Decent into madness

I have recently jumped ship from my third academic ship and it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to follow exactly what i'm doing with my life. I can only imagine how difficult it is for anyone else. So i thought i'd do a quick run down of my academic history, highlighting how i got to where i am today and where i'm trying (for now) to go.

Legend has it that my education started a few minutes after i was born when my dad told me the secret of life: "buy low, sell high." I find this a little hard to believe and don't actually remember it but it's what i'm told. Most of my memories after that are brief painful ones: falling off the top bunk, trying to pet a strange dog, (barking and biting insued) foreskin cought in zipper, and so on and so forth.

After that i can fast forward to grade two. My teacher was Mr. Mac and i can remember two of his lesons. The first one was a little song that we all had to sing before we were allowed out for recess. It was simply the letters of the word because to a generic rythm. b-e-c-a-u-s-e...i don't know why but it stuck with me and i have never misspelt that word. The other lesson was trying to figure out how to spell the "tion" word ending. He asked how we thought it would be spelt and we through out all kinds of suggestions. "schun" "con" "xum" we never did get it. And when he spelt it out on the board all i remember thinking is "that makes no sense."

Few more years passed and i suppose i must have learned the basics, reading, riting 'n 'rithmatic but nothing realy stands out in memory. So we pass right on up to high school where there are all kinds of fun and exciting things happening to expand and open my mind which i will not go into here now or probably evr in public. But the (near) end result of all this was i discovered a love of argueing. At that point i set my sights on becomeing a lawyer. It seemed like the perfect carrer for me, i enjoyed speaking, winning, searching for that little bit of information that will prove you're right. On top of that i had become very politcaly...i want to say active but aware is probably a better word for it...anyways i was big on the social unjustice band wagon. So i did a bit of research and found the concencus to be the best route to Law school was political science. So that was the first long term plan.

That half fell apart in grade twelve when i got into the whole environmental thing. I decided i wanted to specalize in the area of environmental law and found a very intresting program at Grenfell called environmental sciences. I figured i'd get down in the nitty gritty of this subject for four years minor in polisci and go on to law school. That idea flew right out the window in my first enviro-class when i realized how insane the subject was.

You know that liberal bias that Bush n co talk about seriously and Stephen Colbert mocks relentlessly? It actully exists. I wrote my first paper on the absurdity of global worming, because in the 80's universities were teaching about the global COOLING effect. How can you take something like this seriously. Polisci wasn't all that intrigueing either. So i started looking for a new area of study.

I was fairly physically active at te time and i really enjoyed training, the science behind it helping pther people, the whole nine yards. So i transfered into the Kinesiology program at MUN. Law was still somewhere in the back of my head, but fading fast.

When i got to MUN i still wanted o be one of these "well rounded people" and took two more courses that, i can say with a good amount of convidence, shaped the rest of my educational carrer. History of ideas with Mike O'Brien and Intro to Philosophy with Bernie Wills. I loved both classes. I quickly took to the idea of doing a double major with Kin and one of those two feilds. My second history course was not as intresting and after talking to Proff O'Brien in the smoking pit i realised that we really didn't have a very good department for history of IDEA's...we've got canada, milltary, newfoundland but no ideas. No art either. So the working game plan became double major philosophy and kinesiology.

I got a lot of comments as to what a strange combination that was and the natural opposistion of the two styles of thinking quickly began to emerge. Philosophy taught me to think critically and ask questions...Kin asked me to rejurgitate information. The latter quickly began to grate on my nerves. So after much hesitating i have droped out of Kinesiology and am now strictly a Philosophy major English minor (cause books rock and the english proffs at MUN are rockstars) Philosophy has also been the straw that broke the cammels back for law school...i could never do anything so beuracratic and closed minded now. So pretty munch my plans for the future are masters, PhD, Proff...if i can hack it, if not i'll end up a ridiculously well read and cynical construction worker (probably welding, i've always liked the image of someone bent over a hunk of metal, one hand holding a mask over there face, illuminated by the brilliant jumping sparks...)

So yeah...quit polisci, quit enviro, quit kin, quit law. Fingers crossed for the current plan of attack.