Month: October 2017

Spite Test

/ Chris DiMarco / 1 Comment

It took me a few stabs to finally finish college. The events that pushed me to finish the job were not what I expected.

Underachiever of the Year

When I was in early elementary school, I realized that I was a quick study compared to the others in my public school class. By second grade, they had already shuffled me into a “Gifted and Talented” course with a few other bright kids. While everyone else was learning multiplication and division, we were building structures, learning about endangered species, and learning how to program on an old TRS-80 computer the school had sitting around. In the third grade, I discovered that I could ace tests without doing any homework, an enlightenment I would suffer straight through high school. As such, I would do just enough to not have my teachers send the dreaded “One Subject Report” to my parents for signatures, an encounter I was loathe to regularly repeat. I miraculously ended up being allowed to take high school level courses in seventh and eighth grade, which I carried on with an equal lack of zeal. (Aside: around this time period I was very interested in computer programming and music, and I spent endless hours messing with my family’s PC and playing my sax. But I’ll save those topics for another day.)

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TRS-80, for the young bucks. (Source: wikipedia)

In high school, I became very active with the marching band and, like so many others my age, dating. I maintained better than average grades in A & Honors level courses, despite putting mediocre efforts into my work. My grades took a bit of a dive in my senior year as senioritis set in and I was tired of school. Still, my folks encouraged me to go to college nearby at NJIT, Stevens, or Seton Hall. I settled on NJIT because it had direct access to a train via the subway which would get me home and to my girlfriend’s college.

In Flagrante Delicto

Through the opening months of college, that high school romance waxed and waned, and I began to mess around with various other girls during intermissions. One of those girls was Kate. She was a brief flicker in my romantic history, but an encounter involving her seems to be the first instance where someone called me on my nonsense.

C-Dshades

Me and my frat bros at NJIT. I’m on the right lookin’ fly.

Kate and I liked to drink. A lot. Frat parties, in our rooms, other colleges, whatever. One night, we got hammered on Everclear w/Hawaiian Punch & shots of Jack Daniels while watching the best film ever: Stigmata. Naturally, we followed this up with messing around, until there was a knock at my dorm room door. I expected this to be my friend Alex who was with us earlier, but as I shirtlessly flung open the door I was greeted by my Resident Advisor. He looked at me, then the bottle of Jack on the floor, then Kate, then me again. He sighed and asked me to step outside. He and the other RAs grilled Kate and me for an hour trying to paint me as some kind of advantage-taking rapist-to-be, but after Kate’s cries in protest they capitulated. We were both written up for underage drinking and sentenced to put on an anti-drinking seminar and to see a psychiatrist.

The shrink sat me down and began to probe about the regularity of my drinking, why my grades were terrible (I would leave NJIT two semesters later with a 1.25 GPA), and why I didn’t seem to care about how much trouble I was in. I halfheartedly responded to his inquiries, and detecting this, he gave me his professional opinion: I was a chronic underachiever and I had a distinct problem with authority.

At the time, I blew him off.

That diagnosis still haunts my dreams.

Knocks like “Thuuupppp”

Over the course of the next ten years,  various women in my life would utter these words:

“Well, you’d have to read this graph. It’s pretty technical…I don’t expect you to be able to do that.” – Female boss, describing a linear graph I’d encountered regularly since elementary school.

“You don’t have any ambitions beyond lunch.” – Ex-girlfriend.

“I could never date you. You’re not smart enough.” – PhD girl that I was interested in up until that exact moment.

“You weren’t going anywhere.” – Ex-girlfriend, many years later, describing why she moved on.

If there ever was a case for thick skulls, mine is certainly on the list. Each woman gave me the tough love that I desperately needed to hear, but my natural response was to be angry at them. “Why were they all so mean to me?” I recoiled. “Why can’t they just like me for who I am inside?” I’d wonder, all the while knowing I wasn’t living up to that mysterious word we call potential. “I’m a drafter at an engineering firm, screw you!” echoed in my head as I tried to rationalize my existence. It didn’t work.

As the economy dwindled in 2009 & early 2010, the situation at my employer got more and more dire until I was the last employee beyond my boss and his wife. I had nowhere else to hide; it was time to decide the path for my future. Behind door #1: taking another shot at college, having failed miserably in the first attempt, and door #2: calling it a day and looking for a job elsewhere in civil engineering.

I spent months meditating on the correct course of action and all of those old comments bubbled to the surface, bringing anger and shame with them. Somehow, I was deficient. Yes, I had talents, but I wasn’t doing anything with them. The spotlight turned back and pointed at me. The choices I had made all along had these exact consequences. It was at that moment I knew I’d never have any measure of peace with that hanging over my head.

