Fed Up

May 13, 2008

Originally Written 9th May 2008

To be frank, life has been going down it’s usual route and I have been quite content but as of writing I feel downright frustrated and annoyed.

Fed Up

This week I have fortunately been on top of my blogging which is great, I have a nice stash of banked articles and plenty of ideas that I waiting to jot down. One of those ideas has been on my mind probably everyday this week and that is the stigma of video games.

Without trying to ruin the main article that I plan on posting, this topic has been brought to my attention over a recent incident. I feel like I may be boring readers of my gaming blog when I incorporate such stories but it looks like I will be giving it another shot and reoffending.

It doesn’t matter what happened, you can wait for the article but it has me re-examining the stigma that I and many others face. The more I think about the past issues and friction that I have faced with being stigmatized in such a way the more I feel frustrated and angry. The incident that I will later explain is a perfect example of how certain people look down on game players such as myself with frankly unjust justification.

My frustration of being someone stigmatized as a social inadequate (I don’t feel that this is the case anymore, it seems that some people have made it past the gap of a peer pressured institutional context, others haven’t) has snowballed with various other issues that also make me feel very frustrated. The issue of binge drinking is one of those, a past time in which I cannot see reason for. Maybe my vision is blurred somewhat but I struggle to understand why my lack of interest in drinking myself to death, for many people ties in so nicely with that previous mentioned stigma of playing video games (boy that was bitter). It baffles me, I guess one day when I grow up and be a man and decide to buy a large exhaust for my car and throw up in a not-so-innocent friend’s toilet, maybe then I will understand.

More wood of frustration has been tossed onto the fire with a recent exam mark from my Chinese class in which I got a rounded 60%. Yeah I know, I passed, yay. Unfortunately I feel pretty disappointed with myself, considering the extra effort that I put into my Chinese language. This is where the light bulb of resolution switches on.

When I get to an issue like this I begin writing and then as I am writing I am already concluding the article before I even get there, making what I am doing slowly become more and more redundant. This is the point where I am now.

You see, I am right, what I said was correct. I do put in a lot of effort in my Chinese study but what I have found recently and especially this week is that I don’t really set this around the course work. Over the holiday period I saw, set and achieved my goals in language learning and I am still working on getting to the next level of acquisition. I have already mastered the art of self teaching to a tee. What I have found now is that, I am not systematically learning, I am instead learning with intent. I use the classwork and resources as a tool to develop the skills that I myself want to gain form the course. I am not interested in this University qualities rubbish or getting distinctions anymore, I am just learning what is relevant and useful to me.

With this realization I have found a certain disengage with in many of my classes. Particularly Chinese and Marketing. I no longer focus my Chinese work around the curriculum, I just use the tools provided to achieve my own personal goals (in this case become as fluent as possible before my exchange) and as long as I achieve sufficient results and learn what I want to learn then I am happy. I feel that my benefit lies in a different area to that of the courses. So as of late, even though my Chinese, trully has been pushing to new heights, my interest in the course work has dwindled. It is monotonous, uninteresting, unegaging and not very useful. A total disconnect.

As such I have been using classes to develop relevant skills, Chinese classes as a resource for grammar and vocab, linguistics classes to create cultural understanding and to improve literacy quality and marketing classes well for yeah marketing concepts. To be frank the style of fact by fact learning in marketing is just completely tangent to the way I have been learning in recent years, it is less systematical and memorization which is just how I like it because where is the skill in memorization? Maybe this is my issue with Chinese so many characters continue to escape me. Maybe I need balance.

In anycase I feel a total disconnect in these two classes and I guess the results speak for themselves. I really have gotten sick of this whole charade and I would rather spend the next year and a half progressing in areas that suit me. The main goal, call it an occupation is still very unclear. Whatever the case may be I’d like to do something that focuses on my core aspects and distances itself for all of that social stigma.

Man, that makes me sound like a social nazi but allow me to reassure you that this is not the case. I am by no means a withdrawn, isolated create. I just feel frustrated by these very contradictory social particles.

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