Howdy, Amen here for the final installment. The end of it all. You can read from the beginning by clicking the link below.

The Amen University Experience (Year 1)

It was August, and I was taking a week long trip to the town I used to live in—the place where I belong—for my friend’s wedding. He was the first friend I made in that town, and I was invited as a groomsman. I exited the airplane and as I stepped into the airport, I saw all my old friends waiting for me. After 8 years, I was finally back (although temporarily). I’m sure you know the saying “The grass is greener on the other side of the fence” as some kind of “It’s not as good as it looks” thing, but here, the grass really was greener. There were actually lines on the road, lights to show where people are crossing, and other aspects of modern civilization. It was much more beautiful of a place than my place of banishment. Now that I was back, there was something I needed to do.

There was once a point in time where I was cautious and straight-laced, but I came back to this town much different compared to when I first left, and weed had recently been legalized. It was time to go for a rip with my bros (do not try this outside of Canada). It was a bit shady, as we walked from my friend’s apartment where I was staying out into an opening off the highway, and smoked up. I had a huff of the joint, and then one friend asked if I wanted to try the bong. Why not, I thought, and he gave me a hand. Unfortunately, it did not go as planned and I breathed in way too much and it was also kind of burnt too much as well. Uh oh. I instantly felt sick and could not stop coughing. Luckily, I think I had water with me which helped a lot, but it was very painful. Within moments, I started to feel strange. I was still in my regular state of mind, but I could not stop laughing. It was not even like I was laughing at anything particularly funny. It was kind of like being tickled. If I had to guess, it was how laughing gas felt. That said, we were all having a good time, so it wasn’t completely out of place either. We walked back to the apartment, and that’s when things got strange. It started feeling like I only had intermittent moments of consciousness, but it was not like I was actually unconscious. It was more like I had two separate consciousnesses fighting for control. I would be myself, completely aware, for one moment, then the next moment I would go to NPC mode. The best way I can describe it is being attacked by King Crimson from Jojo part 5. I would be normal, then King Crimson’s ability would activate, and I would be unable to experience anything that happened during the period of erased time, but continue to act as I normally would have. Afterwards, when the effect ended, I would find myself in the aftermath of whatever situation I was in. It was very bizarre.

For the rest of my trip, I mainly hung out with friends, playing games, chatting and watching anime and movies with them, and even went back to see my old high school. There, I tried to take the same path I used to take to the mall. Over the years, much had changed. The path had kinda become unusable due to plant overgrowth, and the mall had become a strip mall for some reason. At the end of it all, I attended the wedding, and it went as you’d imagine. Normal wedding things. There’s not too much to say about it, but everything that I experienced during this trip just amplified my desire to return permanently.

After that week, I returned to my metaphorical prison. One key thing about the job I was working at the time, was that it was in a mall, and in that mall, across from my store, the girl who I had a crush on in my final years of high school began working. When I was initially banished, she was the only one who helped me. It wasn’t even much. Since I had moved in the middle of the class, I was missing a lot. The teacher asked to the class, not anyone in particular, for someone to give me a copy of old handouts. Nobody seemed interested in helping except her. It really wasn’t much, but I was very grateful to her regardless. If I had to be honest, I developed a small crush on her then and there, but I’m not stupid enough to think that one act of kindness meant anything special. We’d go on to share a couple other classes after that, and some more in university. We had conversations every now and then during or after some of those classes, and we’d get to know each other more little by little. That small crush didn’t go away. At this point, I can think to myself “I should have pursue further” but I simply didn’t have enough experience back then. I knew that the first encounter wasn’t the right time, but I failed to realize when the right time was, but that was about to change. After everything, I had changed. Back to the present, working at the mall, I’d chat with her on my breaks. It was fun talking to her as usual, and after all this time, I finally was ready to ask her out on a date. She said yes, and we scheduled a date. Unluckily, however, it was a date destined to go nowhere. When I say that, I don’t mean that I didn’t score. It wasn’t about that. She didn’t intend to leave this cursed land, and I needed to get away from it. My time in this town was soon coming to an end anyway since I had to begin my education degree in a month, so we would part ways. I would never see her again.

