10/27/2003 05:40:50 PM|||Travis|||

Last post on Wednesday?

Its amazing when I come back to this great little hole in the wall, only to realize that I haven't updated the site in almost a week. You can see that my mood is strongly correlated with the number of posts that I manage to put up. The more posts the more energetic I am in life in general.

I don't even know where the last five days went. Honeslty. Have you seen them? Perhaps they fell out of my pocket while I was trudging around campus, attending meaningless classes with thousands of depressed souls who all share the same goal of appeasing the "man".

My hatred of the learning process at school obviously continues.

After my fifty minute midterm, I had this feeling that the entire way they teach school is fucked. Once you graduate and join the ranks of office space type workers, the company that hires you has to re-train you to do you job, because you essentially know jack squat. Sure you can have the fundimentals in place, (such as how to write some simple code) but most learning happens when you become actually *interested* in some subject, and then decide on your own to learn about it. School sometimes works when your interests overlap with what you study, but how often does this happen? I got my degree because that degree was valuable and "hot". But how I now hate this forced death march in the computer lab and in the classroom, filling my mind with arbitrary, irrelevent facts.

*sigh... deep breath*

Ok, perhaps that was an overreaction coming from my mid-term today, but its how I feel. We all just need to find that one thing that does it for you. And if what you are doing pisses you off, then you need to find something else. Settling for stuff that keeps your mind in torrment is no way to live. Stress sucks. Life should be simplified.

I should quit school and become a life-long bartender that aspires to nothing besides keeping himself entertained, however I decide to do that. I think that at this point, my computer science degree is not going to be advantageous to me at all really, besides being able to say "hey, I went to college and can learn within their silly guidlines".

I wouldn't hire people on this basis. In fact, I wouldn't care at all if you had a degree or not. It would be trivial. More important is the question- what have you created in your life?

And afterall, isn't that all that really matters?

I am thinking about joining the sailing team here at UCSB. I have always liked to sail, and am searching for something competitive that I can throw myself into. I think that if I can win in something, accomplish SOMETHING, then I can start to spiral upward into greatness. I can achieve something small, and then start to build momentum until I can achieve something incridibly large.

I saw a machinima about my favorite poem today- Ozymandus. The machinima wasn't anything but an inactment of the poem using the Quake 2 engine, nothing amazing. I have no idea how it won the "technical achievement" award at the Machinima festival this year, they must be struggling.

But at anyrate, its about a man who stumbles upon a great, toppled statue. And at one time, this statue represented someone's power.... the power of a great king. But now it lies shattered and desoltate in a sea of sand. Much like the pyramids, these remanents are all that can stand the test of time.

Our lives are like this. Even if we have power now, what happens in a thousand years? What shattered visages will you leave behind that others can find and marvel at?

My whole concept of pyramid building revolves around this concept. A pyramid can stand for undetermined amounts of time and is suprisingly resillent to the weather. Look at the pyramids at Gaza. How long have they been there? Thousands of years. And they always inspire people....

So I say we make a modern pyramid of equal, magnificint proportion. Perhaps it could be as big as a mountain, given the marvel of modern technology. At anyrate, it could dwarf the current pyramids, and become the biggest structure on Earth.

That way, in thousands of years, after nuclear holicost has come and gone and civilizations collapsed, there will still be this massive pyramid that all can wonder about. And then they can wonder about it, and be struck with an intense awe.

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