Cav's Place

I know of the silent treatment in relationships, and it’s a truly bad way to act, regardless of what caused it, but it seems even stranger to be on the receiving end of it from a friend. Or someone I like to think of as a friend, at least. And when, after asking five times, I finally get a reply, she says I didn’t do anything wrong, it’s just that she had nothing to say in response to my messages lately. Why do I find that very hard to believe?

Don’t mind this, I’m just thinking with my fingers again. Plus that I meant to post this yesterday, when she was completely silent, as a last step before posting in more public places, places she couldn’t ignore. But I decided to try one last time to deal with it in private and got the reply I mentioned above. Since it’s useless and unlikely to be true, I still need to think about it, even with my fingers.

Over a year ago, I saw an article in a newspaper which mentioned that a committee had identified the greatest engineering challenges of the century ahead and had set up a site where people could rank them and offer their solutions. They admitted that it’s mainly a “public relations” move, meant to bridge the gap between engineers and the rest of the populace, but it’s an interesting idea nevertheless.

The poll is updated by hand, since they ask for comments and not just a simple vote, and they seem to have stopped updating it on June 30, 2008. The ranking at the time was:
1. Make solar energy economical.
2. Provide energy from fusion.
3. Provide access to clean water.
4. Reverse-engineer the brain.
5. Advance personalized learning.
6. Develop carbon sequestration methods.
7. Engineer the tools of scientific discovery.
8. Restore and improve urban infrastructure.
9. Advance health informatics.
10. Prevent nuclear terror.
11. Engineer better medicines.
12. Enhance virtual reality.
13. Manage the nitrogen cycle.
14. Secure cyberspace.

If I were to briefly analyze these results, I’d say the top two spots show that people seem to be extremely worried about energy. Clean energy, if possible, but their main concern is making sure energy will be available to them, whatever the means. Having the development of carbon sequestration methods also in the top half of the classification only emphasizes that. Clean water has a deserved top spot, nothing strange about that, but I find it interesting that reverse-engineering the brain comes next, considering the ways in which such knowledge could be used. Personalized learning is another challenge that obviously deserves to be a priority, but I find it odd that engineering the tools of scientific discovery ranks so low. Many people probably don’t truly grasp the meaning of such an abstract concept, because to me it seems to be a prerequisite for pretty much everything else!
Moving on to the bottom half, I find it rather pleasing that urban infrastructure isn’t higher on the list. It means some people are really starting to think about the bigger picture and to put global problems above their own need for comfort. Health informatics and better medicines might be more important than this ranking shows, but I think they’re placed so low because of the potential for misuse and the truly rotten attitude and practices of the large pharmaceutical companies. Nuclear terror likely ranks this low because most people don’t really see it as a threat anymore, so long after the last time its effects have been truly noticeable. Virtual reality could have plenty of important uses, but many people probably don’t see it, plus that it’s true that solving many other challenges from this list would have more significant effects immediately. The nitrogen cycle should rank higher, considering the effects it has, but this is another example of a problem that people are mostly unaware of. As for the last spot, that’s certainly caused by the fact that increased security means reduced freedom, and cyberspace should be a free place. There have been way too many bad things done in the name of security already.

