Slightly Damaged Boy Sells Squiggly Symbols By The Sea Shore

[michaelboy]

I have a fond grade-school memory of the SRA reading labs. The program series consisted of several ’graduations’ of color, where each color represented an increasing level of difficulty to the reading material. I was so interested in reading and writing then. It all felt so fresh in the eighth grade. In high school, my social endeavors became more important than academics. I had so little interest in reading and writing. (four blank years)

I went to college. Well, actually I think I just fell into it. It was the "thing to do"; and an opportunity to escape home. I did quite well in math, science and engineering. I considered the language arts (english, writing, foreign language) to be dull and unimportant - afterall I was going to be an engineer and not an english teacher. I was wrong - not wrong about my career choice but in thinking that I didn't need to know how to write effectively. I could smoke weed every day and excel in physics, chemistry and math but I couldn’t write.

The introverted fog I surrounded myself with was my prison rather than my armor.

Now, I feel a twinge of shame for it all. Every word I scratch comes with extra labor. The math, physics,statics and dynamics were not as life-changing as I had imagined and I’m now left holding this odd bag of numerals and squiggly greek symbols.

Comments

[k_sereinroom]

I like your writing, and can't see that it takes extra labor.

[mallorys_camera]

I was gonna say! 😀

[quotidians]

I remember doing something similar in elementary school, with an online reading application that graded books from A-Z. In first grade I grew impatient and decided to skip straight to Z, and wound up reading a book about the tomb of Tutankhamun that explained and subsequently debunked the curse of the pharaohs. It made me deathly scared of catching malaria.

I find maths and physics to be beautiful in their formalism, though I find they are probably the loneliest subjects to study: whole lot of sitting at your desk alone, drawing circles and contorting your left hand into 90 degree angles. Still, there's nothing more satisfying than deriving an equation from fundamentals.