One Thing I Wish I Was Smart Enough to Understand

So here I am again, starting to write my essay days after it was supposed to be finished. I also have yet to keep to plan to only read the topic when I start writing the essay in order to better prepare me for the GREs testing situation. But, I am writing on Notepad instead of Word, so no spell-check for me for this essay. Huzza! Although it did occur to me that it would be actually beneficial to spell check my essays after I have finished writing them in order to note which words I misspelled even after carefully re-reading the essay, so the things that will end up as my actual blog posts will likely be not quite as badly spelled as they could be.

Enough distractions, one thing I wish I was smart enough to understand. My immediate cop-out answer is EVERYTHING!!! Seriously, I love learning new things, and there are few areas that I’m genuinely not interested, just some I happen to have slightly more interest in. A second cop-out answer is why in God’s name the letter “i” is capitalized when its used as a personal pronoun. This simple fact is making my life a living hell right now, as I have to go back and correct the many, many lowercase i’s in this essay, which normally Microsoft Word would lovingly autocorrect for me. A third answer would be not really something I wish I was smart enough to understand, but more just something I wish I could do in general, which is have an absolute belief in anything. However, I won’t be writing about that because even though that’s been true for me for a long time, I pretty much stole it as essay topic from Harrison’s wonderful essay this week, and I really doubt I could do a better job with that topic than he did.

So, having established what I won’t be writing about, I’m about to break another of the rules I set for myself and do something my GRE prep book told me not to do, and not exactly answer the question. Or, to be more precise I’m going to put forward three answers. Why three you ask? Well for one thing, I thought none of three answers I could come up with would make a satisfying essay on their own, and two is just an odd [sic] number. As well, I think each thing I wish I was smart enough to understand reflects a slightly different side of who I am, and that the three together provide a tiny bit more revealing look at who I am than a single answer alone. So, getting down to business.

1) The Shape of the Universe. Specifically how the universe can both be “flat” and infinite. I took a course titled “Origins of Space-time” this year, which was super interesting. One of the concepts we discussed was the shape of the universe. Mathematically I can sort of understand how the universe is flat (sort of because we skipped over some of the ridiculously hard math bits, so I have an understanding of it, without really being able to fully explain it). But conceptually, I just don’t get it. This wasn’t the first time I had come across this concept, but for some reason I had high hopes that finally I would just “get” it. Nope, didn’t happen. I can kind of get it if the universe loops around on itself, so it looks flat because its super big, but if you travel enough in one direction you will end up back where you started, so in one sense its infinite, but in another its not. Sadly, I’m about 95% that situation doesn’t actually describe our universe, which is legitimately “flat” in some way I just don’t really understand. I find it a bit unsettling that the universe that I inhabit has a “shape” that doesn’t make sense to me. Seriously people, flat DOES NOT EQUAL infinite in my mind. I have enough trouble accepting flat when I know we live in (at least) three dimensions of space, but I think flat might then just be a geometrical metaphor and not actually the actual, I don’t know, physical space of the universe. Whatever, it is something that has always given me trouble, and some day I would love to understand it.

So with number one down, I’d like to move a bit away from academia with
2) Art. Specifically visual art. Its one of the few artistic mediums I have very little understanding off (Dance is probably at the top of the list, but that doesn’t bother me as much art for some reason). I’ve never been particularly talented at any artistic medium (except maybe creative writing, which I haven’t really done enough to know about one way or the other), but with some hard work I’ve gathered a reasonably deep appreciation of many of the more common arts. TV, and more recently Movies I find myself able to appreciate, good writing has always deeply appealed to me, theatre is vastly enjoyable, and with some years of training (mostly by playing) I now appreciate and notice music much more than I used to. For each of these mediums my understanding has started with an initial enjoyment, followed by a conscious effort to understanding the workings of the medium. I’ve learned to not just say that I enjoyed a movie, but why. Which elements I thought were particularly effective, and which could have been done better. I still have much to learn about all of these, but I feel I have reasonable level of understanding of each, and am able to articulate my understanding to others. Not so for visual art. I deeply enjoy some artwork, and if you’ve ever been to my room in Hamilton you will know that I like gather art and look at it, but at a pretty fundamental level I don’t get it. I’m not quite sure why, certainly a large part is likely due to the fact that I really, sincerely, cannot draw. I can paint a tiny bit, or at least, working with paint as medium tends to result in less horrifying results than ink or graphite, but really most visual art is beyond my talents. Collage is the closest to a somewhat legitimate visual art form I feel I have an even vague talent for, and that’s re-arranging others work. Its not that I don’t have a visual imagination, I do, a very vivid one, but I’ve never been able to express what I can see in my head in images. A lot of this is lack of formal training, but even as a youth when “art” was a mandatory class I was quite clearly not one of the talented ones, and despite my best efforts, certainly not one of the quickest learners either. Anyways, getting back on track, I like art. I like looking at it, and there is some art I clearly know that I like more than other art. As a general rule I find realistic, or at least non-abstract art more approachable and thus more appealing, but there really is wide variety of artwork that I enjoy. However, I can’t really tell you why I enjoy, or in any serious way differentiate good art from bad. My categorization of artwork extends pretty much to artwork I like, and artwork I don’t like. The thing is, I know there is large amount of artwork that I don’t like, that very smart people say is important, and more significantly enjoyable. It makes me sad that I fundamentally just don’t understand these paintings. So if I had a lot of spare time and more patience for things that I’m bad at than I currently posses, I would like to learn more about the fundamentals of art and art history to get a better understanding of the medium

And continuing my trend away from all things academic
3) Sports. I just don’t get them. Literally for many of them I simply don’t know the rules, and for the ones where I do understand the rules, I don’t get what the fuss is about. I like playing sports, at least casually, but watching them has never held much appeal for me. If I’m in the right mood, and I’m with people who are very invested in the sport, I can find watching a game enjoyable, but I’ve never watched more than five minutes of a game by myself. I simply don’t understand people’s investment in the accomplishments of others. At least for sports. I like seeing a not very well known actor/musician/writer that I like have things go well for them, but I’ve never been able to care about a sports team, or a sports player (at least not ones who I’m not already emotionally attached to for other reasons, for example my friends who play college sports). A number of people who I like and respect, including my dad, enjoy watching sports (although my dad never enough to indoctrinate me into the world of sports), but it has just never been something I can find myself getting invested in. In the abstract I can understand how one can enjoy sports, watching players work together seamlessly as team, expertly pulling of plays that could never be done with that level of artistry at any lower level of skill. I can also deeply appreciate the statistics hawks, who like to try to predict future outcomes from lists of what are to me incomprehensible numbers. But its really just never held any appeal to me. I think because its never held any appeal, I’ve never put in the effort I would need to in order to appreciate the deeper aspects of the game that an untutored eye misses, which means I can’t enjoy them on an intellectual level, which for means I can’t really enjoy them at all. I would like to understand sports because they are so much a part of North American culture, and much as I long ago accepted (and embraced) the fact that I will never be, and really have no desire to be at all like the average North American, I do like to understand people, and its fundamental aspect of our culture that I find myself almost totally unable to connect with. Thus, one thing I wish I was smart enough to understand would certainly be sports.

*Editors note (who is also the writer, but just after he’s done writing). In case your wondering how the timing/spelling is going, the answer is not perfectly, but with some hope. While there were many more spelling errors that Word caught than I might have wished for, there were many fewer than in my average first draft. Timing wise I took longer than the hour I allotted for myself, but I also generated a fairly significant amount of text, so the thing I most need to work on is not speed, but brevity, so that’s good to know.