So how would I rank them? That’s a hard question to answer, but I’ll make an attempt and also explain why I placed each of them where I did.
1. Engineer the tools of scientific discovery. As I said above, this seems to be a prerequisite for everything else. Better scientific tools pave the way towards better and faster scientific discoveries. The others might be hard to rank, but this one’s obvious!
2. Advance personalized learning. People don’t work the same, so they need to be treated as individuals and allowed to develop and make use of their skills and interests as they are, not forced to change in order to fit the mold society would want them to fit! This would also pave the way towards better and faster discoveries.
3. Provide energy from fusion. It does seem to be the best way to generate energy, having less environmental costs than even the cleanest methods available today. If this could be achieved and handled responsibly, we’d go a long way towards living in harmony with Earth.
4. Provide access to clean water. Lack of access to clean water is a major cause for disease. More importantly, wars over the control of clean water sources are already brewing, so a solution to this problem would save us from a lot of bloodshed and suffering. Of course, a prerequisite to finding a solution to this problem is a drastic reduction of the human population worldwide, but that’s another issue.
5. Manage the nitrogen cycle. Nitrogen pollution, generally caused by fertilizers and waste, plays an important part in the degradation of the environment. This tends to be overlooked by the general public both because other environmental issues make the headlines and because solutions for it involve major changes in lifestyle, which is something most people aren’t ready for.
6. Prevent nuclear terror. When a problem gets out of sight, it tends to get worse instead of better. There are way too many nuclear warheads in this world and the fact that some questionable governments already have or will soon develop their own only increases the threat. Also, this measure should include improving the safety of nuclear power plants and better nuclear waste management, both of which are certainly required.
7. Advance health informatics. This would go a long way towards understanding and solving health problems and improving the quality of life for all. However, it must be implemented very carefully, because there is a high potential for misuse.
8. Enhance virtual reality. Putting aside the military and recreational uses, which are also very important, virtual reality is a great tool for designers as well. With it, we could learn how to use areas more effectively and create better buildings and infrastructure, improving our lives and reducing our negative impact on the environment at the same time.
9. Restore and improve urban infrastructure. As I said, if we can improve our lives while also reducing our negative impact on the environment at the same time, why shouldn’t we? But we need to be careful to put the environment above our own interests when we decide what counts as an improvement.
10. Engineer better medicines. It’s a very important issue, but the large pharmaceutical companies already have too much power and the chemicals we pour into our bodies often do more harm than good in the end. We should first change the way medicine is viewed and practiced, then work on better medicines.
11. Make solar energy economical. It’d be nice, but before we make it economical we should make it sustainable. Installing enough solar panels to cover our energy needs would require a lot of space, and the planet isn’t getting any bigger. Also, the most efficient solar panels contain indium, which is an extremely rare mineral and mining operations aren’t exactly good for the environment.
12. Reverse-engineer the brain. It would be useful, but perhaps there are things we shouldn’t tamper with until we evolve into something better. I wouldn’t trust humans to properly use the results of such a discovery.
13. Secure cyberspace. As I said before, more security tends to mean less freedom, and cyberspace should be a free place. We already see the results of this approach and they’re not good. So, instead of trying to secure the whole medium, we should educate people to take care of themselves and offer them the tools needed to improve their own security when they feel it necessary.
14. Develop carbon sequestration methods. No. Period. We need real solutions, not means of delaying the inevitable! We need to stop putting so much carbon in the atmosphere and gather some of that which is already there in order to use the components for something else. Dumping it into the ground is not an answer!

This would be it, feel free to disagree… Since some of these things are equally important, I might even disagree with myself after a while. But it was a nice exercise nevertheless and you should try it too, if you’re reading this.

I often get little flashes of past events that make me feel very embarrassed. In some cases there are also regrets. Regrets that I did what I shouldn’t have, that I didn’t do what I should have, or simply that things happened to me, when I don’t know even now what I could have done or not done to change the outcome.
The biggest regret should be quite obvious for everyone, and that falls into the last category mentioned above, but there are others as well. And, as I said, there are also a lot of memories that simply make me feel like crawling into a hole in the ground due to embarrassment. I guess it’s very easy to make me feel like that, not to mention that I often feel embarrassed for others when I see them do things that’d embarrass me.
The flashes are just a regular part of my life and probably wouldn’t really be worth mentioning if it’d stay at that. But the thing is that every now and then I start thinking about these moments more seriously and end up wrapped in embarrassment and regret. More so than usual, I mean. Now is such a time. Still, I don’t feel ready to write about all those moments I remember, how they make me feel and why they make me feel as they do. Perhaps there will be another time for that…

