It's life Jim, but not as we know it...

So Halloween is creeping up on us again (you like that? creeping up on us… BWAHA!) and Christmas crap is already starting to flood its way into a retail outlet near you. Soon, we’ll all being asked to pay homage to the gods of commercial advertising who will admonish us all to forfeit our earthly monies in exchange for cheap poisonous merchandise from China. Nevertheless we will all be merry because that’s the attitude the season calls for and we’ve all apparently lost our originality and uniqueness in favor of a hive like mind and an automaton like relationship with “The Man”. However, some of us have stayed behind to guard the ever decreasing echelons of sanity and reason and will tend the fires in anticipation of those who may wish to return some day. Having our first snow “storm” (more like a light piddling from a young puppy) of the year, it’s apparent that we’re heading into an early winter. We’re approaching the halfway point through the semester, and while I haven’t been on the top of the scores list, I am certainly doing well enough to pass all my classes. Lately it’s been fairly difficult to find motivation, and I don’t mean just for school either. I’ve found it hard to get excited about work, school, hunting, camping, driving, walking, cooking, eating, sleeping, and pretty much everything my ample body is required to do. I’m not sure what this lack of inspiration could be stemming from, but it seems to be trickling its way into all areas of my life. I can speculate on possibilities, such as my age rapidly approaching 30 and the fact that I am now a parent and thus have completed the cliché middle aged white male stereotype. If I end up buying a minivan, it will officially be time to grab a razor blade and take a dirt nap in the tub. A few weeks ago, I was recalling some of my aspirations from high school (spurred on by my mother giving me a bunch of my old school stuff). It’s interesting how you think life will be when you’re young and have no idea what life is REALLY like. I was reading some of my papers from the lithe SEOP (Student Education & Occupation Planning) meetings where I listed what I wanted to do when I was out of school. Apparently, and I vaguely recall this, I wanted to be a prosthetic engineer, which is to say that I wanted to build replacement limbs for human patients. I think what I had in mind was that I wanted to build war machines for military uses, and the narrow minded, lackluster counselor wrote down the closest thing they could grasp to what I was trying to explain. Nevertheless, things have changed considerably since then. I think it’s funny that when you’re in high school you’ll hear people say that they’ll be a brilliant computer wiz with a huge chain of stores and a massive portfolio, a private yacht and a small harem. You’ll never hear a them say that they want to be a mid-level shift supervisor at a computer parts retailer, still lives with their parents and is doinking one of the girls from the shipping department. It makes me wonder to what extent we set our selves up for failure by our own unreasonable standards. It is pumped into us from a very young age that we can do anything and be anything we want to be if we try hard enough. By the time you’re 35 or 40 you’ve realized that it’s no longer possible for you to achieve what you wanted, all the pieces are now in place for a mid-life crisis of epic proportions. I think about where I am and the dreams I currently have, and then I retrospectively observe the path I’ve trodden so far and how I have fallen far short of pretty much every dream I have ever had, it makes one tempted to project current trends into the future. I still have some dreams (though they pale in comparison to where I thought I would be at this point) and can’t help but think that I am not going to be able to acquire those dreams within the time available to me. I would like to see myself finishing my degree, moving on to graduate school and obtaining an advanced degree (probably still a PhD in Nuclear Physics) and then moving forward into the world with great plans of working with some of the greatest minds on the planet on fantastic projects which will hopefully yield vast improvements in human technology and understanding of our universe. Then I think about things from a realistic standpoint. I am an average guy with reasonable intelligence who is still an undergrad in an infantile physics program at a barely established university in the Midwestern US and has to work full time to meet his obligations to his family. Many of the more interesting problems relating to fields I am interested in have already been solved and by people with much higher intellects than I, leaving me to likely fill positions in the “just-above-peon” category. I haven’t made any friends with terrific political relations I could exploit to advance my status nor am I privy to sensitive information which could be used to blackmail my way up the chain. Basically, I am average and it appears that I’ll be staying this way for quite some time. Now I am sure that you all are thinking about all the good things that I have, like a lovely wife and daughter, a nice home, a good job, etc, and I recognize those things fully. I’m not complaining really, I guess I’m just disappointed in myself for having the audacity to dream so large that I was inevitably setting myself up for a shortcoming. So the point of the lesson is when a teacher tells children that they can become anything they want to become, she’s only telling half of the story (a common theme I’ve run into in EVERYTHING lately, half truths are the norm). Now for all you feminists out there, the only reason the “teacher” in my little side note was female is because most all of my early teachers WERE female and I got into the habit of saying “she” when talking about it. I have a lot more to say, but I am running out of time so I’ll post again later so you all can listen to me bellyache some more (as though there is anyone left who actually reads my stupid blog).