What appears to be providence
Life seems so much more stagnant when it's all viewed from the same spaces.
My parents settled their divorce without the assistance of a lawyer. They talk of this as a great accomplishment for them, and I suppose in the sense that they saved quite a bit of money in doing so, this is true. As this happened when I was as young as I was, I would have to say that it did not have any effect on me, to be sure, because it was central to my development, and not a post-development alteration.
The effects, rather, are happening now that I'm seeing what it is to live the lives that fewer and fewer children experience due to rising divorce rates: one home, one central location where everyone you know exists, one set of chores to manage, one set of clothing. I'll bet no one ever noticed how much I truly thought about balancing my clothing partitions kept at each household of mine.
Because my divorce life wasn't like most: my parents, being rational people who could stand to be in each other's presence for half-hour periods of time without performing random acts of violence, decided to split my life straight down the middle: I'd spend half the week with my father, and half the week with my mother. Of course, it didn't exactly work like that, as I had to go to school from one location. Due to its superior school district, it was decided that I was to go from my father's house, and from that my weekly schedule was made: my father would have me during the week until Friday when my mother was off from work, when she would pick me up to go to her house for the weekend until she dropped me off at school on Monday morning.
Weekends were never to me what they were to anyone else, it seemed. Everyone else saw the same people all week - friends they saw during the week, they could spend greater amounts of time with on the weekends. This was my greatest concern, at least. Having found myself a group of friends that was later to become the Moose Caboose, I felt somewhat distanced at times when they spoke of all the wonderful things they were able to do during these mysterious parcels of time called weekends.
I had a friend in the area of my mother's house. The problem with her location was that, in all the area that my friends at my father's house lived, there was but this one fellow my age in the same area surrounding my mother's house, simply because there are so many fewer houses. And though this fellow was perhaps one the nicest people my age that I knew at the time, we had friend compatibility issues.
In all honesty, I was not the nicest elementary school student you came across, indeed, far from it. Much of this was a result of a lack of retribution for violations of etiquette in my young life until the entrance of my stepfather, who, self proclaimed Duke of Etiquette that he was, had to spend quite some effort before his lessons took effect. At least, I would like to think that these days I am not rude as I once was. For an ironically relevant example, at age four, seeing my stepfather write the word 'rude', I decided to correct his spelling, and announced that he forgot the H. The H in rude? Why yes, if 'Rhode' in Rhode Island has an H, then by golly so should 'rhude'.
Of course, back then, I didn't know when to simply stop talking. Then again, some people never learn when to stop talking.
Paragraph break for emphasis only. Yes, that was directed at someone in particular. Continuing on, if it were possible to quantify such a thing, it would be interesting to plot a graph of my talkativity versus time. I would surmise that, during my first four years, my talkativity rose steadily until it peaked at around four and a half, at which point it dropped somewhat significantly with the entrance of my stepfather and school into my life. Then it would rise gradually until middle school. Sixth grade would be a sharp drop-off, followed by stagnancy until halfway through tenth grade, when it would rise considerably until June, at the commencement of my public schooling. Right now my talkativity quotient is about as low as it ever has been for quite some time.
Gosh, I've given myself a lot of tangents to retrace. It's like writing a set of open parentheses, and having to figure out how many closed parentheses I need to make it all match, and in what order things are closed. Now that you're sufficiently disoriented, let's throw in an arbitrary limerick.
Said a frog to a chef passing by,
"It appears there's a soup in my fly!"
So the chef made frog stew,
So that everyone knew,
Don't complain of the food or you'll die.
Therefore, on account of my somewhat deficient manners, I was not particularly keen on spending great amounts of time with the one friend I did have at my mother's house, and acted on that. As it was, we had difficulty finding things we had in common, as I hadn't much tolerance for ignorance, and this poor fellow failed two grades before reaching middle school.
This only added to the fact that I tended to side with my father on most issues. This wasn't so much my preference of him over my mother, but him over my stepfather, whom in retrospect I seem to have interacted with more than my mother over the years. So my mother probably felt as though she wasn't seeing me all so often, which was probably true. But at those ages, I was my father's child - we had similar interests, because he welcomed me with such equality. Such that now I am a traitor if I do not pay him his deserved respect: each time I am on the phone with him, he uses the phrase 'keep in touch' at least thirty times. I am Andrew Largeman.
