I have decided to go over a few of my folders of academic crap and pull out some of my better papers. I have now posted those papers online in a simple index.
Category: General Life
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Windows 7’s Status Board
I don’t know if I’m really trying to avoid doing work, or what, but It has occurred to me that Windows 7’s task bar is like a status board for my life. Each major task I do has a different set of icons associated with it. At present I have FireFox, Windows Media Player, Word and OneNote open, that indicates that I am working on a paper. Also, Nikon transfer is open, which all it ever indicates is that I am transferring images, unless of course there is another image app open at the same time, in which case, I am doing a project of some sort. I wonder if I can just save myself some time on this who status update and tweeting thing and just get an app to screenshot my task bar when it changes active apps.
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Cleaning Up
I sometimes let my buddy lists on instant messaging services get too busy. There are people on them that I talk to once, or gave me their ID in an email, only to never be spoken to. I find the cluttering of people on these lists to be a bit much to handle, so I feel compelled to clean things up. I am finding that I talk to no one on Aim, seldom anyone on Yahoo, although too many people on Yahoo come from my past and say “hi” periodically, I don’t like it. Finally, there is Google Talk, for which I have interactions with two people, one of which is quite often in the same room with me, making it redundant as well. Maybe I should be sad that I talk to so few people, but on the other hand, it makes things a lot simpler. It just really sucks that I can’t get the 3 or 4 people I talk to on one network so I can reduce the number of things I have to be signed in to (although, its already on 1 pidgin client). I don’t presently feel like I’m missing anything by not having people on these lists, but things do feel empty when I sign in and there is no one around wishing to talk to me (and I almost never start a conversation).
Eh, dilemmas for another day. For now, alone works.
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Deciphering the Moods and Desires of People
Life is quite strange when dealing with these mortals called humans. Do exactly what you believe that these humans desire and then they change what they desire, making your actions and assumptions wrong. If you sit back and make no active change to appease them, they expect for you to have known their desires. Where is the balance and the fairness in interactions? I find the social expectations of individuals to be quite hard to read. You do what you think will make people happy, and then you find yourself alone in a library, staring mindlessly out of a window watching all of the other happy people wander around, carefully avoiding such horrible social situations. If is very uncomfortable to discover that you have no clue what another person truly wants or expects. There are so many variables in social interactions that it is impossible to know. Maybe one day I will figure him out, maybe one day I will understand, but for now, I am confused and alone.
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Public Politeness
An experience I just had makes me question whether or not people understand the concept of being polite in public anymore. In a university library, on the first floor, behind the book racks you would think that there would be an air of quiet and a relaxed academic environment… well, mostly there is. Now, add to that a person diagonally to the right behind you by maybe 6 feet chomping on corn chips. Also, to that add someone who has not turned off their Windows system sounds or bothered to mute their laptop, but sounds like they are navigating through their entire file tree. Now, on the opposite side, a few more feet back, add another person typing on a keyboard that is obviously not soft touch with her long fingernails hitting the keys in a rapid pace. Also, said person is on the phone. The academic usefulness of the environment has just fallen several points.
What has happened to being polite in public? Maybe I am just overly considerate, but if I have to eat in a public place that isn’t a restaurant, I tend to pick foods that are quiet (and usually have low aroma, but that’s just paranoia), and I always mute my laptop sounds, just because not everyone needs to know when I have mail (yeah, that was the other one, some guy logged into AOL and had mail, I shouldn’t know this information). I can’t really complain much about the nails and the keyboard, just situationaly unavoidable, and I probably sound a little loud on my keyboard as well since I tend to type based on emotion. Talking on a cell phone in a library I guess is more of a peeve than being rude, but at the same time, libraries are places to read, work and reflect. It is what it is for the purpose of some isolation.
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Star Ratings Suck
As a person that is being rated more and more often lately in varying areas and on multiple sites, I am starting to really despise the star rating system. First of all, the system is entirely anonymous from the recipient’s perspective. This means that it isn’t possible to determine the difference between the overexciting rating of a friend or the hateful ratings of an enemy. Second, it is too easy for someone to rate something that they have not seen/used, just assigning a rating arbitrarily. Finally, if someone gives 1 star, you know they didn’t like it, but how useful is it to know someone didn’t like something? It puts things into a situation of thinking that people don’t like it, so therefore, just give up, as opposed to having actual comments and being able to respond to those comments by making changes to the way things are done in the future. Without an opportunity to improve, sharing artistic or technological creations with the world is pointless.