While the iron was hot, I rushed to sign up at the local community college. I took two maximum-load semesters of classes to finish my Associate’s degree with a 3.6 GPA. Then I went to UNC-Charlotte for my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in mechanical engineering.

Suck it, bitches.

“Message!”

In hindsight, I half-jokingly blame this whole part of my life on movies and television. In most film, the hero of the story is reluctantly cast into some expansive adventure where he must learn to become strong. He struggles but eventually overcomes the villain and is rewarded.

I was waiting for the beginnings of my own Joseph Campbell “Hero’s Journey,” but no evil pirates showed up at my door to kidnap my brother. No aliens came to whisk me away to a far-off system where I’d need to fight off invaders to save the galaxy.

centauri

“A game! Well, you may thought it was a game, but it was also a test. Aha, a test. Sent out across the universe to find those with the gift to be Starfighters. And here you are, my boy! Here you are!” (Source: thelaststarfighter.wikia.com)

It was only me and my normal life, and the story wasn’t going to write itself. What goes down in the great book will be my responsibility, alone. This is why I’ve made plans for every aspect of my life from the physical to the spiritual and I wake up every morning excited to take the next step in adventures of my own design.

So, if you find yourself in a position where Every Day is Exactly the Same and you are not living the life you’d hoped, spend some time examining your part in it. Chances are, even if you’re a hard worker, having no direction means that you’re working hard at someone else’s goals. If you’re a slacker like me, definitely spend the time to figure out what you need to get moving….even if it is a whole load of spite and anger.

In future posts, I will discuss my journeys through the process of goal setting and achievement. That’s all for now.

Oh, one last thing: I was kidding about Stigmata. It’s friggin’ terrible.

 

Something to Believe In

/ Chris DiMarco / 1 Comment

I have a rather complicated relationship with religion, as I suppose many people my age do. It has been on my mind a lot lately, and I hope writing about it here will help coalesce some of my thoughts.

God and Family

I was a child of the 1980’s, and at that time, suburban life was at a bit of a religious crossroads. My grandparents were all from Italy (Calabria and Abruzzo) and immigrated to the US in the early 1900’s. I do not know either of my grandfathers, as both died before I was a year old, but I grew up spending lots of time with my grandmothers. They were deeply intertwined in Christian life, my mother’s mother specifically. She studied the bible every day, kept volumes of notes on it, rarely missed Sunday mass, was a member of the Church’s prayer chain, and was the Church seamstress (as was her profession). Whenever she came to visit my house, Benny Hinn would be found playing on the TV, and she would instruct my younger brother and I to place our hands on the screen and pray with him. Being a child, I thought nothing of it and followed her direction, attempting to “feel the love of the Lord.”

helen&mario

Mario & Helen, my mother’s parents

My parents were the first generation of what I’ve heard referred to as “Christmas Eve Christians,” or folks who only attend mass on the major holidays. God was never a major player in my day-to-day life, though a plaque with the “Our Father” prayer was hung above our kitchen doorway. It is a bit surprising, given that both my mother and father went to Catholic primary and high schools. I recall that as a pre-teen, my mother said to me that she “wasn’t going to force religion on you [my brother and I], and I want you to make up your own minds.” I think that was the day that I started to distance myself from God.

Throughout my teens and early twenties, I would vacillate between humoring those clinging to a faith, and outright criticizing them as “non-thinking sheep.” This affected my relationship with my parents and my mother’s mother deeply, and only added to the rebellious teenage stage that I went through. Slowly, religion became a non-entity in my life. Almost all of my friends were atheist or agnostic, and my worldview became distinctly leftist and progressive.

Changing Winds

Several changes would turn me around over the following years of my mid-to-late twenties and early thirties. After the 2008 economic downturn, the civil engineering firm that I worked for slowly ran out of work, and two years later, I was on unemployment. I took this time to work on myself physically, spiritually, and mentally. I would run or bike every day, and in six months I had lost over thirty pounds and decreased my mile time to under seven minutes. In the spiritual realm, I meditated frequently, and began to read (and re-read) books like The Tao of Pooh, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and Karen Strong’s Buddha. A dear friend had lent me Jihad vs. McWorld, and another gave me several of Sam Harris’s books. It was around this time that I began to find something valuable in the works describing religious virtue, but I could not quite put my finger on it.

