On Failing

We have all failed at something in our lives. A sport sometimes just does not come naturally to us, we just can't get the hang of speaking Chinese, no matter what you do you cannot walk in high heels. You will fail. Over and over again. Sometimes if you work hard enough at something you will get it down, but there is always a time you will fail. Without that failure you do not appreciate your success as much, and you do not appreciate the hard work that got you to success.

Failing In School

I have always been a pretty decent student. I could have been an A student but I always had other priorities. I typically round out ever semester with a mixture of A's and B's and occasionally a C. For the first time of my schooling career, I am completely failing a class. Not a D even. I am failing. The feeling is terrible, and uncomfortable. Right along side with being terrible and uncomfortable, it is also a learning experience. I acknowledge that I am not putting enough of my time and energy into Chemistry to really understand the complicated subjects, and my regular methods just don't work. A lot of factors are going in to this failure. I could blame a lot of it on the professor who has not taught the class in over twenty years, or the uncoordinated recitation sections. The blame has to sit on your lap and purr at least a little bit though, and I have a lot of other things that I have chosen to spend my time on instead of chemistry study. I accept that, and I also accept that my procrastination may result in me taking chemistry again in my very last semester of my undergraduate degree. I do feel like there are some tips to help you cope with failure, as well as respond properly to your friends and family when they fail.

Do Not Discredit Failure

One of the most hurtful things you can do to yourself or to someone else is discredit their failure. Just because you had no trouble with something doesn't mean that it will be just as easy for everyone else. Every individual comes from a completely unique place, where things in their lives are organized differently from you. You may excel in a subject in school that another person struggles with painfully. Do not, I repeat, do not ever say to someone "Well to me ____ subject is really easy, I don't know why you are having trouble with it." This statement has a lot of things wrong with it. Starting a sentence with 'to me' is perfectly acceptable when describing your feelings, and owning that they are yours and yours alone. However, once you say 'I don't know why YOU" you are saying to a person that you don't understand why they aren't just like you. You know everyone is different, so just don't say it. Of course you don't know why they are having trouble with something, they aren't you and you aren't inside of their head dealing with their problems. This brings me to my next section.

Nothing is beneath you

You might think a subject is cake. That doesn't mean you should stop giving it attention. Love that you have that delicious piece of math or whatever else cake in front of you. Learn more. Go until the cake is gone and you do have trouble with a subject. Once you have reached that struggle, you can understand that that threshold of struggle is important and just might be in a different place for each person. I hear a lot of people say they don't have time to study subjects outside of school. You just aren't making time. How many times do you turn on the TV and just sit there when you don't really have anything you want to watch? What if every time you did that instead you opened up a book you have been meaning to read? How much more would you get done? Now I'm not saying that you can't ever sit down to the TV. As long as your down time has just as much intention to it as your study time. If you say to yourself that 'this time is me time' then your down time has more intention than 'I just got off work and I don't know what I am doing.'

Shit happens

Your boyfriend will break up with you two days before your test. Your cat will get sick before your big performance. Shit just happens. You won't always be performing at your 100% with everything you do, and sometimes you will mess up big time. When this does happen, it is so incredibly tempting to blame it on someone else. I do it, I know other people do it. You do poorly on a test, and it was because the professor wasn't clear with what would be on the exam. You got in to a fender bender, and it was because the other person was driving too slow in front of you. We are all guilty of this. What I say is let yourself make those internal accusations at first, just think them all out. Get mad about it. Once you are done with your blame party, look at yourself and see what YOU could have done better. Don't get angry at yourself for it, but just acknowledge what it is. Whether it was that you should take a few deep breaths when you get stressed driving and try to drive a few miles an hour slower or to make your own study guide of what you think would be on a test to go with the given study guide. Keep your blame party to yourself, and then react in a more self aware way.

Repeat Humbly

As tempting as it is to 'hate' whatever you failed at (I am very bad at this), try to see the good in your failure. I try to remind myself that chemistry is hugely important for my degree, and if I think of it in strictly biology based ways it is a lot more interesting to me. Try not to be embarrassed when you need to re-take a class. Try to learn things that you didn't see the first time, instead of spending the whole time grumbling about how much time and money you are wasting. You don't want to have to repeat the process a third time, so do it right the second time. Try to see what you did wrong before and make adjustments as needed. Don't be too hard on yourself. You may never learn to love whatever it is, but if you can even say you got through it, you can say a lot more than the person who gave up the first time.

