Compared to my quirks when with friends or online, I tend to be mercifully quiet on campus. Even so, people who I don't know (or at least don't remember) often know me... what I do to make an impression on them, I can't fathom.
I envy those of you who can go to university full time. I seriously can't wait until I can be done with this "part time student/work" thing... I'm not ready to sell my soul to the corporate machine yet! D:
Yeah, I'm extremely lucky that my parents are paying for the full 4 years of university education. I think most of my quirks end up not showing up online, fortunately. At school, though, I'm the person who builds cathedrals out of salt and pepper shakers and bottles of tabasco sauce =/
I don't know. This is weird to think about, given that for me all these behaviors are normal. I never used to be able to understand why other people didn't act like me; I act like this because it's what comes naturally, and because it always ends up leaking out all over the place, no matter how hard I try to cover it over. I wear what I think is normal clothing and end up getting stared at anyway; I freak out over things that bother no one else, try to hide it, and mostly end up seeming outrageous; I get stressed and build random things out of available materials, but no one else seems to. This all used to drive me crazy when I was younger. Nowadays I figure that if no one else is going to be bizarre, I'll be bizarre for the rest of them and stop worrying about what others think of me. Causes less stress for everyone concerned, I imagine.
The trance thing still sounds like what happens when I get into a "groove". It's like a permutation of autopilot, in that I don't have to consciously think about the rules of improvisation- what scales, intervals, and rhythms would work within a given key and style, at a given moment- because they can be intuited while in that mental state.
Perhaps it could be described as trusting your prexisting knowledge fully, such that it becomes second-nature. Something like the difference between "thinking" and "knowing".
Ah, but there you're talking about pre-existing knowledge. I usually don't have to consciously think about proof techniques and so on, and can just sit down for three hours and groove with a textbook. Don't even need to think about finding tricks; I just do it, it's easy, I move on. That is the result of a reasonable amount of mathematical training.
I think I'm talking about something else, because it's completely untrained (e.g., it's popped up before I received any sort of formal training). I sit down with a problem and take out a piece of scratch paper to start looking for avenues for so on, and it's like my mind is tickling me. I often write down exactly the same thing over and over again, maybe twenty times all over both sides of a sheet of paper; I don't understand why it's significant. I keep getting more and more frustrated, and probably angry, because I just can't stop writing the same damned thing down and I don't understand why it's important, but whenever I try to do anything else I get stuck thinking about exactly the same thing again.
I know it's right. I don't know how I know it's right. I don't even
think it's right (I'd really rather try a different tack, and be methodical about it). I can't see why it's right, but it's absolutely correct and the key to the problem--not something I built, but something handed to me. Often, I've never seen that particular sort of problem before, nor a technique at all similar to the one I need, nor any sort of hint as to how I should proceed... I just
know, without knowing how or why, and have to pull it out of the part of my brain that solved the problem for me while I wasn't watching.
It's a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it's precisely what one needs to excel at mathematics. On the other hand, it made life difficult before I knew I needed to explain my answers and reasoning, rather than just saying "I wrote that because it's true."
(I'm debating this with you only because it's interesting. If you'd prefer I didn't, I'll stop.)
Author
Topic: Food for the perpetually hungry (Read 12114 times)