I returned to college to finally finish a degree I had started 10 years prior, first at community college to repair the damage from my first nonchalant attempt, then to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where I completed my Master’s degree in mechanical engineering. I believe this was a crucial component, as graduate school hones your critical thinking ability, or as Michael Ruppert put it, “the ability to tell the bullshit from the ice cream.”

My free time at college was filled with some interesting explorations into psychology. I was interested in becoming a stronger, better man, so I found a seminar by David DeAngelo called Man Transformation. The focus was somewhat on success with women, but the more important things I took from it regarded personal responsibility and the biological forces at play between men and women. I tested out a few things from this seminar and found success in relationships both in the sexual and professional world. The empiricist in me was overjoyed; I had found things that made “sense.”

All Monkey no Banana

I finished my Master’s degree in May 2016, and found a job out in Kansas at Garmin. It was around this time that everything went crazy.

Shortly after, Donald Trump won the Republican primary, went on to win the Presidential election, and the political left lost their collective minds. Women’s rights activists, BLM, and mainstream news all began to shout loudly at any opposition to their ideology. All of a sudden, being a moderate or right-wing was no longer valid thinking according to these people, and should be exorcised. They became, in effect, the new incarnation of stifling conservative movement they opposed in the 1960’s. In response, the number of advocates of the extreme right exploded, leading to the KKK being discussed on national news again after decades of irrelevance.

Amidst all this chaos, a new batch of strong thinkers appeared, mostly from alternate news media on Youtube and VidMe. I had come across these folks (and still recommend them):

  • Ben Shapiro
  • Dave Rubin
  • Razorfist
  • Sargon of Akkad
  • Styxhexenhammer666
  • Steven Crowder

…who have all been strident supporters of free speech, clear thinking, and were decidedly anti-SJW (social justice warrior). I found myself nodding in agreement with many of the things they espoused, and I found it interesting that Shapiro and Crowder were extremely religious, and not the “non-thinking sheep” I had made them out to be.

And then….along came a spider.

Jordan B. Peterson

I could easily write volumes on my experience with Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, but I will keep this brief. He is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto who became embroiled in a controversy over his refusal to bow to the compelled use of pronouns by Canadian law. I became aware of him through social media, and my life has not been the same since.

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Kermit the Frog, a.k.a. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

Dr. Peterson has hundreds of hours of lectures loaded on Youtube. His three large contributions are his lectures titled Maps of Meaning, Portraits of Personality, and the Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories. It was this last series on the Bible that had particular impact on me, as Peterson clearly details connections between biology, psychology, history, and religious literature over time using his deep understanding of psychometrics. As I watched more of his lectures, the pieces began to fall together and for the first time in my life, I realized not only the cause of religiosity (specifically Judeo-Christian values), but its necessity, and the reason why so many people work their hardest to undermine it.

Then, as fate would have it, the lights went on in my head.

Thunderstruck

At this point, these ideas are swimming around in my head:

  1. Biological imperatives. Why men and women do what they do.
  2. The need for both structure and chaos.
  3. Why we tell stories; a.k.a. Jesus as the first widespread superhero, showing how we should live our lives.
  4. The sameness of prayer and “Law of Attraction” with meditation.
  5. The failings of post-modern, neo-Marxist belief systems; a.k.a. “how to value nothing and everything simultaneously.”
  6. How those beliefs can lead to dystopia.

I had been getting battered at work on all sides, and thankfully had a planned vacation to St. Louis with the same dear friend that lent me Jihad vs. McWorld. She is a profoundly religious person, and that comes across in all her interactions with the world. She is the first to grab a child’s dropped toy, first to take a group photo for a family at the park, first to talk you up in a time of doubt, and first to offer her resources to those in need. During the four days we spent together, it was impossible not to notice these things, all virtues and proper action.

As part of our trip, we visited the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis. A small voice inside of me said, “this is silly, it’s a church, why are you going, you’re not religious?” Sitting here at this very moment, I’m glad I ignored that voice. Immediately after stepping inside, I had an epiphany.

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The Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis.

I was struck with awe, gobsmacked. I felt part of something bigger than myself. I followed down history to the beginnings of time. I understood why I need religion in my own life.

It is all these things:

  • The recognition of a higher power.
  • The need for personal responsibility.
  • The need for family and community.
  • Passing down of the knowledge of virtuous action
  • The value of asking the universe for a goal, working toward it, and being grateful if it is received.
  • The value in “confessing” your “sins.” I liken this to taking accountability for missing the mark of acting properly in the world.

These bullets do not rationalize the belief in the Christian god, I am fully aware of that. But they do help justify it for me, and they align with the things I’ve known my entire life.

That’s all for now, as I need to explore the meaning of this more.