January 2005 Archives

Tonight I switched from my current AIM SN "NetCalmer" to one of my older names temporarily just for no real reason and discovered a world of people waiting for me. Had time stood still and everyone decided to wait for me on AIM? As soon as I signed in I was greeted by friendly names from the past. A lot of small-talk was had, and I got some people updated on my current life situation. But all of that isn't relevant to this post, but what is relevant is that those people exist. In my present life situation I am not as friendly as I once was, I am less likely to interact with people, I suppose beause I am a lot more scared and not as able to familarize myself with people around me. About the time I start getting to know people is about the time the semester ends. I like people, I like having friends, it is just a long hard road to get there. There is also the jelousy factor, how do I add friends without somehow making my current friends feel somehow less important to my life? I value all of my friends and everyone else in my life in the positions they hold and I don't ever want to make anyone feel that their position is threatened.

I miss a lot of my high school friends and I am having a hard time fititng in with people at UNCC well enough to find people I am socially compatible with. I don't fit in with the jocks, im not that athletic, I don't fit in with the frat boys, I don't drink and I don't fit in with the preps because I am no longer a Bill Gates clone. I am just me, I am unique. I want to find where I fit in, but I can't really find any clubs that interest me, and i'm not willing to let myself go through the whole create-a-club thing again. I had enough fun with that in high school, I am not focused (or responsible ) enough for that to work.

I have to realize that as an adult I now have a much wider spectrum of people to sort through to find the right person for me, but if all else fails, I could always just go through everyone and weed out people who I am not compatible. As for my selection of friends based on surface characteristics, I used to avoid females for friends, but I am currently enjoying talking to this one girl in my accounting class, Vannessa. She isn't like me at all, but she is nice to talk to and is very receptive to things I say. She is very easy-going with life, a personality respembling Jessica Simpson kinda, but not completely, she is less of an air-head.

I don't know what else to say except: If you want to talk to me, go for it, send me an instant message or an email or even respond to this entry with a comment, don't be shy. I love meeting people and talking to people I already know but haven't heard from in a while.

I had some negative feedback on my previous posting, actually it was more like hurtful criticism of my life and I became a little discouraged from being externally expressive. I'm going to have to learn how to filter out people who have alternative reasons for being my friends (or are perhaps bipolar?). Sometimes its so hard to figure out who is around because they like me and who is around for other reasons.

Lets get back into the swing of things with an overview of the thing that takes up the majority of my time, my education. I seem to be doing ok with accounting, I am getting a good grasp on the concepts. Calculus is just that, Calculus, it is more simple than I imagined, but still won't be my simplest course. Business Programming has been VERY dull, we have only been learning basic programming logic, something which I feel could have been covered completed in the first 2 weeks. My micro-economics course has been uneventful for me, it has been primarily a review of macro-economics, which is fairly intense in itself, but for students who have had macro-econ it is a breeze. Once the first test is over I expect the workload to get more intense and more work to be required. Major Figures in Philosphy: Plato has only met a few times, so I can't give a definate review of it yet, however, so far it has been intersting and I am enjoying it. The course requires a LOT of reading, but that isn't the primary content of the course. The reading is just a starting point for the course, the real course material is the discussion that occurs in class about the material in the text and our interpretation of it. Dr. Presler adapts well between course levels, she taught Logic on a fairly low level, but Plato is much higher level. I guess some instructors are just capable of doing that, but some ive had in the past aren't.

In other news, my new pottery wheel has arrived. I'm looking forward to throwing a few projects on it. Here is the wheel:

I haven't been very expressive in the past few weeks, this new outlet for artisitc expression should help with that and allow me to be myself more outwardly.

Other than the stuff I mentioned and hanging out with Chris I haven't really done much in the past few weeks. If anything exciting happens I will post it here, just like always.

