What you don't learn in school.

There is a quote by Neil Gaiman in regards to what you don't learn in school, and it goes like this:

"I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing."

My first year of college is nearly over. I've been making my own personal list of what I didn't learn in school that maybe I should have, and it goes like this:

• What to do when you meet someone whose brain is built differently than yours
• How to know what you want to do with your life
• What to do when the thing you want to do with your life or the thing you're best at is highly unlikely to get you a job of any kind
• Anything involving human nature (and not even what I think it's like. I mean I've never heard any attempts at expressing any beliefs or ideas about human nature.)
• What makes "good art" good and how to manifest the goodness of good art in the things you do (whether it's art or life in general, because a lot of the principles of art are worth thinking about in other pursuits)
• How to feel
• How to think 
• Why the poets and writers really wrote all the things they have you read
• The various gender and sexual identities out there, thus allowing you to figure out how you want to identify and making it less awkward when your identity is "different" than the norm
• The various political beliefs out there, thus allowing you to figure out exactly what you believe and how to go about believing it (in my government class, we learned about how the government process works but not what exact beliefs there were about different topics, and I'm not sure I can ever forgive that mistake on his part. He was a great guy otherwise but he didn't give us any of the tools to go out and have beliefs.)
• Anything involving money
• What to do when you don't love or care about anything and have to pretend that you love or care about something to keep yourself functional
• What to do when you're so angry at something (anything - people, society, your friends, your family, bad things that happen, school) that you just want to go kill everything and everyone or stop living or start a futile revolution or even just yell at everyone in a very violent manner and make life a little less pleasant and a little more unnerving for everyone
• Why anyone does anything

School is important. Don't get me wrong. Being in school teaches you some things, such as how to get along with people you don't like, how to be responsible in areas like doing your homework, and how to listen to authority and (if you have anything resembling a mind of your own and anything resembling opinions or beliefs that differ from authority's) when to listen to them and when not to and the best way to work around authority when something you believe genuinely clashes with what you're being asked to do. And even some of the actual lessons, like history or science, will show you some of the ways in which the world works or give you an idea of how we got where we are or how things physically happen.

They just won't teach you about the things that matter.

I saw something on the internet in which this actually happened to someone and wanted to say what you should do in this kind of situation.

If you have a mental disorder (like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, etc.) and you're with some idiot who finds out and says (just thinking of an example), "I can't hang out with you anymore. I don't want to catch schizophrenia."

If that happens, just give them your most judgmental look, and say, "Oh, I'm glad you said that. I didn't want to hang out with you anymore. I don't want to catch stupid."

I have created another blog. It is called "Jude Conlee's Poem-A-Day", in which I write and post a poem every day. It can be found here. A version of the same is also on Tumblr, which can be found here.

Thank you for reading this.

Here is an uninteresting and possibly regrettable fact about myself. There are exactly three things that I am any good at talking about and they are, in ascending order of importance, Doctor Who, my personality, and my beliefs and morality.

The first is easy to talk about, because if I can't find people who actually watch Doctor Who (a British TV show about a time traveling alien which is probably better than it sounds), I can find people who (pretend that they) are interested in it and want me to explain its premise to them. Which is fun. I like explaining the premises of things I like. But it's also really difficult to talk about, because most of the time, I'm just monologuing about something the other person knows nothing about and not really having any discussion. I'm just...talking at them rather than talking to them. Most of my conversations are like that.

The second is also similar to me just explaining something to people. I like talking about myself. I consider myself an interesting person (if also a bit terrible) and people sometimes like to hear me talk about myself. I'm one of those people who would probably make a brilliant fictional character but an awful real-life human, but this comes with the fortunate fact that talking about myself is fun, both for myself and for the other person. They hear me talk about how I'm depressed and isolated because I am so intelligent and I overthink things. I ramble on about how I don't mean a lot of what I say and how I live for irony (partly true).

