the bipolar Lisp programmer
the bipolar<br>Lisp programmer
You're<br>only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose<br>it.
Robin<br>Williams
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Any lecturer who serves<br>his time will probably graduate hundreds, if not<br>thousands of students. Mostly they merge into a<br>blur; like those paintings of crowd scenes where<br>the leading faces are clearly picked out and the<br>rest just have iconic representations. This<br>anonymity can be embarrassing when some past<br>student hails you by name and you really haven't<br>got the foggiest idea of who he or she is. It's<br>both nice to be remembered and also toe curlingly<br>embarrassing to admit that you cannot recognise<br>who you are talking to.But some faces<br>you do remember; students who did a project under<br>you. Also two other categories - the very good<br>and the very bad. Brilliance and abject failure<br>both stick in the mind. And one of the oddest<br>things, and really why I'm writing this short<br>essay, is that there are some students who<br>actually fall into both camps. Here's another<br>confession. I've always liked these students and<br>had a strong sympathy for them.
Now abject<br>failure is nothing new in life. Quite often I've<br>had students who have failed miserably for no<br>other reason than they had very little ability.<br>This is nothing new. What is new is that in the<br>UK, we now graduate a lot of students like that.<br>But, hey, that's a different story and I'm not<br>going down that route.
No I want to<br>look at the brilliant failures. Because<br>brilliance amd failure are so often mixed<br>together and our initial reaction is it shouldn't<br>be. But it happens and it happens a lot. Why?
Well, to<br>understand that, we have to go back before<br>university. Let's go back to high school and look<br>at a brilliant failure in the making. Those of<br>you who have seen the film Donnie Darko will<br>know exactly the kind of student I'm talking<br>about. But if you haven't, don't worry, because<br>you'll soon recognise the kind of person I'm<br>talking about. Almost every high school has one<br>every other year or so.
Generally what<br>we're talking about here is a student of<br>outstanding brilliance. Someone who is used to<br>acing most of his assignments; of doing things at<br>the last minute but still doing pretty well at<br>them. At some level he doesn't take the whole<br>shebang all that seriously; because, when you get<br>down to it, a lot of the rules at school are<br>pretty damned stupid. In fact a lot of the things<br>in our world don't make a lot of sense, if you<br>really look at them with a fresh mind.
So we have two<br>aspects to this guy; intellectual acuteness and<br>not taking things seriously. The not taking<br>things seriously goes with finding it all pretty<br>easy and a bit dull. But also it goes with<br>realising that a lot of human activity is really<br>pretty pointless, and when you realise that and<br>internalise it then you become cynical and also a<br>bit sad - because you yourself are caught up in<br>this machine and you have to play along if you<br>want to get on. Teenagers are really good at<br>spotting this kind of phony nonsense. Its also<br>the seed of an illness; a melancholia that can<br>deepen in later life into full blown depression.
Another feature<br>about this guy is his low threshold of boredom.<br>He'll pick up on a task and work frantically at<br>it, accomplishing wonders in a short time and<br>then get bored and drop it before its properly<br>finished. He'll do nothing but strum his guitar<br>and lie around in bed for several days after.<br>That's also part of the pattern too; periods of<br>frenetic activity followed by periods of<br>melancholia, withdrawal and inactivity. This is a<br>bipolar personality.
Alright so far?<br>OK, well lets graduate this guy and see him go to<br>university. What happens to him then?
Here we have two<br>stories; a light story and a dark one.
The light story<br>is that he's really turned on by what he chooses<br>and he goes on to graduate summa cum<br>laude, vindicating his natural brilliance.
But that's not<br>the story I want to look at. I want to look at<br>the dark story. The one where brilliance and<br>failure get mixed together.
This is where<br>this student begins by recognising that<br>university, like school, is also fairly phony in<br>many ways. What saves university is generally the<br>beauty of the subject as built by great minds.<br>But if you just look at the professors and don't<br>see past their narrow obsession with their<br>pointless and largely unread (and unreadable)<br>publications to the great invisible university of<br>the mind, you will probably conclude its as phony<br>as anything else. Which it is.
But lets stick<br>to this guy's story.
Now the big<br>difference between school and university for the<br>fresher is FREEDOM. Freedom from mom and dad,<br>freedom to do your own thing. Freedom in fact to<br>screw up in a major way. So our hero begins a new<br>life and finds he can do all he wants. Get drunk,<br>stumble in at 3.00 AM. So he goes to town and he<br>relies on his natural brilliance to carry him<br>through because, hey, it worked at school....