On the Topic of My Character

I'm not going to lie to you, I am a really interesting person.  I find myself to be an extremely interesting person with all kinds of different aspects and layers.  I'm sure everybody out there thinks the exact same thing about themselves as they are all "individuals" or whatever they claim to be but seriously I find myself to be much more interesting to analyze than most of people I've met.  It's largely due to the fact that I am always intrigued by people that I'm not completely sure if I like or not cause then I don't know whether or not to concentrate on their good or their bad traits (so I can compliment or criticize them) so I instead pay attention to both sides, so enough about you and more about me.

First of all, I am mostly incapable of hate.  There are people I don't enjoy being in the company of, as well as some that I have the tendency to disagree with on a large range of topics.  Yet, there are no people in the world that I have personally spoken with that I can say the word hate even begins to be applicable, and that even includes this random dude I met once who angered me and then popped back up in my life in what I momentarily thought to be an inopportune time, as friends of friends you don't connect with seem to be oddly likely to do.  Sometimes I wish I had a rival or someone I could hate that I keep running into, it seems like it would be a nice thing to have going on in the background.  Instead I give people the benefit of the doubt and like to think they are doing things I don't like for perfectly rational reasons.

GET IT!?!?!?!?!?

With the previous paragraph taken into account, it shouldn't be a surprise that I tend to get along with people on a personal level.  I was always an awkward kid who had problems maintaining friends during my early years in school as I have pointed out, having what I consider to be only one real friend in the first decade of my life.  This friend transferred schools after a year and I maintained contact with him for a little bit after that but we slowly fell apart, and haven't knowingly seen each other since.  I made my first current friend when I was 12, and proceeded to grow into a moderately sized group of friends.  During most of High School I had what I consider to be 4 good friends.  I currently believe that I hold at least 4 separate groups of friends that I still see and communicate with often (home friends, undergrad school friends, grad school friends, department friends, etc.)  If you had told me I would have this number of friends at my age a decade ago, I surely would have foamed at the mouth and spent days feverishly looking for a time machine to get here quicker, but first I'd have to visit this future.
It is also amazing that with the amount of friends I have been able to amass over the years that I have never been in a real adult relationship.  This probably would dampen the good mood of decade-ago me after being told how many friends I have.  It is an interesting thing to wonder, because I have so many people who care for me, but there is no proof that they really care about me.  It is a strange kind of loneliness that even though I am rarely lonely in the physical sense, I can't shake the feeling for my life at large.  I think some of my friends will argue that this has something to do with how picky I am with girls.  I understand that I often go for girls that are difficult to date, either being much more attractive than I, being of a personality that is not conducive to dating people like myself, or even finding myself being hung up on girls who are in long term relationships that everyone knows aren't going to end anytime soon.  My answer to that is that it isn't always about quantity, it is sometimes about quality, and I don't believe in doing things for the sake of it in general.  I intentionally put myself in positions to fail when it comes to my personal life, because some situations aren't worth risking to fail on, but the ones that are pay off that much more when you don't fail.  If I learned anything from growing up in my family it is that sometimes one stroke of luck is all you need.

I also think that my system of beliefs is interesting.  I study Applied Mathematics, and that is a type of science.  As you would expect to see from scientists, a lot of the people I spend time with in class and doing work, the prevailing attitude is to be counter-cultural and at odds with the concept of a God.  I diverge with my peers in these respects.  I have a great fondness for popular culture (paragraph 2 implicitly explains why,) it is one of the reasons that I am able to get along with a vast range of people.  I have a lot of interests in all facets of pop culture, and while I obviously give personal preference to some of them (sports), I am well-versed in almost anything you can talk about.  I am also a scientist, so I am also an intellectual to the point where even if you think you are above discussing things that can be seen on a screen and want to talk about concepts or ideas I am also able to hold a great conversation there as well.  As for the religious side, growing older is causing me to see the merits in the systems in place rather than trying to debase them as I would have tried to do in my younger days, and a lot of people I know are still trying to do.  I am still not sure what I believe in, but I certainly believe there is something, not for any rational reasoning but because it is comforting to me.  I think the world is more interesting when there is a greater power choosing to intervene when they feel it suitable, or things like "luck" follow you around and affect the way your life unfolds.  I could also say that these things should arise if you subscribe to the idea of multiple universes that diverge at every decision point or point that could change the world around you.