September came, and it was time to begin my education degree. However, this was at a different campus than my first degree. There were a few choices for dorms, but most of them were shared rooms. That is, two beds in one room with no partition. That was the last thing I wanted, but there was one option in which I could have my own room. It was a 4 bedroom apartment unit, basically. It was a bit old, not nearly as big as the pictures made it seem (and the pictures already made it seem small), and had no ethernet ports in the rooms. There was one outside my room, but it was at the far end of the unit. I had to make due with wifi, and holy moly the wifi was bad. The previous girl I had been seeing (see year 4) had gotten me into League of Legends after Overwatch grew stale, and it was nearly unplayable here. To make matters worse, I had no ceiling light (only a desk light), and one of my roommates would make extremely strange sounds in the bathroom every morning, night, and perhaps other times of day. It sounded like he was trying to make himself gag. I wasn’t sure if he was anorexic or what. One time, I left my room after this and asked “Are you okay man?” and he just said “Yeah” as if nothing had happened.

Before classes began, I had a few days to get settled in. On one of those days, there was an orientation event which I didn’t really want to take part in, but I kind of got roped into it by the residence assistant. I thought it would be some quick thing, but it lasted a lot longer than I thought, and they were taking us all the way to the other end of campus. This was a much bigger campus than my previous one, and it was very easy to get lost. At the beginning it was sunny out. We were herded into a gym and sat on bleachers while stuff happened. What kind of stuff? I can’t really describe much since I wasn’t paying too much attention. There were some kind of games going on, and we were competing for our dorm buildings I guess. At this point, it wasn’t my first time in the rodeo of university. I already had my fun, I just wanted my degree. At some point I found a chance to get down the bleachers, and leave the gym. After exiting, someone confronted me and asked “Where are you going?” I really wasn’t expecting to be put on the spot like this for an optional event, but my quick thinking made me say “Where’s the bathroom?” and I was pointed in the right direction. I may have been able to just say “Going home” but this was less conspicuous. I made my way towards the bathroom, made sure nobody was following me, and booked it out at the first exit I could find. By now, it was night, and I had no idea where the hell I was. It took some wondering, but I eventually did find my way back. Sheesh.

Soon, classes began, and I was sorely disappointed. I’ll sum it up in one paragraph, but most of the classes were not very helpful at all. The most handy class was centered around classroom management. It was practical. However, the rest of the classes were just a waste of time. Since my background was physics and math, I had to take a class centered around teaching science and math. But, they did not teach anything helpful. In the math class, we kind of just did math activities all day, which was fine I guess, but it wasn’t anything I would have expected. The science methods class was the basically the same. There was one nice paper we had to write for the science methods class about misconceptions, but that was it. It would have been nice to have the whole class centered around common misconceptions, what to do and what not to do, how to approach certain topics, etc, but it didn’t really accomplish much of that. Hell, at the end of the math methods class, we just had a straight-up math exam. To make things worse, there were multiple version of the exam, with a very big difference in difficulty. From the sounds of it, I had gotten the more difficult one. One thing that really stuck out to me in these two classes though, is that even though all the students may have degrees, that does not necessarily mean that they are good at their subject. There were a lot of rookie mistakes being made in these activities, and a lot of the education students overall had gotten their first degrees through brute-force by memorizing absolutely as much as they could and by putting 150% effort into every little detail. That may sound fine and all, but it really was the antithesis to my physics degree experience. In physics, you can’t get by through memorization alone. You need problem solving skills and understanding. That was my weapon, alongside a little bit of magic. In the science methods class, I always sat at a table with 4 or so women. As usual with university, the number of men was very small, but it was even more exaggerated for this degree. It was about 1 man for every 10 women. Anyway, it’s often talked about how women may face problems in male dominated zones, but the same can be said for the other way around too. This was especially pronounced in one activity, where I did not get a chance to do anything, and the professor came around. She said something to the like of “In my day, the girls were left out. It’s nice to see the girls in control now.” Thanks. Two wrongs don’t make a right. That said, there was one girl at the table who was really kind and valued my input. Whenever I did have something to say, she would always make sure to listen. We got along pretty well. She was great, and I would have liked to have become more than friends with her, but unfortunately for me, she had a husband or boyfriend. Lucky guy. This is a common theme for this year by the way. Every girl that I got along with was in a relationship of some sort already. Even the ones that had awful personalities and awful appearances to match. Unlucky guys. After going through all the trouble of improving my social skills in my first four years, I was really hoping to find someone before I was out of university for good, but it seems like I was too late.

