I will graduate on June 6th, 2009 and receive a BA. I will travel to Milwaukee and start a new life with marriage and graduate school. I want this diary to be an intro to how I met my fiance and hopefully some of my older personality traits seeps through. I was going to write a diary about my research on option pricing, but I realized no one would understand it and I lack the necessary writing skills to explain what my research means.
I will start by writing what my thoughts were when I first arrived at college. I am in my waning days of college, so writing about past experiences is a good way for me reflect on my life.
This diary is also a bit about a love story, one that rolls around in my mind these days as I am about to be reunited with my fiancee after a year of absence.
When I left high school 4 major topics interested me: chess, physics, math, and Judaism. I came to college a broken, ambitious young man who was determined to make his own path. I was burned from my parents selfish neglect. Thus, I transformed myself into a machine that optimizes decisions with cold, hard logic. But without my fiance, I would have failed and died on the streets. That I am certain of.
I attended Knox because it struck me as a good school with which I could excel at independent thinking free of environmental influences. My first 4 weeks were not merely rough, but humiliating. My first class schedule consisted of physics 110, calc 1 and FP (freshman precepatorial). My high school prepared me poorly and my writing skills were way below sub par. I got a D on my first calc test, I got below a 60% in my physics class and I wasn't sleeping well. But, the one gem I possessed that others lacked was my inquisitive, argumentative nature. I may write poorly, but the way I communicate with the spoken word and read fanatically created an atmosphere of debate that greatly lifted the vigor of class. For those of you scratching your heads, I am speaking of FP. There is no debate or class discussion in math or physics classes. FP is a class that I would describe as a weekly gathering of elite intellectuals who discuss a book recently read while sipping tea and smoking cigars. Well, it would have been like that, but I hate normal or elite group behavior, so I make it my job to disrupt the standard interactions of social gatherings. I am what you would call "a controversial figure". I would tell biology majors who were vegetarians that I love polluting the earth, especially if it allows us to hunt meat for me to sink my teeth into. Or I walk up to an anti-war student and declare that the Iraq war is good because it benefits the economy (I hadn't taken econ 301 yet.) That person has never spoken to me since, for good cause.
So, when I say I added flavor to FP, it was more like I was the igniter that blew up a newly crafted nuclear device over a modern city. This is where my love story comes in, but I would like to comment on my romantic history.
My dating experience can be best explained as non-existent. Never kissed a girl, held hands, or showed any interest in ever dating any one from high school. I wonder these days if my parents thought I was gay, they seemed to get edgier about my lack of dating by my senior year. That conflict ended in my father yelling at me because I told people I was Jewish. Non sequitur, right? No, but I won't get into that. My father is definitely a believer in assimilation. So when most guys go to college, one of the things they look forward to is hitting on hot woman and hoping for action. I came to college assuming most women were not worth my time, so why bother being interested in them. I also don't believe in getting action for the sake of it, personality is far more important than physical qualities.
My love story comes in rather innocently, when I noticed this very attractive blond, who happened to be wearing a Jewish star necklace in my FP class. Now, just because I am not interested in dating women, doesn't mean I don't notice how physically pleasing they look. But, I assumed like most women I had met in my life, she was just another ditz that worries about how she looks in a dress and whether or not that hot guy will notice her skanky underwear. Yeah, my experience with women in high school can be summed up succinctly. I blame society for forcing gender roles on men and women based on cave man culture. But as I said, I hate normal behavior.
It was the next class, when the professor opened the floor up to debate; I put my controversial statement up front defying anyway to contradict me. Enter kos user elsinora, a woman that so thoroughly schooled me in her response that I was left sputtering out nonsense and ending with, "That's the stupidest thing I ever heard." To say I was humiliated underscores the experience. I never met a woman so articulate. I was experiencing a paradigm shift and in frustration I was quiet for the rest of class. But, let me be clear, no one schools me so thoroughly like that and gets no counter attack from myself. The next few weeks I proceeded to argue more vehemently against any position she supported, much like the current Republican party. According to most sources familiar with my argument style, I, at my most peaceful, was someone that defies anyone to think differently from me. If you do, I will murder your wife, children, and any distant relatives. Okay, not that last part, but I was a brazen, argumentative bully that would declare war before agreeing with elsinora on anything. What is so silly about that image is that I am really not a bully. I am a 5'9", 130 pound, nerdy looking, non muscular male, that might be able to lift 50 pounds on a good day. elsinora tells me that my argumentative style is aggressive, but no one takes me seriously because it is quite obvious that I mean no harm (hurts my ego it does). She said that I if I tried to hurt an animal, I would be more likely to hurt myself in the attempt than do actual damage to the animal. I am practically a pacifist and I leave rooms any time serious conflict occurs.
The worst part for me during this experience was how I recognized that I was falling for her more and more after each day. I never do that! Remember, woman were not worth my time when I came to college. Not only that, but I was taking positions against her I didn't believe in; that was a contradiction that was destroying me on the inside. Of course, the number one thing driving me crazy was how she stood up for herself and never backed down. I admit it: I admire that in a woman. Five weeks in, the tone of our discourse changed from Satan vs. G-d to pleasant companions who enjoyed sparring. People were starting to bet on when we would date. It helped that she was teaching me Hebrew and she always seemed to find extra time to be around me, so we would talk about normal affairs. To be clear, she despised me when she saw me at first. But, after seeing me alone at the first Hillel Club meeting, one guy surrounded by a sea of woman (it was overwhelming), she decided to try and make me feel more comfortable by discussing pleasantries with me.
There is far too much to discuss when it comes to our relationship, so perhaps other diaries will take care of that. But I would like to leave you with these thoughts: I am a much better person for having elsinora in my life and the sheer amount of things she has done for me these past four years are not quantifiable. She has slowly brought me back from insanity and instability. Now, I enjoy many of the finer things that normal life brings (but only some). Without her, I would be a raving libertarian that thinks President Obama is a secret terrorist.