Am I the only one who likes he plays for a team that has a horseshoe as their logo?

Mix all of these amicable traits with the fact that I am in that perfect range where I am an attractive human being without being particularly threatening to anybody and that is a very great person.  All I need to do is improve my work ethic a little bit and start molding my body into a statuesque form and I may be a model human being.  And there might be my motivation toward the little self-improvement I have left to do.  Thanks everybody who sat around reading this piece of rhetoric masturbation, best wishes for all of you, especially now that you know you are inferior.

Quick Update

Hello everyone, as is my norm, I will start this article by apologizing for such a long break between posts.  I think that is one thing I'm going to stop doing as the one person who reads this blog understands that this is how I write, I am also going to try to refrain from promising that I'm going to write more often at the end, because I surely know that that is a lie.

So what's new with my life?  I spent most of the last two months on break and being completely restless while giving in to FIFA addiction.  This last week I have announced that I am going to take a lengthy hiatus from playing FIFA as the last time I played I reached nearly unfathomable levels of rage and disappointment.  To make sure that FIFA stays in the opposite corner of my room as my Xbox, I vowed to attempt to spend this semester trying to beat all 5 Splinter Cell games in preparation for Blacklist this summer.  But there isn't a whole lot of interest in my video game habits so lets talk about other things.

Badass.

For the first time in 2 years I am returning to a familiar place at the beginning of a semester (since I'm still in school I still use semesters as my standard time frame.)  After a half year of graduate school I'm only partially sure of what direction I want to go with my adult life.  I am pretty sure that after reading The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver this last month that I have an interest in predictive modeling and hope to be able to find myself doing that for the rest of my life.  This field really interests me because I've always wished I would be able to predict the future.  This reflects in my method of speaking, as more observant people that I know have noticed that I never speak in definite, I will always qualify what I say in one way or another, mostly by using "probably" in the place of "yes."  I do this intentionally, I have no idea what is going to happen to me in the time span between the present and when I am supposed to do whatever I am being asked to do.

I spend a lot of time at night thinking about things and building these intricate futures in my head where things happen in ways that are favorable to me, as any reader of this blog could easily figure out, these futures have vaguely reflected what actually happens a total of zero times in my life.  Maybe if I devote my life to the craft and try really hard I will start to get a few of these predictions correct, even if it means I tone down (or even abolish) the prerequisite that I am favored in the future.  This divergence between reality and expectation has caused me much of my strife over the course of the last few years, although it has been slightly less problematic recently.  Basically I want to accept that I can't control the world, but at the very least I should be able to anticipate what it's going to do.

Take a left! I know a good place there!

On a completely different note, I went to see a Lewis Black concert a few weeks ago.  I am by no means a fan of his work but did enjoy the show, but it got me thinking about stand-up comedy as a craft.  I try to be funny on this blog a large portion of the time, but it's seemingly become a 50/50 split between funny posts and me complaining about things (guess which this one is!)  For the most part I fancy myself to be a clever and insightful person, which is are usually good qualities in comedians, yet I don't find myself to be excessively funny in my everyday life.  It was at that show that I realized that you don't need to be, but for the most part people will laugh a lot harder at your jokes because you are on a stage telling them to a crowd of strangers.  I've secretly had a couple of jokes written in my head that I have tried to tell people and work on over the years and am hoping that I can make up enough to feel confident trying it out myself.

But anyways this quick update turned out to be a lot longer than I expected, I guess I just had too many things to talk about saved up to be able to keep this concise and on topic.  Hopefully next time I decide to write (some random time in the future) I will be in better spirits and produce a funny piece, but I feel I needed to vent a little and while I haven't quite done that to completion, there are some things I don't want to talk to the internet about.  I'll leave you with my Magic 8 Ball's response to me asking if things are going to be good for me this semester.  "It is decidedly so," hooray.