The other classes are not even worth mentioning. There was something about “exceptionalities” which in the professional world we still tend to call learning disabilities, something about “engaging the adolescent learner” which I don’t even remember anything about, and a short two week internship. The internship was interesting. It was mainly observational, where I would sit in with a different teacher each day. Then, in the last week, I was with the same teacher and I would teach a class at the end. That went fine and all, but I realized that the way that physics is simplified for beginners really can produce a lot of bad habits that can screw you up later on. After all, I myself was a victim of this. One example of what I specifically mean is Newton’s second law.

Note the summation. You are supposed to add vectors. The vectors themselves can be positive or negative, but either way, you are adding them. However, physics is commonly taught as just conveniently adding or subtracting depending on the direction. Now, that distinction may not make too much sense, but it’s a very nuanced difference. If you don’t do it right, you will have forces going in the wrong direction. See the following example of Force 1 being applied against a wall and experiencing a normal force in the opposite direction. Students are typically encouraged to take forces aimed right as positive and to subtract forces going to the left. F1 should have a negative value, but if you take it as subtracting F1, it ends up positive. Of course, seeing this, many people think “Ok I’ll just slap on a negative to fix it” which is fine for this level of work, but it will cause problems later down the line when it’s not so easy to tell what direction something should be or when there are many more steps involved.

The internship went fine anyway, and the semester was soon coming to an end. Next up, I would have a semester long internship at a different school.

It was Christmas break, and I was looking forward to 2020. As the year approached, I got the feeling that I wouldn’t come out the same, however I had not yet knowing the horrors that would await. The biggest problem for now was having to go back to my parents’ house for the break. Being there brings back all sorts of depressing feelings, and there was nothing to do or distract me while there. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this already, but the shithole town that they live in has absolutely nothing to do, and it was in the middle of suburb hell. None of the positives of living in a city, with none of the positives of living in the country. All I had with me was an outdated laptop which could not even play games. The most I could really do was watch youtube. It was then that I thought “Hmm, my Japanese listening comprehension could use some work” and I ended up finding vtubers. Because of that I get to say that I was ahead of the curve, whereas most people discovered vtubers sometime mid-2020. The one I ended up settling down with was Nekomata Okayu. At first, it was mainly due to her being very easy to listen to since she spoke clearly and not too fast, but I quickly began enjoying her content and personality. I was hooked. At this point, there were very little translators, so I consumed her streams raw, and was surprised that there was a lot I understood. This wasn’t the first time I got hooked on a content creator, but this time was a little bit different. I had never really been interested in creating content myself, but seeing vtubers had triggered something sort of drive in me. I would watch and think “Wow, they really look like they’re having a lot of fun.” I was never into twitch streamers or twitch culture in general, but these vtubers had a completely different atmosphere to them and a different audience. It made me realize that I want to do something similar. I REALLY started to want to do something similar. It became almost an obsession, but there was a few big problems in the way. I had already committed myself to teaching, and I had no skills suitable towards entertainment. The most I had done up until this point in terms of content creation had been my translations, and writing original lyrics. Those were fulfilling in their own ways, and knowing Japanese was certainly a valuable skill, but it wouldn’t retain an audience.

