All of this is so much like the Brittany thing last year, the Jennifer thing in high school (you know, the thing that prompted me to kick a hole in a chair in the band room), and a half-dozen other conflicts I've all but created for myself in the past however-many years. I wonder if this is just more of the pattern I find myself in. What would've happened, I wonder, if I'd had a blog around this time last year when the Brittany battle was in full swing? What would I have said on here last year as my roommate started drinking more heavily? In some ways I think this blog and my newfound ability to post comments on several blogging services spurs me on, driving me to say more and more outrageous things—or at least to say things that I wouldn't necessarily say in public without this venue to say them in. It's not that the things I say on here aren't well-written or that they don't accurately reflect my thought process, but that not all of this stuff needs to be publicly available.

To some extent the blog is a good thing, as it allows me to keep my writing skills in shape and remain outspoken—but I also get myself into a lot of trouble this way, as we've all seen. It's troublesome to be known. It's troublesome to have people read your opinions and take them to mean things you hadn't dreamed they could mean. Perhaps it's better just to internalize a lot of the things I think, letting them out only in IM conversation and at rare moments in person. I started this blog last semester, and it obviously didn't help me escape my sorrows in any measurable way. I still fucked up a lot of things—yea, more things than usual—in those few months. There's no causal link here, though, and I doubt writing in the blog really did anything more than exacerbate my already-present tendencies toward extreme procrastination, at least as far as academics are concerned.

I suppose part of the problem is that I use this more as an "idea log" of sorts than as a journal—plain-Jane journals generally bore me, especially the ones that are written by me—so instead we get all the ideas and news that strike me as worth writing about. These ideas usually end up concerning ponies, people I dislike, and ideas and events I dislike or take issue with. Ponies are almost invariably a pretty safe bet, albeit one that gets me teased, but the latter items are what cause me trouble.

I could just keep these things to myself and my few trusted confidantes, but what fun would that be? Writing for the limited public has the advantage of letting people see the particularly worthy ideas I come up with, albeit with all the semiworthy ideas keeping them company. Perhaps it was better when I'd keep all but the very best ideas to myself, then write those good ideas as opinion articles and submit them to the newspaper. This year my opinion article output has become severely stunted, and that may well have to do with having this ready venue for all my outpourings. Then again, I also grow increasingly disillusioned with the newspaper and its staff, methods, and audience, so that doesn't really help, either.

My online reading diet has changed considerably since last year, too. Whereas at this point in 2003 I was immersed in the vagaries of the skinning/emulation community at Aqua-Soft and moderating/promoting the MSA Invision board, most of the sites I regularly check and contribute to now are either blogging- or MLP-related ones. I find myself continually missing these bits of myself that I've shed across the last couple of years. All this compromise and change takes its toll.

So what do I do? I'm going to keep the blog, but that doesn't stop me from lamenting what I've become. I used to be better than this, quicker and more tactful, more widely talented, more understanding. Sure, I've maintained a bit of continuity with who I was in high school, yea even surpassed myself in a few areas, but a lot of times I really think it's not enough. I feel like I'm in decline. When does the decline end? When do I get myself back? My guess is that I'll have to fight myself for it, even once I manage to escape the university.

"There's a game life plays...makes you think you're everything they ever said you were...[I'd] like to take some time t'clear away everything I've planned...Was it life I've betrayed for the shape that I'm in? It's so hard to fail...it's not easy to win...Did I drink too much? Could I disappear? ...and there's nothin' that's left but wasted years..."

Sigh. I finally got back my first paper in Postmodernism, and while the comments on it were generally positive, I'm confounded by this statement:

"I'm sympathetic to your position + concerns, + very much hope that Prof. Bourg + I can make the class helpful. However, we're going to need more work from you—meaning that you'll need to make more of an effort to dig deep into the readings. Best + Kellner may seem too sweeping, but they offer a lot of material that you could have used while undertaking this assignment."