University of Colorado Marijuana Incident

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/12/chair-of-cu-boulders-his_n_2272516.html

Colorado has been in the news a lot lately regarding their laws on marijuana. A few days ago two students served pot brownies to their class. I'm not going to report the details of the incident as I provided an article above. I am extremely angry about this incident on my campus for several reasons. I personally did vote to legalize marijuana, although I do not smoke myself. I had mostly economic reasons in mind. I am completely not opposed to people using it as a recreational drug if that 'floats their boat'. This offense brings other things into question that I do not find acceptable, mostly consent and the general idiocy of drugging people against their will or knowing.

The stupidity of the situation makes me absolutely livid. In no way can I rationalize how these two people decided that giving a substance to unknowing students would be a good idea. The number one reason about this is consent. Alcohol, sex, drugs, even just relationships in general are only acceptable when they are between consenting adults. There is a huge difference in a group of people asking for pot brownies and enjoying them together, and a group of unsuspecting students eating brownies that have pot in them. These two students pretty much just raped the rights of their fellow students and professors, and deserve the most sever punishments the courts can think of. I hope that they understand that their entire future is now completely destroyed, and they will most likely never graduate from college. I believe this is an entirely fair punishment. Imagine how you would feel if you were high without knowing you ingested anything. The feeling would be much like a panic attack, you would think you were losing your marbles and would not be able to function throughout the day. Not to mention brownies or any other marijuana infused edible is incredibly strong, and many people report that they had less than desirable highs after ingesting them. Typically someone willingly ingesting marijuana would only take a few bites of an edible.

The reputation of the University of Colorado Boulder is patchy at best to begin with. We have been voted one of the top party schools, and the educational prowess of our school is often ignored. We produce some of the top educated people in the country and are a top tier school. So sometimes it baffles me that people like these two students were accepted and attended for any amount of time. I believe one of the huge benefits of college is to open your mind and awareness to other people. This does not, however, in any way imply that giving someone any sort of drug without their consent is ok in any way. When you attend a university you are not only just representing yourself as an adult pursuing an education but you are also representing the university, whether you want to or not. The main reason you probably went to said university was because of the reputation. You want to have the best job opportunities you can, and doing something like this completely hurts the reputation of the school for everyone. I just hope those two seriously regret what they have done.

The Nice Guy Theory

Recently I have noticed that I have several (mostly male) friends who seem to be having the same problem: they cannot find a girlfriend. After having one very close friend complain about it to me over and over and ask me for advice, I realized I had absolutely no idea how to help them.  However, I realized that there were several social patterns present in these men. Now my sample size is very small, and I am producing a theory from a largely untested source but bear with this idea at least. If you don’t like my opinion too bad. If you’re offended because you’re a nice guy, maybe you should acknowledge that you have some of these traits that I am talking about. That is all the disclaimer I am going to give for this article.

            All of these men are what you would consider very nice. Well educated. Not assholes, have interesting an cool hobbies beyond the usual and are successful at what they do. Most of them are even financially stable or even financially well off, but they complain about years of being alone and the inability to find someone they have a connection with. Some of them blame it on the ‘nice guy syndrome’ which I constantly disagree with and loathe. There is something else at play here beyond the primitive idea that nice guys finish last.

            At one point I found myself telling one friend that I think they shouldn’t have such high standards. I realized in retrospect that this came out totally wrong. I don’t think that they should be looking for less attractive or less successful women to spend time with. I think though, people should be realistic. Just like how a celebrity wouldn’t want to date me, you have to find someone who at least has enough in common with you that you can actually connect. If you are a techie businessman who enjoys reading as a hobby you might not want to go after the gogo dancer studying fashion design. In some sense I believe opposites do attract, but if your schedules and lifestyles are so contrasting that you wouldn’t even be able to find time for each other, then it wouldn’t work out. You want to look for someone who has at least similar goals in relationships as you, otherwise you have no common ground to start on. When a feeling is mutual, there are real signs to show this. As soon as I acknowledge that I may be attracted to someone but they are not attracted to me, I leave it at that. There is no positive products from constantly pursuing people who will not have a biological connection to you, and you can’t force that feeling with charm or bribery.