The internship began, and right off the bat I was expected to teach. That much is fine, I suppose, but the worst part about this was that I was taking over in the middle of a class. In other words, these students were already used to another teacher, their methods, and classroom rules. I had no room to establish myself and do things the way I wanted to do things, and the teacher I was with was not exactly compatible with me. For them, teaching was a life passion. They put in a lot of time and effort into everything. For someone just starting off, following this was not really doable, and they expected even more out of me as someone who just came out of university studying the latest pedagogy. That is to say, they wanted me to improve on their own material and teaching strategies, and expected me to go 120% from the very beginning. I participated in a few extra-curricular events, but their expectations even included showing up quite early. I’m already the kind of guy that shows up early enough to start work on time, but to them, that wasn’t enough. It seemed like I wasn’t committed. Before the first performance report, I had thought that I was adapting rather fast, and I’d like to think that my judgment is accurate considering I have always been an extremely fast learner, but according to them I wasn’t doing as well as I thought. That was okay, I thought. There’s no way I’d be perfect when I’m just starting out, I thought. I tried to keep my expectations realistic but it felt like I was being gaslit. After teaching one class, was told that it didn’t look like I was enthusiastic enough. I enjoyed teaching the class, I enjoyed the subject, I was doing my best, but to them it looked the opposite. There was another moment under a different teacher where the class was supposed to do a lab. Unfortunately, however, that morning, the first printer was broke. And the second printer was broke. And the third and final printer was broke. This was one of those times I actually did come in unreasonably early because I actually had preparation I needed to do, and it was for nothing. But that was no problem, we could continue classes like usual. I had material ready to go. But that was not in the plans of the supervising teacher. That lab HAD to be done that day, according to them. If I was able to run the class my own way, I do not think I would have had nearly as many issues. It would have been a bit basic, but that’s how you’re supposed to begin. I made mistakes trying to follow the supervising teacher’s own system, to which they would say I’m not asking them questions, but I can’t ask questions that I don’t have yet. I couldn’t predict every single problem in advance and ask how to solve them. If I knew certain problems would have occurred, I wouldn’t need to ask anything. To make matters worse, my immune system was taking a beating from being around kids all day, and when I got home I was very tired from pushing myself. The fact that I didn’t have proper lighting didn’t help fight my exhaustion. A combination of burnout, constantly feeling sick, not being able to do things the way I wanted to, and realizing I wanted to try out being an entertainer really took a toll on me. I don’t want to go too in depth on the details of this internship, but it was not good. Eventually, as you all know, covid happened. The internship was cut short, and I was told I’d have to finish it up later. In the meantime, we were all kicked out of the dorms and sent packing while classes all shifted to online in the last minute. Yes, we had to do another semester of classes after the internship. Also, I forgot to mention, but that internship was paid. And by paid, I mean I was the one paying. We had to pay a full semester load worth of tuition in order to do work that was required to get this job. Working full time for months while paying out the whazoo. How awful is that? But I digress, I was back home in shithole nowhere, and classes were about to begin again.

At this point, I was REALLY done with teaching. This was a quarter-life crisis. I wanted to drop out, but I knew that would be a waste of money, but my motivation was at zero. Living at home again was also a huge drain on motivation to do anything in general. I wanted to get out and move back with my friends as soon as possible. At least in university, there are things to do, but this town was and still is purgatory. So, what was my solution to wanting to drop out, not wanting to waste money, and having zero motivation? I would stay in the program, and put in zero effort. I tried a little bit at first, following along the online classes and attempting to read the texts, but it was just not doable. I stopped reading the texts, and I stopped going to classes. Even looking at my transcript, I cannot tell you about any of the classes I was taking at that time.

In my last entry, I introduced the「何とかなる超能力」or the “everything will work out” superpower. This would be the true test of my magic. Even putting in zero effort, could everything work out? The only thing I did was the assignments, and I did not try on those. I strategically did the bare minimum. Whenever I saw terminology in the assignments, I would look up the most basic idea and then guess “It probably means something along the lines of this.” The rest was channeling the spirit of Bullshitticus.

