Gifted Slacker

After observing how social groups form in the postgraduate international dorm at Newcastle, I started to wonder if all such places operate the same way.

At Newcastle, it seems, social groups form within native linguistic groups. The Mandarin (or Cantonese, I can’t tell particularly) group together, the Swahili speakers group together, and the Arabic speakers group together*.

It seems that (white, native) English speakers are almost an out group. There are so many of us in the community that it’s too unwieldy for us to form a group. It feels a bit odd to be an isolated minority in one building and to otherwise be a welcome part of the majority.

Pretty soon I’ll go grab some food from my kitchen that smells like a Chinese restaurant, put on the rest of my clothes, and take off for my fun-fun registration week activities of the day.  The Vice Chancellor’s welcome dinner is tonight. Yay, for free food!

* Arabic speakers seem to also sub-group themselves by nationality or skin tone. It seems more common for the Indian and Pakistani Arabic speakers to group together than they it is for them to accept (black) African Arabic speakers.  Throw religion in the mix, and I completely lose my grasp on the situation.

True, I’ve been here since Tuesday, but this is the first time I’ve had energy enough to login here.

I really have nothing to say at the moment; I’m at least slightly overwhelmed.

I’m just about to walk out the door to run errands and head to the airport. See you all later.

The rest of the YIR posts are going to have to wait. I’m still too close to the things that have happened from May through August to actually write about them. If I were willing to dig around for hours and hours I might be able to come up with the posts, but it’s not worth it. Let’s just say that life has been quite interesting lately.

Stay tuned, they rest are coming. I promise.

At least you can look forward to posts from across the pond, starting sometime after Monday.

This stuff is pretty wicked cool.

On Saturday March 31st I started my cross-country bike trip. It was fairly uneventful until the weather started to get really cold the following week. The night of April 4th I stayed at a hostel in Charlottesville, VA, more than 200 miles from where the trip started. I planned to leave the following day and stay with the Cookie Lady the following night, but the forecast said snow, and, well, waking up at 5 a.m. for a 60+ mile ride through sub-freezing temperatures wasn’t in my game plan (I had no suitable clothing for temps that low).

The outlook was bleak for the next week or so, so I called my dad and he agreed to come pick me up.I planned to hole up with my parents for a week or two until the weather became more reliably non-sucky. Plus, there was a girl I wanted to see about.

After a few days of being home I hear from this girl again, she’s asking about how my trip is going, small-talk, that sort of thing. A few exchanges later we decide to go visit the zoo on April 13th.

Friday the 13th came, and I got in the car to go to the zoo. We were going to meet somewhere near the front of the zoo at about 10:30 am. I was very new to the area at that point and got completely lost on my way. It was after 11:30 when I finally met up with the girl. I felt like such an asshole for being late, but at the day’s end I felt things had gone pretty well.

The rest of April is kind of a blur. I went to Clemson one weekend to visit my brother, Contra danced for the first time, and spent some time in Baltimore. I also stressed about trying to figure out if/when I wanted to restart my bike trip, or if I just wanted to pursue work, or some other adventure.

(I’m a really shit storyteller. My stories don’t have any flow or narrative arc, or anything resembling good. At least my spelling isn’t too bad.)

Read this:

Colleges differ, but they’re nothing like the stamp of destiny so many imagine them to be. People aren’t what some admissions officer decides about them at seventeen. They’re what they make themselves.

Indeed, the great advantage of not caring where people went to college is not just that you can stop judging them (and yourself) by superficial measures, but that you can focus instead on what really matters. What matters is what you make of yourself. I think that’s what we should tell kids. Their job isn’t to get good grades so they can get into a good college, but to learn and do. And not just because that’s more rewarding than worldly success. That will increasingly be the route to worldly success.

Paul Graham is one of the best essayists of our time.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what I would do if I had a near-infinite supply of money.

Three of the most important things in my life are travel, interesting ideas and thinking about those ideas, and doing what I can to make the people around me happy. If I had endless stores of money: I would live in a simple home in an area where I wouldn’t have to drive. I would go to school and I would travel. I would do humanitarian and world-bettering work.

The thing is, people ask you this type of thing to help you try and determine what kind of profession you should have. It doesn’t work for me. I’ve never had an answer that would even begin to guide me to a line of work.

I’ve been a student, an entrepreneur, a computer programmer, and a few other things. I don’t want to program full time, and I’m going to start a Business/Computer Science MSc. soon. That seems to point me into starting a tech startup at some point.

After I finish the MSc. I’m thinking of taking a PhD in Economics or, perhaps, Educational Psychology (a mentor of mine followed this path, I admire Dr. Bryant quite a bit). If I do that, I’m really not sure where that leaves me. I guess I’ll just take things as they come and do my best to get where I want to be. (Where is that? I don’t have a complete image, but I do have a general outline. And, no, I’m not going to tell you about it. Yet.)

I always thought I had formidable patience. People always have told me that I’m quite patient. The truth is, as I’ve recently realized, that I’m very impatient. One of my most frequent utterances is “I can’t wait” (second only to “I’m easy”). Obviously I can wait, it’s just that I really, really don’t like to.

Somethings are easier to wait for than others. I can be quite patient with children, for instance. I can’t stand being patient with gift-giving. When I find something perfect for someone I have a hard time waiting for an appropriate occasion to make the gift.

Christmas gifts are giving me a terrible time at the moment. I usually only buy for about a half-dozen people each year. Most years I have trouble deciding on a decent gift for each person. This year I have several gift ideas for two of the most important people that I intend to buy gifts for. A few of the gifts have already been purchased and I can barely resist giving them now.

I think what people perceive as patience, in me, is actually restraint.

It’s late. Forgive me the blabbering.

I hate money. I hate talking about it, thinking about it, worrying about it. I hate the things it does to people when they have too much of it, and I hate the things it does to people when they have too little of it.

I hate money.

And right now I’m half panicked over it.

This. Fucking. Sucks.

Update 7:15 AM: Life is back to good. Maybe I can take a nap now, before I have to run around for the day.