Intellectual Masturbation

Intellectual Masturbation

i am an irregular bloggetter and it has been a while since i’ve scrawled my feelings down to an entry. I’ve seen some ups and downs and middles and outsides and corners and triangles and ratios and eugenics experiments and that bullshit. I’ve seen people come and go as quickly as a US presidential campaign and I can’t seem to remember half of what has happened in the past week. Thank god I’ve got this outlet for my plugs, so to speak.

First of all, the biggie smalls of my life , University of Melbourne. It’s a strange place. I found it very disappointing, intellectually. You expect a school ranked in the top 30 worldwide to be some kind of utopian communian of knowledge. Instead you get people you are good at looking like they have something to say, and people who are bad at looking like they have something to say, but that doesn’t stop them. Neither of these groups actually contribute, they just masterbate all over the room. Not that I have any thing against masterbation, but I think it’s something you should do either by yourself, or with those you love, and love you back. Even the professors and teacher’s assistants often suffer from some form of similar disease. So many of them will just read from the text while occasionally adding their perspective when they so feel generous enough to deem the 100 or so poor souls in front of them qualified candidates.

To add to this vile of intellectual disappointment, the people there are cool but there’s a certain air of prestigiousness that I can’t seem to live upto. I am, however, fine with this because this is who I am.

That almost sounds like I am generalizing about the whole place, but luckily I have solid evidence against such a perspective. A very smart lecturer, and another very small class with good material keep enrolled. My subjects aren’t very creative, nor imaginative, but this is good for someone like me. Sometimes it’s better to be just asked to add and subtract rather than conjure up an opinion for which no one will care less about. The school is huge and the fresher the student, the less the place cares about you. It’s a tough nut to crack. Many classes work against you, in fact. I am fairly sure they put me in certain classes because they thought I was going to fail.

So for the future anyway, I think I’ll move to Amsterdam/Berlin. It just seems so right for me. The people there are more open to ideas and open to experiences. The strange cults and sexual exploits can always denote a red zone in central Europe on my year 12 Geography map- not that I’d want any of that. But it’s all about opportunity and those strange fixations are more watering holes for those that think that they may want to drink someday.

Depite what you have just read, I am not joining a cult. In fact, the closest thing I have ever become to joining a cult is the various strange university clubs they make available to us coy first years. I have joined a fair few. Germany will hopefully have something I’m searching for. And as humans, our instinct is always to search. Searching for employment, soulmates, friends, family, a place to call our home. No matter what we find, there is always something else to seek out. I wonder if there is someone who believes-truly, that they no longer have to search for anything.

I read this book awhile ago. It was about a guy who was certain that everything that life had for him was in Zanzibar. He was so contrived on this idea of utter completion, that he sold his life to travelling there. I am not one to spoil endings, so maybe one day you’ll find the book whose name escapes me.

I’m hoping that Engineering in Germany will become my Zanzibar