I have been thinking of moving my oldest blog posts here for some time now. I’m talking about the journal I kept on Kiwibox for a little while in 2000, which I named “Moments from the Life of a Knight in Soul Armor”. I didn’t do it at first because I had more or less forgotten all about them. Was actually quite surprised to see they’re still there now. Either way, I plan to move them here as soon as possible.
There is a limit to how many I can move because I have set two goals for this blog when I started it, namely that the number of posts filed in “Personal” and “Tests & Surveys” must be less than half of the total and that the number of posts filed in “Society” must be more than half of those filed in “Personal”. A third goal, writing a post in at least two different days each week, was added later, but this has nothing to do with the issue I’m talking about now. These goals were a little attempt to keep this blog at least somewhat true to the idea I had when I launched it, which was to try to put my thoughts, ideas and ideals into words, express them so others might have a chance of understanding what I mean. Currently, these goals limit the number of posts I can transfer to 14 out of the total of 26.
Excepting the first post, which is about my first love, there really isn’t anything there, so I might decide not to transfer a few of them, but the general idea is that I wrote those things and they should be here along with everything else. It will take some time to correct typos, spelling and grammar mistakes and various other things I seem to have “produced” eight and a half years ago, but the first ones should be here soon. I’ll keep the original time and date of posting, as I did with all the old posts I have transferred here so far, so you’ll find them nearly four years before the oldest posts currently listed and about six and a half years before the actual launch of this blog.

What’s the connection between the two parts of this post? That first old post… I read it again last night and had to cover my eyes and peek through my fingers after a while, that’s how embarrassed it made me feel.

A newspaper from here printed an article about school anxiety two days ago. It pointed out that this fear is the one that appears, or at least significantly worsens, after the child has been in school for a time, so it is different from the separation anxiety which manifests itself from the first day. Then it went on to say that it’s not really triggered by being away from parents and not directly related to any specific event that happened to the child at school, which is perfectly true, but then blew it by saying that it’s most likely linked to a fear of death and therefore triggered after the death of a close friend or relative. I can tell you quite certainly that it’s nothing of the sort, not in my case at least. Either way, it also stressed that parents of children who are afraid of school must not force them to go, but must help them instead. That’s nice, but the real problem follows: By help the author meant finding them a good therapist and pointing out that one or two years of treatment are usually required for a “cure”.
It was certainly better than all the “how to make your child go to school” articles that pop up all over around the beginning of the school year, but it still focused on solving the problem by bending the child’s mind and personality to the will of the world, albeit more gently, instead of by creating a place for that child, just as he or she is, in the world. So I went out on a limb and wrote a lengthy comment under that article, explaining my situation, just in case somebody else feels something similar and would find comfort in knowing they’re not alone, and then (rhetorically) asking why can’t society find ways in which each could put their ideas and skills to use while maintaining their personality, and even their limitations, instead of forcing all to fight who they are if they want to be able to do anything.
But this is not about the general problem and the solutions I have for it, there will be another time for that. This post is simply a part of my story, one I realized I never really explained here.

Since I’m generally very afraid of people, school was certainly not a place where I could ever feel at ease, not to mention that there was also a fair amount of separation anxiety early on. But the actual fear of school became a strong and separate “entity” in third grade. There was no death around that time and it also wasn’t caused by a specific event, despite others thinking they had identified one once. I think it might have been triggered by the realization that school wasn’t something that would be over quickly, that it was going to last for many years to come and then would likely be replaced by some sort of work in a similarly social, stressful and regulated environment. I obviously couldn’t handle that, so I snapped.
What followed were talks with my parents. I was hysterical and they seemed to keep thinking that it either was some specific event that triggered it or I just needed to get used to it better and that either way they could explain to me that it was all right and it’d get better. Obviously, that couldn’t work.
Then they talked with the teacher, trying to determine if anyone was threatening me or if there might have been any other specific situation which might have triggered this. Eventually, I got taken to the first psychologist, who had no idea what she was doing and kept trying to prove to me that my intelligence was way above the average and therefore I shouldn’t fear that I won’t be able to keep up. Thank you, but I already knew that, so what does it have to do with anything?
Further on, my parents took different approaches, with my dad becoming harsher and trying to force me to go, scare me into going to school, and the creature trying a mix of occasionally appearing understanding and letting me have a free day now and then and blackmailing me emotionally the rest of the time. The general theme through all those years was that I’m shaming them with my behavior and creating added stress within the family, which also ruins their relationship.
Back to the chronological order of things, I believe I was in fourth grade when a psychologist came to the school for a day. Knowing of my problem, my teacher decided to take me to him. If you keep in mind that I’m afraid of people, and even more so of doctors, and also of school, it should come as no surprise that I lost it completely when I found out that my teacher was about to make me talk to a doctor I didn’t know, inside the school, about my fear of school. She had to literally drag me all the way from my desk to the doctor’s office, two floors down, while I kicked and screamed and tried to cling on to anything I could get my hands on. The doctor tried to calm me down for a few minutes, realized it was impossible and let me go.