Sometimes in the way we as humans get into patterns we lose parts of ourselves, usually in the way of spontaineous behavior and artistic expression (or for the non-gifted, artistic apprechiation). For the bigest part of my life I have been very patterned in things I did, I basicly didn't do much and anything I did do was under my parents' careful supervision and control. Now that I am an adult (did I just say the A word in reference to myself?) and am mostly free of parental dictatorship I find it hard adapting to the world around me, especially when I am expected to make any type of decision (unless control is clearly granted to me I don't make many decisions). In the past few weeks I have decided that I have become too systematic and too drone-like in my interpreation of the life experience. An attempt to correct this was made with my decision to change my living space's look a little. In August I changed my room around from the way it had been for years, but this was not enough of a change for my personality to show through. In December I decided that I loved the fresco by Raphael called "The School of Athens", so a reprint of it scaled to 4:25 scale (the original is 303 inches wide) would be appropriate. Having this 4ft wide image is interesting and in some ways inspiring. The painting is the ultimate documentation of the personality and role of a lot of philosophers from the origins of philosophy (as all characters expand from either Plato or Aristotle). Now by encouragement from Chris, as well as Oscar (new friend in Texas) is leading to me deciding to put a statue of Michaelangelo's David somewhere in my living space. There was a time in my life when I would have never thought of decorating this way, I used to have no apprechiation for good art, but through some maturing as well as some academic reinforcement I seem to be doing better at understanding art and finding it to be more than just paint on a canvas or a structure of clay. I mention the academic reinforcement some of you probably turn your heads and think "ok, he has been trained to love art", but thats not the case at all. Carol Whitman's Art Apprechiation course during Summer 2004 was a very informative course, but didn't force a love of art, just opened the door and introduced some methods for analysis of art. It is possible to analyze art too much, but if it has no meaning and is just "pretty", then it has lost its point. There are some pieces that shouldn't be explained though, such as a huge painting of a mountain or body of water, it is self-explanityory, but there should be internal feelings of being peacefully overwhelmed by the piece.

A form of art that I didn't really acknowledge much at all was music, I used to just listen to music, without really hearing it, it was a background noise for me. Being around Chris changed that a lot in the past two years. There was a post I made a few months ago called "Assorted Weirdness", which has no relevancy to anything, but is the first time I think I really started to experience music fully without it just being a background noise. It had a meaning and I had a reason to listen to it, the song I was listening to at the time had relevancy to the topic.

To make a relatively complex entry simple, I am begining to function as an individual who expressed personality by art creation (ceramics) as well as by art apprechiation. I feel that I am discovering my personality for once.

I have now dropped LBST2102-022 due to administrative errors at UNCC.

I went to Denny 215 as scheduled for my course today at 3:00PM, when I arrived there was obviously something wrong, Dr. West was in the room and the course was supposed to be taught by Mrs. Bonaparte. The administrative issue occured in the communications department, there was some sort of communication failure between the department and its faculty [laughter is now appopriate]. Mrs. Bonaparte was never notified that she had been scheduled to teach the course specified and as a result the communications department had no one to teach LBST2102 in that field. Earlier today a book was even specified for the non-existant instructor. The error was not caught until 9:30 this morning when Dr. West was looking over the information for his department (general education). By 3:00 a replacement instructor had been located, Mr. David Johnson, from the history department. Upon hearing the department of the replacement I felt like fate was sending me notification that 18 hours is just plain nuts. As soon as I could get logged into Campus Pipeline today I dropped the course (that was no easy task). I will do almost any topic at UNCC, but I draw the line at anything history again.

Dr. West mentioned that 3 other errors like the one with our course occured in the commnunications department. This seems to be just another example of how badly Campus Pipeline is fucking up the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. All issues I have had while at UNCC have occured because of that system and its related systems. UNCC, it is time to throw away CP, it sucks. We have an MIS, SIS, and several Computer Engineering departments, you would think that UNCC could develop its own proprietary system without much of a problem, but of course outsourcing takes less effort. I have gone from not liking Campus Pipeline to despising it.

Bottom line is that I am now at 15.0 credit hours and there is no intention to replace the other course.

I know I haven't posted an entry in a few days and haven't really been around and the last post seemed kind of negative. This post is to state that I am still alive, but going quite nuts from having to share my home with my father for a few weeks (he is gone back to his normal life now).

Tonight CMK4 (my main server) was taken out for a complete configuration overhaul, if you are one of my users and cant login please try the most recent password I would have had for you, most likely your AddressBook password. If you have issues logging in please contact me.

Its 7:30AM, perhaps I should go to bed now?

Why is it that when I think I can't be anymore alone in my feelings and life someone has to go and prove me wrong? It seems like in the past few days the only way people can deal with talking to me is by flying off an electronic cliff or avoiding me by some other method. There is such a difference between knowing people care about me and it being felt. Tonight I had another argument with my father, and my mother made me feel that she cared about me, but my father only stated that he did and didn't show it at all. Since then my father has gone to sit in his chair and my mother has gone to the basement. I attempted to talk to one of my friends about it, but that sort of fell apart quick, so I am now sitting here in my room writing this to my blog. Is my installation of MovableType the only one who cares?

