i just met my high school self, and it was depressing

lately I've had delusions of grandeur involving me writing a lengthy blog post that encompasses all the stuff that's been going on for the past few weeks. that's not going to happen, and I'm in a hurry to share this gem I just found upon rediscovering my TI-86 (more later on why I've been forced to rediscover it...)

:yO.ANN.YOU.SHOULD.LI
KE.USE.YOUR.BRAIN.MOR
E.AND.YOUR.TI-86.LESS
...AND.THE.ONLY.REASO
N.YOU.BEAT.ME.ON.THE.
COMBINED.SAT.IS.CAUSE
.I.HAD.SOME.IMPORTANT
.SHIT.ON.MY.MIND...

I thought that was just hilarious, for the obvious reason (it's ridiculous) but also because the "use your brain more comment" was painfully true. A good 50% of the time I spent in high school chemistry and math classes was wasted in that manner, writing programs back and forth on graphing calculators. Another 25% was spent playing Tetris on the calculator. And for the final 25% of class time, I would make other programs with all the formulas and definitions that might be on the exam, e.g.:

ph=-log h+
log= -log oh-
H+=antilog(-ph)
ph+poh=14
kw=h+*oh-=1.0*10^-14
pH=pKa+log (bs/ac)

WHAT? I have no idea what ANY of that means. Antilog? Am I on crazy pills here? I feel like I'm on crazy pills here.

In college the TI-86 slept for the first three years, then I busted it out again for the single solitary science class I took to fulfill the gen ed requirements. I should have taken geology or "forensic biology" or one of those other blatantly easy courses that humanities majors took to fulfill the requirement while maintaining GPA. But I had a crappy GPA anyways, and my roommate and I thought it would be FUN to take a mechanical engineering class instead, mainly because it was twice a week in the afternoon, instead of three times a week in the morning like most science classes. We thought this would allow us to continue our debaucherous lifestyle by night while learning cool stuff about airplanes by day. HA. That was among the top five mistakes of my college career, and that's really saying a lot.

Anyways, the class was a disaster, but the subject matter provided a lot of good fodder for immature jokes about "thrust," "yaw" and "skin friction." In the TI-86 I found a ton of haiku we wrote, mostly involving the professor and the TA "inducing drag" on each other, and some junk like this:

:flaps incr camber an
d lift. roll ailerons
pitch tail chg dir
:yaw rudder
:elevator horistab
:vrot is tang to blad

WHAT? All of this was kind of fun to find again after all these years, but in a way it's extreeeemely depressing. I mean, I was writing all this in the calculator so I wouldn't have to actually "learn" it, but I did "know," albeit in the most rudimentary sense, what I was talking about. That's right, there was a time in my life when I had some concept of sine and cosine, and just a few years later I actually understood (kind of) how an airplane stayed in the air. These days, if it weren't for the many chemistry textbooks that live on my staircase, I couldn't even tell you the difference between an acid and a base.

I guess it's all relative, because back then I couldn't have told you how to say "nail polish remover contains acetone" in Spanish. I also didn't know the mortality rate of the Lowell mill girls, or the historical trajectory of computer and electronic component manufacturing employment in Essex County. But do any of those things actually matter?

I'm starting to wonder if maybe I'm spreading myself too thin over the years. Let me put it this way - I started nursery school when I was four years old. I'm now almost 26, which means I've been in school (in some capacity) for 22 consecutive years. Yet by some miracle, I'm still not an expert, or anything close to that, on any one thing. You know, that whole "little of everything and all of nothing" thing? Blech. I've learned and forgotten more information than I can fathom, probably due to the fact that I'm constantly switching gears, or the fact that I have the memory of a goldfish. Either way, the other depressing result of this is that I'm basically unqualified for any job that I might actually want.

(Yes, I have stopped "wanting" my current job.)