The following years were more or less a nightmare. I was more and more afraid, they tried more and more to make me go… Obviously, the extreme stress I was under took its toll on my health, and for a time I was making a visit to the hospital about once every two weeks because of it. They always told me it was nothing serious physically, just kept me there for about 30 minutes to calm me down a little and get my heart rate back within acceptable limits, gave some advice about reducing stress which never had anything to do with its real cause, then sent me back home. The results of that are still visible, as my nervous system is in poor shape, I’m shaking a lot and was left with some cardiac arrhythmia, all of which only seem to be getting worse as time passes.
As part of my dad’s part of the attempts to make me keep going, one day he took me to a psychiatrist. I was asked to go to another room and write down how I see the problem while I assume she talked to my dad to see how he sees it. Then she read what I wrote and said it’s not a psychiatric problem, so she referred me to that clinic’s psychologist. My dad took me there next, we were asked what the problem was and as soon as the words were out she told my dad not to accept such behavior, to force me to go by any means necessary. Then she went on to say that she won’t accept that such a condition might exist because she can’t have her son tell her he’s afraid of school at some point in the future and need to admit that he might speak the truth. I’d still like to know who the fuck gave her a license to practice! Still, my dad took her words to heart and the computer was immediately moved out of my room with the understanding that the amount of time I’ll be allowed to use it from then on would depend on my behavior, on going to school calmly and no longer saying that I’m afraid of it. That particular kind of blackmail didn’t last long, but my dad did get even more adamant that I have to go, regardless of how I might feel, after that point.
I’m not sure if this was during that last semester of eighth grade, when they allowed me to stay home, or just before it, but there eventually was another psychologist. She came home, I didn’t have to go to her office. I hated her guts, though she tried to be very gentle. It was just that she kept trying to find one specific reason for my fear, a certain event that happened at school and triggered it, which was not the case.
Yes, as I said, during the last semester of eighth grade my parents finally allowed me to stay home. Homeschooling is illegal here, but they worked something out with the teachers. Some just passed me based on my good results up to that point, saying they’ll handle the loose ends, others allowed me to send a couple of projects that I worked on at home and graded them, yet a few others actually came here once or twice and gave me tests. Then there was the exam at the end of the eighth grade, which I had to take and somehow passed, though I was utterly terrified and still don’t know how I managed to do it.

I thought it’d finally be over after that, but dad did not. He started looking for a high school for me and, since my poor results at that exam I mentioned above severely limited my options as far as public schools were concerned, eventually found a private school that didn’t care for your previous results as long as you passed their exam. So he dragged me there, I took that exam and apparently passed it without problems.
That meant I was to start ninth grade, which was an obviously terrifying prospect. Still, after not sleeping and hardly eating for the last two days before the start of a preparation period which the school required us to go through before the actual start of the school year, I ended up there, dragged along by dad once again. Once there, somehow my eyes fell on Rose and it was love at first sight. I never had a chance, she never gave a damn about me, but she was put in the same class I was and the hope made me capable of fighting the fear, at least partially, for a whole year. I managed to finish ninth grade fueled by false hope alone.
But at the beginning of the tenth grade I realized there will never be anything between us and all my strength crumbled along with my hopes. That meant the very thought of school drove me into hysterics once again and my parents couldn’t make me go at all anymore. So they gave me some more time, let me stay home until the beginning of the “tests” period, towards the end of the semester, making sure I won’t be expelled. Then I went for one day at the start of that period, with the help of a classmate who had become a rather close friend through this period, but I just couldn’t handle it and wouldn’t go again after that at all.
As a result, my parents hired yet another psychologist, which was apparently rather renowned. He also came home and was the only one who seemed to know what he was talking about, at least partially. There were a few things I could actually talk to him about, and he tried to look at the issue from a broader perspective, including my parents more than the others had (though both the others who actually tried to treat me for a while also included the creature, but to a lesser extent), saying they also have a problem, not just me. I hated him for putting me on pills, but at least it didn’t last long. It didn’t last long because after a while he went to my parents and told them that he doesn’t have a problem with continuing to take their money in exchange for having nice chats with me, but he can assure them that my fear is real, I’m not faking it, and there’s nothing to be done about it. So he advised them to just let it go, let me stay home.

