So I suppose I should post a bit about myself before I get going.
I'm a 29 y/o white male, currently enrolled at Oregon State University with the College of Liberal Arts as a Sociology major. I've lived a good majority of my life in small towns within the rural areas of Oregon, and college was honestly my first real exposure to the "rest of the world". That sounds cliche I know, but its the truth. Small town rural life, especially when not near any readily accessible large population center, has a way of limiting your potential life experiences to an nth degree.
My hobbies are wide and varied, but include a good amount of video-gaming, reading, writing, playing music, and on the rare occasion surfing. I currently suffer from Chron's Disease, and a few other medical issues to boot. More on that later possibly.
Well that was briefer than I expected..Anyway.
My interests in sociology started in my local high school, officially, but had always been there since I was younger. As a self-professed individual who leans towards introversion I've always been that someone on the "outside looking in". So to pass the inevitable boredom that high school in America seems to breed, I'd usually observe my classmates, groups of people, or just random individuals in general: People watching if you will. Come high school sociology class though I finally found out just what I was doing: I was being an ignorant sociologist.
"Ignorant sociologist"? Huh, whats that?! - Thats probably what you're thinking right?
Now don't get me wrong, not everyone who sits there on a park bench and people watches is a sociologist and I'm not trying to paint myself (at that point in my life) AS one. I'm merely trying to highlight where the beginnings of my interest in sociology emerged from. I think its important to distinguish between the two for many reasons, some of which I hope to go into later on. Just watching people and observing them is fine, but without a structured perspective for analysis are you really going to learn anything from it? Sociology class in high school is what really helped me to see the need to lend a scientific methodology and perspective to making observations. After all, without it what are you really doing?..Besides being some weird person on a bench staring at people.
So from high school I went to college at Oregon State, with the intent of being a engineer...then a nuclear engineer, computer scientist/programmer, video game developer..You can see where this is going right? Cliche' youth stepping out on his own for the first time listlessly trying to decide what to do with themselves. The college experience in a nut-shell there folks; minus all the booze, drugs, and sex.
Eventually I dedicated myself, after some exposure to more fields of education, on liberal arts and concentrated on sociology and psychology. Now I'm preparing to make the wonderful leap out into "the real world" that awaits us all post-graduation and looking forward to spending some time in a dead-end job as I try to find gainful employment post graduation. As gainful as employment can be with a sociology degree that is.
So here's to my sarcasm and wit hopefully being charming enough to keep a minor audience of readers and people around, while I try and talk about various subjects from a sociological perspective.
Cheers
~WhtsTh@?
