On Dilettantism, Saturn Return, and...oh yeah...I Want My Mommy
31 Jul. 2007
Apparently, there's this thing like a mid-mid-life crisis, which I seem to be undergoing...right. about....now...and which can probably be summed up by something like "aaahhhhh blahhhhbblahhhhh yeaaaargghhhhh huff huff hufffuck." Having understood that, it rather makes the rest of this missive superfluous.
My failure to get into my PhD program of choice is still haunting me, and yet, slowly but surely, the chaos that followed is beginning to make way to something a lot more clear. I liken it to something exploding...oh, more or less literally in my face - everything flies up in the air in complete chaos and disarray, but as the smoke clears and the dust settles, the tidbits that remain are floating to the ground in a reassuringly coherent way, all the useless cruft (including my face and pride) having been taken care of in the initial blast.
Useful tidbits remaining:
- I do not belong on the West Coast
- I still really, really love information
- I like finding information
- I like seeing information
- I like learning information
- I like manipulating information
- I like sharing, parsing, sifting, hunting, visualizing, improving information
- I am fascinated by the human mind, understanding, perception, and experience, particularly how consistent it seems to remain throughout history
- I may or may not be cut out for grad school. This is okay. Contrary to what your average academic would have you believe, this makes me neither weak nor a failure.
- In spite of this, I would probably be wonderful at grad school and do quite well, provided the program I entered was primarily interested in the creation of new methods
- I like to play on the computer
- I like to play on the Internet
- The most important thing in the world to me are people I can share both intelligent conversation and food with. Everything else is secondary.
- I love language for what it can convey but also for the amazing tricks you can play with it. I also hate people who use it with the finesse of a club.
- The thing I am best at is devising new ideas and ways of doing things...solving problems, if you will
Most surprising to me is that these bitlets leave a lot of room for me to carve out a nice little niche for myself in any number of arenas, and that they are an unexpectedly consistent/related set. Now for the easy (sigh) part of making them happen.