Isles of Scion

The primary factors leading to my dismissal were almost entirely based around the volatile conditions that I was placed into during my stay in Ridgeway. There were repeated instances of drugs, drunken fights, parties till 3 AM or later, and strangers ending up in my room and using my things. There was not a single block of 24 hours where I did not smell marijuana at least once. I witnessed everything from public urination to drug deals and I informed a counselor, my residency director, Seargent Bianca and fellow university police , as well as my RA of most if not all the situations many times as they were happening. After a few months of nothing changing I finally gave up and for the first time since junior high I fell into a slump of depression.

On my part as well I made the great mistake of assuming that my work load in community college would be equal to university college. This apparently is the same mistake made by administration in assuming that community college compares in any respect to university level work. Because of this assumption and the surprise expenses like the parking pass (which was 6 times more expensive to get than my community college park pass) I got a job with the Green Coats. Unfortunately the mixture of late hours, work load, and the hostile environment caused me to do far below my standard performance on my first quarter here. A mixture of stress (the highest levels of my entire life) and my surrounding environment caused my improvements to be slow but consistent.

However since escaping the dorms, unfortunately one quarter too late, I have been feeling completely revived. The eye twitch and inability to sleep that have plagued me for months have both subsided for the most part, although my eye does still twitch sometimes when I’m feeling ill from the heat.

Even with the more compact and larger workloads of the summer quarter where I found myself at times reading upwards of 160 pages a night (40-80 pages in each class) I still was able to retain pleasingly high levels of information. It would be unfair for me to attribute my success this quarter within myself completely, the incredible support of my girlfriend, Mr. Singletary, and that of both my professors Dr. Goodvin and Dr. Johnson respectively, each has helped me to set goals and insured that my summer quarter would be full of nothing but knowledge and confidence. Which I must say have both come to be in equally high quantities.

I still very much want to stay with Psychology, I have a deep interest in the human psyche and am a constantly active voice in all my of psychology courses. In the last two quarters my professors have learned who I was by name and all those I’ve met with personally have said that I was a pleasant addition to their classrooms. I don’t believe that my performance in the first few quarters at this university have been because of my abilities and I further disbelieve that switching to a different major would benefit me in any manor. The realm of psychology is something that will likely never cease to fascinate me and it furthers my desire to understand and help the less fortunate around me. Even though I found myself in an incredibly negative situation with my roommates even they knew that if they had serious problems they could speak to me, as my roommate did quite often.

I still need to raise my GPA to officially declare myself a full fledged major in Psychology and I believe over the next quarter I will be able to raise my GPA high enough to do so. Even considering this wall it is only stopping me from completing 302 and 303 both of which I should be able to take any quarter (to my understanding). I would also be willing to meet with the head of the psychology department to discuss becoming a major and setting necessary goals to keep myself in the major.

I know I can do this and I hope that my performance this summer proves that I am above what my current GPA shows. While it is a shame I had to discover it after being dismissed the newfound environment that I’m apart of is the one I was dreaming of from the moment I looked out to the waterfront in front of the Performing Arts Center. While I still have the rude awakener of the sun each morning through my window blinds it is a far more welcomed alarm than the nightly gagging of hungover suite mates. I would like to return in the fall and my planned course outline includes: Classical Studies 450 “Aristophenes & Athena”, Psychology 351 “Abnormal Psychology”, and Psychology 321 “Learning”. This will cover two of the requirements needed for my Major and my intended completion date of my major is by Summer of 09 at the latest. I am greatly looking forward to this quarter as all three classes interest me on a personal level as well as academically.

Here is what confuses me about hatred in this country.

If you make fun of someone that happens to be fat its ignorance towards obesity.
If you make fun of someone that happens to be a woman its misogyny.
If you make fun of someone that happens to be old its hatred towards the elderly.
If you make fun of someone that happens to be any race other than white its racism.
If you make fun of someone that happens to be poor you are insensitive to issues of poverty.
If you make fun of someone that is white and middle class or better it’s quite alright.

This goes for everyone from jokes to assault. If the police officer had tazered some white kid to death it would of been shocking but would of been shrugged off in a few days. The only reason the “Don’t taze me bro” kid got media attention is because it was hilarious.
I admit there are awesome things about being white, because everyone tells me there is. Sure I can’t make fun of anyone that isn’t white without getting attacked or labeled a racist, sure I can’t get financial aid (whereas a close friend who lives in a home instead of a mobile home can and all he has on me is a natural tan), sure when I apply for jobs I’m weighted against the advantageous design of diversity.

