You're All Things That Shine and I'm All Things Darker

Again, these are just my thoughts and feelings on my current life. If you think they're crap, you may leave for your own good.

I have always felt that I never fit in almost anywhere. I could only get a long with several people, in my real life. Even in the internet, I couldn't be as outgoing as other people. The bad news is... some people think I'm arrogant, impolite, and ignorant because of that. Some people even consider me as a cold hard bitch, because I don't seem to care about other people.

These opinions have been really affecting me lately. For in working life, people think I don't meet the requirements as an UI graduate. I am not outgoing. I don't talk much. If I talk much, I cannot talk about things that could please others. I don't sound smart. I don't look smart. I'm lack of sociability. I cannot convince other people to at least listen to my arguments. I cannot start cool conversation with other people because I hardly share the same interest with most people I just met. I am not a Ms. Up to Date who knows every entertainment happening news. I like to talk more about history than future. I am a boring person and am easily bored by people. I am not confident in expressing my opinions, and when I finally could raise my confidence, people find that I am far too "loud". I don't know, I just get the sense that no matter what I do, either speaking up my mind or just keeping silent, people will still despise me.


In short, even If I graduated with good GPA and even if my lecturers were happy about my thesis, I still feel that I am not one of those qualified UI graduates.

I guess I will stop pursuing prestigious jobs, then. Being a teacher is already fine by me. I don't want to feel any more useless in other fields due to my lack of sociability. I know my capability. I can only speak fluently in classrooms (well, even in the classroom, I guess people wouldn't want to hear much about my opinions. But I love classroom activities, so I don't really mind being looked down on as long as I could do something I really like).

But I still put my hopes on studying abroad. Even if I would probably feel more terrible to adjust myself with people from other country, I still want to study a lot of things related to language and linguistics.

I want to find out more why there are people like me, who cannot communicate very well with any kinds of language. And I hope by mastering linguistics, I could apply what I've learned in the real life so that I could fix my relationship with my social environment. All my life, I've always had a terrible relationship with the world because I cannot communicate well with the world. It's so weird, when I really love to learn language but I don't love to communicate with it. I guess competence and performance are two really different things*.

Maybe I could put these ideas in my study objectives for Fulbright application. I know these ideas sound stupid, but that's what I feel from the bottom of my heart. That is the reason why I really want to learn language.

*For more explanation: In linguistics, Chomsky distinguishes between "competence" and "performance." To make the story short, competence is any knowledge you have in mind about a language (the pronunciation, the grammar, the vocabularies, the idioms, etc). While performance is the actual realization of how you use the language (your actual writings and speech). Sometimes these two are just too different. A person may know everything about a language, but in fact, they may be weak in the execution.