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Reconsidering Blog Diversification
At some point in the past I had a lot of things going on in my life to the point where I required several different blogs just to keep things sorted out. I had interests pretty much flying out my ass and needed a place to blog and insert content relevant to each and every one. Now, things are different. My interests are narrowing and things are becoming more stable and cohesive, so the need for a separate blog relating to each thing is becoming less required. Unfortunately even my more specialized (and somewhat secret) blogs are not doing their jobs anymore either, mostly because they do not represent the real me anymore. I still have kinky interests, but they seem to have no meaning or substance without affection and some type of strong emotional bond, so those areas almost come back under the scope of this blog. Originally when this blog was launched it was to be my one-stop place for all of my thoughts, no matter how pure of problematic. Several years ago I had a problem where I considered suicide a few times, the entry where I announced those feelings and tried to write about them so that I could address them was posted to this blog, but now, it might be more likely to go to another blog, Restricted Access (as the name implies, its locked down). A few days ago, my new exercise routine stirred up erotic feelings in me and I felt like I needed an outlet, but it wasn’t right for my fetish blog, and it seemed a little out of the range of the body blog (since it’s a mental issue), so ideally it would be a personal topic, for the personal blog (this one), but once again, that type of thing ended up on RA, out of public view. The thoughts were personal, but not necessarily enough to be completely private. The separation of the body blog from the personal blog is really a self image thing I think. I keep the two worlds separate because I am afraid of screwing up, and then it would be an issue where it would be reflected in this blog and not just some other auxiliary blog that I can either close, or just ignore and forget about. Now I am realizing that the body blog is an ongoing thing and I do not necessarily screw up when I deviate from my goals, it just indicates a change in direction, just like anything else. The art blog has not been updated in over a year, which is probably a bad thing, since my art is a big part of my life. I don’t share much on there because it hardly seems relevant, because I feel like I am always doing the same stuff. It used to be the clay blog, which was great when I was still actively participating in ceramic classes and needed a way to keep my clay thoughts separate from my personal thoughts. Once again, I do not see why the differentiation was needed, except as a content delivery mechanism for the ceramic website (which is pretty much dead now). One other thing that affects the more “uncensored” blogs is the general audience nature of this blog. I really don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable, and I feel like if I started posting in that way, I just might alienate people. Perhaps that defense is more about a disparity in self image more than alienation, but I just can’t be sure. I am not yet comfortable with bridging that separation.
No matter how weird my life is, I am only one person, and there is becoming less and less reason to have everything separate. I want to be whole and outside of authentication mechanisms I’m not really sure how to go about it. I think I will experiment with web presence stuff other than the blogs at first and see if it is even a doable thing for all parts of me to coexist.
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Listing Ones Wishes
Once again this year my mother is participating in the highly commercialized Christmas season and as always she is bugging me for “the list”. It’s that little list I am supposed to work on starting in July and turn into her sometime before the first week of November. Well, in the 20-however-many years I’ve been making this stupid list, I’ve never been on her schedule with it. It also never fails that I have no idea what to put on the list. It feels a little short as well as short-sighted.
http://images.cmkularski.net/blog/ChristmasList2009.pdf
I don’t know where to go with it, and I have very little enthusiasm for it. As if it’s not bad enough that I have to make the list, she will still be obvious about what she is doing because of questions she will ask. Its just no fun, and on top of that, lately the whole receiving gifts thing has started to annoy me. If I don’t need anything, then I don’t need anything, but of course, she will do the frivolous thing as she always has.
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Life Sucks When You Are Unaccomplished
Like sucks when you are unaccomplished. I have for a long time been easily depressed by my own inadequacies when compared to other people, at some point recently I got over that and am no longer worried about how I compare to other people, because if I spend all of my time trying to develop into the type of person that I happen to be focused on at any particular moment, I will never develop into my own person. I take to jealousy easily still, but I try to not let it bother me too much. My concerns at the moment are related to the fact that I feel unaccomplished by my own standards. I feel that I should have accepted a passion in life at this point and that I should be running toward it, but it seems that as soon as I open myself up to let one of these passions in to be “the one” I begin to experience self-doubt and have anxiety over the idea and find numerous reasons for why that particular passion isn’t valid in my life. I love photography and I desperately wish to pursue it as a career, but yet I am working on a degree in Psychology. Why is this? Shouldn’t I be in a degree track for Art, or perhaps even Journalism? Or do I follow Psychology for another reason? Will learning to understand people help me become a better photographer? I can’t say for sure, but I am going with the degree because it feels right and I should really finish off this whole degree thing so I can move on to bigger things. My difficulty comes from my inability to function completely independently, but yet my resistance to following any type of leadership blindly. In my life I have acquired a lot of knowledge, some of it contradictory to itself, but all of it relevant to a successful life. I have experience in computer science, arts, psychology and a number of other areas, why can I not figure out what works best for me? I hate this feeling that I should constantly be changing things. I want to set out on one course in life and make it work. I want to be a photographer and I want to finish my psychology degree. That is who I want to be. There are other traits I wish to have, but none relevant to the central goal.
I’m not sure I entirely understand this post myself, but I feel like I need clarity in my life. I have a direction I want to go, I have focus for it, but I feel like I am lacking a compass to find the direction I wish to point. Perhaps the answer is in more education? Perhaps not.
