The Ultimate Free Lunch

There’s actually something comforting about knowing that all that lies in between me and my goals is a mountain of work and unpleasant, gut-wrenching personal change. After all, work is something that I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to avoid for years, and unpleasant, gut-wrenching personal changes have been a pretty major part of my life so far as well. They can only be more bearable when they happen simultaneously with great personal achievement - this is what economists call a free lunch. Awakening my mind from its fearful, lazy slumber of the last decade costs nothing, and (I hope) benefits the world more than what I have achieved so far in my life. The cost of my temporary discomfort, of stretching my atrophied brain cells and relearning the process of learning, is no cost of all. Learning to channel my endless stream of thought into a narrative will take time, but clear communication of the thoughts on my mind is a prerequisite to the way I want to live the rest of my life. One post on this blog at least every other day will be my writing practice. Also, I think it will be hard to put my thoughts down for others’ consumption this often without gaining some perspective on myself.

New Priorities, New Possibilities

On my 30th birthday I took a serious look at my priorities and started readjusting them; on my 31st birthday I decided I wasn’t happy with the speed of the changes and kicked them into higher gear. Since then I’ve returned to school with a passion, maintaining high grades while working a reduced schedule at my job and participating heavily in class discussions. I’m attempting to reach out to my peers as well as my professors, but 2 part-time semesters is far from enough time to establish a meaningful network of professional contacts from my schoolmates and teachers. Part of what makes me consider returning for graduate studies is a desire to develop some deeper relationships with my peers.

I want to meet others of like age interested in the long-term pursuit of some shared goals. My goals tend towards the lofty and philosophical, and I have figured out that I am happiest when working towards intellectual understanding of things many consider esoteric. I seek the edges of ideas and concepts, and once I know what they cover I seek to combine them in new ways. I don’t know of a better place to expose myself to a variety of ideas than school, and I’ve never been more excited to engage in the conscious act of learning than I am this semester. The combination of these factors has taken me from thinking I'd never set foot in a school again after graduation to thinking about years of future schooling and possible employment in a school afterward. It's not a place I ever thought I would want to be when I was younger, but now that I'm here it feels strangely appropriate and comfortable.

Sharing, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Lectures

The common thread that has run throughout my life has been a love of learning, and I am at the beginning of what I hope will be a many-year Renaissance of large-scale learning in my life. I just returned to college at age 31 to finish my bachelors degree in economics, which has been a 15 year project so far considering some of my AP credits date back to my junior year in high school. This is my last chance to graduate and validate the massive expense my family has borne to put me through my schooling, not to mention the time and energy I’ve spent getting to where I am: within 11 hours of graduating.

I’ve always detested the formal education system and never been able to just accept it for what it is, or accept that it had anything real to offer me; now I find my opinions changing. Half of me no longer cares about fighting the process and just wants the piece of paper that the world seems to value so much. The rest of me is so desperate to bring learning back to the forefront of my life that I’m willing to accept the college environment, with all of its flaws, just for being a place where people go to learn. It’s not that I don’t find people interested in learning in my everyday life, but even on a college campus it’s very difficult to find individuals who will engage in candid and honest intellectual exploration of a topic, or true debate, without the incentives of grades and the rigorous structures of lectures and exams.

As I go through life I realize that learning without others physically nearby to learn from and with is both more difficult and less fulfilling, and less fruitful. Suddenly the structure, the bureaucracy, the gross expense of formal schooling doesn’t seem quite as bad, because the returns can be so great. There are thoughts in my head that I have never had the vocabulary to express, and the words I seek lie behind library doors and in the minds of professors and students I’ve yet to meet. Just dipping my toes back into academia has me dying to return full time, considering graduate studies and wondering what it takes to make a career in academia when your school resume looks as disgruntled as mine. Teaching has never appealed to me, but the idea of sharing ideas all day has and does. Maybe I've been wrong to differentiate between the two to the extent that I have.

A beginning, but I don't know much about those.

Where do you start with something like this?

I’ve never been good at planning, so it’s no surprise that I’m just hitting the ground running here. I don’t even know what this will be about. And by “this” I mean this post, this blog, this entire venture measured from any scale you can think of. Least of all do I know who will end up reading these words, or who I intend them for. I’ve always been more or less ok with talking to an empty room, though, so fuck it.

Between demotivational syndrome caused by certain lifestyle choices, and a strange sort of long-term ADD I suffer from that makes it hard to maintain interests for more than 6-12 months, I have never been able to figure out what I could possibly write a blog about that I would still want to be writing 6 months in the future. I’ve finally decided that the thing I’ll always be in the mood to write about is whatever’s on my mind at that particular time. That may be obvious, but so are its advantages, mainly that it’s basically always guaranteed to be something, and if my friends’ and family’s reactions to my scattered and tumbling thought patterns are any guide, the things that cross my mind are odd enough that they may be interesting in their own regard.