Admiration of Meursault's detachment from the world - The Stranger (Thoughts on my goals in life)

I have just read halfway through "The Stranger" and the character Meursault inspires me and resonate with this character a lot. This character with a characteristic of being emotionless and detached from the real world is what I have been striving for a long time. I wanted to record my thoughts upon this extremely relatable story of Meursault before I lose it.

For all my life, I look forward to characters that could detach themselves from their own desires and live for a greater significance. In Chinese kungfu fiction, these characters go out to help others despite their own cause, and in the Fountainhead, the character was focused on making a more productive world. These characters seem so powerful to me as because they do not care about themselves, the unfortunate or unfairness being opposed to them are ignored despite the devastating effect that it would leave behind. Their detachment to the outside world levitates time for them to think cautiously about their actions. Things that may traumatise one would not affect these detached characters. They live in a higher plane of existence that could ignore the effects that pushed them. Their life is no longer cause and effect, but rather of pure action. Although Meursault in The Stranger is no powerful hero or a highly intelligent being, he could always allow room for thinking and analyzation of his surrounds in busy and distracting areas. He was able to grasp all the conversations within the room of prison meetings while everyone is shouting their dialogues. On top of all that, he is still able to have a straight conversation with his girlfriend and describe his feelings towards her. His awareness and attentive observations although does not explain his relatively stupid actions in his life, it illustrates a big deal of maturity and understanding of the world. His detachment from the world and detail observations resembles the characteristics of a spy. A spy similarly has to forget his personal duties and contribute to the bigger cause. And his observations resembles that of a detective, understanding everything in his sight of vision. While his detachment from the world left him with a bad outcome within his life because of his desire to help others, he is one model that I would forever look up towards.

One of the many ways that Meursault shows his indifference to the world and uncaring of what people think is his way of describing his feeling. While he understands the meaning of happiness, sorrow, sadness, annoyance, he cannot relate these feelings to himself. His act of wanting Maurie, dreaming of her, and enjoying her presence would be quantifiable as love, but he described as not. He detaches his definition of love from his desire for this woman. He understands that he has this exact feeling with other women that he knew, and he reasoned that the feeling of "love" is not loyal to any of them. While Romeo in his story switches his desire for a girl in days and was not aware of it, Meursault is aware of all his emotions. He is in a higher plane of existence as he could understand and analyze his own past experiences. And in addition to his awareness of emotions, he is also very acute when in distracting environments. While I have already mentioned his ability to notice details in the prison meetings, he also was able to pick out details in a courtroom where he is being trailed. His future was defined in the courtroom as to whether he could own his freedom, but he treats it with indifference and was able to notice details again. He was able to understand each facial movement and gesture that the opposing lawyer made. He could notice the details about the crowd's reaction, and his slow thinking and detailing suggests that he also understand his every consequence in his response. While he chose to answer all the questions from the bottom of his heart and with a supernatural amount of honesty, his attentiveness to all the details in the courtroom makes me believe that he is aware of everything that will happen to him beforehand. It is his uncaring to what the world will do to him that affect his decision in his responses.

An artwork that I did during the summer (a long time ago)
It serves as a break for the long long blog post that I just wrote
It is for the people that actually read my post, lol, whatever, I do it for my own benefit.

My believe of his thought of how the world can do whatever to me and I will just live as it goes is what I strive to believe in as well. The only thing that matters to my life is that I am doing my own sole best and am aware of and could predict my future. I want to have the ability to analyze my actions and make a decisions based upon it. And in addition, I would also strive to make that decision independent of my own life. I want to have the "power" that these fictional character has that allows them to live for a greater cause. They could understand their actions and tweak them in the way of shaping the bigger world. The ability to analyze one's surrounding in detachment to the correlation to oneself allows for one person to become more powerful in a sense that it makes them the contributor. In Ayn Rayn's book of Atlas Shrugged, it states how people rip from the empowered and live off of them like parasites. And the most powerful characters within those books are the ones that do not care about whether people live off of him and take advantage of him. They live as because they want to live, and they do not care much about the consequences that they get for doing the good things. They are only interested in what they are able and will produce, and not care about how they are being punished for their good acts. They are helping a society that stabbed them in the back. This also resembles Jesus and I guess it is where I am coming from. These characters are all like Jesus in a way that they are not interested in their own affairs and are only interested in helping others in their best abilities. Jesus saved mankind with his own suffering, dedication, and sacrifice of life. The main character in Atlas Shrugged provided the world with his amazing new metal without cost, in unfairness, and with people trying to take over his business (while others are trying to just let them rot and wait for them to die out). The main character in The Fountainhead provided the world with his stunning new design without complaint, under criticism, under poverty, without defiant (he delivered when people wanted it). The characters from the Chinese Kungfu fictions save lives that do not want to be saved, be humble while others laugh at them being weak (while not being weak) [hiding of their true ablities], and live to better other people lives instead of themselves. These characters all live for others, uncaring for themselves.

