Once upon a time I thought I had always wanted to go into the highest order of academia. Now I'm at Harvard Law School, and I feel like I should have been happy being an artist. At least going far in one way makes you realize how much you really liked being on the other side. I never realized how much of a visual thinker I was until I was around a heap of people that can presenting an entire argument using only the author/philosopher's name or designating a camp of thought. Unfortunately, most names don't have correlating pictures/senses in my mind, so I can't remember them until I know the person well enough that they develop a correlating emotion,visualization, smell, and/or taste.
("Ah, I see you're making an Kantian arguement in a tautological vein, which has been effectively disproven through Posnerian utilitarianism." "Um... oh. I thought I was arguing how the viral spread of violent, destructive cultural memes proliferated through cultures and rotting them from the inside as people justify their habitual behaviors through ideals and rationalizations." *pictures a map as a three-dimensional solid with a red spongy disease spreading through it leaving only blackness*)
On a plus note, being weakly synethetic (or just compulsively creative) has resulted in some awesome cooking and brilliant images. Unfortunately, I've lost a little of the knack of presenting things in the properly ordered way. Somehow I got good at it when I was an obsessive little kid, but somehow I got more crazy/creative as I got older. Keeping the obsession just makes me a lot more project-oriented then a bunch of my artist friends, which makes me feel like the creative manager amongst my artistic friends, and the artsy free spirit when I'm at law school. I'm sure many people feel like they're caught between a lot of contradictory expectations they fail to meet.
Used to think I just needed to adjust to law school. Then I realized that, while I love realistic, reasonable approaches to things, I feel like I'm caught in an insular stream of logic and philosophy that has at some point become divorced from reason. Some areas more than others. "Take these things as given, despite how antiquated or fallacious they seem, now construct a perfectly logical argument using these questionable axioms based on cultural assumptions you may not share." Like Oscar said once, it's like when your art teacher doesn't like your painting because it has too much orange.
On a plus note, I love my fiance. He gets it.
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