But I recall a time when I sat down with my father to calculate exactly how many hours I was spending with each parent, to prove to my mother that it was as near equal as it was going to get. And my father and I shared a good laugh, at my mother's fantasy of me attending a private secondary school, of her suggestion to put me under the care of her mother-in-law during the spans of time between the ends of my school days and the ends of her work days, and at our fudging of my bedtime, to make it appear as though my father was complying with my mother's regulations.
So nothing changed. Nothing with the system changed, at least. My relations with my father became something of an inverse of its prior status. But that's old news to me now. It's just new to him.
That dichotomy is gone - the aspect of my life that my stepfather says gave me the best of both worlds, while I would always think to myself that it was rather the worst of both worlds. Although I hardly thought that coming to a different country for college would make my life any less interesting, one need only look at the flurry of recent entries dealing with events long past to see that is the case.
I is a pronoun. I am a pronoun.
-----
It was a rare day walking back from class in that I found someone I knew to walk beside and converse with on my way to the residences.
Moose: Hello, there.
Alex: Hey, where are you coming from?
Moose: Inorganic chemistry.
Alex: Oof.
Moose: I know, I just a midterm for that class last night. And I thought I did fairly well, but then some of us were discussing it before class today, and I don't know.
I was early, and sitting against the wall, as usual, waiting to see if anyone bothered to sit beside the fellow in the funny hat that no one knew. Actually, my hat blends in much better around here than it did in Buffalo.
Strephon: So I was all like, yeah, take that, carboxyl groups!
Rita: Tee hee! Alright, alright, what about number three? I was kind of confused as to its order. I think I ended up putting down six?
Strephon: I put down twelve.
Moose: It was eight, wasn't it?
They halted their mildly couple-like interactions to turn around and inspect who it was breaking their moment and proving them wrong.
Moose: I'm fairly certain it was eight.
Strephon: No. It. Wasn't.
Moose: Three and two and three. Eight.
Strephon: Twelve.
Moose: What could possibly make you think it's twelve?
Strephon: Well, we did an example just like it in class. You had to split the one group lengthwise, and place the other in a skillet and let it fry for twenty minutes.
I was silent. His accent was difficult to discern as those among the students went. But if I had heard him correctly, I remembered, slowly and painfully, what I had markedly forgotten the evening prior on the test.
Moose: So I don't know, I don't anticipate having done as well as I potentially could have.
Alex: Ah, that's rough, I know how that goes… oh, just hold on a minute, won't you? Scott!
My companion crossed the street to a friend of his I was not acquainted with. I waited where I was, not eager to continue the path alone as I typically do. So this, I realized, was what it was like, to be walking in discussion while everyone else passes you, silent, alone, with their heads down. However, usually when I am in the other position, it seems as though everyone else is in some sort of discussion, which would appear a contradiction. This is explained simply by the fact that everyone else prefers to do what it is I am not doing, or that I subconsciously tend to choose the less popular option for most things.
Alex: Sorry about that, he's in a class with me for which we must write a paper by Friday, and he has my copy of the assignment.
Moose: I see, what's the paper on?
Alex: We have to prove that we exist.
Moose: That's a tough one. I don't know, I guess I think…
Alex: Therefore you are?
Moose: Yes, I suppose.
Alex: Well, that's basically what it comes down to.
Moose: See, I'm not sure I'm convinced that we really do exist, on the larger scale of things, but for all our purposes, certainly we exist.
Alex: Now the much tougher question to pose from here is how we know the past exists. Because that conversation I had with Scott a minute ago - how do I know that really happened, and wasn't a memory planted there by an evil God?
The past is a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between our immediate physical sensations and our states of mind.
Alex: And that's the approach Descartes took - he said that memory cannot be the designs of an evil God, because he stated God to be perfect and therefore good.
I don't believe anything can be perfect, just the same as nothing being capable of attaining infinity. Second graders that swear to being able to perform a task 'infinity times better' than another do not know quite what they are holding themselves to. This in itself does not exclude the possibility of a higher being, only that of a perfect one.
My father has told me that when I am older, religion will be a good thing to hold onto in coping with death. Perhaps it is too good at that, though. Perhaps that is why so many people have died over religion.
