For a while now, this question has been somewhere in the back of my mind. My life has definitely become a bit too formulaic. I tend to see everything as mathematical equations (thankfully, though, not as binormal vectors or linear recurrences). The advantages to this are great, as I mentioned in a previous post; it accounts for efficiency in a lot of areas of life, though I am still not a good decision-maker. Perhaps the only real downside is that life can just get boring when I feel like laws of nature are making decisions for me. Well, I’m also just a more boring person for it. And that certainly isn’t something I foresaw for myself.

I can guess what you’re thinking. But being quiet or shy doesn’t constitute a boring personality. In the past I know that I have been obscure at times, even enigmatic, but I’ve always managed to at least entertain myself. I always got my own droll, subtle, off-the-cuff remarks, and that was enough for me. But even my prepared writing seems to have been lacking the wit I have often displayed spontaneously in the past (people other than myself have occasionally found me funny, too). I think it probably all comes down to the fact that I haven’t been exercising those muscles lately, and I haven’t really found myself in enough social situations to do so. Of course I am going to university away from home, and haven’t done much to make friends here (I don’t like trying—I prefer when it just happens). In fact, I don’t hang out with or really talk to any guys here. Inconceivable! This is coming from a man who never spoke to a girl until high school.

Besides, my being shy has nothing to do with it. I’ve been shy for my whole life, and it hasn’t hindered me in any way from being cool—or uncool, whichever it is that I have been or am trying to be. This summer at work I was often at my wittiest (I just knew I’d think back to that horrible experience with fondness), but that’s because I was around people with whom I was comfortable. To people who intimidated me, and there are many, I was probably just known as the quiet guy.

I have played floor hockey here semi-regularly since September, and I’m pretty sure that I’m known within that group as the guy who doesn’t say anything and always gets frustrated with himself, or maybe as the guy who seems to have lost his scoring touch lately. It probably doesn’t help that one of the other players shares my name. I think I sometimes leave those games disliking my personality, and not even necessarily because I got upset. It’s hockey, and it’s with people who love hockey almost half as much as I do; I should be more sociable and bore myself less. At the same time, though, I am glad that my tacitness sometimes, though not always, prevents me from saying some of the careless things that even respectable people let slip from their lips unnoticed.

Now, since you’ve been subjected to my complaints and stuck it out, here are some things that I do want in my personality:

1. I want to be an honourable yet fierce competitor, without necessarily putting holes in church walls.

2. I want to be the eternal pessimist—“This is the worst day ever: first this happens, and who knows what else might happen”—while remaining the eternal optimist (Vince has promised to draft me with a late-round pick when he becomes an NHL GM. I swear I have it in writing somewhere).

3. I want to be the genius who comes up with such gems as “Dog brings home Stanley Cup,” and the entire “Vote for Thomas” presidential campaign, which was a thousand times better than “Vote for Pedro” or even “Vote for Rory” (thanks go out to my brother, my mom, and James (see attached image at the bottom—whether it made any sense in the campaign is debatable)).

4. I want to be the guy who goes out late at night, grabs McDonald’s, and plays highway soccer with Corey on Manitoba’s #6 (70-stretch for the Thompsonites).

5. I want to be the guy who will quote the The Matrix in its entirety at any given get-together (I realize that I am the only one who wishes this—except maybe Vince…Vince, you reading? Of course you aren’t).

6. I want to be the guy whom people want to always have around, and the guy who earns and keeps their respect over the course of many years.

7. I want to be the guy whose jokes nobody gets, but who gets full entertainment value from them himself—especially when being interviewed for the YC:Fusion testimonial video.

8. I want to be the guy with whom parents want their kids to associate, to be the guy whom they can think of as a role model, and to actually deserve it.

9. I want to make my mom spit out her drink on a student's test paper, that she hasn't yet finished marking, just one more time.

10. I want to try not alphabetizing something, just to see how it feels; but I won’t start with this list.

I wouldn’t normally do this, but I just heard somewhere that you all wanted to read another somber self-reflection piece. You’re welcome.

Labels: Brainstorm

Posted by Farewell, Free Will at 3:12 a.m. | Permalink | Comments

My life thus far has been a battleground for my sense of duty and my eternal desire to create. I have come to wonder if I have any conscious control over the struggle’s outcome at all, because it is hard to think of major life choices wherein my decision mirrored my inner desire. I guess the thing that really confuses me is why I should feel a greater sense of duty to solve complex differential equations like a common machine than to write the music that only I can write. In fact, my greatest fear is that I will ultimately be a cruel master to my potential, never letting it out of its cage and forcing it to stagnate.

One of my favourite questions in the world to be asked is “So, what do you want to do when you’re done university?” My favourite answer so far has been “I want to turn 21.” Another is “So, what are you going to do with a math degree?” To that I replied, “Music.” They asked if math would help with that. Could math help with music? Hmm. That’d be quite a stretch. Do people actually think that I’m taking math on purpose, knowing I’m going to pursue a career in music? Wait a minute… if that’s not what I’m doing, then just what is?

I do owe mathematics a lot. It has aided immensely in my understanding of the world and how everything works. My self-acclaimed reasoning skills in particular probably owe more to mathematics than any other area of my life, and that is worth more than I can express. Math also kept me company through some lonely teen years (well, not exactly, but Vince and I had quite a time trying to figure out how to compute cube roots by hand – until I gave up and looked it up online). For what it’s worth, math allowed me to graduate with honours with distinction, and probably won me a $3000 entrance scholarship to the University of Saskatchewan. But math doesn’t make me feel excited about the future, and therefore it fails the litmus test I should be using to determine whether it is an acceptable career option.

