What Do You Care What Other People Think?

Unrealized Potential

During a recent moment of interviews-of-Monty-Python-actors watching I ran into a wonderful video of John Cleese discussing the steps on how to be creative. He brought up a book from several years ago that argues that in order to know how bad you are at something, you need to become fairly proficient at it. This implies that people who have never tried something are so ignorant about something that they don’t even know that they are terrible at it.

I find this particularly interesting because growing up my father always told me that you never know if you can do something or not until you do the task completely. It’s a weird train of thought, as it says you never are finished with things until you complete them. Such as my attempt at learning Korean. It’s not that I wasn’t able to learn Korean, I just haven’t tried to learn Korean in about 6 months.

More of a rant, but it also reminded me of when my karate instructor tried to teach me the “There is no trying, only doing” adage. He tried to demonstrate it through a cunning use of having me “try” to pick up a notebook. Ever time I picked it up he told me to drop it and say “No, I want you to try.” Which I found really annoying. As a ten year old it was readily apparent to me that the act of picking up the notebook was finishing the notebook picking up ceremony and there was no intermediate step of increasing the gravitational potential on the notebook by Earth with respects to the ground (Though I probably didn’t know what the phrase gravitational potential meant back then).

Anyways, I’m starting my fourth year of University this coming fall, and I’m starting a double major with Biology which should be fun. People always ask me “why in the world would you want to do Physics for the rest of your life?” Which to me translates to “why do you hate yourself so much?”; mostly because it involves math, and not that many people get that feeling of elation when staring at textbooks on complex analysis (Higher form of Calculus for people who hate calculus of imaginary numbers) as I do. And I always respond with “‘Cause I just love Physics”, because I don’t really know what else to say.

Most of the states is the US have this test you must take as a graduation requirement; in my state (when I took it) it was called the WASL-Washington Assessment of Student Learning. You get tested on your proficiency of the Maths, Sciences, and Liberal Arts areas. I failed the Math part 3 times. That is right, I almost didn’t graduate high school because I was unable to do Math. But now I’m a Physics undergraduate at one of the top Universities for Physics in the nation. Funny how that works.

I was never particularly good at Physics or the sciences in high school, and even worse at Math. But I just really liked my Physics class. I failed some exams, but I loved that someone told me to go build a ballista and tell them how it works. That was one of the highlights of my whole pre-university career (the ballista worked, mind you).

So all you people out there wondering if you should do something or not, just go do it. You are going to die someday that is probably sooner than later, so do it before you run out of time. But have some fun, you only get one shot at life, so enjoy it while it lasts.

Also a fun fact: I never really end a piece of work with the same train of thought as you do when you start. A teacher told me in 11th grade to not worry about following my thesis completely, so I haven’t ever since. Personally I think my writing got better, cause I just write instead of writing to a script. But that just might be because I never start my writing with a thesis, I kinda write about what ever I want and make a thesis at the end based off what I wrote. It’s very liberating.

It’s curious the way we get nostalgic for some hoped-for thing that never happened, as if something that never happened were in the past.

—Robert Brault

Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window, and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.

—Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Who considers

 that everyone always speaks of others’ problems happily, with smiling faces.

selenocysteine asked: OMG MY NERD BUDDY'S BACK ON TUMBLR?! :DDD

It’s a dangerous world in here, Jeremy, and it needs a hero. My time here will be short, but someday we’ll achieve peace.