the exception
september 28th, 2000

it's been too long. and i don't really have a lot to say. or rather, i 
have so very much to say that i don't even know where to begin. and even 
if i could begin, i don't possibly have enought time to list it all. it's 
just one of those things, you know? like getting hit by trucks...it just 
happens sometimes.

not that i've been hit by any trucks, lately.

i built something beautiful last night (alestar's diary) and i'm in some 
sort of hangover state from a rush of creativity. probability and 
statistics is looming at me from the inside of my book satchel, and i 
can't find the intiative to pick up my books and go to the library to 
study, which is what i should be doing. there are two reasons for this. 
one - it's probability and statistics. does anybody *really* want to do 
this? and two - i'm becoming painfully aware of how intelligent i really 
am, and it's kind of frightening. somewhere along the line in my years of 
conditioning by the public school system, there was something implanted in 
my psyche which screams "ack! devon! stop it! the other kids will pick on 
you!" and yes, i know i am quite beyond the age of having other student 
make fun of me and put gum in my hair and trip me when i'm walking through 
the aisles in school, but there is still that little critter of fear that 
wallows deep behind her stack of books while the ultra-cool 
modern/postmodern professor handpicks her essay exam as the perfect 
example of what he expects from his students.

there are reasons why i could have never handled fame.

okay, i'm exaggerating a little. in all honesty, for years and years i had 
convinced myself that i was totally stupid and the only reason why other 
kids my age just didn't "get me" was because i was so "inherently 
different" from them, that i was some sort of vampire or faerie or 
mystical creature from another planet or something equally as ridiculous. 
it was all a metaphor, looking back on it now. my own creative way of 
dealing with the horrific gap that was made between my mind and the mind 
of others around me. that's a hard thing to deal with, when you are a 
child.

i knew i was smart when i was a kid. they wanted to push me up many grades 
ahead, they wanted to put me in magnet schools. none of that mattered to 
me either way. i read my mystery books of the girl with the photographic 
memory and examined seashells and developed theories about what happened 
to the dinosaurs and programmed in apple basic. my art teacher said that i 
had a gift, my music teacher adored me, and even the children, in oak 
ridge, early on - they looked to me to organize huge role-playing 
imagination magical games, where rainbow brite and g.i. joe would go 
rescue rudolf the rednosed reindeer from the septicons, who had 
strategically placed themselves on the moon. i started reading stephen 
hawking in the 5th grade (notice i said i never *finished* reading stephen 
hawking *grin*) i was writing poetry and plays and songs and books in 
copious amounts by then (copious is my pet word for the week) i was 
immersed in tolkien and arthurian myths and robin hood in the 6th grade, 
teaching myself small bit of lakota sioux language (awanyanka ina maka) 
and becoming tremendously interested in native american spirituality - and 
then i met angela.

i've been thinking about her a lot the last few days, for some reason. i 
think it's the radio - it has this way of mystically playing songs to 
bring up memories in my brain, which makes me start psychoanalyzing myself 
again (i do that too much.) she meant so much to me, and i sacrificed so 
much. she was jealous of me, because i had a very happy and stable family 
(especially in comparison to hers), because i had an intelligence i wasn't 
even aware of (so of course i started neglecting my studies and letting my 
grades drop. i convinced myself i was stupid to make her feel better, for 
whatever reason. it took me a long time to finally get over that.) at any 
rate, this is a big regression.

the point is, i'm finally beginning to become aware of my intelligence. 
it, like all of my realizations about myself since Ash's birth, has been a 
very slow process. it's culminating with the fact that i have a very good 
understanding of math and science, now - and not even the "average" 
understanding of this, but the sort of understanding that is putting me in 
the top of both classes. when did this happen? ever since i entered high 
school, my big excuse when people would come up to me and say, "oh, devon, 
you're so smart," was "well, only in certain areas - i mean, i can't do 
math worth anything!" and i'd grin my big goofy grin and mumble something 
incoherently cute and then i'd be forgiven for being so strange. but...i 
*can* do math. maybe not as well as some top-notch programmer or some 
incredible math major, but i can do it better than the majority of the 
average people in my class, which is a hell of a lot more than i ever gave 
myself credit for under the mirage of the "math cripple" i had painted on 
myself.

and a lot of this - like my spanish breakthrough last year - is attributed 
to a really good teacher. my math teacher kicks major bootie. with math 
and science, i work best with pictures and images and examples. i have to 
get into it to "get it." and then it's there.

i don't know. i'm getting nervous that i'm sounding braggish, so i'm going 
to back off from the whole academic arena right now. i'm just really proud 
of myself right now, and really amazed. and mostly, just surprised as 
hell.

energy amazes me. i mean, the whole concept. kinetic, and potential, and 
radiative. and the fact that it's never lost. and never created. and never 
destroyed. is there a certain set amount of energy in the universe, then? 
by this law, there must be, right? everything uses energy, or is used by 
energy, or contains energy, or is made up of it. why in the world is there 
such a rift between science and spirituality? science has just "proven" 
eternal existance right there. even if the universe collapses onto itself 
billions and billions of years from now only to recreate the same big 
bang, all of the energy will still be there. the energy that is coursing 
through your veins and causing the irises around your pupils to adjust and 
readjust, causing your lungs to process even more air for oxygen, causing 
the synapses to buzz beneath your skull - all of that energy that is in 
you *right now* was there when the universe began, and will be here when 
the universe dies. do we *need* any other proof of eternity?

i'm cold, suddenly. my jacket is still in my car. and it's about time to 
grab something to eat. there's a candlelight vigil in the ampitheatre 
tonight - the ampitheatre that looks almost exactly like the one in the 
aerospace building at MTSU - remembering another victim of a hate crime 
that happened in roanoke, virginia. i'm going to attend as much as it as i 
can while i'm waiting for my lab to start. sometimes i could swear that 
ETSU was just a cookie-cutter version of MTSU placed in the mountains, 
with a bigger astronomy department and a smaller computer science 
department. there were even sidewalk chalk drawings last week that looked 
as if the pretty revolution might have drawn them. maybe all colleges are 
really the same. except for the really neat ones in the mountains of north 
carolina that have secret gardens and log cabins and tree swings and 
hammocks everywhere. but you know, they're the exception. ;)