Hell lets look at the fact that diversity was defined in my developmental psychology book as “an integration of non white people and cultures”. By definition I’m apparently bland and undeserving. Then look at the fact that I get lumped in with every white hick who says something racist and for reasons unbeknownst to me I have to work harder just because my parents or my grandparents or my great grandparents were dicks to other people.

I didn’t even understand the concept of racism till I got into school. I lived in a neighborhood with people from all over the world (ethnically speaking) and most of us were middle class or below, not once did I think to myself “Wow these darkies need to shape up”. I had a great time and I grew up pretty damn fine, and yet I find myself getting into school and being drilled about how my people are rapists and slave owners. Most times not even emphasized in the past tense.

Racism is just like Gender typing. Racism is not inherently human much like boys are not inherently attracted to much of the things marketed to boys and girls to the things marketed to girls. We as a society treat people differently because of predetermined assumptions on how they should be. Instead of working for individual androgyny we fight hard to keep the “women love makeup and eating disorders” and “Men love cares and burning shit” just as we do the whole “All black people are opressed” and “All white people got it made in the shade”.

At the point people start making broad assumption about any group of people, even germans during world war II, they begin making one erroneous statement after the next. It’s a correlational flaw, did the cop tazer the kid to death because he was black and the cop was racist OR did the cop’s actions get labeled racist because the kid he tazered to death was black. Either way the cop was a dick but using his actions to explain how all white people have it out to tazer black people to death is retarded.

Man…there are far too many red underlined words in this rant…ah well.

PS. Lest I forget the only instances I’ve had with traffic police has been them pulling me over an telling me that people like me kill kids because I was caught going over the speed limit. The first time I was 16 and still learning how to drive the guy brought me to a tear stricken panic because he was shouting into my window and calling me a dumb shit for not knowing where my registration was.

I will begin by firstly stating that I am in no way a qualified source for this information. I am at best a Philosopher…however there seems to be a bit that people don’t seem to grasp that I feel even a child should understand―at least I assume considering that these have been more or less the same concepts of the universe I’ve had since a child (shortly after being disillusioned by going to church).

Firstly we must establish a few things. The following is a Mobius Strip:

I enjoy this figure because it helps explain a staple point in the human sensory system. We understand very little in the world, as a general rule of thumb the unaided human sees at most 2% of their surrounding world. There are different forms of light that we cannot gaze upon, creatures so small that they go unseen, and a plethora of other things that escape all of our senses. This is important, it helps us understand the misconceptions of the universe that were made previously. A quote of mine that I like to tell people is that “Humanity explained its universe when it could see but 2% of it, It’s fallacies now live on because it harnesses but 2% of its brain.”

The Mobius Strip is a single sided object in a 3 dimensional world, many people would assume upon looking at this figure that it in fact as two obvious sides. However if you run a pencil along the middle of any point of it you will eventually meet your original pencil point. This is much like time, we assume and have built much of our belief structure around the idea that time itself has a beginning and an eventual end. Because of this belief in the mortality of time we have attempted to explain just where does it come from, where does the matter that it commands come from? Well I would argue that this question of “where” it comes from is inherently flawed, much like the Mobius strip it doesn’t in fact have a where at all nor does it have a when.

So hopefully we’ve grasped the first step to the universe. The universe itself has no beginning and no end, matter neither came from anywhere nor shall it go anywhere. The entirety of reality exists and will likely always exist (unless something remarkable happens). The big bang is likely a process that has occurred an infinite many times before (or hell might even of only happened once) and who is to say that this universe is the only one? We may be one of many big bangs all over a larger cosmos.

What happened after this big bang?

While I am going to probably screw things up I will attempt to explain it with my very limited knowledge. After the big bang super heated elements were shot across the universe, as they accrued distance rolling spheres of matter began to take shape and their ever increasing gravity mixed with their incredible temperatures caused super massive objects (IE stars) to form. Around these super massive objects were large disks of smaller matter that orbited them and likely collided and in some cases melded to make smaller objects (IE planets and meteor rock).

Either because of the dramatic events involved with the big bang or some other yet unexplained phenomena lead to the formation of black holes. These incredible forces of gravity pulled in super massive objects which consequently brought in their smaller objects to form galaxies. During this time the smaller objects began to cool; as they did the lighter materials moved to the surface and the heavier ones sank into the cores. On our planet in particular (and likely many more out in the cosmos) volcanic activity spewed super heated water vapor and different gases into the air as they continually fired during the early and violent period of Earth’s young life. This process slowly formed an archaic atmosphere and as the water vapors cooled the filled the large pits that covered the Earth. This was the beginning of Oceans.

