I was following my own suggestion from a previous post and I picked up The Demon-Haunted World in order to give it another reading. I got to the point where Sagan wrote that when he told his parents that he wanted to be an astronomer he got all their support, and I was thinking that maybe the 'failed' part wouldn't have been appended to failed.nerd had my parents listened to me when I was 10 or so drawing all sorts of schematics, writing programs in BASIC and dreaming of working at NASA.
Now before you go out for your little violin, I have to say that I turned out quite okay. I'm just saying that maybe I would have been a lot better if had not been for my parent's divorce and the several years worrying about getting something to eat the next day. And I can't help but wonder how many broken dreams go down the same path, how many missed opportunities.
'All things science' this is what comes to my mind when someone asks me what my interests are. But the answer seldom is as imagined. I do have other interests which are more suited to the environment I live in, and I know and love my friends enough not to pester them with my rant about how cool the 3D Mandelbrot Fractal is or how much I love Python. That's not to say that I can't have intellectually stimulating discussions with them, just that they are on a different level. It's just that sometimes I wish I had someone else to talk about these things, someone who would get my obscure Futurama and Firefly references.
This has long left me wanting to reach out and find a place where I can be truly me, and thankfully the Internet has maintained my frustration at low levels. I imagine this is true for many others, wouldn't you say so?
So I guess some thanks are in order, thanks which will go out into the vast space that is the Web, home of the socially awkward and all sorts of interesting human beings.
thank you Internet, thank you Wikipedia, thank you Reddit, thank you all you bloggers out there for sharing who you are and what you do
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