Winter Break Thoughts

Various thoughts that I have over winter break, in list form, added to whenever the opportunity and fortune arises:

- I have since high school gone from absurd over-achiever to deathly lazy under-achiever. Yet somehow I've gotten admitted into medical school, and my schoolwork has only marginally decreased in score. My parents have become more trusting of my academic ability, while I have grown less so. This is highly paradoxical, but somehow I am not perplexed (which is also paradoxical).
- My mother often acts like an immature teenager. She is irritated when she doesn't get her way, and highly competitive to a fault. She cannot take any amount of criticism without a strong negative emotional response. But as time wears on, I've come to realize more and more the selfishness that inherits all of us. I feel saddened that my first instinct after finding another's shortcoming is to malign or patronize.
- Why do I (and many others) find fascination with technological devices? This interest (read: obsession) spans from high-quality headphones to sports cars to military-grade weapons. What really drives people to find things "cool"? What evolutionary process set humans to desire "cool" things?
- Increasingly, I find that I am among the extremely rational. If there were a rationality scale where 100% described a supremely rational being, and 0% described an incomprehensibly irrational being, I feel that I fall around 90%. (This is with the presumption that all people are spread in a scaled fashion, with a bell curve centered around 50%.)
- The previous two points are somewhat contradictory.
- I drink too much water (in comparison). I've observed that with the exception of James Wang and Alan Huang, I drink more water than anybody I know. Yet most of the people I know are not constantly suffering from dehydration routinely as I do, nor do they suffer headaches and other bodily discomforts from a lack of constant hydration. I started drinking more water to avoid the pain of migraines, but instead I have the pain of dependence. This sounds almost like people who drink coffee uncontrollably, but does not involve an addictive psychoactive stimulant.
- The perceived duration of stay at a particular locale affects many regular behavior, at least for me. I do not keep as clean a room, or by comparison to my dorm room, in any case. I am more willing to put up with discomforts, as I know that their length will be short. An example of this would be my willingness to oblige my parents, or my unwillingness to plan events with others.
- Internet gaming is revealing of peoples' true character. Offered the protection of internet anonymity, many players that I have encountered take no qualms from flagrant verbal abuse of their comrades or enemies. A person's entire worth apparently can be judged from his or her ability to play a computer game. I played one game where a player on the opposing team attempted to persuade me for an entire forty-five minutes that my use of the words "there", "their", and "they're" was incorrect without any provocation from me. (Those of you who have been on the receiving end of my provocation may find this difficult to believe.) The particular player's forms of persuasion included insults against my intelligence, race, gender, sexual preference, gaming ability, life ability, age, maturity, and several others, none of which involved grammatical knowledge. If the people that I have had the displeasure of meeting online are at all representative of humanity, then my previous estimates are still wholly too generous. Then again, the average age that I've observed here is probably around sixteen, with a standard deviation of four.
- Nothing beats wearing two pairs of sweat pants in a chilly room.