It Will Be Fun, They Said

I have two types of chill playlists on Spotify: Ataraxia (Tranquility) and Good Vibes. While I've noticed that I tend to listen to Ataraxia the most, I've gotten back in the groove of my Good Vibes songs, which tend to include more rap. I've thus chosen one of my favorite songs from the latter playlist to be the backdrop of this post.

Sunset, by Kid Ink (I love his little hiccups at the beginning of each song)(explicit):

Or if rap (chill or nah) isn't your thing, another song from the same playlist then.

Are You With Me, by Lost Frequencies:

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I find that I very rarely, if ever, set aside time to reflect on myself. I am unconcerned with character development, I just happen to notice it in myself as it passes by.

I'm a little less lax when it comes to my future. I tend to worry about that a little more, mostly because I have no career path set before me yet. I can go in any direction with an ecology major, but there are too many directions - I've no idea which branch I even want to set foot on, let alone think about all the twigs that sprout off even further along.

In trying to figure out what I want to do, I've been looking at a lot of internship opportunities. Last summer, I saw a real job for me in the wildlife rehabilitation area, but unless I get a position high up in that department, in a likewise large facility, I don't think I will be happy. Not entirely because I seek leadership, but I want to be specialized - I want to go to grad school, hopefully for a Ph.D, but for that I may need to study veterinary medicine - a field even more difficult than a doctor or nurse. I don't think I have the discipline for that.

I'm scouring the internet for opportunities next summer already - which SUCKS, because no dates have been released yet this early in the year. I found a program that will let me research abroad in many different areas of the world, as close as Big Sur, as far as South Africa, and as exotic as Fiji. This sounds entirely amazing to me, especially because I can get an entire semester's worth of credits doing that. I was also sent an email from my school about another different, shorter program, which will let me knock out my required upper-division lab class, also abroad. But since that occurs in May and I will (hopefully) still be in Sweden at that time, I'm not considering it. If all else fails, an associate at my wildlife internship last year let me know of an opportunity interning at the San Francisco Zoo. I hope I don't come across as cocky if I assert getting into that program will be easy for me with a letter of recommendation from another wildlife facility.

This is all short-term though. What of after college? A reality, for me, that seems to be approaching a lot more quickly than for my other classmates of the high school class of 2014.

Because I didn't even question I should take as many AP classes as I could in high school, I am on course to graduating an entire year early - given a course I need to take goes through the study abroad team and I can take it in Sweden. Even at a minimum, I'd graduate a semester early (I was two credits short of starting college a sophomore). It's crazy to think that next academic year might be my last year. I started, and just as quickly I stopped.

I'm not really into this whole college experience. Everyone I know is either having a blast, or had a blast and is telling me college will be some of the best times of my life. I mean, I made a few friends, but none I can see myself holding onto - one is too uninteresting (she agrees with everything I say) and the other very reserved (but she texts her old friends all day). A few others I don't even talk to except in class. I don't see any reason to stay here except to postpone my entrance into the real world. I've made no outstanding memories, I agree the campus and surrounding area is absolutely stunning, but I have no personal tie to it. If I graduated right now, I wouldn't even look back. Probably because this was a poor choice to begin with, but I aimed too high with my applications and was basically stuck with this university or an even worse one.

College has become a chore. It is not to be relished, but is merely a stepping stone to the next phase of my life. I'm not happy about what it's become, I wish I had better reasons to want to stay and extend my time here. I was hoping that when the classes got smaller I'd find more people to be friends with, but now I have those classes they are just enjoyable partners for homework. The people here just don't fit with me it seems, and the fact that they come in as large groups from local high schools already with friends doesn't help.

I tried clubs at first. I became a part of my school's Quidditch team, but it was so awkward. It took months for people to recognize my name, and it felt like we met just to practice. We always talked of getting together for a movie marathon or something outside of practice, but if they ever did I wasn't invited. It didn't help that I wasn't very good at the sport itself either; I always felt I was in the way of some of my more athletically superior teammates. Some people were already friends from past years, and very quickly new recruits in the first months trickled out. I only stayed on the entire year because I was too shy to leave. The only friend I made there is studying abroad this semester in England, and since I didn't really want to rejoin the team anyways I emailed the team head and told him since I was so "busy" and since I was planning to study abroad next semester I "didn't have time" to attend practices anymore.

I don't regret leaving the club, but I am very bored all the time. I don't see any other clubs I'd be interested in, and neither do I want to try joining any again. I never even enjoyed the clubs I was in in high school, though I was a part of three. Those experiences are hauntingly similar to my foray into college clubs.

But I'm scared to leave college. I know how hard the job hunt is, and I'm afraid no one will hire someone as young as me. I want to hold onto the institution of the young, I want the comfort of someone there to constantly guide me along whenever I ask. I don't look forward to leaving, but I'm not enjoying my stay to the fullest. I don't want to become complacent in a job, but neither am I making great strides here. I've boxed myself in; I've nowhere to go.

