Australian Crow

To illustrate that even when something looks similar to that thing back in the U.S. it may not be similar at all, have a look at the video attached. It's quite hilarious, I think. It's a crow. Not a baby, and not a goat, but a crow.

In any case, it's been a while! Classes are starting to pick up, which is great, and school is starting to take a bigger portion of my time. All to be expected. But in the meantime, I'm still enjoying the relaxed lifestyle and uni system, it's all quite nice.

After much struggle and tracking down my dean (Australians are hard to get a hold of via email), I managed to change rooms! My old room was in a hallway with nearly entirely first-year students. I spoke with a woman in the housing office who told me, "it's entirely accidental that all first-year students ended up in the same place," a point that I didn't argue - I didn't expect them to intentionally place me in a hallway with only first-year students. However, I spoke with my dean yesterday who said that it was in fact intentional, and was a mistake. I had been placed based on my major and not on my age. There is a different part of the floor that is allocated to older students (where I've moved to) that's intended as a "more mature and quieter area." So, all is well now - I can sleep once more.

I noted at the beginning that perhaps studying abroad in Australia might teach me something about myself just as it will about the Australian culture, people, lifestyle etc. Today I think I realized the first of those insights: I'm quite relaxed. Now this may seem obvious, but let me reconcile it for you against just simple plain evidence. If you take someone who is generally mellow and place them in a highly-competitive country, in a competitive major at a competitive university, competing for opportunities and research positions and teaching assistantships and internships, and eventually culminating in the ultimate competition for a job, he'll not be called relaxed or mellow - he'll usually be told he "lacks passion." But if you take the same person, pluck him out of the abrasively competitive environment and let him thrive amidst similar people, he's called "likable." So taking away the third person now, growing up where so many people aren't like me basically had me convinced I should be feeling more interested in the things I'm studying and doing and thinking. But that's not true at all - I'm perfectly interested in all those things! I'm just relaxed about them. So just chill out, thoughts.

It's remarkable how something changes just due to its context. In some instances, we define an entity by its context. That doesn't make any sense, but imagine a man lives in a valley and looks up to level ground everyday. Call the level ground L. Well, imagine there's another man who lives on a nearby mountain, and looks down onto the same level ground L. From one perspective, L is a mountain and from the other L is a valley - it's simply the context that's changed. While this isn't exactly the same idea here, it is an illustration of the same concept. But the fact that we derive so much of our definition from context still baffles me... People, mate, I don't get it.

#video