So, I've pretty much gotten past my culture shock and am chilling out with my grandpa for the week. I've never done so much math in one sitting my entire life. That and wasting my time watching CSI:Miami and random Korean shows. I feel lazy, so lazy that the thought of me doing anything makes my muscles slump and my bones melt. Yet, I also feel that I've never been more productive, more alive so to speak. I haven't been online for a while; by while, I mean two or three days, and in that time, I have felt extremely lonely, relieved, estatic and hopeful. I feel like during my life back home, even though I tried to be chill about everything, I was still caught up in a culture where success depended on how hard you worked at cramming as much information you could in a short amount of time. In high school, this cramming is important because as a teenager ("young adult"), it's necessary to build the basics of learning how to think and to lay the groundwork for the future. This process continues throughout college and graduate school. It's not really about what you learn but how to process the world around you. In order to do so, the individual is presented with a variety of fields - writing, mathematics, science, etc. All this in order to culture the brain and introduce different mentalities to amorphous blobs that are seeking to find themselves. All this is important. If an individual does not learn
how to think, one cannot truly
live. Personally, I have found this process annoying at best and hell when I felt normal. Not because I'm superior but because I simply learn a little differently and also because I was lazy beyond belief, so it is partly my fault - let me correct that statement - it's mostly my fault that I haven't actually learned anything of any particular value during my school years. I think the problem was, I was more interested in the existence of something rather than what I considered trivial questions like what, why, how, where, when. For me, this dissecting was a pain in the ass. I just wanted to
know. It was so frustrating for me to keep cramming
what without having the
why and the
how and if i partially knew the
why I wanted to know
where and
when. Of course, knowledge can't just be processed as a huge chunk. If it could, there really wouldn't be any secrets to the universe. Human beings struggle to find the whole and do so by finding the small pieces that can only be found by putting together even smaller pieces. I understand that. And I understand that I am being selfish and stupid and ridiculous for wanting to have it all without breaking it down. That's just stupidity and excuses and sheer laziness. I get it. My parents have told me that. My siblings have told me that. My friends have told me that. In fact, the world has spat that into my face. I get it. But I hate the way I am forced to learn. Not the act of being forced to
learn but the information that I am given to work with. Again, that is my fault. If I was truly motivated to
learn and desired it badly enough, I would have gone out on my own to find it. So, I was lazy. My fault. If I didn't like what I was given, I should have gone out and done stuff on my own rather than blaming the system. There's this quote from somewhere that I really like: "If life gives you lemons, throw the lemons back unlike it gives you the oranges you originally asked for." I think there's ultimately two choices. 1) If you get lemons, make lemonade. 2) If you don't like lemons, get the goddamn oranges you wanted. No one gives a FUCK about what you do and no one puts restrictions on what you can achieve. But anyway, enough of the lecture and moving onto what I wanted to talk about. Now that I'm pretty much free to do whatever I want and not face the consequences (probably the last time I will be able to be like this until my retirement), I am finally able to sit down and just think. Here, there are no parents, or people that I know. One of my friends told me once that it was nice to be invisible once in a while. I understand what that means now. I don't know why it was so nice for him, but for me, there's a certain freedom to it. It's wonderful because I have the opportunity to
see. I can finally see glimpses of the beauty of mathematics, of poetry, of music, of living. It's like waking up from a haze of mediocrity and understanding and finding myself lacking in that understanding and struggling to
learn and to
see and to
feel. I have never felt so clear-headed, so grateful, and so willing to explore. This is why people need to travel. This is why it's necessary to get away from the familiarity and to loose oneself in the craziness of being lost, because there, one is found and one can see and hear and one can be free.
I was listening to Yeats' poem,
Those Dancing Days are Gone, sung by Carla Bruni and was struck by the truth and beauty of the words. I know beauty sounds so fucking cliche but what can I do? It's not like I can really describe it or shove it into your face so that you can experience it as I do. So, beauty it is. If you know what I mean, then you know. If not, well, sucks to be you. hope you find it somewhere. Here's the poem below:
Come, let me sing into your ear;
Those dancing days are gone,
All that silk and satin gear;
Crouch upon a stone,
Wrapping that foul body up
In as foul a rag:I carry the sun in a golden cup.
The moon in a silver bag.
Curse as you may I sing it through;
What matter if the knave
That the most could pleasure you,
The children that he gave,
Are somewhere sleeping like a top
Under a marble flag?
I carry the sun in a golden cup.
The moon in a silver bag.
I thought it out this very day.
Noon upon the clock,
A man may put pretence away
Who leans upon a stick,
May sing, and sing until he drop,
Whether to maid or hag:
I carry the sun in a golden cup,
The moon in a silver bag.
So the entire poem is like a passage of time and, it's talking about how everything doesn't matter when we'red dead. And yet, the poem is hopeful, because it tells us to just live. Everything will pass, and
time carries" the sun in a golden cup, the moon in a silver bag," to another day.
=)