They seemed to finally understand then, and until the end of that school year they did let it go. But then my dad came to me one day, close to the start of the next school year, and asked me what did I need for school. I was frozen for a moment, so he asked again. As soon as I could move again, I walked away and went to my room. He came after me, asked once again and waited for me to answer. When he noticed he wasn’t going to get anything out of me, he said he thought I just needed some time, take a year off but then start going again. I said I didn’t think that. Then he finally let it go, just like that. He never again pressed me about going to school after that moment.
However, there seemed to be a switch between my parents after that. The creature started to nag me about going again, which she kept doing for close to two years, also trying to get Andra on her side once she became a part of my life. Initially Andra did try to make me go back and those discussions were so terrifying I can’t even think about them anymore, I just remember sheer terror. Then she suddenly stopped mentioning it at some point. Why she did that became obvious a little while later, when I was in Iasi with her and the creature called. Andra picked up and, after a few random pleasantries, the creature apparently told her that if she truly loves me she must make me go back to school by any means necessary. With barely controlled fury (and a murderous look, though the creature obviously couldn’t see it), she replied: “I do love your son, ma’am, and just because I love him I won’t do that. In the time we spent together I have come to realize that going back would destroy him and I don’t want that to happen. If you know him less after being with him since he was born than I do after one year, I feel sorry for you.” Somehow, that also made the creature stop pressing the issue after that moment.
That didn’t mean I could rest easy from then on, since any mention of school still scared me and Andra was in college, so it was obviously mentioned often. Still, it no longer was about me, the danger of me being forced to go again appeared gone, so I could slowly start to step away from this constant fear. A lot of damage had already been done, but at least there would be no more, at least not for that reason.

I found some statistics on a site once, back when I was still in school, which said that real cases of severe school or workplace anxiety are very rare, only about 200 per year worldwide. However, about 100000 people claim to suffer from this condition each year in order to get away from school or work, which makes such claims be very suspicious and worsens the situation of those who actually have this problem even more, because they’re seen as liars. That site also said that only 22% of those who truly suffer from this condition can be cured, while 45% will sooner or later reach a point where they can no longer fight the fear and have to give up school and work for good. The rest will fight the fear all their lives, which will take a severe toll on their health. Interestingly, as I later found out, that last psychologist I saw had told my parents from the beginning that he had treated a few such cases in the past and the chance of a cure is only 20%, so he will try, but it doesn’t look too good. The numbers seem to match…
I still have to wonder why are people put through this, why are they forced to fight battles they can’t win in a desperate attempt to fit the mold society says they should fit? Why can’t society find ways to let such people, people like myself, put their skills to use in areas that interest them without fighting a losing battle against themselves for a chance to do it?

Don’t talk to me unless you’re determined to change the world. How, why and the exact form of the change you desire could at the very least make an interesting topic for debate, so differences here aren’t the problem. The problem are all the mindless sheep who accept the current state of affairs, even if they’re unhappy with it, just because it’s easier to do so or because they’re unwilling to risk the nice little lives they’re building for themselves for a cause.
I think that if I’d somehow make it clear that there’s nothing to talk about between me and a person who’s not determined to change the world despite being aware that it needs changing, quite a few weird situations, not to mention bitter feelings, would be avoided.

That’s all. As the title says, I’m just venting a little after something that just happened.
I’d much rather have more people fighting for change instead of just more of those who aren’t keeping well away from me, but the odds of good things happening are always slim to none…