This has been a better week then most i must admit. My accounting mark was a B+. Not to shabby if you know anything about me and accounting. I got an A on my Chinese paper. First A on a university essay. And i wrote it in a total of about 5 hours, spread over a day or two. I'm ready to get an A+ on the next one. Macro was low, but it was belled to a mark that was.......well, less low. But i expected as much. Wishful thinking doesn't get you the grades i guess! I went to venue on Thursday for the pub night. I danced with Nerissa for almost the whole night. It was nice. Venue is tiny! But it was a good night. We went out for chinese food afterwards. Shanghai noodles and crispy chicken @ 3 in the morning probably isn't the best diet... but we were all hungry.
I was talking to Tampon, and we came to the realization that all we ever do is bitch and complain whenever we use our respective online journals. In light of this, and considering I have hardly any complaints this week, I guess I'll avoid my regular depressing rants.
Another realization I came to this week I think could be a life-changing one if I gave it some attention. I think that I have an intense compulsion to understand things in an intuitive manner. On the surface, it doesn't seem very odd or important, but I think it actually is.
It partly explains my inability to really subscribe to a specific religion. I'm the sort of person to find certain parts of different religions that allude to an ideaology that benefit society and people in need. I don't reject my Anglican/Methodist background outright b/c despite the fact that I have a contempt for certain aspects of Christianity, there are still many parts of it that are beneficial. What i struggle with in Christianity is the sort of things that don't make intuitive sense to me. I find it devistatingly hard to simply subscribe to something openly, without having an intuitive understanding of its nature. So while I understand and respect such accounts as the coming of Jesus Christ, I find it hard to say such things as the christian god is the one god on earth.
Constantly i wonder why an ultimate God, would send his son down on earth in an area like bethlehem, profoundly touch the lives of a few thousand in the area, and never show his face over in east asia, where another couple thousand were facing times of war in the Han dynasty. What then would that say about the mercy of God? Seems pretty arbitrary. Further still, how then is it fair to impose upon a Chinese person now, the idea that the Christian god is the one true god. Of course, the opposite is true, and it is equally unfair for a Chinese or Indian person to impress upon someone of modern day Christian, that it is in fact Buddha and his teachings that should be followed, rather then the words of Jesus' 12 deciples and a few prophets in the bible.
What makes an eastern religion like Buddhism so attractive is its open-ended claims that any religion is acceptable so long as it points to an ultimate truth and a sense of goodness for humankind. Now that makes intuitive sense! Why fight wars with your neighbours over which parts of the bible are 'right' if, despite obvious discrepancies, all parts of the bible have the ultimate aim of getting people to subscribe to a lifestyle that produces order and harmony for mankind? Why don't we all just get along an adopt this philosophy? Works for the Dalai Lama. Even the Pope, the ultimate worldly figurehead of Catholicism agrees with this. As nice as all of this may seem, i still find it hard to fully subscribe to any eastern religions either. I only accept them insofar as they make intuitive sense to me. I accept the broad concepts of manifestation and change and impermanence, only because they so perfectly relate to concepts like thermodynamics, chemistry and biology. But i still don't have it in me to accept the customs and rituals of the religions, cuz to me a lot of them just don't make any sense.
Intuition partly explains most of my low marks. In every course, i've given enough effort to have a broad understanding of the major concepts, which makes it easy for me to be able to explain to others what to do. But when I'm faced with a basic question on an exam, I struggle. Why? Because when i look at a question, if i haven't practiced it over and over, i can understand perfectly what the question is asking for me to solve, and i can explain exactly how the answer to this question could be usefully applied in real life, and i may have a general understanding of different methods that could be used, but when the question comes down to 'pick the right formula and plug it in' i struggle. I've done poorly in both accountings and stats because of this. Those were my lowest marks (and i actually really like stats). When i form an intuitive link between, for example, deriving a demand function and applying the MUx/MUy formula, i do well and get 7/8. But when I don't make this link, i end up getting 0/12 on a question about journal entries for long-term investments. To ur average accountant, a question like that is a gimme! But i don't have a knack for that sort of thing, not because I can't add, or don't get debits and credits, but because I don't have that intuitive mental picture in my head of exactly how the sale of a bond affects the company and related accounts. I guess intuition comes with hard work, so all of this reduces to, "if i work harder things will make more intuitive sense to me and i'll get higher marks" but as they say, "study smarter, not harder." Now that i realize all this, maybe I can begin to study in a way that'll create an upswing in these marks. Only time will tell!
Man that's a lotta writing... i guess i'll just stop now...
No comments:
Post a Comment