Do you have the time?
I feel so narcissistic to have my own web page splashed across your screen in less-than-dazzling colors (working on getting PhotoCD stuff set up). Do you really want to know more about me? This is probably the most catch-all of the pages in my personal folder, so please, be ready to navigate through mood swings and selfish turns.
Right now, yes, I'm a graduate student. I'm working towards a master's degree and increasingly thinking that doing a doctorate is not for me. I realize that there's those who think that I haven't been in school long enough to be bored with it (seventeen years and counting now, including preschool), but all the same, I'm finding it difficult to motivate myself enough to do good research. I hear what my advisor tells me, I look up books, I walk and talk and make good contacts with people -- in an academic environment like MIT, people are very friendly. On the other hand, in real life, to put it simply, people are not so friendly. Case in point: being in Boston; whether in a car (as a passenger), riding a bicycle, or just walking, I've gotten honked at and cursed out. I think to myself that yeah, it must be my fault; I'm not supposed to be in the crosswalk and still, if you don't have the patience to deal with me, then maybe you shouldn't be driving. I feel like an apologist explaining why I stood aside while Poland was being invaded.
I didn't feel like doing anything.
It's not my jurisdiction.
You gotta learn to take care of yourself.What it all amounts to is that I'm basically lazy at heart. I used to watch college students cut across our lawn even in the middle of winter, when there were feet of snow piled up on it, just to save themselves the ten extra feet it took to go around; I would silently chortle to myself and think that if there's a shortest way to anything, a college student will find it. I wonder sometimes whether I've really matured since leaving high school and small town life behind. After all, I've spent the great majority of my life in school; no matter what else you say about it or me, it's an artificial environment.
It's also an environment that I've been somewhat thriving in for the past seventeen (that number again -- it's always your sweet sixteen, right, so what does that make seventeen? sour?) years. I'm not knocking learning; I think that you can learn plenty outside of school, though. Today I walked in on a professor unannounced and asked him a few (relatively simple) questions about metal vapor deposition; in my twisted view of "the real world", this is equivalent to approaching someone in a business suit outside of Salomon Brothers and asking for financial advice. Yes, you might run into the occasional investment banker-with-a-soul who's willing to give you some free information but it's as likely as not that whoever you ask will stare at you and reduce your sense of self to somewhere between slugs, cockroaches, and plankton.
So what have I learned so far? Beyond a little bit of self-loathing, I think that I'm OK. The world is OK. People you meet are basically decent and there's no need to be paranoid about very much, X-Files fans notwithstanding.
When I was an undergrad, several of my housemates would take semesters/years off of school to decide what exactly they wanted to do and to try to "find" themselves. At the time, I felt somewhat condescending because basically, "finding" themselves usually amounted to sleeping in and living off of their parents' credit cards. I thought that it was marvelously self-indulgent; hadn't people been pulling their bootstraps and boosting themselves and working hard all the time? And as long as that's been happening, there have been the lazy on the sidelines: for every Herculean labor (Pinky and the Brain did an excellent sendup of this) there was the frighfully careless (Pirthoos, from Greek Mythology). I fancied myself something of a hero and never realized exactly what it meant. What for? Just for going ahead and trying to forge on through Berkeley before my scholarship ran out? Probably not. Maybe I just felt somewhat blue-collar plugging away at school while all these others fell by the wayside.
I get the feeling now that maybe I should have spent more time worrying about what I wanted to do rather than being happily smug. You can sit and snivel and snide behind your masks but in the end, if you really are judged by what you do, I can almost guarantee that you're not going to be happy with anything that ever gets tossed your way.
I'm sorry if I'm feeling and sounding a little bitter. I have no right. My life has been easy. It must be the punk music finally getting to me, sitting there night after night hunched over homework and listening to vaguely disaffected youths screaming in my ears -- must be somewhat theraputic to other people, but I think it sets me on edge. I woke up this morning feeling like crap. After falling asleep at my office desk for what must be a record- tying five days in a row, I finally went to sleep on my bed the last night, for the semi-luxurious sum of five hours. When I woke up, I immediately noticed the room gently whirling about me, which rapidly degenerated into a carousel ride when I tried to sit up. I spent most of this morning gaping at my professor during lecture (he doesn't usually orbit around the room, does he?) and putting my head down on my office desk (seems a lot softer now, for some reason) while pretending to study for the midterm I took tonight.