What makes no sense is that at the point when I wrote the paper, that was the only class whose reading I actually was caught up with—if I didn't cite the reading much, that was because the assignment didn't seem to call for that so much as an exposition of my opinions, thoughts, and feelings about postmodernism and the class up to that point. The assignment called for more opinion essay than formal academic paper, as far as I understood it. Alas, I got a B on this particular effort, which was rather disappointing.

Know what? I'm a hammerhead shark. I make no sound. I have no bones. My skeleton is made of cartilage. My wide head helps me swim, see, and hear really well.

Also, Tyler finally got the stuff together to make Bling Bling, the pimpin' panda. This is the quest we were on last time he came to town, but we didn't find enough stuff to completely outfit the bear. Now, though, his panda has all the proper accoutrements a panda needs to be totally pimped out!

This is a response to a post on a blog that has since been deleted. I put it here 'cause it's too long for LiveJournal's dinky comment system. (This is why some have dubbed the system the blogging world's answer to AOL.) This isn't a change of venue, so to speak, but just a way not to break up my argument. In any case, for those of you who don't like to follow links but like to comment on things you haven't read, suck it up and go read her post first. We had problems with this the last time I posted pieces of an argument out of context on here, as people didn't follow the links and didn't seem to get the point.

Edit: The replies I received to this comment just make me utterly sick at heart. It's hard to believe that anyone would twist my words out of proportion to the point they have. I feel, as I noted in another comment on the blog, as if I'd been invited inside for a nice discussion then bashed over the head with a chair. I feel like I was entrapped into something that turned out to be not at all the intelligent, reasoned debate I'd turned out for. [shakes head] Enough of that.

I don't really feel like getting into this (I say, as I get into it), but I want to point out that actually, the jury is still out (and probably will be out for years to come) on whether or not one can actually choose one's sexuality. It's just not clear. What is fairly clear, though is that some people choose to be homosexual and some do not. Sexuality is more nebulous than simply are-you, aren't-you. It's both a physical mode of existence linked to desire and a way of identifying oneself.

Also, let's say, hypothetically, that what you say is true and people can't choose—even then, they still don't have to choose exhaustion, hate, and alienation. There are options, neh? One can move to another place. One can live with other people. One can do a lot of things. Staying closeted is deprecated, but it's always a temporary (or permanent, if that's their choice) option—and in some circumstances it's the better one. (No, no, I'm not saying that everyone who's gay should stay closeted and we should never talk about such things and blah di blah. I'm just saying it's an option—which contradicts your intimations that homosexuals have no other option besides pain and suffering.) Even more subtly, there's the option to only selectively out oneself to friends and acquaintances who will understand—there's definitely room for tact and selectivity in such choices.

My point? In some sense, there is almost always a choice, regardless of whether someone is "born that way" or not. You have a choice who you tell things to. You have a choice where you live. You have a choice to be rational about the whole thing. There's no need to run around shouting "I'm gay! I'm gay!" unless you simply want to be confrontational. Most homosexuals don't go up to people they've just met and say "Hi, my name's so-and-so, and I'm gay," for the same reason that I don't walk up to every person I meet, male or female, and say, "Hi, I'm Margaret. I'm obviously female, I'm heterosexual, I'm a Capricorn, and I like to [insert pastime here]. If you'd like, I can summarize my sexual history for you as well." It's unnecessary information, inappropriate to the situation, in a lot of contexts, and making a big deal about it is an imposition.

Another point, which follows from that—I have a few gay friends who think that all this uproarious demanding rights that's occurring right now isn't the way to go, that in fact all it's doing is glamorizing/making extremity of the whole idea. They agree that it's a good thing that gay marriage be allowed, and it's also a good idea to let the general public know that an imposition is occurring, that people are being denied a right—but perhaps all this clamorous shouting isn't the only way to go about taking steps forward, neh? Many say the religious right is reactionary—so why provoke them when you know that they'll simply lash out right back? Instead, why not try a bit of subtlety, a bit of (non-anti-Biblical) reasoning, and a bit of tact?