I constantly wonder if I should've considered transferring universities more seriously. A girl in my dorm, my second friend of only three at the time, transferred to Purdue at the beginning of second semester of our first year. She realized this place wasn't a fit for her, and she got out early. I wish I could've been that brave.

I will graduate early no matter what, given the chance. I'm not going to stay here and waste money that can be saved for grad school. Paying outrageous sums just for the experience and none of the education is stupid, especially since, so far, the experience sucks. I'll just have to chin up and start looking more carefully into job careers from now on.

Pitting Religion Against Religion

I'm not in a very happy mood today, so I chose a not very happy song.

When You Break, by Bear's Den (explicit)

For all it's melancholia, it's a gorgeous song. Bear's Den may become my next band obsession.

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By far, at this point in the semester, my favorite class has to be Paganism to Christianity.

For the first three weeks we covered Greek mythology, one of my stronger suits in the world of mythology and religion. I've learned a lot of things that the Percy Jackson series didn't cover, like the Dodona oracle, the exegetai, Eleusinian Mysteries - basically, the nitty-gritty stuff that HoO didn't need to cover in order to make sense. Not to mention I read the entire Theogony and Works and Days by Hesiod, which covered five pages, top to bottom in tiny print, of notes about who fathered who and who offended who, plus little tidbits like the actual names of the three Fates/Moirai (Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos), the fact that Athena also goes by Tritogenia (Third-Born), and Aphrodite comes from Cyprus, hence her alternate name Cytherea.

Another interesting thing I kind of always assumed but never really outright learned was the complete and utter lack of secularism. Religion was the law, and kings or governments made decisions based on the gods' will - good omens and the like. In fact, Plato was the first to outright suggest that matters of belief could be criminal offenses. But then again, Plato wanted to ban jokes, so what does he know?

Perhaps my favorite thing I've learned so far is a quote by Xenophanes, and the TL;DR version goes, "If horses could paint, their gods would be horses."A.k.a., anthropomorphism is stupid. Quite interesting how skepticism on religion in Greece was tolerated unless it messed with the practice of rites*. Don't believe in the gods the same way as everyone else? Cool, unless you don't carry out the proper rites. You don't need to believe to practice.

*With the famous exception of Socrates, but to be fair, he was not only disbelieving of the gods, but also taught his pupils the same, and introduced foreign deities. Polytheism doesn't mean it's more liberal in tolerance than Christianity.

This week we started on Roman religion. Up until now, I had assumed that Romans took Greek mythology and just changed a few names around, but it actually worked out a little more like convergent evolution - the Romans already had their gods - Jupiter, Juno, Minerva*, etc. (Ceres was the first to become more Grecian, followed closely by the adoption of Asclepius - not surprising, health and fertility were pretty important things). It's more like the Romans noticed the similarities between the two sets of deities and adopted the cults of Greece into their religion. It was Greece's antiquity - that which the Romans very, VERY much admired - that garnered so much interest and respect from Roman citizens.

*In Percy Jackson, it seems as though Minerva was much less powerful than her Greek version, and Bellona took over her job position. As Reyna told Annabeth, Minerva was more the goddess of arts and crafts in Roman society. But I just learned that on Capitoline Hill is a temple dedicated to Jupiter Optimus Maximus, as well as Juno and - surprise - Minerva. Riordan, what's up with that?

I learned the Romans have no equivalent to the Greek Theogony - no myths about the squabbles of the gods, or who did what to which poor human. There were few stories at all, with or without a moral. Instead, they had rites to celebrate Rome's growth, like a certain victorious day here or a birthday of an emperor there (totally looking at you here, Augustus, you self-centered, conceited master leader you). This isn't to say they didn't sacrifice to the gods at all, but to them the gods were more like benevolent patrons of the state - you could say to worship the gods would be the same as worshipping Rome itself (though that statement is false, citizens didn't sacrifice to their city or anything).

Another interesting (in a different way) part of this class is the number of Christians/Catholics taking it (I also know of one Jewish girl). Not that the interesting part is that they're taking a class that talks about paganism (described by my teacher as "everything other than Christianity"), but how astute and quick they are to draw similarities between their religion and that of the Greeks and Romans.

For instance, I have heard comparisons made between the production of Gaia from Chaos/the Chasm, and the beginning of the universe in the Genesis. I've heard how the Golden Age of Man is similar to the Garden of Eden, and how Pandora is similar to Eve in that they are the cause of all man's misery (My personal observation, might I add, is how they were set up to fail from the beginning by God/the gods, and yet it is still their fault. Pandora with the tantalizing box and a curious heart created by the gods, and Eve with the tantalizing apple of knowledge and free will given by God). Most recently is the comparison of Romulus and Remus to Cain and Abel - brothers killing each other, yeah, I see it.

