I’ve been watching old episodes of THE UNIVERSE from the History Channel over the past week. I’ve always found astronomy fascinating, been self-amused at the feeling I get trying to wrap my brain around the immense scope and size of things, spooked by the utterly microscopic importance of us.
I wish I had studied more science in school. As an adult I’ve read a fair number of books about the things that interest me about astronomy. I’ve delved into Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, reread Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries, and now watched THE UNIVERSE. All I can do is skim the surface, though, because I barely paid attention in high school physics (in fairness, it was the class right after lunch, and my adventures in sleep-deprivation due to uncommon biorhythms was well underway by then). Come to think about it, I barely paid attention to anything in high school that didn’t have it’s short-lived place in my window of constantly-shifting interest. That’s why I almost didn’t graduate high school.
I wonder why they don’t teach a class in high school called about living. You could spent a week on not getting into stupid debt by running up credit card balances on drinking and CDs in college. Maybe a week on how things have cause and effect, and things you do will have consequences. A day or two on how you’re not entitled to anything in this world, how karma doesn’t work out for everyone, that bad things happen to good people and vice versa.
Sure, parents and social systems are supposed to be teaching you all this, but have you seen the people that are spawning out in the world lately? I know that there have been bad or negligent parents throughout the history of civilization, but this is ridiculous.
Not to mention that most high school kids wouldn’t pay any more attention in these classes than they do in English. Have you gotten an email from these people lately? You’d think your friends were trying to beat spam monitors as hard as the marketers…
But I’m an experiential learner, more than a vicarious one. I can’t read a manual on how to use a piece of software and understand it enough to make a difference; I have to poke my way though a specific task. I can’t hear my parents say, “Credit cards are bad;” I have to run myself into a dangerous level of debt and live on Ramen noodles and work multiple jobs for years to see what they meant. So it’s not my parents’ fault that I fucked up (in oh-so-many ways). In spite of my best efforts, they did a really good job.
And I recognize that I’ve got to reap what I’ve sown, at least until they make that wormhole that allows me to time travel and fix some things here and there. But it doesn’t stop me from wishing, from time to time, that I had managed my finances instead of mangling them, that I had learned more then about the things I wish I knew now, that I could make things better for the me now by making a few sacrifices and alterations then.
Also, when you fancy suits that paid attention in high-school physics work out that wormhole thing? I’d like to request a feature that allows one to re-experience specific dreams that one can’t necessarily remember when they were dreamt, so I can have that dream of a magnified universe hovering over my night-sky. That was a nice one.
Now listening to Brian Eno’s and Harold Budd’s AMBIENT 2: THE PLATEAUX OF MIRRORS
Now watching: Apocalyptica (I may not be learning enough, but at least I can enjoy listening)