Yeah, you all say, but what's the margin in that? Where have I ever shown the right to be anything but chicken-livered and perfectly bouncy happy? Honestly, I can't tell you. I wasn't the poorest kid at school; I've never broken any bones; I usually end up with what I want in the end. It takes a struggle, though, and that reminds me: I'm alive. You, too, are probably alive, but in this litigious society we live in anything I say could be considered an affront.
I'm alive. You're alive. Isn't that enough to make anyone feel miserably joyful or laughingly morose or profoundly frivolous?
You've heard the standard drill: moderation in all things. Mediocrity in all things. Don't stand out, that's the lesson we all learned in junior high. Why does the sullen teenage spirit crush our effervescent childhood like so many peanuts? I wanted to be the fastest one in my second-grade class with the math assignments; it didn't matter after awhile, though; the reputation was the thing that kept on driving me. Oh, he's the fast one. Oh, it's the last one. Oh, she sings at her desk. It's wonderful not to be relentlessly mundane in elementary school. Just don't tell it to the junior high kids.
Personally, I used to think the same way, tried to tread the middle ground. As I'm getting older, I find that I'm not taking the same risks that I used to think were acceptable, and it makes me feel perhaps a little wiser but also more sad that things seem never to have changed much. I didn't take many risks growing up either -- I never had the courage to slide down the fireman's poles that they had at the playground, and there was no way that I'd ever be able to hang upside-down from the monkey bars. I read nowadays in the paper about how political conservatives are holding up examples of how six-year-olds getting expelled from school for "innocent" pecks on the cheek (or whatever) as proof of how "political correctness" has run amok. I have no stomach for politics; I used to discuss them, when I knew how, when I was a freshman in high school and people started to call the presidential candidate "doo-ka-ka". I like to think that politics is still run on essentially the same level as high school freshmen: a little nervous but still strutting about, all big-people-on-campus and constantly looking out for yourself. I just wanted to add this: kids aren't innocent. Just because they're shorter than you or me and they still like peanut butter-and-banana sandwiches doesn't mean that they can't figure it out when you try to talk over their heads. They listen, too, and will catch all your little slips and throw them back with daggers. With the amount of information that you can digest in a steady stream nowadays, innocence is a lost cause.
I have to preface that remark, though. While sounding a bit like Sally Struthers, I have to say that a lot of the poor and those living in poor school districts (I guess we qualified; most of my friends received free lunch) may be the last innocents left. Before I get misty-eyed as the rest of you raise up arms in protest, I have to say that you're going to laugh at me for saying this, me who graduated from my small high school with small dreams and small-mindedness. And you'll laugh and point at my classmates, half of whom stayed in the rural northwest and got married within a year, laugh and laugh. Being cosmopolitan doesn't necessarily make you any smarter than me or my high school chums; it just meant that you had better opportunities in life. It's not just a small-town innocence; if your school doesn't have enough money to let you try out LOGO or some other computer, there's no way that you'll look upon the library terminals as being more than electronic monstrosities. Books and computers and most importantly good teachers all cost money, and without it, good people are worn to nubs, students and teachers alike. Meanwhile, better funded schools set up their own websites and teflon-coat the whole process of education so that what usually grinds at most schools whirs smoothly.
I was unlucky. I was in a school district with poor people all around. I was lucky. I lived in a college town, where voters would actually raise taxes on themselves to give their children a better education. Given the breadth of opportunities available to me as a public school student, because of cooperation between education and community, I was blessed. I hate to stand up on my soapbox, but here goes: settle for nothing less than harmony between your public school -- it doesn't matter if you're privately educated or not -- and your community, if you want to make the biggest impact that you can in this world.
So I guess you could call that my philosophy in life: a little cynical, a little haggard, a little tired. I do try to think the best of other people.
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