Helter Skelter

Yes, I am blogging yet again. Probably because I have been in a crappier than usual mood this week, which has resulted in me being more acerbically sarcastic and snarky towards my classmates. I don't know, this week has just been off, I don't know why. But today, I just got angry after I left my ICOS lecture early. Now the reason I left early was becasue my landlady left a message saying she was showing my room so I wanted to get home before they came to clean up my room a little bit. But the real reason is that I just got fed up with a person attending the lecture, who is, for lack of a better world, crazy. Like real fucked up in the mind crazy. Like most things, this has a backstory. Oh yeah for those of you, who don't like reading then you should probably stop now because I plan on ranting for quite a while.

Ursula was telling me a story about a Japanese classmate she had the year before I came to SI. I would have been classmates with him had I not deferred a year. Anyway, she described that he seemed pretty off, like he actually videotaped (on his own cognition and apparently own enjoyment) a 504 lecture. Now 504 was interesting but hardly worth videotaping. She also said he did a lot of weird stuff, like emailing out the questions and answers to one of the foundations finals the week before the class was supposed to take it. She also said he just flat out failed plenty of times so they finally booted his ass out of the program. Now, I didn't give this a thought until two weeks ago at ICOS. There was this Japanese dude there. Everyone introduced themselves briefly (and I do mean briefy like "Hi My name is David Choi, School of Information." When we get to this dude, he says "Hi, My name is XXXX, formerly of the School of Information" and then goes off on this bizarre exposition about what he is supposedly doing, which I didn't understand and I doubt many in the room did. And if you listened carefully, he actually isn't part of any department on campus. He is just is some how affiliated with them in some, most likely, informal way as in he keeps badgering some poor professor and the person hasn't the heart to tell him to fuck off. I thought that perhaps this could be the same Japanese classmate that Ursuala described. Flash foward to earlier this week, I was checking my email. Unfortunately, our SI mailing list gets hit with lots of email announcements from different departments on campus. More likely than not, they don't deal remotely with any topic at SI. Anyway, I am usually delete them but if I am feeling generous, I'll scan them and then delete them for the remote chance that one may interest me. Anyway, one of them was signed XXXX and then in his signature it says "Dismissed from SI in 2004" Which is strange to say at least as in most people don't mention places they have gotten kicked out of.

Cut to the lecture today, where said Japanese dude is there again. Anyway, the topic for this week is really complex having to deal with network and historical analysis of firms in Hungary. I don't understand nearly half of it. When the lecture starts, I start to notice the Japanese dude. And I see all the trademarks. He can hardly sit still. He is constantly fiddling, getting up, and he is furiously writing. And he is not even looking up at the slides when he is writing, so he isn't copying down the slides. He is just going through pages and pages of notes. The kicker is that he is writing while the guys is lecturing but when he stops to provide elaboration and explanation (the most valuable part of any lecture in my opinion), he doesn't write that down. This guy gets up three or four times to get snacks and drinks. He gets up and turns off the lights in the room for a chart being displayed even though everyone in the room can see it perfectly. And don't get me started on the questions he was asking. They were either retarded or bizarely off-topic (including some mentioning of the 4th dimension and Einstein - remember this is about firms in Hungary). I come to the probable conclusion that this guy is schizophrenic.

For my close friends, you probably already know about my past history in dealing with the mentally ill, which unfortunately includes someone in my family. I have endured far too much stress, regret, frustration, and anger over the years because of it. Whether it is the phone calls in the night, the trips to the hospital, or trying to help only to get screamed at with vicious scorn, it is something I don't wish upon anyone. Because of this, I have exhausted all my compassion for the mentally ill. Don't get me wrong, I have no ill feelings towards those who actually try to get help. I applaud those who recognize they have a problem and they need help. That is real courage, not the phony kind practiced by say our current president. Which is why I really admired Brooke Shields who recognized that she had post-partum depression and sought help for it. And which is why I have nothing but scorn for Tom Cruise, who says mental illness doesn't exists and says people can cure themselves thorugh vitamins and exercise. In fact, I have considered dumping my copy of Minority Report, the only tom cruise movie I own, because of it. People like him, who are probably are mentally ill, shouldn't dictate the lives of those who truly need help.

Some of my classmates have pointed I have been unduly harsh towards a few of my classmates who have poor social skills. They are not mean or anything, it is they just don't know when to keep quiet or they'll barge into your conversation with something completely off-topic or irrelevant. Now one of them is alright because he recognizes and at least tries to curtail it. The others, to my knowledge do not. For example, I was in the student lounge last year with a few other people. We were just sitting looking at our laptops. This guy just comes in and sits down and starts talking. We weren't having a conversation (I hardly know the dude) but he starts talking. The rest of us either ignore him or just "yup" or some other platitude. Once he realizes that none of us are in a talking mood, he starts, apparently, staring at me. Now this goes on for like five minutes or so, until I ask him if he wants to ask me something. He says no, he was just looking at the map behind me and asks, "North America looks really big on that map, doesn't it?" Now this map is about two inches behind my head on the wall, unless I can turn my head a complete 180 degrees I can't look at the map. So yeah, poor social skills like I was saying. Oh yeah map dude has the fidgeting problem like the Japanese ICOS dude. There is another dude who walks around in tiny t-shirts, shorts, and flip-flops in Michigan winter weather but I don't think he is mentally ill. He is just a moron. Anyway, one of my classmates says that these poor social skills classmates may not have poor social skills at all. There is apparently some disorder in which some people's brains don't recognize verbal cues and social interaction like the rest of us. That means that don't understand why it isn't appropriate to talk at a certain moment for example. While that may be true, it doesn't change the fact I have no compassion for them. Call me selfish. Call me cold. But I don't care anymore.

The reason I have no sympathy for the mentally ill is that, I have quite frankly run out of sympathy. The mentally ill who stay that way don't want to get better. They want people to keep enabling their problem. People would say they are so far deluded or gone they don't realize they have a problem. That may be true, but I would like to think that maybe, once in a blue moon, they may think about it. It is not like they haven't noticed the crappy things happening to them. The Japanese ICOS dude got kicked out of SI, the other mentally ill people I have known have suffered through similiar things but never do, not even once, consider it as their fault. Obviously it is someone else's problem, not theirs. People may say it is their life, so I should just butt out. Which does have some merit. I have let friends of mine knowingly make mistakes without stopping them or intervening because, as I like to put it, it is their mistake to make not mine. Plus I doubt if they would listen to me anyway. If I were in their shoes, I probably wouldn't either. But should they make mistakes, don't expect complete sympathy from me. Of course, I won't be a prick and I will try to make them feel better. But part of me, which is probably not a good way to be, will say it was a fucking mistake and you knew that it could turn out badly. Nobody put a gun to your head. You made the wrong choice, now live with it. Just like Japanese ICOS dude, my poor social skills classmates, and yes, someone in my family, have made wrong choices. These wrong choices could be because of their illness but it doesn't change the fact that they made them.

I am tired of the fidgeting.

I am tired of the bizzare questions.

I am tired of the fucked up situations you constantly get yourself into.

I am tired of having to feel sorry for you.

I am tired and my compassion has run out.

Go be crazy on your own fucking time.

Stop wasting my time.