The funny thing is I'm not tired... I'm wondering if I'm developing insomnia... Anyway I've accomplished absolutely nothing today... well that's not true, I went and got the Natalie Imbruglia CD... listening to it at the moment actually... Why is it that people have no accent while singing? Apparently Natalie is an Australian living in England though you wouldn't know it from the song... I s'pose that's the universal appeal of voice, it has no nationality.
You know it's kind of funny when I think about who I'm talking to... being as I have no idea who you are I can let my imagination run wild... Perhaps you're a psychology student estatic that some nut wondered along and is giving you all this cool free information for your thesis... maybe you're some paranoid upper-middle-class white woman that thinks I'm stalking you... Maybe you are some famous babe... At this point in time I no longer care... it's mildly liberating to talk to someone that is effectively no one... You reader have no identity... it's really very odd.. but so am I at the moment... It seems a waste to write all this only have the only advantage be the pleasant cathartic effect and have noone else on the other end to... umm... "appreciate" it... I dunno...
Though I'm not tired physically, mentally I think I'm getting a little on the fuzzy side. Can you tell though? I was having a conversation with maryam today... basically my own personal lack-of-sleep-inspired pity party. Bitching about the injustice of the world... I am a stubborn lazy bastard... that's about the total of that conversation... here... let me present my case.
Tennessee is reputed to have one of the best special education programs in the country. There are many programs helping to get children with learning disabilities up to a capacity where they can become autonomous members of society. My complaint is this: I am learning disabled. Tennessee has a designation for children who exhibit above average aptitude; "gifted." I am gifted they say. The interesting thing is that there are several government reports on the subject of children who exhibit above average aptitude which all say that when they are left in a standard program designed for average students they tend to perform poorly. They get bored, combative, surly... or in other words become stubborn lazy bastards. Because of this "gifted" students are also classified as "learning disabled." Though there are a variety of programs available to help me to learn my shapes and colors there are none if I, perhaps, wish to learn chaos theory... or the finer points of quantum mechanics... maybe even learn how DNA works in greater detail. There are no special programs developed for the "high end learning disabled" students. Not to say that I've never seen any effects of this gifted status. Generally it ammounts to a teacher here or there saying "Now I know you can do this." The problem was... I knew I could do it too... So... If I know I can do this, and They know I can do this... Why are they bothering with asking me to do it if the only tangible result will be little numbers in a book? This was my attitude. At the end of the first semester of my freshman year in highschool after I managed to screw around and barely barely pass those subject to which i objected there was a meeting... They asked me what I would like to do. I stated my desire to get out of that particular environment as soon as possible. I was asked if I would like an accelerated learning program. I said Yes, so long as that doesn't mean you're just going to give me more work. What was the end result? Well.. in 4 or my 6 classes absolutely nothing happened, no change. In one class the teacher gave me a little workbook in which I completed the first assignment, turned it in to be graded, then never saw again. In the other class, Biology, I was allowed to work at my own pace. I got exactly what I said I didn't want, more work, but because biology is actually interesting i didn't complain. By the end of the second semester I had done 3 times more work than the rest of the class. Their Exam was 200 questions... Mine was over 700.
