Status update
Current condition:
In the last two days, I've been on campus for about 30 hours. I've gotten a lot done, though.
I've been thinking quite a bit about what I'll do when Brandon and Jim graduate and move away, and I'm left without my two best friends in the city. I'm trying (desperately?) to connect with people in the play I'm in, but it's getting harder as time moves on. It's not that my social skills are degrading or I grew a third arm or anything, it's just that my tastes in terms of the people and things I like are shifting radically. I'm growing worried that there are many things that I find beautiful which very few others understand, much less comprehend. And lack of total comprehension is part of the allure, the idea that there are things in the world which work completely counterintuitively on the surface, but you look a layer deeper and find that the elegance and beauty of the simplicity is almost breathtaking. I can see now why (contrary to popular belief) there are very few truly atheist scientists. Agnostic, yes, but it's difficult, when you see all the underlying currents and order in the universe, to say that it was not somehow put there by something.
And that's my problem with relating to people. I can see their points of view, appreciate what they appreciate, recognize the value in a work of art or literature. Hell, I love theater and I'm intentionally depriving myself of other pursuits to be involved in it. But no one seems to care about what I like, because it's boring, because for years of high school they've been taught that math is "uncool" (by the way, kudos to Americana for making scholastic pursuit worthy of insult!), and, frankly, for many people, it is, thanks to the your standard-issue terrifically apathetic high school teacher.
I overheard someone the other day lamenting that science has taken the fun out of life. That things that were once magical - love, rainbows, the flight of birds - is now all just a series of equations that are understood and documented. I have two problems with that. The first is the old quote from Arthur C. Clarke - any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Yes, rainbows, love, and flight are all well-known to someone, but not to you. If I were to write out all the of calculations involving the spectrum of light - Fourier transforms, frequency shifting, all leading up to "simple" diffraction - that governed the appearance of a rainbow, the average person would have absolutely no idea what I was saying. The result? Magic. A process which is completely alien to you. The only difference between what I do and what a wizard of old might do is that my process involves significantly more swearing. The second problem with the alleged de-mystification of society is that somehow, given a greater understanding of a complex process, one's appreciation for it is decreased. I have found this to be completely contrary to my experience. For example, I like music. I also know exactly how music, for lack of a better word, works. I know how notes are spaced in both the frequency and time domains, why they are pleasing, exactly how one octave differs from another and how such a distinction came into being. I also know how the music was recorded, stored, decoded and played. But my ability to determine why I like music - "That chord is nice because each note's second harmonic is separated from the other by three fundamental frequencies, leading to constructive interference on the first and third harmonics!" - doesn't effect my ability to still like it nonetheless. If anything, it makes me appreciate it more. Yet, when I should mention something along the lines of the above quote to a person - not even your run-of-the-mill plebeian, but, say, an allegedly open-minded and educated college student - I am destroying art, I am trying to strip the world down to numbers. Unfortunately, the world is governed, by and large, by numbers. And similarly unfortunately, my understanding of these numbers is inversely proportional to whether or not people like me.
So, that is my whining for today.
In the last two days, I've been on campus for about 30 hours. I've gotten a lot done, though.
I've been thinking quite a bit about what I'll do when Brandon and Jim graduate and move away, and I'm left without my two best friends in the city. I'm trying (desperately?) to connect with people in the play I'm in, but it's getting harder as time moves on. It's not that my social skills are degrading or I grew a third arm or anything, it's just that my tastes in terms of the people and things I like are shifting radically. I'm growing worried that there are many things that I find beautiful which very few others understand, much less comprehend. And lack of total comprehension is part of the allure, the idea that there are things in the world which work completely counterintuitively on the surface, but you look a layer deeper and find that the elegance and beauty of the simplicity is almost breathtaking. I can see now why (contrary to popular belief) there are very few truly atheist scientists. Agnostic, yes, but it's difficult, when you see all the underlying currents and order in the universe, to say that it was not somehow put there by something.
And that's my problem with relating to people. I can see their points of view, appreciate what they appreciate, recognize the value in a work of art or literature. Hell, I love theater and I'm intentionally depriving myself of other pursuits to be involved in it. But no one seems to care about what I like, because it's boring, because for years of high school they've been taught that math is "uncool" (by the way, kudos to Americana for making scholastic pursuit worthy of insult!), and, frankly, for many people, it is, thanks to the your standard-issue terrifically apathetic high school teacher.
I overheard someone the other day lamenting that science has taken the fun out of life. That things that were once magical - love, rainbows, the flight of birds - is now all just a series of equations that are understood and documented. I have two problems with that. The first is the old quote from Arthur C. Clarke - any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Yes, rainbows, love, and flight are all well-known to someone, but not to you. If I were to write out all the of calculations involving the spectrum of light - Fourier transforms, frequency shifting, all leading up to "simple" diffraction - that governed the appearance of a rainbow, the average person would have absolutely no idea what I was saying. The result? Magic. A process which is completely alien to you. The only difference between what I do and what a wizard of old might do is that my process involves significantly more swearing. The second problem with the alleged de-mystification of society is that somehow, given a greater understanding of a complex process, one's appreciation for it is decreased. I have found this to be completely contrary to my experience. For example, I like music. I also know exactly how music, for lack of a better word, works. I know how notes are spaced in both the frequency and time domains, why they are pleasing, exactly how one octave differs from another and how such a distinction came into being. I also know how the music was recorded, stored, decoded and played. But my ability to determine why I like music - "That chord is nice because each note's second harmonic is separated from the other by three fundamental frequencies, leading to constructive interference on the first and third harmonics!" - doesn't effect my ability to still like it nonetheless. If anything, it makes me appreciate it more. Yet, when I should mention something along the lines of the above quote to a person - not even your run-of-the-mill plebeian, but, say, an allegedly open-minded and educated college student - I am destroying art, I am trying to strip the world down to numbers. Unfortunately, the world is governed, by and large, by numbers. And similarly unfortunately, my understanding of these numbers is inversely proportional to whether or not people like me.
So, that is my whining for today.