People who know me from different periods in my life have wildly divergent opinions of me. People who’ve known me since childhood think I’m a genius. People from UP think I’m an evil slacker nerd. People from law school think I’m a weird loner at school who also happens to be fun at parties. So it’s not easy to find common ground about my personality traits except that I’m a weirdo.

If I had to point a particular trait out, though, it’s that I like to learn.

This may come at a complete surprise for the people who knew me as the class-skipping bum from college, or the thoroughly mediocre law student from Ateneo, but that’s only because I only like learning about things that interest me, and at any given moment that could be anything from running a web server to cooking to the Kabbalah to skateboarding.

When I was a little kid people thought I was a science whiz, but most of my scientific knowledge I picked up by opening a physics textbook from a US high school and actually doing all the experiments I could and documenting the results. (I knew the chemical composition of glucose at five years old because I liked spouting scientific-sounding jargon.) When I was in high school people thought I was a math genius because I saw algebra and geometry as puzzles that needed solving.

But by the time I reached college I’d gotten bored with the math-sci track and somehow found myself spending all my time writing. Not stories, necessarily, just my observations about life in general (which sometimes took the form of stories). I was naturally attracted to the Internet as a source of information and spent a lot of time online just reading about answers to trivial questions that no one else I knew could give. Everything from anime to radionics to sexual positions, available at my fingertips.

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There is an anime that I love called Golden Boy, about a law school dropout named Kintaro Oe who actually had all the units to get his degree from Todai (Tokyo University) but left so he could learn more about the world, taking part-time jobs at software companies to noodle shops to animation studios. A bit of a gentleman pervert and a world-class freeter, his apparent incompetence and lecherousness hides a sincere desire to learn, an immense capacity to learn at an accelerated pace, and a self-imposed mandate to help the people around him. Still, most people never figure this about him until he’s skipped town to the next odd job he can find.

His mantra is “Life is study!” but he never appears to be studying anything most people would consider useful. For instance, he spends an evening hiding in a girl’s locker taking notes about cup sizes, types of stockings and other tidbits about women’s underwear. Before you dismiss this as pure lechery, he demonstrates a remarkable mastery on the subject later in the series, proving that he was actually doing it to learn. Weirdo. He writes down sayings about the Buddha that yakuza use, notes that the human head cannot turn 360 degrees (after trying it out on himself), and sagely informs the viewer that C (the programming language) is not sex (after attempting to get the female programmers at the software company to demonstrate C on him).

There is something wrong with my role models.

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The parts of my job at the law firm that I enjoy most of all are the times when I am thrown into the deep end of the pool and am expected to learn to swim. Never mind that I’ve never handled direct examination or pre-trial or registering with the NTC before, I just suck it up and do it. I expect to make mistakes. I expect to make a lot of them. But I don’t let the fear of failure stop me from trying.

I don’t mind asking lots of questions for clarification. I don’t mind risking making a fool of myself. How else am I supposed to learn?

It’s when the learning has stopped that I start to lose interest in anything. When I realized I knew as much about science as my teachers, I quit the Math Science club in high school and decided to be the editor-in-chief of the school paper, simply because it was something I’d never tried before. When I got tired of acting in plays I started singing in the choir. When I got tired of the Boy Scouts I joined the officer corps. When I got tired of drawing still life I started drawing Garfield.

I love learning. I don’t understand people who hide inside their comfort zones because they’re afraid of change. I don’t get people who don’t try new things because ‘it’s not them’. I can’t empathize with people who’ve gotten locked in the box of their narrow world views because they don’t want to look foolish.

Right now I’m writing the script for a webcomic I’m doing with an artist acquaintance of mine that I intend to release as a professional work. Yes, this is something completely new to me. Yes, it could bomb completely. No, I don’t care. Some people hold off doing what they want to do until they think they’re completely ready. By ‘completely ready’ they mean without expending too much effort and without going outside their comfort zones and somehow turning out a masterpiece that is above criticism. That’s impossible.

Everyone looks foolish when they start learning something, no matter what it is. You will be honked at while you’re learning how to drive. You will be laughed at on the dance floor. Your stories, your drawings, your songs will be critiqued heavily by people who favor their own style. Why is that enough to stop you from trying? What is so wrong with people thinking less than the best of you?

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At the end of every episode of Golden Boy, Kintaro leaves before anyone realizes how awesome he actually is, not waiting for the acclaim or the money or the nookie that comes with the recognition of his talents. He doesn’t even wait for vindication. He just moves on to the next new thing, because he loves learning new things.

I’d prefer to get paid, or laid, or vindicated, personally. I’m not running a charity.

But I wouldn’t put my life on hold, waiting around for it, either. That just isn’t the point.

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