That sounds pretentious, even to me. Isn't that sad?
However, looking at the endlessly excellent Hyperbole and a Half and recently discovering something called Tales of Mere Existence have reminded me again that it's not hard to have interesting things to say, so long as you say things as if they were interesting. Even a simple interaction such as a day in class or a short ride on the bus could be interesting given the right company, context, or even philosophical convention. Here I was, better than keeping up this blog, when I had billions of snippets of daily life I could be thinking about. Or, better still, writing about.
I had written this down once for NaNoWriMo,
So, aside from thinking I'm "better than" roughly seventy-seven trillion plus possible words, I should remember that I'm as human as the next guy, and not hold so much against myself for making mistakes. And also realize that it's as much as mistake to not do anything as it is to do something stupid. Advice like "It's better for some to think you a fool than open your mouth and prove them right" is sage enough for some situations, but terribly crippling others.
Mathematically speaking, in order to write fifty thousand words in twenty days, it means writing two-thousand five hundred words in a single day. Movies and television are shot in twenty-four to thirty frames per second. This is because that's what theorists have speculated is “most similar” to the way human eyes perceive movement and action. In order to make this simple, that means that humans capture roughly thirty still images in any given second.
Popular theory suggests that a single picture has the worth of a thousand words. This means that at any given second, the perceived images can amount to three thousand words, meaning that any given minute will produce one million, eight hundred words worth of still images. Any hour produces one hundred and eight million. A day will produce two billion, five hundred and ninety two million. So in a month's time, the number of images processed by the constantly-awake human mind is an astounding seventy-seven trillion, seven hundred and sixty billion words worth of imagery.
So, forget the failures of the past, at least in part. I made mistakes, but... Eh, it happens. Instead, let's focus on the future. Below will be a usual post if I don't have something deep or super thought-provoking about which to speak. Maybe just something from my day, or an inane thought given a few hundred words to wobble about.
Something I constantly learn about higher education is how much more intelligent I would feel if I didn't seek so much time into trying to elevate my education. Granted, it's not a perfect system, as too much or little of anything is as harmful as anything else, but I find that the longer I tool myself into a school-attending machine, the less I'm actually learning and the more I'm actually gaining the system. I have to wonder how much of my last ten or so classes were spent learning, and how much of them were more focused on GPAs and less on the actual material itself. Hell, half of my English class was more concerned over the due date of the essays due than the content of the essays themselves.
Which is unnerving in its own way. Side-saddle with so much responsibility of learning and gaining and coming to terms with more, less, this, that, the other. We're expected to do all of our maturing, learning, and growing in the four short years of college, and we're expected to come out of the system to join the adult system. It's as much disheartening as it is unnerving.
As I sit here writing this, I wonder if I'm doing enough to help fix the system. Probably not, just another one of the "useless" college generation doing more to complain about problems with seeing the need to fix them. However, given my lack of age, maturity, and room for growth, I wonder how much I'll be heard before I finish college. And if I'm so mature after it's over, will I still have the vested concern to fix it? If I even have time to do so between trying to learn?
But, most importantly, will writing my congressman get me bonus points?
