It’s a Magical World out there, Hobbes ol’buddy

Coming from a man who religiously wore a hat for a couple of years, I don’t think people look up enough. When you’re used to a block above you, it’s absence really shows you what you had been missing.

Nowadays, we tend to be too fixated upon our screens and at our little boxes of entertainment, and in life in general. All too often we miss the beauty in the world, we miss those wonderful things like sunsets, or the majesty of the planets and stars.

Maybe its a throwback to the Calvin-and-Hobbesian childhood, but is that bad? Maybe we need to recapture that sense of wonder and of adventure that we lose.

So, go adventurin’, go stare at the stars, spend an afternoon looking for shapes in the clouds, like you used to. Go and be happy.

Growing up

I feel as if I have grown up most in this last six months, than I ever have.
Thankfully it has not been due to sorrow or hardship, but happiness. I feel that I have begun the journey from trying to be the man that (I think) others think I should be, to being the person I am/want to be.

It has taken me nearly two years of university, three months of working, and living on my own to figure out I have been doing it wrong for the last two decades.
For the last two decades, I have been concentrating on academics, and, more importantly, grades. I believed that if you knew how to solve simultaneous equations or extrapolate the emmissive power of the sun from just a cup left out on a clear day, then the world was yours. I believed that I would be judged on the letters and percentages on a silly little piece of paper, rather than the content of my character. I was wrong.

Don’t get me wrong, knowing things is still important. I, for a fact, know that I would not be where I am today if it wasn’t for all the work I have done in the past. I don’t know how things would have played out, but I am sure that I wouldn’t be so well off academically without my friends through secondary school, without the friendly rivalry of “who got the better grade”, or who got the answer first.

It was Andy. It was always Andy.

We were a close-knit bunch. We spent the whole day together (because, of course, we took all the same classes), then we would go home, and talk for hours, play games until the wee hours of the next morning. We watched the same shows, we played the same games, we cared about the same things. It was wonderful, and sometimes I miss it. But, perhaps, it was a problem. I was surrounded by people who were better than I was. They were better than me in games, they continually bested me in exams, on the piste. In short, I felt, at life. And so I wanted to be more like them, rather than be me.

It has always been the story, there’s always been people better than I, whom I wish to emulate, or make proud. From my parents, with their walls of brilliant books(of which I have read less than 10%) and lives of comfort and love. To friends, who perhaps ‘got the girl’ or could no-scope me from the other side of the bloody map! I love, and respect all of them, but it was time for a change.

Coming to university, living on my own has deprived me of all that. There is no-one whom I am a worse version of (or who is a better version of me). I am surrounded by diversity, by people who do, and think, things I never would have considered. There are people here who are not afraid to be, in fact, they want to be who they are. I hope to be as awesome as they are. I don’t want to be them, I want to be worthy of them.

I have never been a confident man, and I am trying to change that. I am trying to speak more openly (or just more (-;), trying to laugh more heartily, and more often. I want to be honest, and to like myself for who I am, then maybe others will.
So yes, I am a man of twenty studying to become an engineer, who has a soft spot for lifting heavy things and digging big holes. And, I bake, I have a sewing machine and I like musicals. I read books, science fiction mostly, and I have recently rediscovered a love of slam poetry. In the past, I would have been concerned about saying that, as being a strong advocate of STEM subjects, brings a bit of shallow elitism towards ‘the arts’. Now, I realise I was doing myself a disservice by trivialising them- and I want to make up for that. I want to experience things, be it a wonderful performance (like Avenue Q, or some of the slam poetry, like Taylor Mali*) or even something I can’t even dream up now.

In this, I am trying to broaden myself from being simply being a fancy calculator which can sometime write code, to being a fully fledged human being.

Please forgive me if this makes no sense, as it is 2:30 in the morning, and I have never been great at these, though I want to improve.

/*My apologies if this is old hat to you, or if it sounds like I’m channelling a whiny 14 year old*/

*Seriously, check him out, especially his poem “What teachers make” and “The the impotence of proofreading”