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[ 7 minute read ]
Don't believe me I am disrespectful
I am not competitive. I look at other people to assess how well I am doing; I have had to do that for a long while. I am disappointed. I know that lots of people are leaning on others for support; I don't do that. I don't trust people, because huge numbers of them are competitively crushing what they see as beyond their capability. They are cheats. They are thieves. They are liars and blaggers.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease. I am disappointed.
If you take certain elements from my last post, 'The effects of being sorry' (yesterday) and put them into some kind of A.I. text generator, you might get a make-believe story with the same elements but attributed to different people. 'recent death', 'grief', 'fortitude', 'woman', 'eighteen years old', 'support', That takes no creativity or effort. Even if I never write a book (and I never will) I can pretend I have written a book by saying I am a writer and use A.I. to generate an image that shows what I would like my book to look like. I can take a photo of my bookshelf and say that my books are situated somewhere on the bookshelf. If I have written only one book, I can put numerous copies of the same book on the bookshelf, and make sure the title is blurred, to make the viewer think I have written more than one book, when in fact, there are multiple copies of the same book.
My goal is to highlight human emotions. I don't need a degree to do that. I only need the technique of story-telling. I am enraged by people who take something kind and thoughtful and claim it as their own. I shall never make a lot of money. I don't need a degree to be rich, because I never will be. My success is not measured by how many people know me or my name, or how many 'friends' I have. My success is measured by how honest I am, and noticing that other people do not feel afraid of being honest. Why am I like this? Why do I not crave approbation? From whom? Liars, cheats, and charlatans who think that success is measured by how high up one is in an hierarchy of deceivers? Not on your Nelly!
In sitting, just sit. In standing, just stand. Above all, don't wobble. What does that mean? Practically nothing if you do not know yourself. If you are living, then live; it could mean that. It could also mean, don't be a anarchist lawyer. It might mean to some people, make a decision about what you are going to do, who you love, who you don't love. It might mean take a position and defend it. It means, to me, stop dithering and stop grasping at straws. If I have no talent I avoid doing things that require a talent to do them. When I get to the end of my degree program. I shall not hover in the Open University background for three years as alumni. I shall not keep crowning myself because I fail to be continually crowned by others. Here, I am not considering the attainment of a degree as being a crown, or lack of one. I shall quietly leave with my degree, because I am only studying at degree level to get the knowledge I need to quietly leave (and live, to do something I like).
There are alumni persons who stay around and help students. These are invaluable to everyone's learning, including tutors, examiners, course writers, and all kinds of academics. There are also peripheral alumni people: like institutionalised prisoners they hang around in a liminal state, neither alive nor dead. I hope I will never be that. Thank you to those who help us. My brother was a conspiracy theorist who told people how they should live. Because he was part of a community of people who believed the same things as him, he felt that his opinion was valid. That is psychosis:
"I have knowledge and you don't. You should do what I tell you to do. Live your lives like this. Believe this. It is all in this book and in this video."
We would have laughed, but everyone recognised a bully. Any truth he may have said was drowned by his other forceful words. He was an evangelist conspiracy theorist, and an evangelist vegan. Because he believed something he believed everyone else should believe the same. He crowned himself a guru of living, when all he realistically did was destroy relationships and turn people away from seeking any truth in his wild words. If he was a Christian, people would have stopped believing in God. He was the sort to take individual pieces of information and thrust them down people's throats as the truth. If he had a Bible he would not bother with syllogisms to offer to people as reasoned arguments from premises found in the Bible. He would, in this way, show that he had no spiritual life or knowledge to share. He was not alive even while he breathed. He was a shell with nothing of him inside, except ranting rhetoric to quell human ambition, because despite his narcissism, he knew he was lacking. Harsh words, huh? I simply don't lie; that is what I saw.
Like abusive older siblings, food critics and book reviewers, especially book reviewers, who take themselves seriously, they are only giving a subjective opinion based on their own experiences and the environment they are from and not necessarily in. Book reviewers are trained to review books; I am being trained to do that, and I will abandon doing that training as soon as I can, and entirely forget how to strip someone's creativity down into worthless chunks merely to pass a module. No-one, I suggest, actually needs these people. I suggest that, they are parasitic middlemen creaming off a living from someone else's creativity. Yet, the general public rely on star ratings from unmet people. I don't know them, so I certainly don't trust their comments. Everything comes down to cultural relativism for assessing qualitative comments by the public. "It is the best hotel I have been to"; "It is the best book I have read"; "She is the kindest person I have ever met". All written by someone who has never stayed in a hotel before; has just read a book for the first time; and is describing an air steward; an air steward who has been trained to present as being kind and is compelled to show it, otherwise they will lose their job.
My point is that only the living, and the lively, should talk about living......the rest of us should quietly move on. I write these posts because I am alive; I am learning. When I start telling people how to think and how to live according to someone else's ideas, I shall know that I died and have nothing of myself left. If I tell people how to think, it will not be someone else's thoughts I speak, it will be entirely from my own experiences. This is one of the strongest reasons I dislike quoting, citing and referencing other people in essays; because I am compelled to show that I am only partially alive, and need a crutch to support my living state (pass a module). I am still at level one in my degree and 'champing at the bit' to start breathing for myself. I am currently only writing essays about what other people have said. I am a reviewer of other people's comments. My current module makes this clear to anyone who cares to read between the lines. Effectively, it says. 'We can't believe everything we read and ancient ruins only tell a partial story.'
You are right, I am not doing a STEM degree.
Finally, you and your degree are important and everything you do with the Open University is valid and adds to your credibility, if you move on and use it in the real world.
My understanding of Level One modules is that we may not find all the subject material to be interesting, or feel it is useful. I have even read that somewhere on the OU website. At level one, we are learning how to learn. If you care to take my weak advice: It is showing that you are learning to learn, with a smattering of subject material to stitch it all together that passes TMAs at level one.
Don't let me discourage you. I am a ranting idiot who is disrespectful because I lack understanding.