What Do I Actually Know?

I feel like this is going to be a long journey. At Cal, the ChemE professors drilled in a thought process flow: 1.) Identify the questions, 2.) make of list of the things you know (the bottom drawer...The Balances: MB, EB, MB), 3.) identify the proper control volume, 3.) make assumptions to get rid of the stuff you don't know (cross cancel and basic science/engineering), 4.) repeat steps 1, 2, and 3 until you can combine the three and get some kind of answer....5.) then use what you know to make some kind of sense of it. Sometimes I feel like this basic process is what separates the engineers from the rest of society...what makes us somewhat awkward to everyone else. It definitely makes me frustrated especially when I can't figure out how non-engineers come up with answers that should have been eliminated in the first couple steps. Arg...frustration.

Anyway...I guess this is what I know...or more accurately...what questions I need to solve:

• During my "Senior Trip" to Japan, I went to Disney Sea with my mom. And of course, at the end of the night Disney ended our magical adventure with a beautiful display of eloquently, musically choreographed pyrotechnics. Instead of enjoying the moment and enjoying the show...I cried. I realized that I had lost my dream. I had wanted to be a pyrotechnician for Disney and the Olympics...and somewhere between ChemE 140 and ChemE 160 I forgot about my dream. This dream wasn't replaced by another dream, or even a specific direction, but it was displaced with a feeling of social obligation. So now that I've realized I have no dream, no path, and no corresponding drive...where do I go from here? Since I was sad about losing my dream do I get back on that path? My dream was to make firework shows and help make people's memories a little more special...but that doesn't really help anyone does it? Why do I feel like Cal STOMPED on my dream and said it wasn't big enough? What dream is big enough? Since I'm an engineer, am I not suppose to have dreams anymore because those usually get eliminated in the "identify control volume" step? What about social obligation: if I'm suppose to help people...how should I help them? Again, where do I go from here?

• Where's that line between being stuck up, and simply just being better? For example: lately, I feel like I'm a pretentious bitch...now I just don't feel like meeting people anymore. I can't stand listening to people tell stories where every noun, adjective, verb, and adverb is the word fuck. Sometimes, the pure frequency of the word makes me lose interest in the story. I recently caught myself no longer paying attention to the dialogue, but instead counting the number of descriptive words that was over 5 letters and trying to come up with ways to use "fuck" as a predicate. I know I use that word occasionally, but it has a limit. Am I truly better than this or am I really a pretentious bitch? How do you tell the difference? Is there a difference?

• I've never considered anyone to be my role model...I've always found someone that I didn't like about someone to take the out of the role model category...a "turning point." I have a whole list of thing I didn't want to be (obviously, since I'm in this position, I've failed at some of those)...but I don't have a positive list...things I want to be. How do invert the list and make any sense of it? I know what I don't want...but how do I make this a list of what I do want when the options aren't black or white?

• I know I'm unhappy; I'm working at a job I don't like, living in a place I hate, and surviving close to an environment that I've worked so hard to get away from. I hate myself for having to drive my car like all the other southern Californians and contributing to the air pollution problem of LA. It's really sad, that the best thing in my life right now is that little puppy at my mom's house, that I have to drive my pollution creating car over 60 miles to get to see on the weekends. What the hell was I suppose to learn from all of this? There has to be a life lesson in all of this...what the fuck is it?

I don't see my "glass" as being half empty or half full...the questions are "wtf am I putting in this glass?" "whose glass is it?" And, "why are we trying to put things in it in the first place" I know I probably have more points for step one...but my hands are tired. Good night.