I don't know, but for some reason it bothers me how much these people are trying to find their God in everything, even in an era when the concept of their God didn't even exist yet. They're kind of like that friend that somehow always manages to make the conversation about them - "Oh, yesterday I went biking with my family." "Really? That's so cool, I once had a bike my brother gave to me, we went riding together all the time, I have to tell you about this one time where we blah blah blah I've changed the subject to me now, hope you didn't have anything else you wanted to say."

That doesn't bother me so much as what went down today though. A boy (the same who connected the Golden Age with Eden and Romulus with Cain) had a lot to say when we learned the Romans weren't as concerned with ethics.

Some backstory: So basically, the Romans had no dogma, and no moral code. To have the favor of the gods in their society meant one was successful, wealthy, and healthy. As Cicero said, "The supreme law is the well being of the people." They had social customs - they had piety, or respectfulness to the gods and the people around them - but their religion itself did not have a code of ethics.

A lot of religious classmates took extreme issue with this news. The boy previously mentioned asked if the religion didn't provide morals, did the government do it instead? Since technically the gods and government are the same thing. I thought this was a fair question, but it slightly unsettled me because it meant in the boy's mind there absolutely needed to be a guideline for daily life from a higher power. If it didn't come from a god, then it had to come from a god-like source. The possibility a code, in any form, didn't even exist in the first place couldn't seem to occur to him. That thought is scary, that he thinks humans are such weak creatures that we cannot independently and rationally determine for ourselves what is right and wrong, and that we'd screw it up if we ever did.

Another dude asked since the Roman society offered no moral code, did the citizens go elsewhere to seek guidance? This one pissed me off much more than the first question, because it implied citizens could not be moral without someone, probably supernatural, telling then what was right and wrong. In my mind, the boy's tone was condescending - how could these people possibly know what to do unless someone else explicitly told them? They must have gone to a different cult for guidance, they wouldn't've implicitly known to be honorable. This last analysis also pissed me off because it implied conversion - a practice many Christians love to promote despite the obvious discomfort of the recipient - not because they "fear God's wrath" and would rather prefer to "sin," but because it's an unwarranted and unwanted imposition of one point of view over another (Can you tell this experience is personal?).

I've never witnessed so many hands raised to ask questions yet - six in succession, quite a lot in a class where no one really has a hard time understanding the material. This phenomenon ties in with I've witnessed with other religious people, namely Christian and Catholics, who all seem fixated on a God telling them what is right and wrong. I've heard extremists - the ones who won't outright say that they think Christianity has a monopoly on morals - claim that without the Bible and/or the Ten Commandments, many people would genuinely not know what to do, and we'd have many more murderers and criminals in general without religion. An interesting claim, since recent stats have revealed .07% of self-reported prisoners are atheist. (What Percentage of Prisoners are Atheists? It’s a Lot Smaller Than We Ever Imagined)

I'm clearly revealing my own bias now, so I'll stop. An interesting note on myself is how I automatically link sources to facts after writing essays that need multiple in-text citations as compared to high school. It happened in my last post too.

Results and Conclusion (Is this a scientific report format I detect?): I am enjoying my class on religion the most out of my four total classes, probably because I'm such a Greek mythology buff to begin with. However, I'm not appreciating the constant comparison of one religion to another, supposedly and traditionally better one. But since I understand that they cannot help their upbringing any more than I can help mine, I won't condemn a person simply because their one view (on a subject that matters very little to me) differs from mine.

Discouraged Passion

My roommate is amazing.

How amazing?

Some people are just born with the gift of perfect timing.

Her essay reminds me of when I was applying to colleges and selecting my majors for each, and my parents were trying really hard to get me to at least consider a field in the arts. I love art, but I'm a little narrow-minded and self-centered in my pursuits - I only like art when I'm the one doing it. I adore playing the piano and I love to draw and paint - but if I were to attend a symphony or visit a museum, I'd get bored very quickly.

Besides that, I also didn't want to pursue art because there's little to no job stability. It's interesting how much of what we fondly remember of the classical era is art - epic poetry, statues, murals, architecture, and of course paintings - but it's such a poor and uncertain field to follow in the post-modern age. I wish I weren't so shallow as to have money be such an important thing to me, but it is a crucial element to a comfortable and happy life.

But my roommate has reminded me of how much I love to draw. It's fun for me, and a break from my computer, and I won't keep coyly denying that I'm not good at it anymore - I'm no Picasso, but I'm certainly better than a lot of other people.

In my first few weeks at college I finally got back into my Evanescia project and finished Aria - whom I had technically finished last October but just never got around to editing. I no longer have my Wacom tablet with me so I decided to leave the pencil marks rather than smoothing it out like I did with the previous people. Besides, I didn't want to mess up the blonde hair, as it wouldn't've done well with the jet-black shininess look anyways.

I got another person done too and ready for editing, but I'll probably wait a few weeks before I finish that too.

It's nice having motivating people around me again.