In in my own ways, I always try to be like these fictional character(1) in a way that I help people despite my situation (I don' really follow this too much). I try to help people in detachment of my responsibilities as being a student. I would try to disregard my desire to draw, to do the extra-curricular activities that I like in place of helping others, tutoring others to my best ability (2). My relatively diverse skill that ranges from video editing, 3d animation, drawing, coding, attempt in self-approvement allows me to help others, it is only my lack in my trying that I had failed to be like these characters. I also refer to how we should always help ourselves out with the oxygen mask on a plane before others because without situating ourselves, it would only cause our inability to help others later. It is more efficient to help myself and then use my 200% to help others. But this is an excuse and I should work toward perfecting my own ability so that I do not need to care about myself. Like in the plane again, I could gain the ability to not needing to breathe oxygen(3) and then gain the ability to help others. It is acquiring power for myself in the bigger picture of helping others. I want to be the most powerful person in a room(maybe also just for personal selfish desire) and be able to help others or be aware of everything that is going on.

With all this rambling, I was just trying to get all my thoughts down on paper so that I could review them later on (Edit: now that I have reviewed on it once, it shows the problems with my current mindset, lol. im like overconfident annoying guy). I could barely articulate my role-model in life and what my goal is(4). I know I want to live for a greater cause (maybe, now I say it, I just want to have a satisfying personal life), but I do not know how so. After reading half of The Stranger, I sense my ability to articulate some of it, and so this is just me typing what I think without much attention to the output.

I may just rewrite this later because I really want to clearly articulate my ideas, but when do I ever do what I say I am going to do.

Now that I have put down all my thoughts that I gained from reading the class-required The Stranger, I need to do the study guide that goes along with it, lol. Ahhh, it's like 10: 17 pm and it is due tmr. Ah, lol. Ah. as dfasdf. I love not doing work on the first 2 days of a 3 day weekend.

(1)I know that these godly qualities are existing in real-life examples as well, it is just that I only get to experience the fiction examples for now and is only inspired by those with these narratives for now.

(2) trying to help others is one reason, but I also reason myself with how I would just procrastinate in response to the additional time that I get from not helping other people.

(3) One of the ways that I try to better my own ability is now with a daily schedule that I do. It records the to-do list of the way and how I spread out my to-do list. It somehow just ends up me having a burnout every other week, but I think it is a step in the right direction for putting this on.

(4) Being able to visualise one's goal would help them more easily work towards it.

All of Meursault awareness of his surrounds might solely originate from the author's desire to convey the overall environment that Meursault was in, but this does not change the fact that Meursault noticed everything he did. While this might not be intentional, and his detachment from the world only means his uneducated and simple background, it is ingrained into his character and that alone inspires me of what I want myself to become.

Grammar And My inUnderstanding of it

It's 12:25 in the morning right now, and my consciousness is slowly drifting away. But either way, I wanted to write this blog about grammar that goes along with the last post I did about effort. While I have been learning English since I was born and had wonderful Native English teachers that taught me English 1-to-1, the only thing that I seem to get out of it is my sort of American accent. Despite all the thought that my parents had put into visualizing my needs in the future, I still lack much in the category of English grammar. I do not know when to capitalize words, how to spell words without Grammarly, or even differentiate between slang and formal words. My diction in essays suffers in a way that I do not use words adequately and in the right way.

For the last in-class-essay that I got back today, there were 14 mistakes that my teacher could not resist in underlining. Although the overall score for the essay was actually good, the bad grammar was probably discounted. This being the first-ever in-class-essay that I took gives me a buffer in what small mistakes that I could get away with, but this bad trait of my writing would only come around to bite me in the back in the future during formalized tests. The History essay that I just did was more on the side of a research paper and the use of evidence presented outside of class tells the teacher the effort one had put in. For me, I am guessing that my use of outside sources detailed to history books presents my effort in trying very much. This effort that I put in masks the underlying problem of my grammar. As I was typing out my mistakes into my digital notebook, I couldn't help but laugh at my inability to spell. Even after the indication of the wrong spelling, I was left with a blank mind. Although the word looks and sounds weird and insensible, I cannot for the life of me figure out the correct spelling. The grammar problem that I have is more than just the time-constraint but is also of how I could not differ between "al" and "le" when spelling. While others are complaining about words with the same pronunciation in Chinese, I am struggling with similar sounds in English syllables.

