Assignment #14.

When you're young, you don't know a thing about beauty. I'm talking very young, perhaps about five years old or younger. Although to be honest, you don't know much at all before five years old anyway, at least, not typically. You see, it doesn't make sense to try and understand beauty when you're that young. You're still a child. Things need to make sense to you more than anything else. But not in an empirical sense, rather, it's more like things need to seem right. Because if it feels right, or is made to feel right, we'll come to understand it that way. It's how we learn. When I was little, I didn't know whether or not my mom was beautiful. I might have told her she was pretty, but I didn't understand things like beauty the way I do now. When you're young, it doesn't make sense to judge things aesthetically, because you don't see why you should compare the faces and outfits of the people around you to an ideal. But you do know, that when you hug your mom, she'll probably smell pretty good and the hug will be warm and soft; and that's probably more important than whether or not you like the look of the person you're hugging, because at that point there's no calculation. Of course, we grow old and then our perspectives alter our standards, and it's no longer acceptable to act as a child. Even when the folly would be appropriate.

When I was about ten years old, I switched from homeschooling to the public school system. The big difference and most influential adjustment wasn't the social change, but the time change. For me, social flux wasn't a problem. The environment changed around me and I adapted. But the big deal was spending a minimum of six hours a day on a pre-set schedule, as opposed to the average four hours taken for homeschooling. I'm not too big on an efficiency comparison, because what's done is done, but overall I had to start adjusting to the time management. There's a lot of freedom in homeschooling, which I think is what attracts people to it in the first place. When that freedom changed, I think I changed with it. And so the turbulence which everybody wanted to attribute to some scheme of a "change of environment and social setting" was more the result of a once carefree boy being retrained to spend time on things other than his own desires. It is difficult to tame the free.

A large part of my sophomore year in high school was spent at a church. This, along with school, somehow became the bane of my pre-collegiate career. I guess it's just that what had started as what should have been some sort of spiritual journey for an adolescent turned out to be nothing more than the unveiling of a corrupted network. I had watched people come and go throughout the five years I was there, but perhaps it turned the most when I was fifteen, when a new batch of members to the youth group signaled a rift between myself and the rest of the congregated. I realized that I was in there for my own discovery, that is to say I had thought I merely wanted to take an individually directed approach to the church. I hoped to bring myself and what I knew in order to make myself someone over there. I was viewing the church as a team. But the other people around me...they were full of tears and disappointment, and they used the youth group at the church to mollify their own struggles. I won't go into detail about their problems, but since then it dawned on me: I wasn't starving for a savior like they were. I wasn't starving for truth.

This past semester, I somehow got accepted into the exchange program at my school. I'm effin excited! It feels like I'm finally forcing myself into change. I never would have thought that my seemingly random choice to begin studying Japanese in high school would result in something that could alter my lifestyle. I mean, I'm coming back, but I suppose it is a big thing to be fairly independent for once. But I think I know now, after some twenty years, a bit more than when I started. I've got to make my time count, because before I know it, I'll be back. And I hope you know that too. I'm coming back!