Why didn't I test out of this in high school?

As I sit through an Empirical World lecture on various topics I already learned about in my high school physics class (and watch as my friend Chelsea’s sanity slowly slips away), I begin to wonder when and how I screwed up in order to end up in this situation. On one hand, it is true that this isn’t the first redundant educational experience I’ve had. After all, I endured years of history classes in which the same segment of world history was covered year after year – the American Revolution, the American Civil War, the American Great Depression, the American World Wars and so forth. At least, that’s what it always felt like. So what makes this different?

I suppose the difference between the twelve-year-long history class I took in grade school and this rudimentary science course is that, had I been gifted with the necessary foresight and work ethic, I probably would’ve tested out of this and some of my other gen-ed classes after all. But alas, while I was certainly a capable student and a quick learner in the days of yore, I did not have the motivation which likely would have been necessary to pass my school’s Advanced Placement courses. The closest I came to this was taking honors English and Geometry courses, and I earned C’s in both of these classes. While such grades may not look that bad to many people, from my parents’ perspective a “C” is the equivalent to an “F-” trying to eat itself from the inside out and then vomiting halfway through the attempt. Even though it happens that Geometry is one of my academic blind spots, I had no good excuse to get a lower grade in an English class.

Getting to my point, it seems as if it’s entirely my fault that I’m stuck in the position I’m currently in. Due to my lack of motivation and drive during high school, I never put myself to a challenge that, looking back, I think I should’ve been able to take on. Perhaps if I was able to anticipate this future filled with classes which I could skip and ace anyway (though school rules permit this only to a certain extent in lower-division classes), I would’ve had the necessary incentive to buckle down and take some AP classes so I wouldn’t have to endure supposedly college-level courses – Empirical World, General Psychology and so forth. Since humans generally aren’t magical or gifted with psychic abilities, however, I guess we should instead make plans and be prepared specifically because we can’t see what lies ahead of us.

As usual, I intended to write another entry much sooner than I actually have. I’ll try to keep this blog a little more up-to-date than I have been so far, but so much depends on me feeling sufficiently inspired (or bored) enough to write.

Letting the Bandwagon Out of the Bag

So, with the encouragement of one of my English major friends, I have finally decided to hop onto this blogging bandwagon. Being the wannabe nonconformist that I am, I was initially reluctant to start blogging. When I initially made the decision to start writing, I actually wanted to complete my first post on the first of this month, but I procrastinated, got distracted and so on. I could go on about why I decided to do this, why I chose the title I did and so forth, but a blog about my decision to start blogging wouldn’t be very interesting now, would it?

Let’s get to it, then. The fact that it is now the year 2010 has, predictably, given me much to think about. After my father, younger brother and I stated that none of us had showered since the previous decade, my mind wandered to the current apocalypse craze in the media. Ever since some nameless bloke read an ancient Mayan calendar which inexplicably stopped at the date December 21^st, 2012 and assumed that the Mayans thought our world as we know it would be destroyed on this date, millions of people hopped onto a bandwagon of a different kind: believing yet another prediction of the incoming end of the world. Even though several of these predictions were made in the previous century when the world was worse off than it is right now, many people have nonetheless fallen for the claim that the end of the Mayan calendar is somehow a sign that our world will soon be destroyed in a catastrophic event. Seeing this recent trend, a host of writers, directors and producers have chosen to profit off of the latest apocalyptic scare by releasing one title after another about the topic.

Since I enjoy studying – and by extension, getting a good laugh out of – conspiracy and doomsday theories of all kinds, I naturally began to research the latest claims that we’re all going to die or something. In summary, I found no objective evidence that the world may be destroyed or that the human race may be wiped out. Not within the next few years, anyway. I found plenty of theories, sure, but none of them were backed on a logical basis. If anything, most of them seem to be the result of “theorists” jumping to conclusions and then developing theories based on the baseless beliefs they develop. For example, the claim that the Mayan calendar ending on December 21^st, 2012 predicts our doom relies upon the assumption that the calendar was ended on this date because the Mayans somehow predicted that the world would end at this point, even though the date simply marks the end of a cycle on their calendar which is to be followed by another one. This is comparable to how we assigned a symbolic significance to the year 2000 because it was the end of one millennium and the beginning of another despite the fact that years are numbered arbitrarily. Proponents of another theory state that a planet or planet-sized object, dubbed Nibiru or Planet X, will collide into our own planet during that fateful December. However, any object the size of this fabled planet would have difficulty, to say the least, slipping under the radar of our numerous international observatories. It is also worth mentioning that the Nibiru collision was originally predicted for the year 2003.

But enough of that. What I’ve really been wondering is why people are so fascinated with eschatology in the first place. Personally, I would attribute this fascination primarily to a fear of the unknown. Over time, I have learned that there are many people, quite possibly the majority of us, who simply don’t like surprises. While in actuality astronomers would have noticed an object of dangerous size hurtling through space toward our planet years ago, it would nonetheless be an unpleasant surprise for a rock the size of Earth to suddenly crash into us, would it not? Of course, even if we could accurately predict the end of times, it’s not like we could do anything about it anyway.

Well, that’s my rant for today. Assuming I write additional posts in the future, they won’t necessarily be about eschatology or the new year. I’ll just write about whatever catches my attention, strikes my interest or irks me enough to ramble about it. For the sake of my reader(s), I’ll try to keep the rambling to a minimum unless it’s about something really important. Really.