Throughout this time innumerable chemical reactions were happening all over the world and in fact all over the galaxy (as I imagine they still do). At some point the simplest of life was formed via these processes, either on the Earth or abroad and carried to Earth via a meteor. The first life was likely extremely simplistic, not even carrying the protein information that current life forms use to transfer characteristics onto young. As time progressed these creatures became more and more adapted for the environment. I would think that the first of these creatures would be small plants, phytoplankton (I think that is what plant plankton is called).

The question of why is quite simple. There was a vast source of food in the water and in the air, Carbon Dioxide. This was likely far greater in the very early stages of Earth’s evolution than it is now. These plants advances from simple single cell CO2 processing machines into more complicated multi cellular ones. Their success and expansion causing oxygen to spread and flourish in the water and surrounding airspace (which settled because of gravity and the atmosphere). At some point in this process some of the simpler organisms (maybe plants but I’m skeptical) discovered much like plants the now abundant supply of oxygen floating around, for whatever reason this material was far easier to process for energy than carbon dioxide and thusly the organisms that began using it were quicker and more active―this was the beginning of the first animals.

These animal organisms went along with the same basic process of successes and failures and the optimization and mutations that all living things are accustomed to either experiencing or witnessing (anyone who feels mutations don’t exist must of never seen a freak show). Much like the human brain as optimization occurred among the creatures their similarities and homogeneity became more and more difficult to see.

Somewhere in this timeframe plants had begun moving onto land and with them likely came some amphibious creatures. Generally when a resource is exposed and is found to be flourishing then creatures that desire that resource will follow. For primal creatures it is food, for Humans it can be something as trivial as shiny metal.

This process will continue with different geographical phenomenon and cosmic forces impacting it up until the first humans. I imagine the first set of humans spread off from the primates because of some dramatic mutation to the brain. Either by radiation or perhaps because of a dramatic influx of food. Or it might have been an inevitable effect of the changes in our throats (the ability to make dexterous sounds as opposed to simple grunts). This is something I don’t know a great deal about but I’m quite certain that humans did expand from Africa.

Again we ask why? Well when you look at language itself you see a dramatic transition from a singular point. Proto-Indo-European (I believe is the name) of a language that all (or almost all) languages from the coast of Europe to as far east as India can be connected to. These languages came up from Africa into Minoan Crete in the form of Linear B and likely were a few other languages before Linear B in Africa itself. Native and South Americans were likely the result of traveling across the Alaskan-Russian land bridge that existed (I believe much of it is under water now).

What about god?

As I believe I noted earlier in this piece I believe most fantastic stories of the past are best explained by the fact that humanity could only see 2% of the world around them and that now the reason these stories survive is that humanity uses but 2% of its collective brains. When we look at religion and the similarities across religions of persons that likely never met it seems to some that this is a justification for their reality.

It appears to me to be an inevitable result of our own similarities. Taking normal development into account all humans sense their world physically in the same fashion, the thing that makes us different is our means of deciphering what we are sensing. It would make sense then that people across the world with similar technological difficulties and similar environments (as in we all are on Earth) would come up with similar but somewhat altered (because of differences in environment) versions of how our world and at times the Universe came into being.

I find it hard to believe that anyone has read the religious texts of two faiths that formed near one another and not seen nigh plagiarized material in one if not both of them. Each taking from one the other their good ideas and attempting to make something better. It is marketing at a level of wondrously epic proportions.

However I find it hard to believe personally that any being could or would create the universe with such harmonious results (albeit chaotic harmony but anyone in a long term marriage has similar challenges) would in that same breath create something so frail as living things. To think they could built a nicely harmonized push of heat and expansion to gravity in stars so that they didn’t expand forever and consume planets or fall in upon themselves would be the same being that can’t get passed the action of pooping to take care of poor processing techniques.

That a universe would be created for the sole purpose of fostering a group of small bipedal mammals and that same universe would be filled with extremes that are constantly working to mutate; burn; freeze; crush; irradiate and in all cases kill them is illogical. Unless we look at how I play Sim City then it might make sense. Considering Will Wright has done a better job of creating a Galaxy leads me to believe that if there was a divine creator they were hardly university grade intelligent.

In Closing 

The universe seems to show no signs to me that it has a definitive beginning or an end. If it is in fact on an ever expanding tract that will never end then it is true that this particular time will inevitably lead to the final slowing of the last moving atom and the eternal darkness of all the cosmos. However as in the past we cannot see our entire world yet and I feel it is a great injustice to attribute such a beautiful harmony that has taken millions of years to some poorly written deity (Albeit I did enjoy Greek Mythology I doubt Cosmos would have created a being as dense as Ouranos) a deity who couldn’t even do well enough to inform his creation what matter they were actually made of (Carbon and not Silicon).