A Nerd’s Haven

This past week has been pretty damned sucky. It’s not one of those weeks that makes me particularly angry, or depressed, or anything else so… dramatic, but I feel I could have done just fine without most of the stuff that occured.

As I predicted, my Physics exam kicked my ass. The lack of surprise lessens the shame a bit, but not by much. I did learn a little about relativity that captured my attention, though.

Tuesday, after the final portion of my Physics exam, a couple of old friends came into town. We met them about six years ago, when we lived in a very rural area of Texas (Rhome, Texas, near Dee-cay-tur). My parents were a little hungry for companionship by other blacks, and thus we met Eve, her husband, and their children. Eve’s husband died not long ago, and Eve and her son, who is just a year older than me, are visiting the husband’s family up North (capitalizing the word “north” isn’t really done anymore, is it?). En route, they invited themselves to stay at our house for a couple of days. There are two big things that make this unbearable.

First, my main rule is that when you travel, book a friggin’ hotel room. If I have the space, and the energy, then I’ll probably invite you to stay, but no assumptions should be made to the effect that you’ll be staying at my place. Likewise, arrange some transportation, for the same reason. They took my bathroom, leaving me, the Rat, and my folks to share a single bathroom. I swore, when we moved out of our one-and-a-half-bath apartment two years ago that I would never share a bathroom with my father ever again. Well, given a long enough timeline, we will all become liars about something, right? They totally disrupted the house schedule, sleeping in everyday until about 10 (I was up about 7 o’clock every morning), needing rides everywhere, etc. They decided, apparently a while ago, that they were going to purchase a camcorder to create videos, particularly of the main reason for their trip to their next destination–Eve’s daughter’s ship was going to dock in Norfolk that upcoming weekend, and it was her first deployment. Somehow, I found myself doing all of the research necessary to their purchasing a decent camcorder for a low price, given that I knew nil about cameras and had to bring myself up to speed on abilities, media, etc since I last looked five years ago. Then the five of us crammed into a four passenger Acura 3.0 CLS Type S (there is literally no middle seat in the back; there is instead a little storage compartment), and we got to listen to the complaints of our guests as we had to drive across town, in rain, in Charlotte’s traffic, with a squirming near-four year-old sitting illegally, to get to the Wolf Camera to pick up their camera. All they cared was that it should have a flip-out LCD screen and that it be a certain price. I wanted to punch the both of them. During that round trip (a total of about 5 hours, including stops), we had to stop about three times to stuff these folks with food. Both of them are such physical people; she’s a dancer and aerobics instructor, and he’s a weight trainer for a club. They wanted to work out three times a day while they were here. I don’t even eat three times a day! But when they eat… gawd. We hit Golden Corral, which is an all-you-can-eat type place. I ate a salad and a half-plate of veggies; each of them went back about three times and ate two desserts. Just watching them made me quite not-hungry.

Secondly, there is the small matter of the fact that, since I met them (I was about thirteen years old at the time), Eve has felt that I am destined to be with her mammoth son. And I use the word “mammoth” in a polite sense. He’s about six foot six and works out religiously. I felt even more like a short, pudgy midget at five foot six or so. Exercise to me currently means attempting to stay, at the very least, somewhat limber. And, of course, exercising the muscles in my hands and forearms as I hold books, type, and surf the Web. But between Eve hinting at things like that we should go ahead and compromise on how many children we are going to have, I figured I could at least give the guy the time of day and attempt to draw him out into conversation. I thought he was just going for the “strong, silent type” thing; I quickly realized that he really had nothing to say on any topic that interested me, nor did he seem to have any topics of his own to bring to the discussion:

Me: You know, I’m cataloguing all of my books so that I can manage loans and keep track of what’s mine and what’s my father’s when I go off to college. Do you enjoy reading?
Mordecai: Nah. What kinda books do you read?
Me: Well, I love sci-fi and fantasy, but I love me some Faulkner, Shakespeare, and Austen. And computer books too, of course.
Mordecai: Fantasy, eh? Do you have any adult books?
Me: [trying not to frown] You mean, like, romance novels, or literary pornography? Uh, not really…
Mordecai: [just as serious] What about books with pictures in it? Got any of those?
Me: [slightly interested again] Actually, I just picked up this book called Oron from the bookstore, and it has full-page sketches of–
Mordecai: [now he’s frowning] I was kidding.
Me: Oh. [desperately fishing for another topic…]