            Having no common ground to start on brings me to the next super important part of why these people are having trouble finding partners. Rejection. If you are pursuing the wrong people who will not be attracted to you or be interested in pursuing back, you will get rejected. These sensible but sensitive young men are hugely dejected by this, and will often lament immediately afterwards that they can never get the girl. For one, this makes a girl immediately feel terrible and is going to destroy any comfortable friendship, and it puts an imbalance in the playing field. From my perspective if a guy who I am not attracted to is trying in earnest in a respectful way to pursue me but I am not interested, when I reject him if he is heartbroken about it I’m going to feel uncomfortable. If you are making women feel uncomfortable in general then you are not being conscious enough about being ‘nice’ to them. Considering the feelings of the opposite party are hugely important. Pity will not win you the girl. If you are sadly telling everyone that you can get a girl, you won’t get one. I guess it is more of something you should try not to mention all the time. I would eventually like to do a study on people who talk about wanting/their lack of a partner and those who do not but are also single and their chances of finding a relationship in the near future. My proposal is that those who are not so single-mindedly driven by the need to find someone to be with are more likely to find a partner. This is probably why guys who are ‘not nice’ are more likely to find themselves with the girl. Although the underlying drive for finding relationships is to reproduce (just from an evolutionary standpoint) that isn’t the main intention of most relationships. We want to be able to feel out a person before jumping into anything serious, to really make sure you like each other. If a girl is attracted to a guy but during this finding out process is pushed into a relationship she will probably react negatively.

            Comfort zones are another huge part. If you are having trouble finding someone to connect with, chances are you do not like change. Humans in general do not like change, or fear change before it happens. Some people just have a stronger dislike for it.  Think about these people in your life. Moving is extremely stressful for them. They don’t like to go to new bars or hangout places, they prefer the ones they already know. When they do move, they try to keep their living situation as similar to their old one as possible. They very rarely will try to change their schedule at work or pursue a different job or career. When you speak with them, it is the change in their lives that they have the most complaints about. I think life begins outside of your comfort zone. If you stay in your same bubble of safety and comfort, then you are very unlikely to meet new people. Stirring around in the same pot of people and places you go looking for a new person is counter productive. If you want to meet new people, do new things. Do something that makes you hugely uncomfortable just because it puts you around new people. I am by nature an introvert, and from time to time I force myself to go to large social events where I know no one. Not because I enjoy it (quite the opposite) but because I usually gain something positive once its over. If anything I find a newfound respect for the quiet of my own home.  Relationships are change, and if you don’t like change but want it you are going to get nowhere. When you’re dating someone many things will change about your life. The person will come over at different times, change your eating habits, change what movies you are watching, and much more. These all happen unintentionally, but if you think about any relationship you have had that has lasted any length of time, your schedule does change when there is another person who takes priority. Your fear of change might be holding you back, even if you do think you want a relationship.

            One phrase you always hear people say to those who are hugely driven by the desire to find a partner is ‘stop looking’. This phrase I do agree with. I think the time and energy you spend looking for someone is completely wasted if you are staying inside of your comfort zone and just looking under the same rocks over and over again. You need to make your life important to you before someone else will consider your life important. Do not let a relationship define you. No matter how important you think marriage or having children is, you cannot let that be your only driving factor in life. Girls are just as scared off by commitment crazy guys as the other way around. What sounds more appealing? A person who is doing what they want in life, enjoying new things and has hobbies that entertain them but is single, or someone who neglects what they love and is only on the quest to find a partner? One of the huge aspects of life is reproduction, if you look at it from a biological standpoint but also the need to reproduce just for the sake of carrying on our existence is less necessary.

            In general I believe if you have a problem, it is ok to confer with friends about it but you should also be coming up with solutions.  If you can solve something yourself, you should. If you are going to continually have the same problem (regardless to that problem) and not try anything new, then you are simply sitting in the mud cold and miserable and will stay there until your bones ache and your skin is pruning. Don’t be ashamed to explore dating websites, but also involve yourself in new activities where you might meet different people, and change what you want to change about yourself first. Always be realistic about what you want from love.