My parents settled their divorce without the assistance of a lawyer. They talk of this as a great accomplishment for them, and I suppose in the sense that they saved quite a bit of money in doing so, this is true. As this happened when I was as young as I was, I would have to say that it did not have any effect on me, to be sure, because it was central to my development, and not a post-development alteration.
The effects, rather, are happening now that I'm seeing what it is to live the lives that fewer and fewer children experience due to rising divorce rates: one home, one central location where everyone you know exists, one set of chores to manage, one set of clothing. I'll bet no one ever noticed how much I truly thought about balancing my clothing partitions kept at each household of mine.
Because my divorce life wasn't like most: my parents, being rational people who could stand to be in each other's presence for half-hour periods of time without performing random acts of violence, decided to split my life straight down the middle: I'd spend half the week with my father, and half the week with my mother. Of course, it didn't exactly work like that, as I had to go to school from one location. Due to its superior school district, it was decided that I was to go from my father's house, and from that my weekly schedule was made: my father would have me during the week until Friday when my mother was off from work, when she would pick me up to go to her house for the weekend until she dropped me off at school on Monday morning.
Weekends were never to me what they were to anyone else, it seemed. Everyone else saw the same people all week - friends they saw during the week, they could spend greater amounts of time with on the weekends. This was my greatest concern, at least. Having found myself a group of friends that was later to become the Moose Caboose, I felt somewhat distanced at times when they spoke of all the wonderful things they were able to do during these mysterious parcels of time called weekends.
I had a friend in the area of my mother's house. The problem with her location was that, in all the area that my friends at my father's house lived, there was but this one fellow my age in the same area surrounding my mother's house, simply because there are so many fewer houses. And though this fellow was perhaps one the nicest people my age that I knew at the time, we had friend compatibility issues.
In all honesty, I was not the nicest elementary school student you came across, indeed, far from it. Much of this was a result of a lack of retribution for violations of etiquette in my young life until the entrance of my stepfather, who, self proclaimed Duke of Etiquette that he was, had to spend quite some effort before his lessons took effect. At least, I would like to think that these days I am not rude as I once was. For an ironically relevant example, at age four, seeing my stepfather write the word 'rude', I decided to correct his spelling, and announced that he forgot the H. The H in rude? Why yes, if 'Rhode' in Rhode Island has an H, then by golly so should 'rhude'.
Of course, back then, I didn't know when to simply stop talking. Then again, some people never learn when to stop talking.
Paragraph break for emphasis only. Yes, that was directed at someone in particular. Continuing on, if it were possible to quantify such a thing, it would be interesting to plot a graph of my talkativity versus time. I would surmise that, during my first four years, my talkativity rose steadily until it peaked at around four and a half, at which point it dropped somewhat significantly with the entrance of my stepfather and school into my life. Then it would rise gradually until middle school. Sixth grade would be a sharp drop-off, followed by stagnancy until halfway through tenth grade, when it would rise considerably until June, at the commencement of my public schooling. Right now my talkativity quotient is about as low as it ever has been for quite some time.
Gosh, I've given myself a lot of tangents to retrace. It's like writing a set of open parentheses, and having to figure out how many closed parentheses I need to make it all match, and in what order things are closed. Now that you're sufficiently disoriented, let's throw in an arbitrary limerick.
Said a frog to a chef passing by,
"It appears there's a soup in my fly!"
So the chef made frog stew,
So that everyone knew,
Don't complain of the food or you'll die.
Therefore, on account of my somewhat deficient manners, I was not particularly keen on spending great amounts of time with the one friend I did have at my mother's house, and acted on that. As it was, we had difficulty finding things we had in common, as I hadn't much tolerance for ignorance, and this poor fellow failed two grades before reaching middle school.
This only added to the fact that I tended to side with my father on most issues. This wasn't so much my preference of him over my mother, but him over my stepfather, whom in retrospect I seem to have interacted with more than my mother over the years. So my mother probably felt as though she wasn't seeing me all so often, which was probably true. But at those ages, I was my father's child - we had similar interests, because he welcomed me with such equality. Such that now I am a traitor if I do not pay him his deserved respect: each time I am on the phone with him, he uses the phrase 'keep in touch' at least thirty times. I am Andrew Largeman.
