Adam Pearce's diary

Hello introspection!

hi colllege
My friend toph recently sent a long note recapping 4 years of his life. Previously he had aimed to send quartly updates, but as length of the notes increased he would periodically fall behind and with the death of his father and marriage got years behind.

The last 20 words of his 50k word essay announced the birth of his daughter; I think the prospect of his life changing forced him to either finish the update or come to terms with never doing it.

It was well written, better written than claude slop or the utilitarin stripped down pragmatic prose we use at work to describe research, document technical systems or cordinate cross functionally.

Other than work, I haven't read much this year or introspected. This week, for the first time that I can remember, I'm trying to disconnect from work -- grab back a little bit of slack from Slack to write a self indulgent note.

What I think about the first 26 years of my life has settled into a grove and hasn't changed much; I'll start with a brief note about that and then spend most of this note digging into the last 10 where the narrative is more unrurly/contested and see if I can wrangle it into coherence.

What I tell people about my life

My parents met at Northern Illinois university and to UT together for grad school. My dad finished his PhD in trombone playing after I was born, and we moved around Texas and Oklahoma following his facility jobs. As I finished up elemetry school, we moved back to my mom’s childhood home outside of Chicago – the schools in Oklalhom were quite poor and I think they didn’t want to stay in the South long term. Shockingly to me, they just packed up and moved when the school year finished and found jobs as an elementary school libraian and high school band teacher in neirbooring suburbs.

In Oklahoma, I was pretty outdoorsy, doing scouts and playing midfield on a competive soccer team. After moving up north, I shifted indoors doing debate and math team.

I was fine at them, but not great. I started debate softmore year and ended up on the outskirts of the top 100 teams in the country; a little bit later I learned about math olymidads too late to try for them and did fine at regionals/state, but never at anything real.

I think reading Enders game threw me for a bit of a loop in school. if I was ever trying to write a paper and feeling like it wasn't going to be excellent, I’d put it off and off and off to avoid cronfonting its/my mediocratiority and then be proud of getting a B for something done in a rush. Rereading the book in my 20s clarified some physic holes I’d dug for myself (while not as rare/precious as genius, just be able to sit and work and make something new isn’t nothing), now in my 30s I’m coming to terms with just being good enough to help brilliant people do work. [I think cut, move this? Keep intro more just the facts?] That said, I am still proud of getting a 5 on AP bio after having to drop the class in the fall after being late to school habitually.

Things also went off the rails a little in HS after my dad told me my parents wouldn’t be able to pay off college – I gave up a little at trying at school, assuming I wouldn't be able to go anywhere fancy and resigned myself to a shitty state school. This really didn’t make sense? Possibly I was just depressed/having trouble not being addicted to the internet and wanted something external to blame.

At the end of HS, I think I applied to UTDallas, Iowa, Northern Illinois University, UMKC and Macclaster – schools that might be me a debate scholarship and one of the schools where my long distance debate girlfriend Julia was applying. I was really interested in Harvey Mudd (I ride a unicycle and math) but couldn't bring myself to complete the application (probably wouldn’t have gotten in and couldn’t have paid for it either way)

UTDallas gave me a full ride (possibly influenced by the debate coach? But it wasn’t conditional on debate) and my dad insisted that we spend spring break visiting the school and fixing up some rental houses he had kept when we moved. “Why bother if I have to go anyways” I thought and ended up going anyways.

UTDallas

I floundered. I think I’ve done best when I had something difficult/impressive/tractable; I bounced off of their debate team, didn’t have my life together enough to apply to the honors program and the classes were less rigourous than what I had done in HS. I ended up playing an enormous amount of League of Legends; while not, like, impressive, it did offer the pleasure of being difficult and tractabled. If I really focused on it, I could feel myself getting better. I ended up being ranked in the top 500 North American players.

(I guess I'm writing this because I want to avoid falling into a rut again/don't want my kids too? in retrospect I think I was so unhappy because I could feel myself wasting years of my life)

I kept dating Julia throughout college, it felt like that one part of my life that hadn’t fallen out? Most people at UTD didn’t know much about much; I could always find something interesting to talk about when meeting new people (how does your job work?) but connecting more than superfillically never seem to happen.

I started as a CS major, really disliked java and switched to math, picking up philosophy and econ minors along the way. Like with most people I met, the most interesting bit was always at the begining, where everything new and simple to pick up. And then everything got harder and the new field's ability to change how I understood the world started to fizzle out.

By then my grades were too poor to transfer anywhere else (both to be accepted anywhere or for my parents to encourage). With all the AP/CLEP exams, my coursework was mostly done after two years and not knowing what else to do I took an electic mix of grad school classes.

I had a vague plan of learning enough math to prove something new, to etch my name on the tree of human knowledge before becoming a teacher like my parents. But I didn't really stick with anything long enough to approach to the frontier and left school thinking I’d take a few acturtial exams, get a stable/boring job, start a family with Julia and then die eventually.

After college

Finishing college wasn’t clean. I collected my dioplma onstage with my family watching (both my grandma’s drove down! They'd both pass away four years later), but had taken an incomplete in an economics graduate course. I enjoyed the readings and discussions, but hadn’t been able to write the final paper – I wanted to it to be excellent, or at least or at least compentent. Without a firm deadline or a clear idea of how to do that I keep putting it off and letting it fester.

This was too ridiciouls to admit to anyone. I think I kept it from Julia for a few weeks and my parents for a few months (or maybe years?). Eventually I emailed an applogogy to the professor, was given a D for the course and officially graduated after doing paperwork.

That summer was mostly like other Summer breaks. I studied for and passed the first acturial exam. I read a post on music machinary describing how to make a music visualizer inside of spotify; at the time the desktop application allowed you to embed custom html and I learned js to do that. My family went to seattle on vactation, I went to concerts and played board games, I spent time in DC and MA with Julia’s family. Looking back, I’m honestly not sure what I did all day with all that time? I did uninstall league before leaving UTD; without dhjsjsjs

In the fall, Julia went to Spain to teach English and write; I followed to study for the next two acturial exam. I mostly started

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