and stuff
Published on June 15, 2005
By
PJ_
In
Misc
Sometimes I feel an urge to write something here. Express what I'm feeling, or something like that. The problem is I don't have anything specific in mind that I want to say. Maybe I'm feeling something that I just can't identify and put into words, or maybe what I'm feeling is just the need to reach out, so there's no specific set of words that would be meaningful. I do feel better when I write things out, though. It's actually kind of funny: if you had told me back in high school that I might actually enjoy writing something I would never have believed you. I hated sitting there in English class, thinking about what I could possibly say about those two dogs in Where the Red Fern Grows. And I hated assignments where I was supposed to say something personal about myself. I didn't have anything interesting to write about. And if I did, maybe I didn't want to say it. Don't want to get too personal, after all. That actually might go back to something they told me in elementary school. Don't use the work "I" when writing an essay. Focus on the book, or whatever you're writing about, and leave yourself out of it. And that gives you a certain style of writing that I guess the teachers are looking for at that stage, but if you want writing to be anything other than a tedious chore (or as I sometimes saw it, a painful process of tryint to extract the Truth Of The Matter) you have to put yourself into it. The philosophy papefs I wrote and got As on last quarter would have been bland crap if I tried to stay completely objective rather than presenting my opinion from my own very personal point of view.
I wish i had saved copies of those papers. That's what i get for emptying my Recycle Bin. I wanted to look back on the last two, because as I was lying in bed the other night that the last two draw contradictory conclusions and use essentially the same situation as an example. The difference was the attitude toward the meaning of the word "truth." But i guess there's not much you can't do if you get to play with the meaning of basic terms. That's something that was bothering me throughout that course. I didn't feel we could really confidently talk about anything until the whole question of what "truth" ment was resolved once and for all. Well, needless to say that didn't happen, and so I could come to two contradictory conclusions and that was Just Fine.
i little while ago i got asked the question of what I might have done if i hadn't gone into Computer Science. That's a question that maybe I should have given more thought to before I spent 3 years as a Computer Science major. Not that I don't like CS, but all the job interviewers want to know how well I work on a team. Apparently, almost all the work gets done in teams. As opposed to school, where almost none of the work gets done in teams. I don't like teams. It's been my observation that, when a team project is required, team members are most productive when they can do their jobs with no interaction at all with the other team members. Like we learned in Parallel Programming: communication is the most expensive part. The more each process depends on other processes, the less efficient the whole thing is going to be. Teams are no way to get work done.
Anyway, the thought occurred to be that I might like to be a writer. This was quite surprising to me, since I never liked writing at all until at least my second year of college, and I purposly avoided classes where a great deal of it might be required. It wouldn't have surprised my Driver's Ed' instructor, who thought it was odd that I was going into computers when i had a perfect score on the Verbal section of the SAT. My responce was always that, since I speak English as my native language, it's perfectly natural for me to get a perfect score on a test of my knowledge of the English language. Why wouldn't I? I've been talking since I was a baby, and reading non-stop since third grade. (I didn't care much for the short stories they had us reading in first and second grade. I liked full-length stories much better.)
But now I'm wondering what it would be like to write a story. Come up with some characters, a situation, events, a plot. To bring it all together in my mind and let the story unfold. My prediction is that it would be kind of a rough start, but then when I got going it would be easier, but i would have a lot of trouble ending it. Hm. I should think about giving it a shot, now that I've got some free time on my hands. Might be interesting. Might be fin. It might be a good way to express myself, or whatever it is I've been wanting to do.