I appreciated the humor. I really did. I was just looking for a moderately serious conversation, ya know? Start off with something that shows you have a serious interest in the topic, then crack a joke or two. Doing the joke bit first just makes you look a wee bit daft. I was willing to try to make a friend, of course, but even now, after sitting and “chatting” with him for a couple of hours, with me asking all the questions and coming up with all the conversation starters (anyone who knows me knows this took actual effort on the part of my nerdy, anti-social ass), I still have no idea of his interests. He works, he goes to a community college with a major in radiologoy (which he randomly chose from the list of available majors… I’m serious), and hangs out with friends. And he doesn’t really seem to care about anything remotely in my fields of interest. We are mutally exclusive events, if viewing a Venn diagram. And he had a half-naked picture of himself as the background of the cell phone he played with constantly. Playing with gadgets in a restaurant or during a conversation is just rude.

Thursday afternoon, these slow, late folks left for Norfolk, Virginia with my mother to see the docking of the U.S.(S.?) Harry Truman. I was a smart enough cookie to keep my ass at home, even though it entailed babysitting the Rat for three days. In retrospect, that probably wasn’t a good thing to do; my father is rarely home, I don’t have a car or anyone I could call who could arrive in a car in a timely manner should anything happen. But as long as my father wasn’t there, the Rat and I got along just fine. I fed her better and let her watch much less television than usual, and figured she could never say I never did anything good for her ever again. Not that she would say that at the ripe old age of three, but… you know. One must cover one’s ass.

My mother and the two guests returned Saturday night, and I obligingly moved back out of my bathroom. My mother had her own horror stories to quietly tell me upon her return. They were due to leave Sunday morning; they needed to be at the bus station downtown by 11 o’clock, and their bus left at noon. Right. The first one got out of the bathroom at 10:30 (at which time they should have been heading out of the door), and Eve insisted on finishing the movie Kingdom Come. Maybe it struck a note with her, but damn. They left at twenty minutes ’till noon, and barely made it downtown in time. Whatever. Time to wear pajamas again (even though I wear flannel pajamas, I can’t bring myself to where them when dudes are in the house, you know?), and to stretch out happily on the couch again, and take a shower in my shower again (which has better water pressure than my parents), and all that good stuff.

But, alas, the week of hell is not over yet. I went to school today for the first time in over a week. I was received with a shower of hugs (very touching, actually), but all day, we did abso-fucking-lutely nothing. My mistake was only taking one book, which I finished with two classes remaining in the day. So I remained bored. But the bestest part is when I get home. I was all into re-reading a Czerneda book tonight, but my sister somehow manages to bash her skull in while simply walking through the living room area. And it was oogly. We got to the emergency room about six o’clock, and just got home around eight. And that’s not a bad track record for an emergency room, I know, but the healthy folks waiting on their ill loved ones managed to annoy the piss out of the rest of us (and the sick ones) by not controlling their demonic children, talking loudly to people across the waiting room, and changing the television from the news to ghetto-ass shows not appropriate for young’uns (or many adults, either) and then jacking up the volume. Of course, they hung around before getting called just long enough to about permanently destroy my concentration on my book (A History of the Sciences, by Stephen F. Mason, a superb book). Grr.

I’m packing two books tomorrow, and I’m ready for any interesting conversation my physics teacher (Mr. M) wants to throw at me.

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I’ve had a couple of conversations today that touched on the concept of choice, something I’ve realized, in my interactions with people, that I take a rather different perspective on than many people.

