Down to Earth

Wow. I feel really detached from everything today, but it hasn’t only been today. The past few weeks have been really saturated—not necessarily busy, although some days were. But every day was saturated with activities. Now I feel like someone cut my tether and I‘m lost in space.

I’m attempting to muddle through this scholarship application for the Canadian Merit Award, and uh—yeah, it’s really difficult. They expect me to be some sort of leader who contributes a lot to the community. I’m not going to delude myself: I haven’t contributed much to the community, and I’m not much of a leader. It’s these sorts of activities that really rub it in. It’s like writing my resume all over again—in fact, it is precisely that. I‘m trying to sell myself to them, and I hate it. I hate the entire process of trying to tell a bunch of people I don’t know how great I am and why they should give me money.

So I‘m filling out all of this stuff, and I hit the essay questions. Ouch. As I’m trying to answer these questions, I more and more feel like I‘m not a leader. Which is fine. I’m a follower with leader-like qualities that means I‘m the reliable right-hand (or left-hand, depending upon where the comfiest chair is) man. I don’t mind. What’s with all this focus on being a leader anyway? I think that society has falsely associated leadership with original thinking. These are two distinct concepts. Leaders don’t have to be original thinkers, and original thinkers don’t have to be leaders. I’m an original thinker, or at least more so than I am a leader, what with my whole introverted personality. Yet due to a consistent lack of conscious social engineering policies in our education system, the schools attempt to treat the concepts as one in the same: leaders are thinkers, followers are not, and they disproportionately award leaders.

(The contributions to the community thing I can understand, although I admit it’s ironic that I espouse socialist sympathies yet don’t really participate much in “community” stuff. )

I really need to stop going to bed at 1 AM too. I try to cram too much into my evenings, because that’s the only time I have, but I pay for it by being tired the next morning.

Sometimes I feel like a tachyon. We go so fast, we move faster than light.

So in short, I have lost track of the meaningful stuff and been swept up in the minutiae of my life. If you or anyone you know has a tractor beam, transporter, Goa’uld cargo ship, or even a really long rope, please pull me back down to Earth.