The solution to this problem is to just write more in handwriting and quit being too reliant on digital grammar correctors. I have to get rid of this trait of mine within a year to be prepared for the internal & external assessments that are going to come. There is much disconnect between me and my set goal of college and my future, but I see the possible effort that I could put in to fix it. While not everything in life has a straight-forward and definite easy answer, the solution to the problem of my grammar could be boiled down to writing with more and with caution to my error in grammar.

Another art for Inktober.
I love Inktober, always gives me things to post with a constant stream.

lol, as I was saying about "al"s and "le"s

Born with a Head Start

Toward the start of the semester, I wrote a blog post about my frustration within my new IB schedule. In that post, I was going to talk about how the hard-work that one put in doesn't correlate with their result. The result of the hard-work would only be an improvement compared with the lack thereof. Within the academic structure, it is a very unfair and unjustified situation when the student that works hard gets a lower grade than the one being lazy. There seems to be a genetic difference between people that determines their "intelligence". But this is not true, the people that seem to be smarter and putting in less effort are only that way because they had worked hard when they are young. Their parents have guided them through more practice and left them with more experiences when it comes to school. In contrast, the students who need to work marginally harder is that way because they had never been taught the right way of facing a problem. Gifted individuals are born with a head start due to their unconscious effort made when they are young.

The difference in the time for different people to understand a concept varies extensively, and it stays true even when they are being taught the same way. It explains why some people need hours upon hours of extra-dedicated tutoring while others understand at the instant the teacher explains. The way that some people already have the training of interpreting new information saves them from the need for previewing or even reviewing. While these "gifted" people procrastinate or invest their free time, the unfortunate need to work an extra mile to get to the same place. These late-starters require double, triple, or quadruple the time to catch up with the "gifted" people. This all is evident in my process of teaching a multitude of people coding. Some of the people that I taught are in the highest coding class offered in school, while the others are coding for their first time. These two types of people understand new concepts in two very different speed. While the ones who learnt coding for three years could recreate my examples in one attempt, the ones new to coding need my step-by-step commentary of what their thought-processes need to be. This two type of people is meshed by the people in the middle: the ones who have developed a coding (step-by-step) mindset from past experiences. Although all of these people work and think with the same degree of concentration, the time that takes them to understand and reproduce a skill demonstrated range according to their past experiences. Their lack of past experiences suffocate them from the ability to understand, and they have to work harder to do the same thing as others.

In the IB classroom, the effort that each student varies a lot, but the grades of each individual are not that different. The lowest grade for a person would be a B(me :( , lol), not really even a B-. This difference in the effort put into schoolwork inversely correlate how much extra-curricular activity that person has. The ones that treat IB as a walk in the park are part of the "international"(?) debate team, asb, part of nation-wide internships and more that I feel like its there (I don't stalk people). The things that I mention that the "intelligent" is part of comes in combinations, and it shocks me as because any one of them would completely use all my time. These people could handle the IB classes with ease and continue with their desire to achieve more. In the contrary, there are the ones that dedicate all their time to only IB. These people while getting similar or even worse grades that the ones with their hands full work all day to review and catch up (I speak of this from my experience and my intuition on what I think about other's situation, not really that convincing, but bare with me, or not).  This difference comes from the past experience one have in school. For me, I had always been in standard level classes all my life. From the start of grade 7, I had accustomed to myself to the work-load of these comparatively easy classes(I didn't have a choice, really), and I always had a slow and inefficient way of understanding course materials. In response to the unplanned but weekly tests, it takes me upwards of 4 hours to review for a chapter. While others are going through flashcards, I am going through a process of making notes digitally, hand-writing them, covering them and reciting it at the end (flashcards for me would result in an F, maybe a bit exaggerated, but you get what I mean). Although work had been put in for all of the students, the time it takes for one to prepare differs a lot from another.

While the work put in by different people differs, people who have started learning earlier enjoys the benefit of getting good results despite the lack of work. The people without a head-start needs to work harder. And despite being negative about having and not having a head start, this phenomenon tells us that what Albert Einstein said about hard-work is true: "Genius is 1% talent and 99% percent hard work..." And for the ones who have disadvantages, it only comes more true that anyone could make up their lack of hard work just by starting to be diligent. As a famous Chinese saying puts it: "If you don't proceed, you are retracting"

My attempt at making an acapella... lol. I know its a bit - very off. 

I will just scrap and redo the whole thing again.

but either way, I wanted to share it on somewhere that no one will notice

An Art I did for Inktober: wasn't the best ever, but I was bulk doing 6 of these in an hour, lol
plus it is for the blog thumbnail