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I’m going to burn myself a new CD (yeah me!). Does anyone have suggestions? I don’t have a theme or anything.

Whatever Happened to Being Merely Eccentric?

Your Social Dysfunction: Schizotypal You display social deficits and oddities of thinking. Your perception and communication are similar to those of a schizophrenic.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com Please note that we aren't, nor do we claim to be, psychologists. This quiz is for fun and entertainment only. Try not to freak out about your results.

Realizations - Postamble?

So there it is. I’m done. I almost didn’t allow comments on this series of posts. Hmmm.

IV. Now

Anyone who’s still reading these posts obviously has too time on their hands. I recently made the following interesting (well, to me) realization. I feel more like a stereotypical teenager now than I ever did while I actually was a teenager. Allow me to delineate my meaning.

- I want a girlfriend. While I obviously had various crushes throughout high school I never serious considered dating, I was just a kid, after all. This changed in my third year of University (in my first two years I was far to busy just staying alive to be concerned with anything else). Perhaps this aspiration is an expression of a desire for greater emotional intimacy. The end result is me sizing up almost every new girl I meet, something rather new to me.

- I want to move out. In general, I want to be less bound to the life of my parents and my family. I crave self-sufficiency. However, I can’t help being overly sensitive to what I perceive to be the needs or moods of people around me. Hence the feeling that only by moving out will I force myself to detach and live my own life. Moving out would force me to take care of myself instead of relying on my family. This is especially true in the area of relationships. Right now when I feel lonely it’s much easier to seek the company of sibling or parent than some other friend. If I lived by myself I wouldn’t be able to take the easy way out, instead I’d have to learn to overcome my shyness and build new relationships. In short, I feel it’s necessary if I’m going to continue to mature.

III. EP/Summer Job

EP stands for engineering physics, not physics engineering. Examination of the second form quickly reveals it to be nonsensical, as it implies that a practitioner of this discipline attempts to engineer the science of physics. This improper terminology is even more obvious if the term physics engineer is applied to someone (the correct term is engineering physicist). How did I pick this discipline with the hard-to-remember name? The answer is: foolishly.

- Never let shyness get in the way of conducting a thorough investigation before making an important decision. While this realization is intuitively obvious, I still make this mistake all of the time. When the time came to choose my major I believed the hype that said EP would allow me a future in any specialization I desired. What I didn’t do was speak to EP students and professors or look beyond the course calendar descriptions. Thus I find myself in a subject I’ve learned to loath. The reason for this failure is simple, the fear of seeking out strangers and speaking to them about stuff I don’t know.

- You have to find happiness in your day-to-day life. The description of my last summer job sounds very impressive. I attempted to improve the capabilities of a satellite instrument so that it could do something it was never designed to do, all with the purpose of furthering humanity’s understanding of the atmospheric science of climate change. However, my day-to-day work was incredibly boring – writing and debugging and debugging and debugging and debugging computer code in a language I was completely unfamiliar with. While it sounds romantic to do certain things, often the reality just isn’t something you can live with. Therefore, my plans for the future have been greatly revised from what they once were. Where I once aspired to design space probes that would travel to other planets, now I wish only for a job doing something where I’d enjoy the day-to-day tasks (and with an overall purpose I can live with, of course). Letting go of my dream is very hard.

II. High School/University

University is hell, of a sort. This is interesting considering the alluring promise our society holds out for it. In university you’ll have a choice of all sorts of interesting classes and activities. You’ll meet new friends from all over that you’ll be close to for the rest of your life. University is relaxed, you can study when you’d like and pick your classes to fit your own personal clock. It’s the best years of your life, before you start that awful daily grind in the working world. Forgive me this excess of bile. My realizations are simple.

- If being a professional engineer is close to as much work as being an engineering student, I’m going to quit and do something else. Quite probably, teach high school.

- The world is full of wonderful people I have constant contact with but don’t know and never will. I made this realization at the end of high school when I looked around me and saw that I was surrounded by kind, decent people, but they weren’t my friends. How come people fail to connect?

- Virtually the only reason I had contact with anyone is because I was in high school with them. This hit in first year when everything I’d known was quite suddenly gone. Happenstance is by definition a terrible thing to depend on, but that’s just what I’d done. If the only reason you see anyone is because you are in some activity with them, you will cease to see them when your participation in that activity ends (e.g. dramatic productions).