The shortcomings of music as a career lie in unpredictability and its high disaster potential. Ten years down the road I might not necessarily be overwhelmingly happy, but I might be thankful that I completed my B.Sc. in Mathematics. If you discover that I have not changed courses over the next year, then you can safely assume that my sense of duty has defeated my sense of adventure and my caged desire yet again. You can also continue to wait patiently and in great anticipation for my upcoming CD.

The really big decisions in life are often governed by the smaller ones; they may even be consequences of them. Before we know it, we can be two years into a degree into which we don’t even really know how we got in the first place. I think that it is important to realize that every decision that is made is intended to be the best decision possible. A great way to learn from our mistakes is to recognize questionable decisions and use their results to adjust the criteria on which we base our decision making. That way, we can understand why we made certain decisions and learn to live with them, while also helping ourselves not to make the same mistakes in the future.

In conclusion, yes, it is exam time, and I have had two enormous math-related exams on the schedule (one down, one to go), so the posts have been and may continue to be sparser ‘til all is over.

Now, inspired by the ridiculous midterm exams of my calculus professor, Dr. John Martin, I will proceed to offer a multiple choice question to end things off. Any one of the answers is probably right.

Q. So Why Did I Start a Math Degree, Anyway?

a)

b) Math can be pretty fun.

c) I’m afraid of actually putting everything I've got into a pursuit of a music career.

d) I have absolutely no backbone.

Cheers.

Labels: Brainstorm

Posted by Farewell, Free Will at 4:00 a.m. | Permalink | Comments

Now that my first 130 hours of Final Fantasy XII have come to an end, I have decided, before officially reviewing the game, to revisit all of the other games in the series. I do realize that it will span several months, but my first-ever Final Fantasy Marathon is already underway. I will thoroughly play every game from Final Fantasy to Final Fantasy X, and then XII again, posting complete reviews along the way. The totality of what this will accomplish is beyond comprehension, but what is known for certain is that official ratings and rankings of these games by yours truly are long overdue. I hope that you are as excited as I. Stay tuned.

Labels: Final Fantasy

Posted by Farewell, Free Will at 7:07 p.m. | Permalink | Comments

Here Is the Article

I noticed that I had been experiencing intense cases of déjà vu every time I sat down to watch a Canucks game, so it's a relief to discover that I'm not alone.

Labels: Hockey

Posted by Farewell, Free Will at 12:09 p.m. | Permalink | Comments

Genesis 2:15-17 (KJV)
And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

When I was very young, my sister Ladonna and I were in our family’s old van, a 1980-something Ford Club Wagon, sitting in a driveway while my mom had run in to the house for a few minutes. To this day it puzzles me, but before my mom went in, she specifically instructed Ladonna not to let me get to the front of the van. Now I am fairly certain that I was two years old at the time – three at the most – so I suppose it’s possible that I already had a history of mischief behind the wheel, but one wouldn’t think so. Oh yeah, and it is worth noting that the vehicle was running and that the brake pedal did not need to be depressed to shift from park. To shorten the story, everyone involved was uninjured, but the garage door needed to be replaced. It is also worth noting that this was not our house. Yet I don’t think that anyone necessarily acted irresponsibly. If you disagree, then I would like to also hear your interpretation of God’s role in the fall of man.

If today we were all granted the gift of free will for the first time, I’m sure the response would be fairly positive. “Great,” we’d all say. “This is much better than the vibration of one-dimensional strings in n spacetime dimensions deciding what is best to come out of my mouth next.” But what would be any different? It is probably true that if we suddenly lost our free will, we probably wouldn’t even know how to tell the difference. So why does it matter?

Free will is important because of accountability. Without it, there would be no such things as sin, morality, or righteousness, and respect, love, and kindness would be mere illusions.

I don’t believe that the key to the original gift of free will was that humans could make relatively trivial life choices such as whether to learn a trade or get a college degree. Important as those decisions are, the fall of man is clearly a much broader issue. To understand what free will really means, one must understand that infinity cannot be found in nature; in other words, everything we know has limits. The examples are endless but obvious. One way in which free will has changed over time is that those limits have increased in number since the days of the garden. Adam and Eve had the free will to decide whether or not to live an eternal life in paradise without knowing sin. That was the original gift of free will, and we no longer have that option.

Thinking back to that incident in the van so many years ago, I imagine that I wasn’t even aware that there was something wrong that I could do until my mom mentioned it. That probably put the thought into my head, though she didn’t mean for that to happen. This causes me to speculate that, if He had wanted to, God could have done more to prevent the fall from happening without violating free will. I’m sure he could have kept the serpent out of the garden. He could have hidden the tree far away or made it a hundred feet tall. Whether or not we are talking about an actual tree is irrelevant. By telling Adam and Eve not to eat of the tree, he was not only warning them, but also giving them a choice; the ball was in their court. And like we all continue to do, they failed.

The responsibility that comes with such a gift is overwhelming. Just thinking about the scope of it makes me timid. If one simple act of irresponsibility can turn human and spiritual history upside-down, then what sort of catastrophe might I induce? Would I sacrifice the gift of freedom to ensure that the blame for such disappointment and regret never falls on my shoulders?

On that note, I hope that the right decision has been made to create this public eyehole into my mind. We often don’t act rationally even though we try to. With that in mind, instead of pointing out that I have fallen into the vortex of a social phenomenon with a high risk of pretentiousness, I would ask you all to ignore that this collection of articles will be hosted by a service called "Blogger."

Thank you for reading, and enjoy.

Labels: Brainstorm

Posted by Farewell, Free Will at 6:18 p.m. | Permalink | Comments