Part 3 of ?

Answer the call, answer the call, answer the call. I am answering.

I feel very dulled. I think this is the most concerning development I’ve undergone in my life; or perhaps I mean disconcerting more than concerning. I’ve had this idea of myself for years of being sharper than a tack; sharper than the word sharp, just on the ball, turn on a dime, a million revolutions per minute, but lately, I am feeling the sluggish reality. Somewhere along the way, stagnation stormed in, set up its oppressive regime and mental atrophy soaked everything up. Of course, it didn’t stop there, because a new leader was put in place of the regime and stagnation wasn’t enough for this tyrant– somewhere along the way, there was a recession of sorts.

I honestly don’t know how I could have avoided it, or what the long-term effects will be, but when you think about it, it is just really difficult to overcome the environment you are in. I am not trying to blame things here, because the way I see things, I always am going to see the sum of myself being what I am putting into myself, but school definitely led the charge of stagnation. I don’t know what you’d call it, maybe a game of sorts, you know, a game.. as in something that adults call a game so kids will do stuff that they want to do. Like quiet mouse, what is the best way to get those miniature energy human things to shut up for once? Oh, we’ll just tell them its a game! That is how I have been going through school for, well, who knows how long. When I was really young, I really wanted to excel, and I enjoyed learning. I just had an uncontrollable desire to make the most out of it. Then middle school days came, and the whole social world started to shift. Suddenly, I saw this entire sphere that I hadn’t paid much mind to. Of course, you have friends, you have your best friends and then you have everyone else. Though when your eyes truly see the scope of this sphere, you get confused, suddenly, “everyone else” is something crucial.

I could identify a moment in time where it was totally disoriented by this revelation. I left the academic sphere all to itself and tried to figure out what was going on with this social one, further leading to a see-sawing between the two, and much like in the physical realm, I can’t even juggle 2 object properly. Time passed and I like to think that I got the concept of finding the right pocket between the two spheres down, you know, Venn Diagrams and what-not. So I returned, fully, to the realm of education. By this time, I had grown up a lot and had a few more tools on my belt than I was as just a lad, and at some point in high school, I really started to begin to develop intellectually. Now, let me say that I am not saying that I was well-developed in that realm by than, nor that I even am now, but just that the process began then; a process that seems to always gain momentum.

So now that this brief recollection of personal history is out of the way, I can get to what I intended to. At some point, I figured out the game of school, or rather, that no matter the setting, you could pretty much always game the system.  I suppose that I figured that I could juggle things more efficiently if I constructed a simple game out of school,  because I knew I could get what I need to out of it without having to put in more time and effort than required. I could probably argue that this was the beginning of the end.

Years and years of playing the same game, just with different variations and the time came; I had my Sky Net moment. I became self-aware. I guess I accepted the truth of how things were. I still have continued to have a desire to really put everything I can into this entire education thing, yet it was nothing like the unstoppable force within me when I was young, just like a rumbling beneath the surface, the Richter scale could perhaps pick it up,  but nothing was felt. Perhaps it was my own folly, for not trying hard enough to get into studying something that stimulated me hard enough, because there are plenty of fields that I would think are much more demanding than what I’ve been doing, but I also think that this is a fragmented stipulation. Why? Well, because it is hard to avoid the BS factor of everything. It is a lot like interacting with people, we have this initial BS layer that we all encounter as a facade of sorts. In my head, I see it like Star Trek, Star Wars and most any space travel Sci-Fi, with these shields around the ship, and we can encounter these vessels only at shield level first. I’ve always hated that when interacting with people, and I guess I hate it with learning too.

Here is the sad part of it all, it really makes me realize how basic I am as an individual. I am almost purely driven by stimulation.

Am I mentally stimulated?

If yes, then initiate obsession sequence.

If not, then forget it– and I do, very quickly.

I study business, primarily. Here’s the thing, I am actually interested in the subject matter. You should have seen me when the whole financial collapse was happening. I didn’t sleep. I just read everything I could find that somehow related to it. I sought out every single perspective I could find on everything. Even more, I was emotionally moved by a lot of what was transpiring.

I haven’t given a damn about anything related to studying business in quite a while. It was almost like I could go into class– first day– and without looking at the syllabus, or even knowing what class I was in, I knew what was expected of the class. I could probably just skim through some Powerpoints, look up the instructions for one of 1-5 major assignments/papers/group projects/presentations, spend a night working on it, and it’d turn out fine. I hate how that sounds, but it is at least close to the truth, because for most classes, in or outside of my major field of study, I’ve followed a really similar formula for practically 4 1/2 years, except you can throw in actually attendance to class, as well as earnest yet meager attempts to actually study anymore than that.

Let me stop myself right here. I don’t want this to sound like a couple thousand words of me venting about school, educational institutions or undergraduate studies, because this is not my goal, nor what I want to do. In fact, I do think that the university that I call home has proven to be one of the best in the area in a lot of fields that I have been interested in. I can easily keep this kind of talk up for pages, the point being, I am not wanting to bash school, the common educational process or make myself sound like I think I am brilliant or anything. None of these are true, I just need context. I need contrast. I need to outline how I’ve gotten to where I am.

Now that I’ve rambled a bit too much, then tried to excuse my rant, I can skip ahead and do what I should have been doing all along; sum it up. Long ago, the things which took up the majority of my time began to fail at mentally stimulating me. I resided in this stagnant land for too long, without questioning it. Furthermore, if you throw in stages of emotional and personal turmoil of sorts, as well as unexpected phases of life in there, you get desecration.

So I’ve been living in a desecrated mental-emotional state. I let it come to this. Now I’ve dulled. I wake up and still think I am sharp like I used to be, but I try to venture outside of my own head and immediately get tangled in the weeds. This troubles me and I hate it. I hate stagnation. I hate this dim feeling. I realize now, that because of how my mind works, how I work, I can never accept stagnation.

I feel like people have been perceiving me in the wrong way for a good while now, even close friends, or probably former close friends, as I’ve strayed away from most everybody– this idea that I just don’t care. I’ve dulled out. I care, perhaps to the point of addiction, about trivial things, thus I am a harmless tack.

I’ll tell you one thing, I may have dulled in many ways, but when it comes down to it, I am sharper than you. I am Excalibur.

I just need to get back to applying this to all these other areas of my life, and not only my own purely internal interests. I guess at this part of the story, I’m still just the Sword in the Stone.