As you may imagine, the majority of these assignments were either essays or research papers. For research papers, I relied almost entirely on intuition, cherrypicking, and confirmation bias. I would think of something, then figure “There’s probably research about this,” look it up, find it, and use it to craft whatever narrative I wanted. I may have done similar with the essays, but there was a lot more room for freedom. For essays, I could basically make up anything I wanted as long as it sounded reasonable. We had one assignment where we had to apply the marketplace of ideas concept to a short story about a teacher and an education district and their pilot program. The key idea behind the marketplace of ideas is similar to the idea of the free market, where with perfect information, consumers make logical choices to maximize their transactions. For this essay, I said that I don’t believe in the free market and just decided to write about behavioral economics instead. Consumers often don’t make logical choices. The professor must have liked it, because I got a good grade. I was able to manage that one because I had a small interest in economics and just focused on that instead of the education part of the essay, but most essays I wrote had concepts entirely new to me that I didn’t understand. I would just reason it out “This probably means something like this,” write whatever came to mind without caring and it would go well somehow. All you need to do is sound convincing. I knew nothing, and I will say this once again, but I did not go to any classes or read any of the textbooks or required readings. True knowledge was not there, and yet, if you asked the professors, I knew what I was talking about. At the end of it all, I passed all my classes—some with disgustingly high marks.

Textbooks and classes are useless.
True understanding is not needed.
All that is needed is reasoning.
Knowledge does not come from without, but is created within.

The power to conjure information about something one knows nothing about. With this, I ascended. This is the power of a Sorcerer of Knowledge. This was Requiem.

My gamble had worked out. My magic had not faded, and with these new powers, I would never need to be afraid of essays or research papers ever again. Of course, this power would only work for assignments like these. It would not apply at all to something rigorous like physics or math. All that said, this degree wasn’t completely over. I still had to finish that internship. This time, I went to a different school, began at the very beginning of the school year, and was able to do things how I wanted. The supervising teacher was a lot more hands-off, but was still there for support if I needed anything. It worked out much better when they weren’t trying to shape me into their image. The students loved me, and would miss me after I finished, but by the end I still decided that I never wanted to teach in a school again. This whole summer of pain, waiting for my degree to be over, waiting to escape and move back where I belonged, I came up with a plan. Well, I don’t think you could call it a plan. But basically, I had a goal. 5 goals, in fact, which I called the Five Impossible Dreams.

1. Become an author
2. Become a streamer
3. Get a job that will put me in middle class
4. Start a business
5. (Especially impossible) Get married

If any one of these worked out, it would be a miracle.

After finishing the degree, I packed up and booked it away from my prison, never to return. When I got back to where I belonged, however everything was different. It was the middle of covid, and, well, you know how lockdowns went. At this point, I was sick of fate doing everything in its power to ruin my life, so I ignored lockdown rules and hung out with my friends anyway. That was nice, but places I wanted to go to were shut down, and there were no ways to meet new people. Unfortunately, many small businesses that I was interested in would remain closed even after the covid era ended. Many hobby groups would never get together again. A lot of places that did survive would never stay open as late. I still wanted a girlfriend so I wanted to join some hobby groups, but it seemed like destiny would again have the last laugh. But that was only one of my five impossible dreams. I started on the others, and began writing a book and streaming. It was fun, but for some reason I found it difficult to stay motivated. I still want to finish the book, but in the end I figured I wasn’t cut out to be an entertainer. I don’t think I have the personality for it or the skills, and I don’t know how to get the skills. How does one become a good talker? How do you keep an audience engaged? My friends think I’m funny but that’s only because I know how to say the right thing in a conversation. That’s a lot harder to do solo. After several months, what I did succeed at was getting a job. It was on the higher paying end, and it was work from home which I thought was neat, but I was back in education. I really wanted to stay away from education, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.

