Thank you for your kind wishes for my progress on the path of 無念! I’ve still got a long way to go.
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Well why do you think that bourgeois section is ON there, mister smarty pants?!?! To keep the plebes on the low end of the scale.
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Come swim with us, boy, and bring that copy of Goerrrrteay and read to us while we shave our pits.
I think I know what you’re getting at but I just had to check the translation
Practicing not thinking will lead you to chagrin and regret.
(ah, I notice that the Chinese translation makes more sense, but the auto detect said Japanese)
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Google’s translate is, as it so often does, missing the context. In both Japanese and Chinese, it is a specific Buddhist term, roughly translating as “no-thought” (though, without the context, that doesn’t really do it justice), which differs from its vernacular meaning in Japanese (as far as I’m aware, there’s no vernacular meaning in Chinese).
I was shooting for Chinese, but I only have my computer set up for simplified text input in Chinese, so I switched to Japanese to get the traditional characters, hence Google’s auto-detect.
As always, you give a kind and compassionate response. But though I might have grown up with a mild economic disadvantage, I didn’t have any social ones. I was a white cisgendered male heterosexual right-handed American with no disabilities who grew up around plenty of friends who did end up going to respectable institutions of higher learning. Yeah, my counselor was crap, but she was also Jason B’s counselor, and though he grew up across the road from my trailer park and scored somewhat lower on the SAT, he became valedictorian and went to Yale and eventually got his J.D. from Tulane. He and I played kickball together and were in Cub Scouts together and on the Academic Decathlon team together, and had essentially interchangeable childhoods, by any socioeconomic standard.
But he put in the effort. I didn’t.
I hear you, and respect the fact that you’re taking ownership of your choices, but again I say to you that teens are nowhere near as mature as they think they are. Just as some grow to full height sooner than others, some take longer to develop enough of their prefrontal cortex to be able to make life-changing decisions intelligently.
Also, the relationship between a counselor or teacher and a student is an individual one. It is quite possible that Jason B had a better rapport with your counselor and she respected him/his family more, and so she worked harder on his behalf. Ditto his teachers. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve compared notes with other parents and we have entirely different perceptions about a particular teacher or administrator, and in many cases we’ve been able to figure out that it has to do with that person appearing to be more comfortable or more protective with kids from different backgrounds/families. For example, very good friends of ours are a stereotypical family: mom & dad married with no divorces in their past; conventional occupations, with the wife having more of a supporting job; northern European heritage; two kids, one of each gender (and both blond); etc. In many cases they have exactly the opposite experience our family does with the same teachers.
Do not discount the fact that growing up ACROSS FROM the trailer park conferred less prejudice on Jason B.
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I have to, at least a little bit (he said with a wry grin). My street address was 14360 Rios Canyon Road. His address was something like 14363 Rios Canyon Road. The road was (and probably still is) barely paved, with plenty of potholes. A couple of the households on that quite rural road had horses; I don’t remember if Jason’s family did (my sister’s pal Mary did, and she was 2 or 3 doors down from Jason), but I know that especially by the time we got to high school, which was 3.7 miles away according to Google Maps, nobody would have thought Jason’ home life noticeably more advantageous than mine. We took almost all the same classes. We both drove modest used cars to school once we were old enough. The fact is that in 8th grade, my classmates voted me (not Jason) “Most Likely To Succeed” and yet, four years later, though I had outscored him on most standardized tests, Jason’s weighted grade-point average was around a 4.2, whereas mine was somewhere around a 3.4. He was valedictorian, and I, ranked number 35 in a graduating class of 349, barely missed being an honor grad in the top 10% of the class.
I don’t resent any of this, and I understand how somebody else’s social stigma might have held them back from their full potential. But I really, truly, honestly believe that all I had to do was work a little harder. Aptitude tests told me I could do anything (my SAT score was perfectly balanced between math and verbal scores), and the world was my oyster, but I coasted and chickened out and went to a community college to get my lower-division classes taken care of on the cheap, diddled around with too many Theatre Arts electives and not enough transferable general ed classes, then went to work in Hollywood.
I wouldn’t blame any disadvantaged kid who went through somewhat similar circumstances, but I’m perfectly content to blame myself for this round. Jason and I both escaped the redneck dirt-road confines of Rios Canyon (and are both pretty danged progressive for having come from there), but there’s no escaping the fact that he’s a conscientious, diligent, committed hard worker (in addition to having a mind like a steel trap), whereas I’m a bit more of a Jeff Spicoli type (albeit one who doesn’t surf).
I do wish somebody had kicked my ass a little harder, but really, they shouldn’t have needed to.
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You’re an older student now, not dead. Keep doing kick-ass things.
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Weren’t you the sixth or seventh child? Did your parents have any ass-kicking left in them by that point? Heck by three (albeit twins) I am already in “eh let 'em get hurt so they learn” mode a bit. Can’t imagine six or seven… Though I know a guy with 8 kids, 7 boys and the latest is a girl. She’s in for a surprise.
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What’s funny is that my mom had us in batches. The first four by the time she was 25, and then three more starting 13 years later.
Helicopter parents they weren’t.
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@codinghorror, @donald_petersen I love you guys.
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That’s how I begin each entry in my diary.[/quote]
That’s funny.
is how I begin my diary every day, but I’ve forgotten what that means.
Sort of kind of, It was also interesting for me, my problem was being able to pass high school by doing fuck all. I guess if I didn’t go to a bloody hard engineering school I probably would have done okay. Anyway finally changing majors to pure math I did better. I guess I am weird in that I think things like number theory are fun. But by the time I got to graduation audit I found out my transfer was effed up and I had to take all kinds of stuff like lab for chem 2 which was dumb. Anyway I had been at that 7 years and punted, plus my part time gig as a helpdesk tech in the student labs had moved up to a full time gig for the school one. So yeah degree, whatever. If I became financially able to I could might back and finish get a proper math degree, maybe physics too. No post grad as I am not sure there is anything I could be that hyped about learning that in depth. I did actually get better grades by then not that I did more homework but good profs and an actual interest in the subject helped a lot.
Then I went and got married to a girl across the continent, and we settled on Seattle as that was where the IT job market was. I ended up getting work at the big plane company doing desktop and DOS server support/moving equipment via a temp agency. Then since I was the only guy around who knew CCMail at the time that got me a real full time job and it has been a fun ride from NT4 till now where I am still doing sysadmin stuff.
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You must have had the stomach of a concrete elephant to deal with CCMail.
I really wish in the US there was a system of vocational schools that weren’t denegrated. Everyone I work with has either a law degree, an MBA, a phd, or is so good they are Distinguished almost automatically.
CS, music, and ahem Humanities should be vocations. The first two are obvious, the third is: how do I set up a non profit, how do I figure out if I am duplicating work and if i am merge efforts, and how do I manage my Humanities endeavor so it supports slightly more than me?
Enh, it was a big but stable user base most of the problems were getting the device drivers in the right order in config.sys (oh I do not miss that voodoo at all). It was what the university used along with netware way back in the win3.11 days so I had a clue about it. It was okay for the time.
Notes on the other hand. CSC keeps telling us they will dump it but man it hangs on. I will never ever have a bad thing to say about the bloated thing that is Outlook/Exchange thanks to Notes Happily all I get is the notification for CSC staff and corporate spam and since I have to use the Boeing provided laptop I use the web portal for it which is so so so much faster but still the worst email UI ever.
After dealing with Notes, I swore to never badmouth MSFT again.
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