Re: Ode to Losing Virginity.

I Find Karma (adam@cs.caltech.edu)
Thu, 6 Aug 1998 03:54:19 -0700


> > PEOPLE TYPE "A" are the folks for whom everything major in life gets
> > achieved with relative ease....
> >
> > PEOPLE TYPE "B" are the "botched and the bungled" -- these are the
> > people who are not blessed with an overwhelming amount of any given
> > resource, and as a result their goals in life are much more modest....
> >
> > PEOPLE TYPE "C" are the people for whom nothing comes easy. They have
> > more resources than the people of type "B," and possibly have more
> > resources than the people of type "A." However, unlike the "A"s, these
> > resources came with a high price...
> >
> > The thought I thought was this. That it's possible that I'm not a type
> > "B", that I'm not born stupid. That it's possible that I was born a
> > type "C" -- someone very much realizing there is much he doesn't know --
> > but have not yet figured out what my resource is or how to glean it once
> > I do figure it out.
>
> Ummm... you *must* be a type C if it even occurs to you to ask the
> question. Think about it.

I guess one can be self-defeating and think oneself a strange kind of B
that is botched, bungled, AND unhappy.

I guess I would call those mutated B's, the killer B's without the
"happy" gene usually attached to being a B. But I wonder how many such
people like that there are. I suspect that most of the B's are either
too busy struggling to survive or too busy watching television to have
time to be unhappy.

That's what I thought I was. Now I'm not so sure. I guess my point is
your point: all this thinking makes me wonder if it's possible I could
still be a B, even a weird mutant B.

> > See, I've often held the opinion that people do not change their core
> > nature without a life-altering epiphany -- a realization that so strikes
> > at the core of one's existence that in so doing it alters one's core
> > from that point forward. What comes next does not necessarily make me
> > happy; I place my whole value system in question as I hold my nose and
> > jump feet first into what I know I must now do.
> But you were working at Microsoft already ;-).

Yes, this is even more vial than that. It's the realization that it's
more important to get out of school than to write the perfect thesis.

It's also the realization that I must let Rohit have his own experiences
and his own failures, even if it pains me to watch, e.g.

http://xent.ics.uci.edu/FoRK-archive/july98/0268.html

----
adam@cs.caltech.edu

Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes.
That way, when you criticize them... you are a mile away AND you have
their shoes.