Hello! My internet pseudonym is Aja, and I'm currently a second-year undergraduate student at the University of Chicago, which is located in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago on the Near South Side. I originally come from the quiet suburbs of more rural New England, and until I came to college, I'd spent all my life in the same house in the same (relatively) small town; the greatest move I'd made before moving out to Chicago for school was changing bedrooms in my house. Two of my aunts live in the immediate suburbs of Chicago, and my grandparents spent many years in the 1980s and 90s living in a northern suburb of Chicago, so my move a time zone west wasn't entirely unprecedented in my family history.
At school I currently study English and maybe psychology, although I still have not fully decided on my majors (or, for that matter, my future plans). I love studying languages and reading/writing, and I have been very interested in the cultures of the world for as long as I can remember. I'm also very interested in science, although I do not like doing the leg work of it at all, and I love some of the more "popular" scientists like Carl Sagan and, to a certain extent, Michio Kaku. I briefly attempted studying some linguistics last year, and I took the equivalent of a year of French in middle school, in addition to my four years of Latin in high school and the Italian that I've been studying for a little over a year here in college. Other languages that I'd really like to learn more in depth someday include Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, and Mandarin.
My mother's side of the family is classic Irish/Italian Catholic immigrant from the early 1900s, and my father's side of the family has largely been in the United States since the time of the Mayflower and is now mostly UCC Protestant. I was raised and baptized in the Catholic church and went through First Communion and First Confession; from fourth grade through about sixth or seventh grade, I was an altar girl at my local parish. My mother and her siblings have always had an uneasy relationship with Catholicism, however, mostly fueled by Catholicism's insane dogmas and sex scandals, which finally ruptured when Benedict XVI became pope. At about the same time, I myself had kind of a belated realization of the absurdity of it all. My middle school years were spent alternately trying out fervent Catholicism (the rituality of it appealed to me far more than any actual belief in a man rising from the dead) and dabbling in light/cultural paganism and a bizarre sort of pantheism (nature and the idea of wraiths and ghosts appealed strongly to a young teenager who spent too much time reading fantasy novels).
Today I identify anywhere along the non-religious spectrum, from agnostic to atheist to secular humanist and many others. Mostly my mind rests in modern scientific fact about the cosmos and in the chilling beauty of a universe when seen as it really is, not seen through the lenses of various gods. At the same time, my mother's recent dabbles in a kind of light/Westernized Buddhist/general spiritualist thought have influenced my perceptions of time and being, to the extent that I have learned not to fear time and to try never to waste a day being unhappy or unproductive. Time is what it is and seems largely to be a human construct; we, after all, have no memories before we are born, and I strongly think that there may well be no memories or being after we die--all the more reason to live for today, revel in the beauty of the universe, and treat others as we would like to be treated.
This attitude has in part been strengthened by my own battle with mild depression since late 2009 and by the startling change in my attitudes and confidence after trying just a few months of brain-clearing talk therapy and a just-over-placebo dose of antidepressants. The fact that my ability to see out of the fog of depression can be so drastically improved by playing around with my brain chemistry has taught me, more than anything else since I've graduated high school, what carnal creatures humans are and how the "magic" of life is the magic of chemical reactions, a fact that does not cheapen our experience but only reinforces how tightly wound we are with the universe as a whole. As Carl Sagan says, everything about the way we are put together and the way we work points to the ultimate realization that we are, indeed, "children of the stars."
