User:Blum

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D@iSY[edit]


iNTRODUCTiON[edit]

Wednesday, April 9, 2008: Wow... that was a long time ago. I still maintain that I was a member of the Explorer class. But almost everything else I said is currently quite false. I am struck by a slight feeling of nostalgia as I read those cute and outdated words. Here's what really happened:

I struggled to maintain my interest in the area of Mathematics and found myself searching for freedom and more room for adaptation and creativity. In other words I stopped going to school and spent every day reading. Result: I failed all of my classes that semester, but I learned a lot.

I thought about Chemistry and Physics before settling on Cognitive Science. It's interdisciplinariness and relatively recent conception I thought would provide a fertile space within which I could explore my own interests and shape my surroundings. That worked for a semester. Then I got tired of all of the bullshit that surrounded and had soaked into the subject in the lack of anything real. If someone told me that this was always the way new disciplines started and that it wasn't until selfless, patient people had waded through all of the bullshit and superstitions and discarded the majority that real progress could be made I would whole-heartedly believe it. I got tired of arguing over points of no interest and trying to refocus discussion classes. In other terms I was too lazy--read: important--to make my place in Cognitive Science.

Then while pouring through the General Catalog I read about a Rhetoric class. I didn't know what the word even meant so I decided to sit in on the class. I loved it so much and I felt there was so much truth to be had in that class that I added it. Rhetoric: the art of persuasion as taught here through the French New Enlightenment School of philosophy. The class had me read new, mostly French, philosophy of language and literature and therefore of everything. I was smitten with the novel way of looking at the world and found hope in Nietzsche and Borges. I became a Rhetoric major. Rhetoric, or more accurately, the texts it has us read, ripped the foundations, the unexamined truths out from under me and proceeded to teach me how to operate in a foundationless and constantly shifting world of relativities and relational events. I loved the new found freedom, but Rhetoric's big mistake was that it put itself in everything and became inseparable from the world and therefore lost. I realized that rhetoric could be studied alongside of any field of study or even along side none of them. I immediately looked for something more.

I had taken a Latin class for the first part of a language requirement back in Freshman year. I decided I would take a second course in it to fulfill the second part of the requirement. I took the class and in it found something I liked. Latin is a puzzle. A code that most people cannot read. No time is spent on conversational training that, as with the study of living languages, usually teaches you all of the uninteresting things possible to say in a language such as "How are you? And where is the nearest bread shop?" I studied Latin with interest for a semester and a summer and half of another semester. Then once again I gave up on school. This time due to my interest in a girl. I would later regret my actions regarding this girl, but that is another story which I will not tell here and not tell elsewhere, unless drunk. I withdrew from school to avoid being sent home due to academic difficulties.

I have spent the last year away from school and working for West Marine, a boating supply store. In two months I went from the guy who cleans out the bathroom and sweeps the floor to Inventory Manager. I liked it well enough. I was good at it, but once I felt like I had the knack for it and it presented not much in the way of further challenge and interestingness I became discontented. At the same time the store was blessed with a new Manager and he just happened to be unlikeable, incompetent, and rude. I left and now I am planning on finishing school.

I am tiring of Berkeley. I have spent too many days here by far. But I am actually looking forward to studying again. And, once I finish, it means I will soon have a fresh start.

In between the phases of my Academic Experience were bad times when I was depressed and lazy and did nothing useful. I will never write of those times and the first ones have already almost completely faded from my memory. I am just coming out of a "bad time" and I hope that I will not always be so cyclical. Perhaps I am wiser and can manage to avoid other wasteful avenues.

I dream of different things all the time, but I feel I am progressing, if not linearly, then logically.

For now I will study Latin. I have also gotten interested in business due to its many facetedness and its adaptability.


I was a member of the Explorer class. I am currently a student at University of California - Berkeley, where I have vague plans to major in Mathematics and Plant Biology, perhaps with a minor in Computer Science. The Academy provided little in the way of college or career guidance, and my current condition is the result. However, the Academy was a support group, which I didn't realize until I had left. I might wind up being a doctor, but that really takes a long time and I am restless. Most likely I'll finish out some schooling and then hop aboard a ship and head out to sea and away from this tame, plastic country. I will add more to this sometime later this week.

THOUGHTS[edit]

Beside the Misanthrope and Ms. Hunt I appear to be the only Explorer with content. I'm thinking of trying to get some folks to contribute. But I might not.

QUOTATiONS[edit]

CURRENT iNTERESTS[edit]

  • Table Tennis
  • Sailing
  • Nietzsche
  • Business
  • Puzzles
  • Latin
  • Cryptology
  • Learning

CURRENT CLASSES[edit]

NONE

CONTACT iNFORMATiON[edit]

Email:

silentconfusion@sbcglobal.net (disused)
silentconfusion@gmail.com (thanks to Chrax)

--Yes, Thanks Chrax for updating me.

MSN Messenger:

silentconfusion@hotmail.com (rarely used)

COMMENTS[edit]