Not letting myself fall

I simply won’t let that happen. Well, at least not in my words anyway.

Random subject, but I don’t think many people realise that like many other things, writing is a developed skill, it is not inborn talent alone. Like being able to play an instrument, to be able to experiment with words to create glorious visages in stories is the same as how a musician experiments with different patterns of notes to create wonderful ensembles.

Now, as informal as my own writing may be, I can’t let it fall behind. I don’t want to lose one of my only means of communication that I feel most comfortable with, and if I let my writing itself deteriorate, what would that mean to my own, spoken language?

Generally (and I am including myself inn this particular spectrum), people tend to write a higher level than they speak, albeit even if just a little bit and ignoring all of this chat text abbreviations. Whether or not the lack of face-to-face communication allows them to actually think before they write/type is the reason behind that, I’m not quite sure. I would hope that I am the same way, even if it’s just by a little.

I’ve actually never had a person have a grey opinion of me, meaning I’ve never had a person voice their opinion about me and were really undecided on how to place me. I’ve only ever gotten opinions that were on the far ends of the spectrum, whether that person thought that I was smart, or whether that person questioned how I got into college in the first place. Mind you, I’ve always been irked when someone blatantly expresses the latter, but I guess that’s just how it is. Not like I can change their mind once it’s made up.

But if in a hypothetical sense I had the chance to convince them otherwise, it would be through my writing, and this is why I refuse to let that part of me deteriorate.

Whether or not this is a foreshadow for more blogs to come, and at a slightly higher frequency, I can’t honestly tell you. Half the time, I’ll have my blog editor open just sitting there, blank, because, though I want to write and know that I can write about practically anything on this blog, I want it to actually mean something, and have my rambles connect, even if only loosely. I think about what I’m writing, so it doesn’t seem like random jargon put together like a collage, even though that’s how it is sometimes.

But I figured, if I wrote every single blog post like an essay, you’d get tired of seeing a horrible worded thesis statement somewhere in the midst of the first paragraph, because I apparently overcomplicate the phrasing of the points that I attempt to make.

But nonetheless, I won’t let myself fall. If I fall and lose my writing, lose my words, there’s no point in trying to get back up.

My Introversion

I typically go by Karlo, seeing as that’s my name.
Quite frankly, if you actually knew me, it’d never be the same.
My paradigms, visions, memories give shape to my progressing form.
Not yet fully developed; like the calm before the storm.

My opinions, views, and beliefs run deep, even oceans now seem shallow.
A quality world so intricate and firm, one might even consider it hallowed.
I’ll not thrust my beliefs upon you; such arrogance, my hatred burns.
But respect and tact should be common sense, through experience, I’ve learned.

I’d even create a great facade to maintain this subtle rapport.
I’d falsify my ability to rhyme in quatrains, perhaps, I’m not quite sure.
But with merely shallow simulacra, my persona can’t be defined.
No labels, archetypes, or characterizations could it ever be assigned.

Let no words gain such power to create a visage of my ever yearning spirit.
Such imperfection shan’t be perceived, let alone words ever coming near it.
Perhaps I’m over reaching the boundaries of my literary scope.
But hopefully I’ve explained, as plain as I am, that words are beautiful, I hope.

Unless you’ve met me, our only tie is pixels upon a screen.
With words, I hope I’ve shown you the “me” no one’s ever truly seen.
But even if my convoluted thoughts confused you more than intended.
The message is clear, no person is one colour, but a variety of them blended.

So with a parting note, I’ll say again, I’m Karlo, yeah, that’s my name.
Now you’ve had a glimpse of my true nature, will you still look at me the same?

---

A bit of a compulsory, but very lame poem by me in attempt to explain (in a very roundabout way) that even though I can be similar to other people you’ve talked to, I’d still never be the same as that person. Also, I can’t say this from a professional standpoint, but I typically classify myself as an introvert though I exhibit features in opposition more often than not (which is very typical I might add).

