily normal.

I read a lot, as a result. I knew the librarians better than I knew my classmates. I was bowled over, in fact, to learn that books were free in the library, where you could sit and learn as much as you'd like, never mind that the teachers were being paid to teach you.

I started and left grade school not exactly knowing why I did the things I did, but just that when I did them, people around me were mostly happy. As a counterexample, I offer the that while in preschool, I stole a piece of wood from someone else so that I could make a sword. I got caught, and the sword was never built, more's the pity, not that I could have been Zorro or Inigo but I could have tried ...

All the same, I really enjoyed grade school. You got crayons, glue, pencils, and a notebook in September. You listened to stories after lunch. You wondered what was on top of the roof, over the fire escape, past the fences, behind the bushes, under the slides, inside the teacher's lounge. I personally had a huge fear of being in the sunlight with the bloodstones present. As my friend described it, it would suck the blood right out of your body, much as lab reports and midterms were to do in a few years.

The first couple of years I went to a Laboratory School. We weren't given chemistry sets and crystal radios. We were the experiment. I realize this now only in hindsight, as there really was no other reason to have thirty foot (9m) high ceilings than to line the upper half of the walls with one-way glass and set graduate (education majors) students on the observation decks. We would see them, occasionally, behind the glass, and we'd wave to them blithely unaware of ourselves.

While I was growing up, my parents rented and eventually bought a small grocery store in the local big city. Originally, they bought it to provide my newly immigrated uncle and aunt with jobs. As time went on (we eventually held on to the store for ten years, more than half of my life by the time we sold it), I came to regard the store as an unnecessarily evil drain on my time, patience, and attention span. Now, in retrospect, I see a flowering of trust and old-style virtues of locally-owned and family-run businesses.

I moved to a different elementary school fairly early on and achieved some of my most visible academic achievements there ("Student is a joy to have in class," comment code #12, I think). I remember thinking that my second grade teacher was dazzlingly beautiful and pitied the kids in the other second grade for having such a drab teacher. A few years later I had a series of crushes, and I didn't really know what was going on until about the third or fourth one -- before, I just found that I couldn't look that person in the face before having to turn away, dazzled by glory and beauty and wisdom and the great headiness of keeping an open secret. I decided that the world and I could get along, the way things were going. I wouldn't feel that way again until my third year of college.

By the time I got to junior high, I became acutely conscious of who I was. Your shoes never match your pants, no matter that they're corduroy and no one in their right mind would want to wear ugly poop-colored corduroys, to say nothing of your shirt not accessorizing well with your hairstyle, if you want to call that a hairstyle, standing in front of your locker-mirror with a comb and brush all day and all between periods the acrid wafting of AquaNet on the breeze ... I'm sure that most of you know what it's like.

The last two years of junior high, after that first awful shock of having everyone in the school district in your classes, were somewhat better. I settled down a little bit and got yearbooks those years. Most of the time, I didn't have to use too much whiteout to let my parents peer through them, not that the words were so bad, they just leered frighteningly bold and real from the pages. The nicest entry I ever read in my yearbook was written by someone I hardly knew beyond bumping into a few times in class and yet seemed perceive me more clearly than I even saw myself.

To be honest, things didn't change much in high school. The hair of the student body didn't pose the fire hazard that it used to, but we stayed in the groups that we'd split into as junior high people. I don't condemn it because it just happens and seems as natural as plate tectonics: huge masses rushing towards each other and one would inevitably grind the other down, but not without rumbling and trembling. It's not always a wasteland, though; sometimes you find genuinely honest and wonderful people, like some of my neighboring locker-owners. We all had to deal with the peculiar quirks of the school, such as how it was designed for southern California weather (and hence was a series of disconnected buildings) while experiencing a snow-belt reality. I still like almost all of the people who graduated with me, but it was difficult to reach across the group borders afterwards; I have yet to contact probably 90% of my graduating class with something stronger than a rumor.

When I reached Berkeley to begin studies as an undergraduate in Mechanical Engineering, I had no idea what to expect or even what things would be like.

Ditto for graduate school. Moving across the country is something of a traumatic experience. Being away from the friends and family that I've known for ten years or more has made me reevaluate my priorities in life, and realize that things only get more complex from here on out. No, you don't need to deprive yourself of all the joy in your life to try to figure out what you really want out of it. It does seem to help me, though.

What have I found interesting on the web? It's a nice little diversion of time, especially setting up your own home page.

Philosophy | Growing Up | Libraries | Preschool | Grade School | Laboratory School | Grocery Store | Crushes | Junior High School | Nicest Yearbook | High School | Undergraduate | Graduate | Interesting

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