As I sit here struggling with my decision to start this blarg and fill it with meaningful (HA!) and intelligent (dos HA!) insights from my life, I hesitate. Why do you hesitate, Christopher, you might be asking yourselves right now. Well. Like I have said before in
Porpoises I want this space to become a garden of my intelect, a tub of legos for my imagination, and above all else a sacred place for me to come and expose my thoughts. And yet while that is all good and perfect in thought, it means I need to let go. I need to break down the walls that hide my private ideas to allow them to inhabit this imaginarium. That's a big step.
It's kinda funny when I think about it. If I were to go back to my undergraduate campus and ask the friends that I still have there how they would characterize me, I think most would talk about the extracurricular activities I was a part of. I was president of the student musical theatre troupe, president of the all male a cappella group, and involved in the chamber singers. Very artistic things. And yet here I am in a Ph.D program for physics. Now I'm not saying that these two areas are mutually exclusive (in my life or in the external reality), but I think we can all agree that they are vastly different areas of interest. So where does that place me? I often feel caught in the middle of the warring sides of my brain. Part of me wants to literally quit my job and become a dj, while painting landscapes of the sea, and start a theatre troupe. The other parts wants to devote my entire existence to learning computer languages, researching areas of astrophysics, condensed matter, and even biology (as touchy-feely as it can be), and reading, reading, reading everything that comes my way! My hear-rate is actually rising right now at both of these extreme possibilities. I am a passionate, analytically imaginative, and calculating person. I am comprised of opposites.
To me this is a very good and handy thing!
Going further in this vein of thought is, from my point of view, building me up to be this amazing bridge between a large divide, which is not my goal at all. Far from it. While I love having both sides of my brain very active ( I mean we all do, I am just unsure if a lot of people experience a war between their ears), I feel like I'm not particularly good at any one thing. I can be half-decent artistically and half-decent analytically, but I cannot be actually good at either one.... Although that sounds awfully close to a big fat cop-out. I think I'm just making a very elaborate excuse over my shortcomings. Okay. I think that I'm getting a insy-weensy bit too self-indulgent now.
But back to the original point I was trying to make. Because we know each other in only the aspects in which we interact with them (i.e. undergrad friends see me in an artistic light, grad friends see me in a physic-y light, my fiance sees me as crazy, etc), we in a sense can end up sheilding parts of ourselves to each respective group. We act differently around different people and essentially become a conglomerate of different identities resulting in one consciousness.
Exaggeration? Maybe. Who knows, maybe I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill here. I guess what I'm trying to say is it may take a while to find myself here... to form a personality appropriate for the medium.
I guess we all feel at war with ourselves some times. Some more so that others. In this crazy world we live in with technology connecting us faster and faster, it's no wonder a person
could go quite mad!
Yep. Any excuse to bring up The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
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