The title was actually supposed to be a pun for “My Introduction,” seeing as how I’ve never properly written an introduction about myself on his blog, but I couldn’t really find a more fitting title that combined the words “introduction” and “introversion” correctly, seeing as that’s what I was trying to express. I kept it as is, and besides, it’s not much of an introduction anyway.

To let it flow…

So it is more than obvious that I’d pretty much abandoned this blog without any prior announcement of doing so over a year ago, and perhaps it’s even more pathetic to now admit that I never even planned on coming back, but of course, we all have a relapse every now and then and manage to come back to something we enjoyed in a past repeatedly.

But now I’ve decided on a simple purpose of this blog.

My aim had always been too high. I wanted to make a couple of online friends, I wanted an active in-flow of commentary on my posts, and I tried to make at least a slight majority of my posts to somehow encourage that behaviour, but my lack of activity had always been my hindering factor.

So now what I really want to do is clarify. No longer am I striving for anyone to honestly read my posts, but more like, it’d be a pleasant surprise if that does indeed happen every once in a while.

I’ve always been more technologically inclined when it came to everything. Even now, I’m not the type of person that you would find having any type of paper with them. A very large majority of my notes and assignments are electronically stored. I take written notes with a stylus on my tablet in class, I type them up whenever I deem it easier to do so, and I don’t find the aesthetic appeal of needing to have a hard copy of everything.

Thus, this is why I came back here.

It was a simple and random, but still shockingly logical decision on my part. I was looking for a way to vent through writing, and though I love creative writing (particularly stories), I was way too much of a perfectionist to even bother posting anything that could have still been considered a draft. Not to mention, I’m too nit-picky with how I want things worded, and that becomes even more apparent when I’m writing a story. So a blog was the perfect way to vent, through all the bland posts and reflect. And, of course, because it was electronic, I was even more inclined to do so.

Basically, I’d come to the conclusion that blogging is the perfect way for me to vent, and knowing that there might be some random person reading this, I still try to maintain a bit of formality within my writing, and not just curse everything to their deaths as I tend to do more often than not…

I will not say that I will update this often, but I will say that I will use this blog as a way to let my own words flow as freely as I’d wanted them.

When is this threshold crossed?

I just want to say that I do not generally watch any type of television programming whilst here on my college campus for the channels are usually preset up to some type of sports channel that I don't find too terribly interesting. However, on this particular day, I found News9 broadcasting and decided to update myself with certain hot topics going on around the USA. This was when they broadcasted this:

Detroit High School Protest: Students Suspended After Demanding 'An Education'*
*this is linked to the original Huffington Post article which News9 linked to.

I will not bore anyone with just a huge synopsis of the article, so read if you wish to follow up with the next. And as the person I am, before voicing out my own personally biased views, I ended up reading some of the comments first before plotting out this obviously organised blog post.

I sort of shake my head in disapproval in some of these views that some people still hold, no matter how outdated/overrated/obnoxious they are (hey, three Os. Perhaps I should adopt 'triple O' for those three adjectives alone), but nonetheless, i could not completely say that any of those views was completely incorrect.

I should also probably mention that I am forming each of these opinions all on my own after reading the article solely. I have no personal experience with this type of situation and looking at the pictures on that post alone, so if my views seem more biased towards one side and does not take the other to full consideration, I apologise in advance.

Okay, so after having read a few portions of the article, I found myself questioning certain things from a possible philosophical perspective, the type of view point that seems to plague our system even more by making things much more complex than how we originally thought them to be.

I believe (whether in the comments, News9, or somewhere else) that I had read that they regarded the education they were receiving as sub-par. Here's the problem with this. Who defines what education is up to par? What is par in the first place?

I’m fortunate enough to have attended an International Baccalaureate (IB) programmed schooling in which, no matter how much I complained about all the workload and the daftness of some of the teacher’s styles of lecturing, am thankful for every second I spent there and admire how much they work for as little pay they get for doing their job. That is what I call dedication.