In the rest of my highschool years no special programs were set up to help me with my learning disability... mainly because I made no effort to try to get one. I did voice my dissatisfaction with their previous efforts but the response I got made clear that they were doing just about all they were willing to do. So I continue to creep along in the classes designed for "normal" students... Though my sophmore year geometry class had a particularly ineffective teacher... I was one of the 4 that people that passed that class. The class was mostly juniors by the way. My Junior year I failed AP US History. In this case I think it was a 50:50 effort between my general apathy and the teacher's vested dislike of me. Shortly before the AP test, for college credit, she made clear that I had no chance of getting a 3 and that I would be lucky to get a 2. I got a 4, got college credit, and had an average of 100 when I took the course in summer school to get the high-school credit. My senior year went similarly... only this time with AP European History. I also tend to do poorly in literature intensive classes. This is due to my own personal, somewhat romantic, philisophical objections to the classes. Don't get me wrong, I love to read. I'm reading War and Peace right now just for the hell of it. I read Age of Innocence, Catcher in the Rye, Gulliver's Travels, Brave New World and Animal Farm just for the hell of it as well... in reverse order by the way, I read Animal Farm when I was nine... or maybe I was eight. I've also read a variety of science fiction novels... some good some bad... Shortly before I donated my collection to the school's library I added up the pages... 10 457 if I recall correctly... that was just the novels I had read in the past year. I've read a couple of Steven King books... I don't particularly like Steven King because if you cut out all of his digressions about Maine history his books would be short stories in most cases... interesting, but not fullfilling. I've also read the entire Mission Earth dekology by L. Ron Hubbard. I'm mildly frightened that he later found a religion, he is a warped little man if that series is any example. I also read the Hitchiker's Guide to the Universe... which it the collected works including the Galaxy Guide, Thanks for the Fish, etc. I think one day I'm going to get bored enough to read the Bible... I haven't been able to yet, It's a poorly constructed novel. I read parts of the Qur'an when I was much younger, I think my impression of it was rather stilted as I was a major Far Side freak at the time and it's insistence on Cows struck me a humorous at the time. Hopefully it's clear that I like reading at this point. However, I don't like literature classes. It's fine if you want me to read something, It's entirely another if you want to tell me what I read afterwords. Literature has a meaning which is highly personal. You might read a book and get a completely different meaning from it than the impression I get. We might argue about it and eventually come to some sort of understanding and agreement about what it means, and this process is exactly the problem with Literature Classes. The old men have already argued about it, and they have decided what the plays, poems, novels, etc. mean. The problem is, the old men are dead now so we students can't argue with them. The result is Leterature being taught like math... "A+B=C" Actual quote.
It's interesting that I don't bitch as much about the science and math courses though as they do the same thing as what they're attempting in the Lit. classes. I s'pose I don't object because Mathematics refers to it's own self created reality and the Sciences appear to refer to an objective reality... Literature however is a subjective reality. Words mean what we want them to mean. And what meaning we give them is only in reference to our own personal experiences. By teaching a novel or a story as definite object with specific attributes is an attempt to force us all to have the same experience. It is that Idea against which I rebel. Though I'm sure I could learn the correct answers to test questions and even effectively argue one point over another even If i didn't believe them... but I don't want to risk tainting myself with the homogenized pre-packaged ideas required of quantitative measurement needed for report cards and grades. Society it seems is desolving into a culture in which quantity is valued over quality. I might get a 67 or a 43 but, in my opinion, that 67 has more value than a 100. Is it worth it to sacrifice my identity for 33 points? Someone pointed out that I'm destroying my future by these poor grades... It my future worth sacrificing my identity? If I sacrifice my identity will it really be MY future anymore?
I was planning on writing until I got tired... it's been an hour or so now and it's not happening... I'm still curious as to whether you read these.
"I'm cold and I am shamed, lying naked on the floor" I wonder how many time's I've listened to that song now. It's been on repeat in the background the whole time and a while before that. Hey you what kind of a singing voice do you have? I don't think I have a very good one, it's versatile though. I don't sing wonderfully but I can pretty well hack my way through any vocal style fairly well. Opera, Rap, Punk, etc. I can also do a really good impersonation of a cat... or at least good enough to confuse real cats and get them to answer me or get dogs to bark at me. I'm a cat person, if you're interested. I'm not really much of a social animal myself which is probably why I don't like dogs. I prize my independence too much.
Okay... So now I've been awake for 37½ hours... still not tired...
You know... being as Amino Acids are pretty much symetical about their carbon axis how to they tell if they're R or L? Something to look up.
Ahh... the COOH group is asymetric okay... and the O is pointing to the right... remember that! Did you know that we only use right handed amino acids?
The problem I have with the human genome project is that they're still too far away. DNA must be sequenced at the level of individual neucleotide sets. It's a simple Base-4 rhythm... we know which codons correspond to which amino acids... we've sequenced the amino acids in many proteins... Of course I'm not even sure if we can sequence DNA at this point... I think we can though.
Anyway... I think I'm going to go do other things now as I've already written enough...
Aufwiederlesen ¦¬)
Ser JuanCompos