a slacker's guide to navigating through college

section four: regarding the classroom environment

tip #12: if you're scheduled to give a presentation, cut sleep short the night before. or, even better, forgo the nightly habit altogether and sap the strength of your 2nd wind by running briskly to class. fatigue calms the nerves. when you're fighting to stay awake, the prospect of elevating heart rate, perspiring, playing with pocket contents, and other signs of public speaking angst, all appear, to the instinctual decision-making portion of your brain, to be unnecessary, energy-wasting behaviors. moreover, whenever you're approaching death faster than the speed naturally dictated by the passage of time, as is the case with extreme sleep deprivation, the instinctual decision-making portion of your brain has far more influence over what you actually end up doing than what the self-conscious decision-making portion of your brain would like you do to.

do you mean that?

won spring mourning a disgruntled fella shook his girl awake, saying "weave know cache, sew cum hear, lett mi beet yew wit my karat." instead, she rolled over, blue hymn a kiss, and razed her hand, as if two waive buy-by.

what would truly be impressive is if someone wrote a couple paragraphs composed entirely out of this sort of thing and was able to make it intelligible on both levels: from the literal meanings of the words written as well as from the pronunciation point of view.

c'mere, lemme talk to you

I was thinking back to a conversation I'd had a few days ago at a friend's house and realized I couldn't remember much of what had been said.

you can think of conversations as being two-way interactions, but the flow of information can never be symmetric from the point of view of one of the participants. by this I mean that while you hear what another person is saying, what you say is both heard by you and has been thought by you prior, by definition of your being able to say it. I'll concede that you also think about what you hear the other person say, otherwise you might as well be talking to a rock, but I'd guess that the type of thought you devote to what you hear others say leaves less of a mark on memory than the type of thought you devote to what you say in order to say it. this would explain why most of what little I do remember of the conversation were things I'd said.

why are things this way? I've decided it's highly variable from person to person and in what context the conversation takes place, so that things might not be this way for you or at least not always this way. in my case, I wasn't completely at ease. if I had been, maybe I would've listened more carefully to what they were saying, thereby approaching a symmetrical conversation from my point of view and allowing me to remember as much of what they had said as I could remember of what I had said.

when you're standing across from someone, there's pressure to reply quickly to what they've said, which often doesn't allow sufficient time to think enough about what they've said to be able to remember it at a later date.

instant messaging conversations are a nice effortless cheat, allowing near symmetry even if you're not completely at ease. this is possible since reading what another person has written is closer to the kind of mental processing treatment you give your own writing than the type of mental processing laden with asymmetric pitfalls I described earlier which everyone is prone to unless the people involved are really in tune with each other.

think harder, it's not bright enough to read in here

IQ is a stupid metric. --hold for laughs-- it's arrogant for psychiatrists and others to believe that we've learned enough about the workings of the mind to be able to assign a numerical value to something as abstruse as a person's intelligence. how softly humorous that I should utilize thesaurus.com to augment my vocabulary when writing a post on this topic. the offending word was abstruse, if you hadn't already guessed.

and yet, the IQ concept is pervasive in much of the world's population. so, having shared my negative opinion of IQ, I'll proceed to play games and assume that it is a legitimate concept despite the fact neuroscience has asked far more questions than it has answered. one widely held belief is that the faster and more thoroughly a person has absorbed and understood new information, the smarter they are. I don't have a major problem with this. however, I can't help but mention that words like thoroughly, absorbed, and understood, which admittedly have obvious meanings, are only obvious at the language level; the biological processes behind them are hardly known. these words are convenient for philosophical discussions, if that's what you're into, but their ease of use disappears when you're looking at a slice of brain under a microscope.

here's something that gets overlooked: rather than a person's ability to absorb information being the main determinant of their IQ, I think their ability to ignore the noise is equally important. we're bombarded with so much bullshit that it's difficult not to be affected. since the concept of IQ is going to endure effortlessly, I think it should be revised to take this overlooked ability into account. there's an evolutionary justification as well: lions would be extinct if as a species they were mesmerized by swaying blades of grass every time the wind blew. if you want to know how you fare at ignoring noise, see if you're at a loss to the 1-800 number that's been repeated 4 times in a row on an AM radio advertisement or if the incessant jackhammer voice has busted through the doors of your castle forcing you to remember the digits to dial.

prologue to homeless living, part 2

last week I was mistaken for a street dweller. I was walking home from school via my usual route behind buildings, staring a few steps in advance of my feet, oblivious to things not in my vision, wearing the large hood of my green winter cotton/wool coat. a man in the parking lot of one retail store I was walking behind called out

"where are you headed off to?"
"home."
"that's a nice place."
"...yeah."
"good luck."

there are benefits of being perceived as homeless: you need not worry of being bothered by either home-dwelling solicitors or homeless solicitors. you have the luxury of taking advantage of rescue mission type programs without being shunned or kicked out on account of being too well off to deserve free food or bed.

it's also dangerous to be perceived as homeless. if you fall asleep on a bench in the open, you may wake up in flames because someone has doused you in gasoline and struck a match. more commonly, you risk getting beat up in an alley for the fun of violence.