I played “let’s question the American” in my Physics class today (there were only two students, myself and a Chinese guy); my teacher, Mr. M, is Syrian and often finds himself baffled as to the reasons for why some things are the way they are here. And today he threw a couple (ha!) of questions at me. One of which related to child-raising and morality. Now, I’m hardly an expert on children, nor do I have any type of concrete way in which I would raise a child, but I do have ideas about potentially good methods, given that the child is mentally healthy and intelligent and all that. You know, just enough to criticize the way others do it, but not enough to think I could do the job well myself. But I do watch. I watch how people treat and raise their children (among other things, of course), so when the conversation turned to instilling morality and values in children and why many American children (from the perspective of both a teacher and a student) don’t seem to have these values, I was ready for an interesting conversation. Mr. M seemed to think that if he raised a son that became a thief at the age of 16, that would automatically constitute a failure on his part as a parent, as his son didn’t have those morals Mr. M had tried to instill in him. He quoted an saying about a girl to whom the speaker was going to be married that amounted to: “Just look at her mother.” When you hear something like that here, I think it tends to be more about looks and haggish-ness, but Mr. M was, of course, pointing out that by meeting and getting to know the mother, you would have a good idea as to what to expect in the daughter in terms of morality. After I pointed out how Orthodox Christian and Islam families tend to be rather patriarchal, which would naturally leave the mother to instill many, if not all, of the values, I mentioned that this assumed that children would become the moral duplicates of their parents. It was something I hadn’t consciously realized, but it does seem to be an assumption (or hope?) of more than just his society. When your child is young, parents (well, most, anyway) are going to do whatever they feel necessary to instill the values and morals that they and society see as being correct, possibly including spankings/beatings, depending on your culture. But what if, as they child gets older (let’s say, 13 or older), they don’t hold some of your values? Maybe they see nothing wrong with stealing (Lenin and Stalin, anyone? Sorry, bad joke). The first instinct may be to say they need another beating, ‘cuz they obviously didn’t catch it right the first time. But at what point are children allowed differences in their morality and values, even if it differs from society’s norms? How far can you go to push your values on your child before it becomes pushing your values on another person, which (I think) most people try not to do? Parents often seem to have a hard time seeing when their children grow up and become more mature; when they are capable of thinking through moral issues themselves. I think both sides (children and adults) can at least grudgingly agree to this. So many parents would automatically say, “But I’ve got more experience, I know about these things!” But, no matter if they are your child (or maybe particularly because they are your child), you can’t know with any precision what type of moral system is right for that person. And children are people, ya know. As a separate person, they are going to face experiences you may not have had, and may choose to respond differently. Just because it isn’t the choice you would have made, is it any less valid? Is their moral system automatically incorrect if it leads to different choices than you would make? There comes a point, after you have taught your child how to think, after you have lectured, discussed, spanked, and pleaded, that the child becomes a person; never a stranger, but an entity just as capable as you of making moral and ethical decisions. There’s a certain level of… I don’t know that it’s respect, per se… but you have to begin to honor the sanctity of their choices, just as much as you would honor your own or another person’s. Well, as much as you would honor your own, anyway.

Mr. M then asked me (in the tone of someone rather exasperated at this point) if it were wrong of him to become strict in order to instill a moral point in his children. After objecting to being asked to judge the manner in which he raised his kids, I pointed out that it was a choice. Every parent chooses, at some point, the level of severity they are willing to take with their children. It almost doesn’t matter what the choice itself is, in my opinion, as long as the parent (or anyone, with any choice, actually) is willing to accept responsibility for the consequences. If they choose to be their child’s best friend at the age of 6 and never discipline them, and their child becomes a lazy bum and a professional hobo, at some point, that’s a consequence that must be accepted. Rather, I should say that it should be accepted that the choice they make may influence the child’s life decisions in this manner. Although I’m not suggesting that a lack of discipline produces professional hobos (which apparently exist), of course. That’s a rather sweeping generalization to make. But I think I got my point across. Likewise with parents who are willing to become physical with their children to drive a point home; if your child hates your guts and rejects all authority as a teenager and adult and starts turning tricks downtown for a quick buck despite her ultra-conservative Christian upbringing, accept that your actions probably influenced his or her decision to become that way. Don’t wail around talking about “I don’t understand! We always loved Little Suzy. How could she turn out like this?” It’s all a combination of choices. I’m not one of those that tries to make meaning of choices made based on consequences, necessarily, but I do strive to understand the why’s and how’s of choices.