The point of mentioning that small aside is this. When one says par, it creates a threshold, a minimum in which everyone below or sub-par gives a negative connotation, and everything above just vice-versa. However, it depends on where par actually is until those assumptions can be made. I went to this IB school, and frankly, I regard that type of schooling in which nearly all my classes were honours, at or above the AP standard, as my par. It’s my biased view in which when I see another school in a less fortunate setting, I find it below par, even if that school was still a pretty good school as well. I ended up getting out of 22-course hours before even coming in as a freshman, and I felt that perhaps I could have gotten more. To me, my performance was sub-par. I don’t have that viewpoint in which I can mention for the rest of the country’s standards where par is on this educational scale, but then again, what person does? Not even going into international statistics, our education levels right here in the US change dramatically just moving from region to region, and par-level education is viewed differently in each. So while I may agree with the major view that this school is substantially enough below this par-level that we needn’t fuss too much about that aspect of it. The problem lies with what happens next. Were the school to actually improve just to attempt to match up to par-level education, it is then we must consider where par is.

The other problem that sort of stems from this is the fact that this current generation’s intellectual scale is so broad. Those that don’t want to learn will laze around as always, but those that find so many things fascinating have access to so much more information because of our technological advances. This becomes problematic when trying to set this par.

If we were to take a very oversimplified example, we can make a small model of a scale. Not to say that people back then were not intelligent or anything, but our generation is just so much more intelligent for their age (and certain studies have hinted that as a balance to this, they also stay in their adolescent stage for a significantly longer period of time, but I digress). Back then, we can label the genii (geniuses) as being rated 5 in intellect, 0 for those that do not wish to learn. If par were labelled as the average or midpoint in between the two, this would be 2.5. However, let’s say this generation’s mental capacity would be up to 10 for genii, and those that are academically apathetic still being at 0. That would mean our par would then be 5, and you can see that our par for standards has basically doubled. Perhaps this is the reason why some schools’ standards have changed and have risen to a slightly higher level, and it's becoming harder for those that have been labeled as sub-par to catch up.

Another thing that I want to mention would be my uneasiness with some of these actions taken.

Firstly, I want to also mention that though I may be analytically discouraging throughout this entire post, I do find this type of action done by these students to be rather admirable. However, perhaps actually marching out of the classroom to go through with this protest may not have been the best decision for that becomes a little bit contradictory on their part. To me, perhaps it was just how the article had phrased that gave me this impression, but, marching out of the school and ditching class in order to protest because of lacking education was not the most brilliant move. Maybe a more media-appealing one (since that seems to have been their goal), but not the brightest.

The suspension seems rather incorrectly justified. Sure, had the students been skipping too many classes and such, perhaps some merit would be given on their side, but if the suspension had been given solely because of the fact of the protest, then that seems like daftness overkill. Is this some form of academic misconduct that I’m unaware of? Why should the students have to pay for their lack of education when they’re really striving to learn? But of course, as I mentioned before, unless these kids have also been technologically deprived (and god forbid if they couldn’t find a nearby library), they could always learn by other means.

I do want to mention a rather daft ideology that most people have adopted, and I don’t know why it’s turned this way. A couple of years back, within the pre-2000 era, when a student wasn’t doing well, he would be scolded for his laziness and lack of effort. Now, it seems as though the teachers are being reprimanded more by the parents because of their children’s lack of knowledge. I don’t mean to back up those teachers mentioned within the article for 68 days of absence, and to such extents that large groups had to be formed to keep an eye on the students, is totally unacceptable. However, this ideology that the teacher is like an all-knowing being and that it must be the teachers fault isn’t learning anything is completely incorrect. If anything, I would say that if the child is not learning, it’s either that the child apathy level has risen to such a high extent, or the teacher fails to encourage the child to want to learn.

That’s honestly all there is to it. Unless the child has a serious learning disability, if the child has the desire to learn, they will learn. If they don’t, they won’t.

I do believe in the 50-50 split of efforts though. Obviously, it cannot be the student’s fault entirely, but it also works the other way. The teacher is only responsible for half of that responsibility to learn, you must meet them half way, but once again, where is this half way point in which you must meet? It’s become the same as how we define par.