My father's excuse for not wanting to talk to me was that I talk over his head, my mother opted to stay out of it, and as for the rest of the world, im sure no one else cares to hear about it, so I leave it as this blog entry with only my feelings of being abandoned and being wholely alone, nothing more.

Sometimes faking happy is just too hard. I don't want to do it any more, I just want my life to correct itself and everyone around me be happy. I don't want to grow up just yet, im not ready for it. I am not ready for my life as it is even, sometimes im not sure I am ready to be human yet.

My life sucks and there is not a damn thing I can do about it.

Sometimes in life there comes a time when it will be necessary to override part of the self for the greater good of the entire self as well as the entire body.

For those of you not familar with Freudian structuralism theory, the self is composed of an ego (presenting personality and equalizer), id (natural desire) and super ego (an "ideal" self representation).

It has become painfully clear that my superego wants me to take as many credit hours as possible and maybe find a way to take more above the 18 hour limit. My ego is not that ambitious and is more lazy. I have to obey the ego and id only in this situation, the superego can have no bearing on my decision for courses for spring, it has done enough damage.

My super-ego is my representation of perfection or somewhere close to it, basicly the best Curtis I can be, which in this case has me ending as being "Dr. Curt" before year 2010. If I am going to fulfil that self I need to gain a lot of motivation really quickly. I don't really want to have a PhD for any special reason, just to have it, to say that I accomplished something in my life.

In addition to scheduling courses besed on the super ego I have also been using criteria of what is "safe". Courses that I might not excel at, such as anything with the prefix "MATH". So instead of taking a major with some MATH courses that could potentially be fun and harmless I went with the major with lots of boring business courses. I avoided FBLA in high school as much as I could, but now im essentially running to the business brats because im a little scared of MATH and STAT courses. This isn't how my life should be. I should be in the major I want to be in, the one I know I will love, without fear of the few math courses that I need, its not like I have to have something stupid like Differential Equations. I can deal with MATH courses that have "Linear" in the title, things like "Exponential", "Complex" and "Advanced" scare me, but my major of choice doens't require any of those, just a few simple programming-related MATH courses and one STAT course (I enjoyed high school statistics, i think i can handle it). There is no reason for me to run from math anymore. I took Deductive Logic partially to familarize myself with formal thinking, which is helpful in many forms of math. On this early January morning I declare a challenge to my super ego; I challenge thee to take on the obstacles and to overcome them to succeed in fulfilling the dreams of the ego which thou serves.

There is no need for me to take an 18 hour or more course load to accomplish my goals in a timely fasion. I am still young, I have many good years ahead of me to deal with my goals and make my dreams come true, but if I let a few courses stand in my way I will never be happy.

This so far has been one shitty year. After a nice new year's eve and fairly fun new year's morning I headed home from Chris's house at 7:15AM, on highway 49 a minor issue occured, the vehicle seemed to be exhausting excessively, this was thought to be the case until stopping at a stoplight and realizing that the vehicle was approaching upper-level engine warmth. Luckily I kinda had a disaster plan in my head for such an occurance, and I knew the correct location to stop at, I went to the next light, University City Blvd and Pavillion where I landed my ass at a very cozy gas station/cafe. Now me being the gay guy that I am, I managed to find the cleanest, most hospitible gas station on earth. However, this station does not include things like emergency auto-parts, fluids, etc. I woke up yesterday at noon, and I seem to still be ok, so I will forego sleep again for now, until later tonight, like a week ago, except about 5 hours less awake time. For those of you better with chrono-lists, here it is:

7:30AM - problem detected
7:35AM - distress signal sent
8:00AM - supplies gathered, rescue team dispatched
8:42AM - Rescue team arrives at my location
9:15AM - Vehicle repairs complete, depart for home
10:03AM - Arrival at home

Now, for the fun part of this story. The problem was a hose that my father knew needed replaceing and he even had the part, but neglected to install it for whatever reason. So, he pretty much risked the car, my life and my sanity by being so fucking lazy! His inaction is unacceptable! I can understand if there was an issue I neglected to inform him about, but he is always kept apprised of issues with the vehicle, even when they are just in my head.