02/02/2012

There are still a couple of hours until lab starts.  It should be easy—separating the components of a common drug—I have done it before.  But then, what haven’t I?

This afternoon I did some preparation for lab, and then studied for my calculus exam tomorrow morning.  Math has always been my weakest subject, partly, I’m sure, because I don’t like it.  Which isn’t to say “I hate math!” or “Math sucks!”  I don’t, and it doesn’t.  It’s just that math (the kind that I suffer through, that is) lacks consequences.  If I make a mistake and get the wrong value for x, there is no real effect on my life, except perhaps a slight lowering of my midterm grade.

Conversely, I don’t mind using math outside of math classes.  Some of my favorite chemistry topics involve rather a lot of math, and my quantitative biology class is probably about the coolest class ever.  So go figure, right?

I only got a 27 on the math portion of the ACT, and this once said to me that I would be a failure as a scientist.  I wasn’t “good enough” at math.  The average math ACT score is just a hair over 21.  Sure, I probably wasn’t going to the Ivy Leagues with a score like that, but at Hometown University I could have gotten along just fine.

I don’t know what’s worse: the lies I’ve been told by others, or the lies I tell myself.

I took an enneagram test.  I am a type 5.

http://www.enneagraminstitute.com/TypeFive.asp

One of “our” greatest fears is being useless, or being unprepared for the real world.  Our greatest delusion is that we are both.  I have always felt unprepared for everything.  As if, somehow, I had missed a crucial lesson in “being a real person,” a lesson that everyone else had passed and that I could never make up.  I’ve gone to school for the last twenty years, and still have not learned realness.  I wonder if I ever will.

So I continually hold back for fear of being inadequate, waiting to learn more so that I can finally “show my stuff.”  Except I will never know enough, because everything I learn is “nothing” and it all fades into meaninglessness almost instantly. 

I am surely an “unhealthy 5,” somewhere down between levels 7 and 9.  “Explosively self-destructive” seems like a bit much, though.  Just a bit.