Now it seems as though I’ve digressed into my own personal rant and not to much focus on the article itself, and perhaps that’s why I decided to write this post anyway. Perhaps the message I was trying to convey turned out to be rather useless after all, just restating the problem and never providing any solutions. I would like to say, however, that regardless of the circumstances, regardless of the possibility that this was another publicity stunt (though I highly doubt this), I do find it admirable that they would go to such extents for their own education.

And I’ll leave the rant about defining education (and what it means to be educated) for a later time.

Are there no depths?

Are there no depths that still remain that make one want to ponder upon a subject for more than the briefest moment?

It is never extremely appropriate for one to consider themselves so much more superior than others, but honestly, as the days keep passing by, I cannot help but notice how...shallow and colloquial conversations seem to be, and it's just an endless string of them all woven together that form this society most refer to as college.

Today, before lunch, a friend and I were walking down the main walkway of our campus. Apparently today was the "perfect" day for all of the pro-life members to grace this major walkway with their presence as they hand out flyers for the public to support their views. The piece of paper that I received was presenting the comparison of abortion with slavery, and both are generally a touchy topic for anyone. My friend and I do not particularly share the same views, for she is atheist and I am the resident Catholic in our group of two (as most refer to as a duo, if you must know). However, we did share one thing in common pertaining to the entire scenario, and that is that we both found it completely daft and were rather irked by the imposing nature of those standing out there in the gusty wind. Not only that, but even though the paper presented some valid, debatable points, credibility is completely lost when one uses the word "effect" as a verb.

My friend and I go to eat lunch and discuss our opposing views upon the topic. We don't generally agree, but we respected each others' views and did not impose our own upon the other's and it turned out to be a rather lively and enjoyable conversation (which is actually rather difficult to do with such a touchy topic).

And because it is such a touchy topic, and although it irked me when I found the large amount of "advertisers" lining the boundaries of the walkway from earlier, it irked me even more to find many of the people accepting these flyers only to be throwing them on the ground a few feet from the source. Firstly, let us not litter. Our world is dirty enough and your contribution is honestly not needed. Secondly, are you that primitive that any type of subject that seems a little more complicated than what you're used to is just disregarded as soon as it is presented?

Are there no depths to thy mental complexes?

I hear more about sex, drugs, and alcohol more than I would ever want to on a daily basis, and though I've grown accustomed to it, it baffles me as to why I even had to adapt. I hear the largest strings of curses just listening to what my hallmates say in a two hour interval most evenings. I hear more about addictive iPhone apps and upcoming parties more than I do about actual education. It disturbs me to bits as to how shallow this generation has become.

Of course, there are not many who will take these thoughts very seriously for as of right now, I'm only on the verge of turning 19, but just because I take into account the fact that most would ignore my views, perhaps placing them right here in a small sanction of the vastness of the internet would attract even the smallest audience's attention.

Is it because of this horrifying degradation of our supposed intellect that those at a younger age are usually ignored? Or perhaps we lack the real-life experience that would justify many of our claims that make us so easily abused and pushed aside (and by us, I mean our generation in the overly generalised sense).

Do not misunderstand me when I say the degradation of our intellect for perhaps that's not the best way to phrase it either. Maybe I was aiming for more of the apathetic nature of things. Many individuals are generally smart, though it seems that they just won't use this "innate" intelligence of theirs for anything useful. It's as if we have a shallow sea with gorgeous, uninhabited trenches at the bottom. Most would prefer to swim in the open waters blessed with the glorious amount of sunlight that sheds any doubt. Only those willing to use a little more effort to learn more would muster the courage to travel deeper, into the true depths of these trenches, and find that perhaps it's not so bad. Treasures are never found in the open, it is only when we dig deeper that we are ultimately rewarded.

However, many things are right in front of our eyes, or are we blinded by such colloquial rhythms of everyday life that deviating pattern would cause more pain than not?