Over a year passed since getting the job. Working from home was fun at first, but it grew to be very dull, and after a period of time you start to associate home with work, and work with home. It makes it a lot harder to relax, and it makes it a lot harder to work, paradoxically. Not to mention my schedule was all over the place because I was working with people all across Canada, which meant massive time zone differences. Some days I would have to be up and working at 9am, while others I would be working until 12am. That was perhaps the most hellish part and what really wore on me. Working from home also meant no chances to meet new local people. I managed to keep up for a while though, and my team leader said I managed to fit in exceedingly well during my performance review after a year, but I was becoming more and more dismayed. My coworkers were great people, but they were all older people, who had husbands, houses, and kids already. I’m happy for them, but hearing about how great their lives were really started to take its toll on me since I had nothing, and no way to begin anything. I couldn’t relate to them at all. The great pay was fun at first, but buying physical things was only a temporary pleasure. My favourite pizza brand left Canada so I couldn’t even buy it anymore. I still couldn’t even dream of affording a proper house with the housing crisis going on despite being what used to be considered middle class, and I could hardly see the point of owning a house anyway if I don’t have a wife. My life came to a complete standstill. I didn’t even feel like I was improving any of my skills, except social engineering, and I hated that. I didn’t face any meaningful challenges. The feeling of satisfaction in solving difficult physics questions was something that I really wanted to feel again, but there was never any satisfaction in what I did now. It had been years since I strongly felt the presence of my shadow giving me aid. It wasn’t just my inner life taking a turn for the worse. Canada quickly started flooding with record amounts of immigrants from a certain culture that doesn’t value the same standards of quality, and all the restaurants they would work in would go downhill. Moldy buns, raw chicken, contaminated food. It had never been this bad before, and immigrants from other parts of the world did not cause the same issues. To make the record clear, I support immigration when it benefits both parties. For example, we always need more doctors, and even if they’re not doctors or other highly skilled professionals it’s fine within reasonable levels of people coming in, but these people were taking up all the minimum wage positions and putting pressure on the lower class that was already in a rough spot, and the sheer number of them, millions of them by the year, worsened the housing crisis and even put the country in a ‘population trap’ causing living standards to suffer. The ladder to the middle class had been pulled up. This was by design, all following the Century Initiative  – a lobby group formed in 2009 that wants to triple Canada’s population to 100 million by 2100. They gained influence once Trudeau became the prime minister, and since the replacement rate of our own natural born population has been lowered significantly, you can follow that immigration has been their means, and the numbers in reality have been following this. They are on track to meet their goal at the expense of everyone except corpos who need a new slave underclass to keep wages down and keep profits going up. A simple look at their board members shows the clear conflicts of interest.  The immigrants are just as much victims, getting sold fake dreams back in their home country and getting put through a diploma mill, or getting wrung dry by the exuberant international tuition fees of real universities, before working minimum wage and sharing a dozen people to a house. It all sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it’s not a conspiracy at all; They’re completely open about it, and reputable sources have come to the conclusion that what’s happening is awful. Not to mention the carbon tax put in place that increases every april fool’s, despite the fact that Canada’s trees take in more CO2 than is emitted. This tax is also taxed, and has had a massive impact on every link of the supply chain leading to an incalculable economic burden. In short, I had money, but it was now worthless. The only purpose it served was to pay rent. It couldn’t buy meaning. It couldn’t fix the country. I had no one to spend it on. It couldn’t help me meet anyone new. Really, what good was it?

I quit my job in hopes of finding something closer to what I was actually passionate about – physics and math, or really any kind of job that would allow me to solve problems. Doing difficult things was fulfilling, and you would think that would be an attractive trait for a candidate to have. After a few years experience of working a high-profile job and doing well too, I could get something easily, right? I was at the top of my graduating class and had received multiple awards. By all means I was extremely competent when given a fair chance. Despite having solid skills from a solid degree, despite having a good looking resume, that was not the case. I just wanted a regular 9-5 job that wasn’t work from home, that would make use of my skills even if the pay was significantly lower. I happily applied to jobs paying up to $15/hr less than what I had been making. Most of the jobs I was looking for ended up being under companies who had been forced to sign an employment equity agreement, which meant they were not looking for people like me. They favoured minorities, women, and the disabled. The funny thing is, I used to be a minority but Trudeau revoked my ethnicity. One drop rule – I was no longer considered pure of blood enough to retain my minority superpowers, and trust me, they were superpowers. All the talk of “white privilege” is a joke when I gained so many advantages being federally recognized as a minority that I no longer can obtain. Once you have walked on both sides of the fence, the difference is undeniable. These companies ask up-front in the job applications what you are so there’s not even the illusion of being seen for who you are.