- I have no passion for anything other than other people. When I look into a happy future for myself, I don’t see myself doing anything, I see myself with other people. Throughout my life I’ve tried many different activities, from music to wrestling to social justice. However, I inevitably fail to connect through these activities because not really interested in them the way that other people are. For example, EWB is full of incredibly excited and passionate people. While intellectually I believe in the work they’re doing I’m separated from them because I don’t share that passion (and because of their rather anti-religious bent). I really don’t care what I do, so long as I’m doing it with people I care for.

I. Shad Valley

In July of the summer in-between Grade 11 and Grade 12 I went to Ottawa, specifically, Carlton University. There I attended the Shad Valley program for high-achieving high students interested in math, science, and business. Shad Valley changed me. I came back a far less naïve, more bitter and cynical, and more tired person than I left. Over the years I’ve sorted my experience into the following insights.

- People are the same everywhere. I met people from Ontario and the Maritimes, many of whom were first generation immigrants from all over the world. I was startled to discover that all of these people were mirrors of people I knew at home in high school; there was the music geek, the computer geeks, the jocks, etc. The second part of this realization is that going someplace else won’t solve any problems. Inevitably, my life there would be the same as before.

- Intelligence is not a personality trait. This is in the same vain as my first statement. Having a 95% average in school has nothing to do with being shy, kind/rude, or even whether or not you’re a drug addict.

- People will cheat you. After being sold on an exciting month away and having my parents pay large sums of cash I discovered that the program mysteriously had virtually no money (not to mention terrible food). Almost every activity done there was designed to market and promote the program. In essence, a group of talented students became their free labour pool.

- In a much lighter spirit, I found out that it is possible to sleep in a lecture. In fact, there is video documentation of my doing so. I consider this experience to have been a preparation for university, although I’ve yet to find any instructor here that incredibly boring.

Incidentally, it was on the last day of my Shad Valley experience that I received the compliment that touched me unlike any other one I’ve ever been given. The words are simple: “So you’re the boy my son went to church with”. However, I’ll never forget the light in her eyes when she said it. “She” was the mother of a very nice East Indian boy. To my surprise, their family was very strongly Catholic and so the two of us went to mass together (it was just us). Until her comment this never really occurred to me to be as profound as it was.

Realizations – Preamble

In recent days I have read many New Year’s resolutions. I have never (in my memory) made any such resolutions. This is not surprising considering that my family has never celebrated New Year’s in any way (with the exception of the obligatory mass because of the feast day, but of course that’s not really related to New Year’s). If any member of my family happens to be up at 12 am it’s merely a coincidence. Thus, in place of New Year’s resolutions or lists of top somethings I have decided to write a series of important realizations in my life.

These posts are a product of a long-standing desire (resolution would be too strong a word) to be more open. This blog is in fact a manifestation of this same desire. Yet despite knowing that my good friends, who have never shown me anything but respect and kindness, are the only people who would possibly read this, I constantly convince myself to say nothing of consequence. Actually, I think (no, I’m certain) my fear of writing in this forum has increased since its existence became known. I have many voices in my head telling me that I’m being self-centered, airing my dirty laundry in public, or making an inappropriate cry for attention, but this is my blog and it’s time that I said something about myself in my own words. So here it is; some pain, some gain, and a lot of me.

What is a Blog?

This is essentially the question I asked myself when I was attempting to determine whether or not to start this blog. Why did I desire one? What benefit would it give me? What would I use it for? Perhaps in its ideal form a blog is meant to foster an exchange of ideas between people and provide the opportunity for people to express themselves on suitable issues of public debate. However, I find that I have nothing in this vein to offer - nothing I care about, anyway. While I read the paper through almost every day and have a great deal opinions about everything from politics to cartoons, the matter currently of interest to me, and of seemingly ever-growing importance, is my own self. Therefore, what I will write in the near future will be of a personal nature and I’m not writing any of it because I think it would be of benefit for someone to read it, but rather because I need to write it.

Congratulations,
you're Mr. Darcy! Though you seem reserved or
aloof in public, once people see the real you,
they can't find a single bad thing to say. You
should be yourself more often! Also, like your
counterpart Elizabeth, you tend to jump to
conclusions about people, so avoid those
preconceived notions and happiness shall be
yours! Please invite me to Pemberley
sometime...

Which Character from Pride and Prejudice Are You?
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