Career / Life Complex

I've always been opposed to having a career; I'd much rather work many different jobs in a number of different places. It sounds commitment-phobic and this fantasy might reveal my aversion to complicated/stressful work, but I think such a life-style would be a rewarding adventure. But that's just fantasizing. That would never fly with my family, and I'm too attached to the idea of (relative) career and economic security.

That aside, I was thinking about how careers tend to influence how we are as people. Thinking of the preceding spiel actually didn't temporally precede what led me to think of this topic in the first place...

Today I got my hair cut. TFS, right? No, shush. Anyway, so I go to the hair salon with my brother and I'm up first. It's obvious Grace ajuma remembers cutting my hair before, as she asks me if I want it cut like last time. But the funny thing is she doesn't remember me; she just remembers my hair. Grace knows how long each area on my head was cut, and can remember roughly around when she last cut it, but she doesn't know a goddamn thing about me. In fact, she asks me if I'm Alex or David, and if I'm the one who just finished Law School.

Obviously it's understandable that she can't remember personal details about the dozens of people whose hair she cuts. However, what I found interesting was the extent of her knowledge of my hair. That got me thinking about jobs in the service sector, and how professionals must remember people mostly through the way in which they serviced them. Hair cutters remember hair, lawyers remember cases, dentists remember teeth, prostitutes remember penises (I'm only guessing so), etc.

Then do doctors remember illnesses? As someone considering a career in medicine, I felt a little depressed at the prospect of remembering people in my life by their ailments, benign and fatal. Tom? Oh the guy with heart disease. The woman paralyzed from the waist down. Leukemia kid. Tasty Coma Wife. I wonder if this is the path I want to go down.

[Edit: I forgot to add that nobody in my extended family that I know is David; my brother, who was with me at the time, is named Christopher. He graduated from law school at UC Hastings, not me. Also if you don't get the "Tasty Coma Wife" reference, I realize that sounds really offensive. Sorry to anyone with relatives who are in a coma.]

Broken?

So I'm finally here at college. Yay. It's turning out to be a decent amount of what I'd wanted and expected. Especially the freedom. But what I didn't expect was how odd I'd be responding to this new freedom. I almost feel anxious about having an unregulated, self-planned schedule. To have almost complete control about how one goes about one's day is kind of a scary thing for me. Today I decided to have lunch at 3 instead of at 12, the latter being the strict time that my grandma adhered to. And it was awesome. Now I'm going to go eat dinner, and I'm actually hungry, unlike usual when I'm just forced to sit and eat at the same time every night. But I still feel anxious for what I have--I mean want to do tomorrow. Hopefully this anxious feeling will go away and I'll be able to embrace my freedom better.

"The best rape whistle is your voice!"

This amused me, that's all. No special commentary or anything; it really speaks for itself.

-Sigh-

I want to meet the 17% who got this problem wrong -_-. 17% of 39,609 people is 6733.53 people. So 6733 people and 1 midget got this problem wrong. -Sigh-...

Something From Nothing

In econ this year (trust me this has a point so don't close the window or go to facebook instead -_-) we learned about something called the money multiplier effect. The money supply increases in a few different ways, the most interesting of them being by lending and borrowing in a credit system. By loaning out money lent to them by savers, banks artificially create more money.

This is actually sort of analogous (and me being me, I love a good analogy) to a principle I've strictly adhered to my whole life: don't take out your problems on other people. They don't deserve it, and it never makes your original problems any better.

It's like the money multiplier. Someone or something injects you with negative emotion, and you don't just pass that on like currency to the next person; it still stays with you but then creates needless negativity. Just like there's no tangible good behind the artificially generated currency, the original event never had anything to do with blow that was dealt to the victim of somebody's inability to deal with their problems. Perry told us it's like we created something from nothing. Whether it's pain or money, such a thing shouldn't happen.

To be or not to be

How sad. It's Saturday night and I'm laying on a couch in my underwear with my laptop resting on my stomach, and the most socially active thing I'm doing is blogging. Strangely enough, I'm not really sad. Of course there's going to be (and there has been all summer) that nagging, antsy feeling that I should be getting the most out of my summer, spending every precious moment creating outstanding memories with friends and working on self-improving.

I really hate that feeling.

But it passes. Not to say I haven't done some of that, but honestly I've spent a large sum of time sitting on my ass reading manga, playing farmville, and listening to my itunes on shuffle. Oh and surprisingly I haven't been getting that much sleep, but that's irrelevant.

Now there's less than a month of summer left. I'm not lamenting that though. I'm more beaten up that I wasn't more honest the last 4 years of my life. Just now I'm embracing and accepting how much I love lounging around by myself, just like how I love stupid movies unimaginable in the film canon and silly manga that don't have a shred of realism in them. All of the things I thought a respectable person shouldn't love doing.

I think I would've been much happier had I let myself be--Hrm, why do we have to be "ourselves"? People say not to be other people, or who you think you should be, or who you think other people think you should think you should be, or any other confusing combination

of clauses, and they say "be yourself". Well I think you sort of lose yourself when you consciously decide who "yourself" is.

So I say just be. I look forward to just being during the next four years of my life.

Disappointment and Despair

I tried uploading this gif to facebook for my profile picture and it didn't dance around. i was sorely disappointed. -sigh- maybe i just fail at the internet. who knows. but it's unassailably cute. trust me.

it's a snippet from this video i think: