stimulation
13:21 07/11/2003
This is something I wrote a couple of months back, on 6th of September. Thought it was suitable for here.
You know I had an idea today. It was another one of those days where I have this feeling of something hanging over me, in this case it was my maths repeat exam which is taking place the day after tomorrow. Exams often have this affect on me, but only when I’m not prepared. This wasn’t and isn’t always the case, but for a number of years now it has been happening. This feeling tends to create a despondancy in me, a sort of lack lustre boredom, where I don’t really do anything. It’s not that I don’t think I need to study, nor that I don’t care about the exam. I do, I just don’t seem to give a damn. Occasionally I get a feeling of panic, and the fear that I might fail comes, but it passes overpowered by a sense of numbness.
I often look to TV for the answer, or perhaps a book. A book is dangerous though, since it can suck you in and you find yourself several days later with the book read, but nothing else done. TV always seems a safe bet, at most it’s going to take two hours to watch a film. Of course that rarely happens. Occasionally, it does work. I sit down, watch some TV and then I can go study. But a lot of the time, I just end up a couch potato, flicking between channels searching for something….anything. (Daytime TV alas doesn’t have a lot to offer.)
So that was my day today, I played some computer games, mostly Freecell trying to keep my stats up, and also flicked around the channels on the TV. Not once did I try to do anything productive, apart from make myself some food a couple of times. Nothing…. That’s very depressing, it’s like a Catch-22, you want to do something but beacuse you haven’t done anything, you don’t feel like doing anything, because what’s the point? Hmm….interesting thought, I’ll come back to this in a bit.
However, things got a little better later. It always happens at night, I have a crappy day and then I watch a film and it makes me laugh and I feel better. The power of laughter is an amazing thing. Tonight it was “Bullworth,” a political satire starring and directed by Warren Beatty. I’d heard about it before, heard it was a good movie, and so I thought that I might watch it. I actually decided to watch “The French Connection” again when I found it was on, but “Bullworth” came on first and so I started to watch it. It was funny, it pretty much straight away made me laugh and continued to make me laugh. I found myself laughing at a later part of the movie then stopped as I realised that what I was laughing at was a tragedy, in fact it was horrifying. This group of ten year olds and younger going round dealing drugs with guns down their pants. A sobering thought when it sank in. That’s good satire.
The movie has a positive message, it presented a lot of the problems in America and it did so with heart. Maybe that’s what I found refreshing about it, it had heart and I think that Beatty really cared about what he was making. That’s the kind of the thing that inspires people and it inspired me. It also stimulated me, forcing me to think about things that I don’t always think about, although I do think about them from time to time.
It was during an ad break that I realised that I was feeling chipper and stimulated not drowsy and bored. This got me to thinking, that maybe that was what was wrong with me earlier. I hadn’t been stimulated and hence was unable to study or to even begin to study. My plan tomorrow is to try and get stimulated, though how I will do this I have no idea.
I suspect that I may be in the wrong course and that computers is too narrow a field for me, even if my course covers a wide-range in the field of computers. I think that I was better stimulated in Primary and Secondary School, perhaps because some of my teachers where actually trying to stimulate us, whereas most, nearly all, of our lecturers don’t go out of their way to stimulate us, instead just imparting what we need to know for the exams. A sad state of affairs. But not only that, in Secondary School, I had science, english, maths, business, history, geography, irish, french, german and music. I begin to suspect that this wide ranging syllabus is more in my nature than a specialisation. This is not to say that I wasn’t bored in Secondary School, I often was. This had more to do with the speed we were covering things, which I often found too slow. I think this is why some of my teachers where lax in letting me chat to a friend of mine, who no doubt felt things were going slowly as well, since he is probably smarter than me. He now holds the advantage of discipline and focus which were once what I thought where my fortes.
But these are not my only problems, often I don’t really want to have remember in detail some of the stuff I have to learn. Once I’ve read it, and hopefully I got the idea then I don’t really want to go over it again. But then if I got the idea, I shouldn’t really need to go over it again. Sounds like another Catch-22.
So stimulation and inspiration appear to be the key. You gotta feel stimulated and inspired to want to do something. After watching “Bullworth” I feel stimulated and inspired. I play once again with the idea of trying to do my little part to help make the world a better place. This leads me to the idea of getting into politics and there I shudder. To be able to do a lot, you need to go into politics, and that’s something I don’t want to do. Maybe that’s why politicians are doing such a bad job, and are so corrupt. The people who would be good as politicians don’t want to go near the stinking mess. I guess it’s a question of if you care enough, which if my idea is right, depends on whether you’re stimulated enough.