My idea of an ideal parent-child relationship would be one in which, yes, for the first several years the parents taught the kid what they feel is correct, but they also taught their kid how to think about these types of things. And I don’t necessarily mean how they think about morality, etc., but more how to think. I talk with people, and I ask them questions like “You just said that cell phone was “gay”. Ignoring how idiotic that sounds, do you realize that, somewhere in your mind, the word “gay” has a negative connotation to you?” When is calling something “gay” ever a compliment? But it’s not really the issue of whether they are okay with the homosexual lifestyle and practices (although I might also ask what place it is of theirs to accept or reject a lifestyle that they, by virtue or genetics or whatever, wouldn’t practice anyway–no one questions heterosexuality in that way); it’s the fact that they don’t even try to think about the way they think. They say “Come on, ‘gay’ is a term that, in this society, is acceptable to use in that sense.” What the fuck does society have to do with it? Yes, I understand that when you live in a society, your choose to conform to certain norms (or else you accept the consequences for not doing so), but by accepting (or following) the values and morals of a society, must you automatically try to mold your thinking to their standards? As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t consider myself a rebel, nor do I think I actually try to be different (you know, those “fake” rebels), but why is it so bad to think about why things are the way they are (in terms of thoughts and interactions) and how things got to be that way? I get so fucking sick of people telling me that I think too much, or read too much, when I look around a classroom of 30 people and can’t find a single one that could hold their own in a conversation (not even a debate) about religion, morality, or the entity we call society. Just because you may be brain-dead in some areas, don’t try to bring me down to your level.

On a rather related note, there is the matter of judgements and condemnation. People like to ask me, “How can you say you follow such an ‘aloof’ set of ideas, but then sit there and call people ‘Little Shit’ or insinuate (or flatly state) that someone is wrong for way they (don’t) think?” Sure it’s hypocritical. But I recognize that I really have no right to make those judgements, but I choose to state them (and believe them) anyway, both for the sake of comedy and to inspire my own thoughts; taking yourself too seriously can cause injury, ya know. How many people recognize their own hypocrisy? I’m starting to think not many do. Also, I have always found myself best suited to argue with myself; I tend to fear physical pain enough to not become violent with myself (I almost smacked someone I was arguing with today in the mall after watching that shit they call “Matrix Reloaded”), and whenever I want to argue a point, I’m always available. Up until about a year ago, all this stuff I argue about now just rattled around in my head. But I have blind spots. I know I do, even if I don’t always know what or where they are. I may reach a snag, or even a conclusion on a matter, and it takes a little extra push from a conversation with someone else for me to go “Ah-ha! There’s a nearly perfect example that challenges what I was thinking.” Then I’ll realize that I think or assume nearly the same thing (or exactly the opposite) and hadn’t even realized it. And off I go. But I swear, the next person that tells me I think too much is either going to be hit or will never be graced with my presence again. I’m genuinely sick of it. People act as though this type of crap makes me “smart”; when, in the history of American society, has it even been considered “smart” to want to know a little about yourself? Grr.

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I decided to post something here today, just to say hey, and maybe, just maybe, to bitch a little bit. Particularly about this (slow load, and it opens in a new window).

I’m still not sure how much bitching I’m going to do.