But I recall a time when I sat down with my father to calculate exactly how many hours I was spending with each parent, to prove to my mother that it was as near equal as it was going to get. And my father and I shared a good laugh, at my mother's fantasy of me attending a private secondary school, of her suggestion to put me under the care of her mother-in-law during the spans of time between the ends of my school days and the ends of her work days, and at our fudging of my bedtime, to make it appear as though my father was complying with my mother's regulations.
So nothing changed. Nothing with the system changed, at least. My relations with my father became something of an inverse of its prior status. But that's old news to me now. It's just new to him.
That dichotomy is gone - the aspect of my life that my stepfather says gave me the best of both worlds, while I would always think to myself that it was rather the worst of both worlds. Although I hardly thought that coming to a different country for college would make my life any less interesting, one need only look at the flurry of recent entries dealing with events long past to see that is the case.
I is a pronoun. I am a pronoun.
-----
It was a rare day walking back from class in that I found someone I knew to walk beside and converse with on my way to the residences.
Moose: Hello, there.
Alex: Hey, where are you coming from?
Moose: Inorganic chemistry.
Alex: Oof.
Moose: I know, I just a midterm for that class last night. And I thought I did fairly well, but then some of us were discussing it before class today, and I don't know.
I was early, and sitting against the wall, as usual, waiting to see if anyone bothered to sit beside the fellow in the funny hat that no one knew. Actually, my hat blends in much better around here than it did in Buffalo.
Strephon: So I was all like, yeah, take that, carboxyl groups!
Rita: Tee hee! Alright, alright, what about number three? I was kind of confused as to its order. I think I ended up putting down six?
Strephon: I put down twelve.
Moose: It was eight, wasn't it?
They halted their mildly couple-like interactions to turn around and inspect who it was breaking their moment and proving them wrong.
Moose: I'm fairly certain it was eight.
Strephon: No. It. Wasn't.
Moose: Three and two and three. Eight.
Strephon: Twelve.
Moose: What could possibly make you think it's twelve?
Strephon: Well, we did an example just like it in class. You had to split the one group lengthwise, and place the other in a skillet and let it fry for twenty minutes.
I was silent. His accent was difficult to discern as those among the students went. But if I had heard him correctly, I remembered, slowly and painfully, what I had markedly forgotten the evening prior on the test.
Moose: So I don't know, I don't anticipate having done as well as I potentially could have.
Alex: Ah, that's rough, I know how that goes… oh, just hold on a minute, won't you? Scott!
My companion crossed the street to a friend of his I was not acquainted with. I waited where I was, not eager to continue the path alone as I typically do. So this, I realized, was what it was like, to be walking in discussion while everyone else passes you, silent, alone, with their heads down. However, usually when I am in the other position, it seems as though everyone else is in some sort of discussion, which would appear a contradiction. This is explained simply by the fact that everyone else prefers to do what it is I am not doing, or that I subconsciously tend to choose the less popular option for most things.
Alex: Sorry about that, he's in a class with me for which we must write a paper by Friday, and he has my copy of the assignment.
Moose: I see, what's the paper on?
Alex: We have to prove that we exist.
Moose: That's a tough one. I don't know, I guess I think…
Alex: Therefore you are?
Moose: Yes, I suppose.
Alex: Well, that's basically what it comes down to.
Moose: See, I'm not sure I'm convinced that we really do exist, on the larger scale of things, but for all our purposes, certainly we exist.
Alex: Now the much tougher question to pose from here is how we know the past exists. Because that conversation I had with Scott a minute ago - how do I know that really happened, and wasn't a memory planted there by an evil God?
The past is a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between our immediate physical sensations and our states of mind.
Alex: And that's the approach Descartes took - he said that memory cannot be the designs of an evil God, because he stated God to be perfect and therefore good.
I don't believe anything can be perfect, just the same as nothing being capable of attaining infinity. Second graders that swear to being able to perform a task 'infinity times better' than another do not know quite what they are holding themselves to. This in itself does not exclude the possibility of a higher being, only that of a perfect one.
My father has told me that when I am older, religion will be a good thing to hold onto in coping with death. Perhaps it is too good at that, though. Perhaps that is why so many people have died over religion.