Well, blog faithful, here you have it - my first legit post in a couple months. No excuses, no nothing . . . I have not posted on here because I have been too busy and because, for the first time in my life, I have been around people, and people I am friends with, enough that the reason I used to keep a blog (venting at my frustrations and expressing my thoughts and opinions) now is done primarily in my life to other people.
Whatever you make of this, I'm not sure personally what to make of the change, because I love this blog as a time capsule of my mindset at any given point. Now, all I have is occasional conversations to remind me as well as the occasional extremely long phone conversation (my phone saves all call times in a folder for some reason). In return, though, I get the benefit of closer human relationships.
One thing I would like to put in writing here is that I learned a lot in the last few months. I have learned so much that I'm not sure I could get it all or even most of it out by sitting down here at a keyboard for a week and typing straight, with my hunting-and-pecking and other fingers pointlessly resting on the rest of the keys like I use home rows. I could never even remember everything either . . . some lessons are just too fleeting, some messages too subtle to be noticed on any other than a subconscious level. Some times a whole thought, a whole fucking novel even, is the turn of a head and a look, a look and a body gesture with just that sort of posture. It's almost like a dance the way people change their expression and posture. And sometimes I dance back, but it takes just the right curve of your lips into a smile or a seductive stare to make me tango, and I don't mean to be passive, don't get me wrong, but sometimes it's just so beautiful to watch, and let the novel write itself. Sometimes it's also beautiful to jump into the plot, though, and shake things up a little bit. (Queue wink face)
I now evaluate peoples' behavior much differently than I did 5 or 6 months ago. Some of it is more in a positive light, much of it is in a more negative light. Either way, I am continually astounded and reminded of my own helplessness at times, my utter inconsequentiality. Other times, I feel pretty big, like I could make a difference, like I'm a good dancer and this just became a ballroom in here. There's still a lot of things that people my age tend to enjoy doing with other people that I cannot reconcile my value system to. I reject these activities on some sort of moral grounds. But this list of activities that offend me or that I have a distaste for has shrunken significantly, least of all; because I now participate, or sometimes, allow myself to passively experience, activities which I would have not even thought about ever doing 12 or 18 months ago.
I feel like a graph - imagine 1/square root of x. Y represents amount of knowledge about myself I have yet learn. X is time. The graph keeps getting smaller and smaller, I keep learning more and more. At the same time, though, there is still so much to learn - the area under the curve is practically infinite - and I will never learn it all. I feel the important thing I have experienced is not necessarily that since I have come to UF my Y value has gone much, much, closer to 0 (though it has!) but that I realized my graph has more dimensions. I may gain something in knowledge or experience, but at the same time, I lose a little bit of the mystery and the sexy vagueness that held the place of actual knowledge. Yeah, I like to be enlightened, but sometimes what you learn is quite disappointing when compared to how useful you thought the information would be.
So, I guess, here I am. I am living the quintessential college experience. (I am tiny.) At the same time, though, I am recognizing each and every day how my experience is unique in context of the greater, emotional, social and physical knowledge I have received. (I am so great!) It strikes me as profound, for instance, that no one knows exactly the same as I know about a given subject, in ANY area (emotional, social, physical). Some people that may know very close to the same as me, though, may use their knowledge differently, because their value and belief system makes them interpret the incoming information in a different way (neither tight nor wrong).
I've found that it's these people, along with those that interpret things in a similar way as I do, that I enjoy talking to the most. (Someone reading this just threw their hands up or shook their head and went DUHH!!!!) When I talk to people who think like I do, yet understand more or less about certain things, it serves as a comfortable reassurance of what I think I know. It also allows me to find my holes in my own thinking when I am talking to someone who thinks similarly to me and I hear them saying something that may be right on a superficial level or on a momentary basis, but in the grand scheme of things is pretty untrue or otherwise disagreeable to me. I enjoy talking to other people on a similar or higher intellectual level yet with different values than I do because it not only allows me to pinprick individual points of my beliefs, but to examine the whole foundation upon which my beliefs fall.
I have a friend who thinks similarly to me but in a more wide-eyed and optimistic way. He often calls me, and introduces me to others as, "the smartest person I've ever met". I'm more than willing to accept the superlative, but I have to question what his criteria for intelligence are. I think about it for a while and I come to the conclusion that he judges intelligence by how closely he see's another person's viewpoint as matching up with his own. If you think like he does but can elaborate on a higher level about it than he can, then you, in his eyes, are a genius. Now, he doesn't do this consciously, and he's not pompous on a conscious level, so I find the whole thing very interesting as a window into another person's mind and thought pattern. Of course, this may all sound a bit cynical to you (rightly, might I add). So I'd like to add that I know I can't totally pigeonhole his opinion of me as being evaluable in the context of his own want for behavioral self-affirmation. He is, after all, a smart guy.
I fear less, because I know more. That sounds like something that wound sound good in Latin. I think it's my new motto. But as I look at it and let my mind roll over it a couple times, I begin to think that maybe that's only what I WANT my motto to be - and that it's not actually a good description of my intellectual changes.
I can say more, because I know more.
Or maybe something related to how I gain while losing something at the same time: I have traded intellectual clouds for concrete.
Ay, there's the rub!! I can't even give myself a manifesto!! I'd be a horrible revolutionary . . .
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