I, for one, would much prefer listening to the frustrated grunts of those trying their hardest to understand chemistry concepts they have yet to grasp than amiable laughs about how they thought that a girl was lousy in bed.

And with that, I leave you with a rather poetic end note, as well as a Chinese proverb.

To seek greater understanding, one must travel many miles.
No jewel polished without friction, not a man perfected without trials.

Pondering?

And as the threshold between yesterday and today is surpassed, here I am, once again, wondering what this next set of twenty-four hours will have to offer me.

Did you know that it's actually a rather relaxing feeling as one ponders upon many things. Perhaps it's the fact that for this pondering to even commence, one must have at least a very slight amount of serenity to greet them. It's funny actually, how most of my deepest thoughts as to what will become of me in the future, or perhaps, how would I cope with certain disastrous future events, all come up as I sit here in the dark, coziness of my college dorm room listening to the shower in the background as a suite mate cleanses himself of his daily odours and filth. But then again, since when were things not completely contradictory to each other.

For example (and albeit, it may be rather disturbing), I'm Catholic, yet I find it much more disconcerting to see interracial couples as opposed to homosexual ones. This is not to bash against my own religious outlooks, but it's just another contradiction that I make do with, I'm guessing.

The other billions of intricate details that, when woven together in such a specific pattern, form my overall persona contradict one another too. I am not a gradiented melting pot design in which you can't make me out. I'm the tiled mosaic that seems almost childishly and hastily put together that it seems out of place, and not very appealing to look at or interpret. However, if you take enough time to actually look at all of these pieces, you will see that though it's rather random, there's a unique aspect to it that cannot be matched. You find yourself drawn in, and then never letting go. Then a bound is formed.

This is what friendship is.

Whether this is advantageous or disadvantageous, I know not. My closest friends have always been very limited to a select few, perhaps six or seven people at most, but these are tight bonds. I'd always found it rather hard to make friends, but these few that I've made, we've known each other for years, and this friendship doesn't appear to be deteriorating either.

And then, once again, I find myself isolated in this room as these friends of mine are probably all sleeping soundly in their own beds. The clicks and sounds of the keyboard keys consecutively being pushed down upon has become a natural sound to me. At times, I don't even notice it anymore. My hands just instinctively guide themselves above this plain with smooth gestures, and this is how I'm communicating.

This is language.

Be it spoken or written (or typed, if you prefer that to be a separate category), my realisation of language being expressed in so many different ways is not exactly a new one, but still rather intriguing to stumble upon when I, once again, find myself in this serene state. It is so broad, so vibrant, but still so limiting in many ways if diversity were to be taken out of the equation. Some things can only be expressed through written scripture, while others, with the numerous intonations in one's vocal chords. Some don't even need words, gestures become sufficient enough to communicate all messages. However, we cannot focus on one of these alone and hope that we will survive. We must implement all forms to truly master the art of language and communication.

I will not attempt to imitate James Joyce's Ulysses, but were you to imagine this entire post completely devoid of any punctuation, this message I'm conveying to you through these words would be completely lost. It could be read in a series of shouts just as easily as a stream of whispers that drift off into nothingness. Periods themselves help convey emotion. Though you may not see it physically, you can assume that I'm not shouting throughout this entire post (and don't be so daft as to say that I could be, I don't contradict myself that much). There is a certain flow that I like to keep as I write, was that expressed?

Ah, the magic of such things, but now, I must bid you adieu for even constant attempts to fabricate great wisdom cannot combat the mighty power of exhaustion.

But perhaps these drabbles or pondering blogs (or whatever you would want to label them as) will provide a new insight for you, and maybe even me when I read it in the future. It will give me a chance to reflect and perhaps even adjust my own views as I continue my journey through this thing called life.

Though I suppose the lesson we must all learn is that, wisdom or intelligence is not about knowing answers. It's being able to wonder about things in such obscure manners, yet not to the extent in which it would affect one's life negatively.

It's being able to accept the fact that you don't know, and still be comfortable with that feeling.