Jobs that I was qualified for, would have enjoyed, and would have been good at and now had blocked access because I was born wrong. Again, this is not a conspiracy theory. There are job advertisements openly stating that they are only accepting minority applicants. Even when it is not openly admitted, my friends have had experiences where they were straight up told that they were only hiring women. Destiny always comes back in the end to have the last laugh. I hated my minority superpowers even back when I was able to use them because of how unfair they felt, and now I was on the opposite end. In my eyes, something truly fair is helping those of a poor socio-economic background despite physical features, but under this system a rich woman would get priority over a poor man. The only reason I even got my last job was because I was personally scouted. Even now, at the time of publishing this, it’s been over a year and a half and I still haven’t been able to get a new job despite being fully qualified for the far majority of what I’ve applied to. Despite trying to undercut the competition and offering to work for lower than what pay is advertised. I’ve been fully rejected from society. Guess I shouldn’t have been born as a male who likes science. Guess I should have been born a little more purer of blood. I hate how political this post has become, but this is where it started affecting me personally in a way that I could no longer ignore. I had seen the skewed enrollment rates where 65-70% of new students were female, and yet there were still plenty of female only scholarships with nothing being done to address the dearth of male students. I saw deranged posters hung in the halls by feminists who by all means had their voices heard and got their wishes, but still pushed for more under the guise of being oppressed. I had talked to women who had a grudge against me simply for being a male. One of my mandatory education classes was straight-up indoctrination in which they said, for example, that you could not be sexist against men because women don’t have power, despite them giving an examples where women had complete power over men. The following scenario depicts a hiring board consisting of entirely women. Tell me they don’t have systematic power here.

I hoped I could ignore it all and move on with my life, but it was no longer possible. Society has become completely divided, and I was now an enemy of society. Again, it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but I assure you that the more you look into it, the worse it gets. I’m not talking about fringe alternative news sources. I’m talking about information on government web pages about what they are doing. I’m not about to deny that women and minorities had it hard historically. They still have their own problems in the modern day, but the course of the ship has certainly been over-corrected. It is very easy for older people to remain in the past and believe that society hasn’t progressed all that much, but growing up in my time has shown that everything has changed. Moving back here was supposed to be a happy ending, but too much has changed. I came back too late. It was an impossible choice between having my old friends back in a place where I used to feel a sense of belonging, and having a sense of purpose in pursuing a graduate degree in physics where I got my first degree. I chose my friends, but I don’t think there was a single correct option. To borrow chess terminology, I had been forked. It all goes back to when I was initially banished. Once I had been placed in that situation, the only correct move was to leave as soon as I finished high school and go to university here, where I am now, even if it costed an arm and a leg. Only now do I realize that money is worthless, though I guess it wasn’t so worthless back then. By staying in the cursed lands, I had allowed myself to get forked and was unable to get out without yet again sacrificing something, and at this point is seems like all the time I spent there was entirely for nothing. My degrees ended up useless, years upon years were wasted, and the world has become worse.

I want to believe that there is still some hope I can manage to get a job that utilizes my analytical skills, that would give me some sense of purpose, but it’s not looking good. I want to believe that I can meet someone compatible with me, but after finishing university and living in a post covid world, it’s not looking good. I want to believe my country will recover, but it’s not looking good. I wish I could at least enjoy my favourite pizza, but it was not meant to be. I hate to end this saga with such a bleak ending, but you can’t go against fate. The more you resist it, the stronger its shackles become. Just once you think you’ve escaped, you find that you’re only enclosed in a larger cage, like matryoshka dolls each contained within each other. I’ll update this post again if things change someday. Until then, wish me luck.

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After years of futility, a thread of fate finally came unraveled. Although I will have to move away from my friends, I will only be an hour and a half away. In exchange, I managed to obtain exactly the type of job I had been hoping to find. After years and years, I will be able to call myself a professional mathematician. Not only will I be doing what I enjoy and what I am good at, but I will also be making more money than I have ever made before, and I will have a path further upwards. Although money is currently worthless, there is a breakthrough point where it does once again gain value, and that is when you make enough to afford a house. Astronomically priced as they are due to Canada’s pyramid scheme situation, such an option may not be off the table for much longer as I approach double the median income of the country. This has been a very important change, however this is only one thread of many. Overcoming the pyramid scheme and owning a house is another, as is finding a girl worth committing to, and, least likely of all, seeing this country return to its former glory. Everything may be futile, but I must continue to struggle regardless.