My New Plan

I must work for SETI.

Or somewhere that researches similar kinds of things, namely extra-terrestrial communications and questions of time/space, etc.

I am starting from the beginning - Algebra. Unfortunately, I have always been a little too adept at finding my way around rules and doing things I don't want to do. Some would call this cheating, I would probably call it cheating now, but at the time, I considered it ingenuity. I never actually cheated, I never had someone else do my homework, I just ordered teacher edition books, or memorized everything. The teacher editions might be cheating...I'm not sure. Memorizing, though, was just veering around the actual work. I still worked hard making note cards, and doing the actual memorizing, it was just a type of work I was familiar with and so it seemed easier than sitting there doing math problems I didn't understand immediately.

I like work that I know how to do. I like that work to be dynamic, and complex, but I want to already have the tools and knowledge of the tools at my "immediate" disposal. By immediate, I just mean that I don't want to have to practice for months before I get the hang of it.

I MUST get over this. Few things are learned in a day, and I think I'm running out all the possibilities there. Reading books, watching movies/TV, making art projects, etc. Plus, all these things cost money (presumably, though I've found ways around this, too).

Ultimately, it comes down to commitment, and I have very little. I attribute this to my 8th grade teacher giving me a -27% on an English assignment. How is this possible, you ask? I don't know. I did more wrong than was actually required to be right, I suppose. Up until that point, I pretty much had straight A's. To be honest, I laughed at the -27% (which the more I think about it may have actually been -43% and I'm in denial), but the laughter was out of disbelief, and at that moment I felt my care for grades float away. My brain had to protect me from the desire to try to reconcile a grade so poor it was below zero with my desire to do well in school - the only thing I had really committed to.

Small price to pay, I say. While I attribute my noncommittal attitude to this moment, I am also VERY grateful I'm not one of those freaks who cry and lash out over a bad grade. Every time I've gotten a bad grade, I know exactly why: Very Little Effort (VLE). When I've gotten good grades, the pride comes from a feeling of successful deception, as I most likely put forth VLE. Boy, does that make things easy.

My days of little effort must end. I think. It's going to be difficult, as I'm pretty sure it's now hard-wired, but I find I may be just competitive enough to duke it out with my very lazy alter-ego, AKizzle.

I will miss the fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants, carefree, schedule-free, why not?, go for it, let's do it self, that balances out my very boring no-I-have-to-go-to-bed self, but I'm confident the adjustment will not be too painful, and that my good logic will figure out a way to make what I MUST do into that which I WANT to do, and will therefore transform the MUST into the fun part, returning to me the carefree self.

If I can suffer through the homework of Algebra, and then Calculus, I will be on my way to Mechanics, Astrophysics, and Electricity. I will soon be on my way to sound waves and sitting in a room with headphones listening to space static. I'm actually not that interested in the sitting in the room part. I'm a brainstormer. I want to be able to help think of ways the technology we have can be reformulated to work for other things. For instance, wind energy. It's essentially a reverse fan. One would think that on days when it's particularly windy, the turbine would not move at a constant speed, but at a speed proportional to the amount of wind with a limit dependent on the torque of the blades. Thereby making more energy that we could store up for future use, or immediately transport to the grid. I don't actually know what that last part entails, but it sounds right, right?

Someone's probably going to steal my logic now and make millions. Then again, perhaps it already exists. That's what I have to find out, and that is why I am going to take as many physics classes as I have to in order to get into the MS program at UND. I'm going to be here any way, and I get 9 free credits a year.

I went to the library yesterday and got 4 books on mathematical history and theory, one being Intro to Mathematics by Alfred North Whitehead, which is shockingly interesting (once you get through the series of 40 consecutive yawns that come from reading a math book). This book was written in 1911, but from what I gather is one of the premiere math theory books for those claiming mathematical retardation, such as I.

We'll see how this goes. My last jaunt into concrete decision making combined with action lead to the Iowa Debacle of 2009, so I'm a little skittish, but I can't really do much worse than that, and it's not costing me any money (at the moment), and hopefully the desire to not fail will be motivation enough to push me through the tedious part.

To infinity, and beyond!

Speaking of Buzz, I saw Toy Story 3 and pretty much cried my eyes out through the whole thing, but it was really good.

Ken to Barbie: I love your leggings.

Barbie to Ken: I love your ascot.

Get it? Haha