But not this one

To begin with, lately I've been listening to a Smashing Pumpkins song called "Muzzle" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA8th9vUA48 - also, note how disenchanted with life James Iha looks while playing guitar) that I feel echoes my current sentiments regarding my situation and life in general:

"I fear that I'm ordinary, just like everyone [...]
My life has been extraordinary,
Blessed and cursed and won."

For someone who always considered himself to be somewhat intelligent, I feel like the college and post-university experiences are continually proving the contrary. As a child, it seemed I had a formidable memory, able to recall all sorts of statistics from my collection of baseball and football cards as well as my time spent watching sports. I could picture famous sports plays in my head with an almost photographic-like memory. Furthermore, I was a pretty good speller, capable of reading a word once in a book and later talk about the meaning and provide the spelling. At some point, however, it appears this began to go downhill to the point that I feel I am below average, and I feel it was almost certainly in the post-high school era.

In engineering, we were taught that memorization was (almost) never important. All of the information we would ever need was available in books, and it was simply enough to understand the procedure necessary to solve a problem. As a result, I think I quit caring about memorizing anything, and I sometimes would go into tests feeling like I knew nothing and would rely on the ability to solve a problem correctly when I came across it. Apparently, this worked well, but to the detriment (I feel) of memorization skills. Unfortunately, the latter is rather important in learning a language, in learning history, etc. Thus, I often come across new words in French while reading and have to look them up multiple times in the dictionary, even when I write them down. Being a visual learner, it's often worse when speaking to people. They begin to think I'm stupid with the number of times I need a word repeated, unless of course a particularly memorable context eliminates this need. This has been quite frustrating, but perhaps it would have been just the opposite had I studied something else, and I would still find myself complaining.

On the other hand, however, all things considered, my life to this point has been somewhat extraordinary. I've been blessed to have some awesome people around me, and also to experience some incredible things. With my family, friends, and the amount of traveling and things I've seen, I certainly cannot complain. It's been a sweet ride, and hopefully the excitement continues on down the line, although I do fear that getting old and boring is at some point inevitable.