
 Originally Posted by 
Last Year
					
				 
					I have a penchant for the old orders:  I don't fast-forward through fifteen year old commercials while watching VHS—they fascinate me;  I nearly regret how large my school has grown, remembering the free-reign and privileges we had as a small place that  future students will never know they lack;  I have spent hours reading arbitrary files from on-line communities that were saved twenty years ago.  This is not to say, however that I do not embrace new ways that are developing in the world. I strive to maintain a sense of tradition and normalcy in my courses, but inevitably I end up straying from those paths, and from those of anyone I know.  This cannot be helped, so I have come to expect it.  Predictably, as one who is thrown into the world of today, I use computers excessively. However, unlike other teenage girls, that does not require the extent of my sojourns be Myspace, MSN Messenger, and Facebook  Instead,  I subscribe to various news “Feeds”, participate at various fora, and have taken my computer apart and put it back together again, successfully.  However, I do not plan to be a Computer Science major.  I will leave that sort of thing for my boyfriend;  I am concerned with its parent technology field.  I want to be a lady-engineer.  My dad instilled a love of math in me when I was little.  He went to Arkansas Tech University before I was born, took all the math courses offered there, and didn't bother to graduate since he didn't want to take six hours of English.  He filled all my notebooks with “ciphering” which irritated me then because I drew in them (I like drawing, but I don't have the mindset to take art seriously, so I have technically good works of  kinds that kitschy art majors find crude).  Nowadays, I cipher myself in whatever notebook is handy.  Mathematical aptitude seemed to manifest in another form as I attended piano lessons, then joined band, started to compose simple songs, and made All-Region bands four years running.  Music and math are supposed to be related in brain function, so I suppose there is some correlation. My dad had nothing to do with this, as he is not musically inclined, but he has indulged in my pleasure in tinkering.  Together we've recorded phonograph records from a 1982 Hi Fi on a computer, built an electromagnet running off of AAs, and other things that aren't a far cry from sophisticated sounding things like Mechanical Engineering.  To study those sorts of things would imply I study at a college, and I have one picked out, but due to my tendency to wander off the path of Tradition and Correctness, all bets are off as to what will occur after those four years are up.  There may be more schooling, or perhaps not.  Hopefully a daughter or son that I can make geeky will be involved.  Really I only hope I come out having a happy family and perhaps improved the world a bit.