The third one is the one that's most likely to scare people off. I have been known to have conversations (sometimes civil, sometimes ones in which I raise my voice) that basically amount to me judging actions and basic types of people that I believe to be evil. See, my sense of morality is unfortunately one of those "judge the evil people, make the buggers pay" type of moralities. (And with that I've probably bothered everyone who's read this. Note, though, that I don't discriminate against people for things they can't help. In fact, I judge the people who discriminate against others. In other words...I only hate haters? one could say. But that does result in an awful lot of hate. Hate's honestly one of the only emotions that even remotely satisfies me.) But then I also talk about how everyone needs to "apologize for their existence" (i.e. do good things for other people that make their existences worthwhile. We're all valuable as people but if we don't prove our worth, then our value is never realized.) Basically, though, I like to talk about the way I think the world is and what I think people should do and think, because that, to me, is the only important thing there is, and I think it's a real shame not to talk about the only thing in the universe that matters.

I'm not sure why I'm good at having these conversations. I wish I were better at making small talk and talking about pointless little things that other people are aware of. I wish I didn't have to bore people with my esoteric interests, give them the impression of narcissism with discussions of my personality, or intimidate them with my loud and judgmental beliefs. There's just not anything else that's interesting or worthwhile. Not to me. And I hate people anyway, so I'm not going to make an effort for them. With that, I have branded myself as an asocial jerk, but I don't care.

(It also bears mentioning that I'm having a really bad day today and I was trying to write some sort of entry that explains some aspect of myself so people might read this blog and think, "Hmm, that's an interesting person, let me read the blog this person makes because I am interested in this person." But I've either failed miserably or succeeded brilliantly. How can I know until I get a response.)

No one ever reads this blog.

This is for the perfectly logical reason that I never update this blog.

I don't write consistently enough for me to talk about, and my own life isn't interesting enough for me to sustain a blog about it. Heh, listen to me giving the classic "nothing happens to me" line that would almost immediately be proven wrong were I the protagonist in a book or movie. Alas, I'm not the fiction protagonist, no matter how I might seem it given my personality. (I am one of those people - and I guess a lot of writerly personalities might be like this - who would make a great fictional character but doesn't do so well as a real person.)

But I'm going to try to remember that this blog exists and remember that I have the ability to make things sound interesting when I say them (and the fact that I've been cursed with a certain eloquence as of late, or you might say plain old loquaciousness). And I'm going to try to put these facts together and make a blog that other people might read.

I'll write a proper entry tomorrow morning about something. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

In which I announce my intentions to write an April Novel again.

So after a lot of weird things happening in my head (mostly me being unable to write anything), I think I'm going to write a novel again. It's a superstition of mine that, every April, I write a lengthy and probably good piece. The thing about this superstition is that it's so far been accurate and correct. As in, I do this in April.

My current novel is about time travel and it has a sort of fantasy feel (perhaps a bit fairytale - and that was not intended to sound like the Doctor Who reference my brain turned it into). It's also got psychological drama and philosophical plot points and it's probably going to be really good. And they meet Ludwig von Beethoven and accidentally become the reason we went deaf. Aha, have a spoiler, my friends.

(If you can't tell, I'm actually in a really good mood writing this, and this is unusual for me, especially as of late.)

I was at the grocery store today, and I went around, looking at people, and I started thinking about them. Like I became cognizant of the fact that they were people with their own lives and that the world looks slightly different from their (equally valid) perspectives, and that made me think, "I wonder what the world, from my perspective, would look like to them."

What are other people like? What goes on inside their heads? Do they love the world? Hate it? Not care? Maybe they haven't formed an opinion on that idea. Do they have a set of rules they follow? A philosophy? A religion? Maybe they have religion or philosophy but no rules it results in them following. Maybe they have the opposite; rules with no kind of philosophy or religion from which they result.

What do other people feel? What do they not feel? Are there people who live without anger or hate or despair? Maybe there are some without joy or love or excitement. Have they loved? Do they currently love? Do they go around wondering what in the world love is? Is there anything in this life that they hate, something that sparks a fire of rage and anger inside them that nothing else does? Or maybe they don't have intense emotions. Maybe some of them have muted feelings. Maybe some of them are the opposite. All their emotions are intense. Do they think about the world? Are they clever? Do they ever consider the full scope of life and go through it, burdened with the need to think about things all the time? Or maybe they're the opposite, living in a tiny world but free from the stress of having to stop and think about what existing really is.
 
What must it be like inside their heads?