… and I’m not talking about funny orbits, though I could discourse there for a while if people are really interested (thought it’s not as much fun as actual rocket science, my favorite subject in physics).
See, the other day I was talking to a friend-colleague of mine, and he was describing his father. His father has no cell phone. He has no television. He has no computer. He has no answering machine for the-I-$h!7-you-not, rotary telephone. He is, in a word, eccentric. This man is a product of his choices, many of them not to join the rest of the world.
And I got to thinking about all the times I almost bowed out of all pop culture.
As a grad student, well, there isn’t a whole lot of extra time in the world for anything (Yeah, I know, when do I write? Well, the university only owns my thoughts for so many hours out of the day—that’s not actually a joke, the university does actually own my thoughts while I’m on the clock). Every now and then I decide that I’ll never do ______ again. I’ll declare that wasting my time on Pandora only increased my desire to listen to even stranger than normal music. I swore I would never watch TV again. All for the sake of saving time to spend doing something “useful” with my life.
Thankfully, I got over myself, but there are plenty of academic types who never do, my friend’s father among them. Yeah, he’s a little extreme, but I’ve met enough of these people, I can now honestly say, the strange ones stay in school… forever.
Next up, how the Lord of the Rings is just like Grad school.
That's an interesting observation. He probably thinks he's being completely normal too, and doesn't understand what the big deal is. ;)
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