Again, it's been a while since I've updated. I'm currently in grant writing hell, with my second resubmission of my NIH grant due on August 5th, and yet I continue to procrastinate and stare at the computer screen, not making progress. Oh well.
A conversation in the current events board made me remember an interesting historical event. Apparently biblical scholars in the 1970's discovered that, much to their surprise, early versions of the new testament written in hebrew made no mention of the "virgin mary," and in fact the whole idea of an immaculate conception resulted from a mistranslation of the word in hebrew for "young woman" into the word in greek for "virgin." Whoops. There's a mistake I wish I could go back in time and fix. While it's an interesting discussion in and of itself (in general I shy away from talking about religion, as my views on the subject tend to alienate most everyone except people like Richard Dawkins) the topic that it made me think of was how we've all ended up where we are. It seems to me that if you stop and think about the chain of events that have lead to where you are in life (at least for me, and I imagine it's similar for most people) that the smallest changes and decisions end up having enormous repercussions later on down the road.
While there are obviously exceptions, this mainly doesn't happen until people leave their parents and go off on their own. My own story is comical in how idiotic some of the forces were in making me end up where I am today. When I was deciding where to apply for colleges, I was mainly looking at Ivy League schools, and (surprisingly, in retrospect) a bunch of schools in the midwest like Wisconsin-Madison, Michigan, Northwestern, U. Chicago, Washington U. at St. Louis. I got the application for UC Berkeley on a whim and filled it out like one day before it was due, then sent it off figuring I would never hear from them again. To me, California was this dreamy place where all of the women were gorgeous and everyone hung around the beach surfing all day. My senior year in college I went to Cancun, Mexico with some friends for spring break (
). The day I got back I crashed hard, and was basically passed out and hung over when my parents barged into my room and woke me up. I had gotten a "thick letter" from Berkeley, and apparently had gotten in. In an attempt to get them to leave me alone and let me go back to sleep I said "Yeah, that's great, I'm going to go there. Can I go to back to sleep now?" And without really thinking about it, made a decision that had me, five months later, ending up 3000 miles from anyone I knew, wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into.
When I started college I was an electrical engineering/computer science major. I did OK (actually better than in most of my later bio classes) but when I took this class in solid state physics/device mechanics, it was horrible. The class was totally boring, and the work consisted of memorizing equations that took up half a page determining things that I really didn't give a crap about. One day during a midterm exam, I just decided "this sucks. I hate this class." And proceeded to put the answer "4" down for every question in the test, hand it in early and leave. It could have just been a bad mood, bad weather, the fact that I had almost gotten hit by a car riding my bike to the exam, but that simple decision resulted in me changing my major, which later determined my job after college, where I became convinced that I wanted to go to grad school, which eventually brought my to New York city.
It's funny to think about if maybe I had studied a little bit more or gotten more sleep or walked to that particular test that I could have a completely different job in a different part of the world right now, with different friends. Maybe a wife, 2 kids and a house with a white picket fence. (doubtful, that one.
) I don't know, this is sort of a rambling entry, I just think it's funny to think back to this extremely minor decisions that end up drastically changing the courses of our lives. It also makes me think that any seriously long-term planning in one's life is both unrealistic and stupid. Circumstances change, people change, and the spontaneity that lets us make snap decisions like that is what keeps life interesting.
A conversation in the current events board made me remember an interesting historical event. Apparently biblical scholars in the 1970's discovered that, much to their surprise, early versions of the new testament written in hebrew made no mention of the "virgin mary," and in fact the whole idea of an immaculate conception resulted from a mistranslation of the word in hebrew for "young woman" into the word in greek for "virgin." Whoops. There's a mistake I wish I could go back in time and fix. While it's an interesting discussion in and of itself (in general I shy away from talking about religion, as my views on the subject tend to alienate most everyone except people like Richard Dawkins) the topic that it made me think of was how we've all ended up where we are. It seems to me that if you stop and think about the chain of events that have lead to where you are in life (at least for me, and I imagine it's similar for most people) that the smallest changes and decisions end up having enormous repercussions later on down the road.
While there are obviously exceptions, this mainly doesn't happen until people leave their parents and go off on their own. My own story is comical in how idiotic some of the forces were in making me end up where I am today. When I was deciding where to apply for colleges, I was mainly looking at Ivy League schools, and (surprisingly, in retrospect) a bunch of schools in the midwest like Wisconsin-Madison, Michigan, Northwestern, U. Chicago, Washington U. at St. Louis. I got the application for UC Berkeley on a whim and filled it out like one day before it was due, then sent it off figuring I would never hear from them again. To me, California was this dreamy place where all of the women were gorgeous and everyone hung around the beach surfing all day. My senior year in college I went to Cancun, Mexico with some friends for spring break (
). The day I got back I crashed hard, and was basically passed out and hung over when my parents barged into my room and woke me up. I had gotten a "thick letter" from Berkeley, and apparently had gotten in. In an attempt to get them to leave me alone and let me go back to sleep I said "Yeah, that's great, I'm going to go there. Can I go to back to sleep now?" And without really thinking about it, made a decision that had me, five months later, ending up 3000 miles from anyone I knew, wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into.
When I started college I was an electrical engineering/computer science major. I did OK (actually better than in most of my later bio classes) but when I took this class in solid state physics/device mechanics, it was horrible. The class was totally boring, and the work consisted of memorizing equations that took up half a page determining things that I really didn't give a crap about. One day during a midterm exam, I just decided "this sucks. I hate this class." And proceeded to put the answer "4" down for every question in the test, hand it in early and leave. It could have just been a bad mood, bad weather, the fact that I had almost gotten hit by a car riding my bike to the exam, but that simple decision resulted in me changing my major, which later determined my job after college, where I became convinced that I wanted to go to grad school, which eventually brought my to New York city.
It's funny to think about if maybe I had studied a little bit more or gotten more sleep or walked to that particular test that I could have a completely different job in a different part of the world right now, with different friends. Maybe a wife, 2 kids and a house with a white picket fence. (doubtful, that one.
) I don't know, this is sort of a rambling entry, I just think it's funny to think back to this extremely minor decisions that end up drastically changing the courses of our lives. It also makes me think that any seriously long-term planning in one's life is both unrealistic and stupid. Circumstances change, people change, and the spontaneity that lets us make snap decisions like that is what keeps life interesting.VIEW 25 of 29 COMMENTS
[Edited on Aug 05, 2004 11:37AM]
i think that's odd.
granted,
im thinking of only top tier schools here.