The exams are going well. They are all suspiciously easy, however. I don’t attribute that to any heavy studying, because, well, people who haven’t studied much at all (myself included on some of them) think they’re easy as well. I would expect the IB exams to be easier, because of the way the program works. For those that don’t know, IB courses consists of internal and exteral assessments. Every course has at least one internal assessment, graded by your teacher, that covers some portion of your studies for the one or two years that you take the course. For example, English A1 Higher Level is a two year course in IB’s eyes. It’s broken into four Parts: World Literature in Translation (Part I), a detailed study of four authors from different genres (Part II), four works by different authors connected by genre (Part III), and the school’s free choice of 4 works by different authors, 3 in English, 1 translated (Part IV). We do Parts I and IV in our junoir year, and complete two short papers (1500 words) as the assessments for Part I (see my Guilt and Confession… and Barbaric Sex essays) and a 10-15 minute presentation as assement for Part IV. These are graded by the teacher, although a sampling of the papers are sent in, so that IB can assess the teacher’s assessment. Um… yeah. Anyway, senior year we do Parts II and III, and record a 10-15 minute commentary on a randomly chosen passage or poem from a Part II work (which I bombed, due to my nervousness with regards to recorders of any type). That leaves Part III, right? Well, that’s what the external assessment is on. The external assessment is the English A1 HL Paper I and Paper II on that schedule up there I just decided not to bitch about. Paper I is a two-hour commentary on a prose passage or poem we have never seen before (unless you are a major poetry buff and read probably obscure writers). Paper II is a two-hour essay (from a variety of choices of topics) on two or three of the Part III works we studied. For example, we studied The Stranger by Camus, The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald (bleh), Jane Eyre by Brontë, and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Hurston (which I didn’t even finish reading, I must confess; any book with so much dialect that it slows my reading rate to about 30 pages an hour and almost forces me to read it aloud gets a “bleh” from me, even if the plot and characters are damned interesting). I’m not going to say what was on the papers, but I loved the poem I wrote on (I may find a way to “randomly” mention the poem sometime during the summer) and I managed to know what I was writing about on Paper II, and if parts of my paper were a little weak (like my thesis), I amply proved that I have studied the works and could point out tone, symbolism, yakkity-smackity, as well as specific examples (although not quotes) from the books, which is really the purpose of the exam. With the French exam, the fact that we do a recorded oral presentation as an internal assessment prevents us from having to do a verbal section on the IB exam (which, I might note, is included on the French AP exam, which I am happily not taking).

But, as I said, the exams are all going well for the most part, especially given that my health is still good (for the last 3 years I’ve gotten sick during exam times) and my stress levels are low. My new slacker mentality is extending itself to include these exams as well, I’m afraid. I can’t get credit for French at RHIT, as they don’t offer French, so the purpose of that exam is only to get the IB Diploma, which is second place in my mind. I don’t want Physics credit, because I understand so little physics that if I place in a higher class than Electromagnetism I (Mechanics I I think I can do without), I’m screwed. Besides, I need a different perspective on physics than the one I’ve had for the past three years. Dr. M. (my teacher these three years) knows what he’s talking about, he just doesn’t teach well. I bombed the AP English Literature exam (I hadn’t written a 40 minute essay, much less three, since last year’s AP English exam and tried to write too much on the first one), but I think the IB scores will compensate for that, giving me credit for two courses, I believe (the first two semesters of courses… I think). That’s good, since I’m still planning on minoring in English and Literature.

My four days of math exams went well also. I didn’t know what “fixed iterations” were, so I lost at least 5 marks on the Math Methods Paper II Calculus problem, but I could still land a 6 (out of 7), if the Computer Science test from last year was any indication. If I’d had a good calculator, I would have done the statistics problem instead, as I could have nailed that one, but the stat package on the TI-86 is rather skimpy. The AP Statistics exam (on which I got to use my trusty TI-89, which is banned from IB exams) was scarily easy. I know some people have to take alternates (meaning that, due to conflicts, they have to take a different edition of the exam later this month) and all that good stuff, so I won’t say why, but I was rather shocked; the most difficult topic, in my opinion, was tested by only a question or two on the multiple choice section, and nothing on the free-response section. What the…? The AP Calculus exam was a little more difficult, but still easier than I expected, given that I studied not a lick. What I didn’t know how to do, I didn’t know at all, so there wasn’t much problem in whether I should leave certain choices blank or not (which were only three on the calculator multiple-choice), and on the free-response, I bullshitted enough to be able to at least get a couple of the marks points (damn IB and their “foreign” ways) out of the 9 available for each problem. They’re quite lenient with giving out points, from what we’ve seen in class.

The hardest ones are the ones remaining, though. Physics (all three days of it) is going to kick my ass all over the place, and I’m doing my best to be nonchalant about it, but I still have to report these scores, ya know? And RHIT (and the Dean of Admissions, a very nice guy) seem to have such high expections… I would hate to have to report a 2 or 3 on the AP exam, or to not be able to get my IB Diploma because I got a 2 on the Physics Papers… Oh, well. Study, study, study, right?

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