Instead of attacking the Bible, an approach that immediately turns off a lot of people, religious or not, why not just accept the fact that yes, the Bible exists, yes, people believe in it, and then work from there? Churches can define marriage however they want—that's not stopping anyone from passing legislation giving civil unions the name "marriage." You're arguing contradictory points, in that what you want is the state to call it marriage, neh? If that's what you want, don't pick on religion, saying that they're the ones "keeping us down," so to speak. These are completely separate things, and you're not going to change the minds of the religious right by attacking the Bible. It's not as if anyone has written the Ten Commandments into secular law—the influence of religion in the U.S. is more subtle than that.

The problem you will run up against, however, which I talked about a while back here, is that our supposedly secular representatives aren't always separating their religious consciences from their political ones. That's something that we're going to have to take stock of...but I'm not exactly sure how we'd go about it. You can't force people to vote against conscience, regardless of how they derived that conscience.

[[shrugs]] Anyway, I'm not a big passionate advocate of any side in this debate, but I figured those points might be instructive.

What do you think—if someone stuck their tongue on the Arch right now, would it stick? It's 29 degrees Fahrenheit outside...and yes, I know, someone's bound to say, "Why don't you try it if you're so smart?" to which I'm going to preemptively reply, "Bite me." Doesn't that work nicely?

Since these things have this habit of disappearing once I've said them (i.e. the way my last major rebuttal to something Alex said disappeared later), I'm gonna copy some of the more interesting and comprehensive comments I've left on some other blogs recently here.

First, there's this dispute on Alex's blog. I'm nothing if not thorough. Here's what I think about laundry:

"While it annoys me that people leave crap in dryers/washers too long, it seems to be a problem that's not confined to members of either sex exclusively. Guys and girls here seem to be pretty equally inconsiderate. I generally just take their stuff out, fold it, and put it on top of whichever machine it came out of or (here in the dorm) on top of the upright washer on the end. I could be inconsiderate and throw their stuff around, but then again, I'm one of those people who takes up four-plus washers/dryers at a time myself, so I figure that a little courtesy goes a long way. Perhaps if I'm nice to their stuff, they'll think twice about messing around with mine. (Not that they know it's mine, which is why I've really gotta question the idea that people can actually tell that one person is taking up more than one dryer—how could you possibly tell?—but nonetheless, perhaps people will figure out that that's the thing to do.)

As for touching other people's laundry, 1. if I'm touching it, it's been washed, 2. if it's been washed it's probably clean, and 3. someday I'll most likely have to do family members' laundry when I have a family of my own, at least until the kids are old enough to do their own laundry, hence I think this squeamishness is really rather misplaced. I personally tend to think that a lot of our promiscuous friends here are probably more diseased than the general population, but nonetheless, laundry is laundry.

As for the selfishness of taking up four dryers with four loads of laundry, that's actually pretty necessary around here, as the dryers aren't terribly efficient. You oughta know that. If I'm willing to spend the money to wash and dry four separate loads of clothing at once, I think I'm entitled to the time and space."

Next, here's the recent dispute with Ben on darkmachina's blog. For the lazy (and for the record), here's my pseudo-conservative apologetic:

"Well, OK, as I noted, perhaps we don't want it exactly like it was then, but you've got to see that being able to believe in things and have some sort of faith in something may well be better than what we've got now, neh? While sure, it seems like we're more open about 'scandalous' things these days, there's still a good bit that's not uncovered even now, so in that respect I really don't think we can say things are that much better currently than they were 'back then.' People are still oppressed all over the world, so apparently the things we're championing as 'enlightened'—our rampant commercialization and secularization, Big Business, and whatnot—aren't necessarily the answer to things, either. In the grand scheme of things we're now seeing a lot of disaffected, disillusioned people in this country. Faith and ideals are subjugated to the mores of pop culture and Janet Jackson's breast.

Anyway, it's not possible right now, as far as I can see, to actually return to the sort of time where, as you say, anyone who wasn't a WASP was persecuted along with blacks/minorities/women. I'm pretty sure we're not going back to that, as there are a lot of forces in this society fighting against getting to anywhere that remotely resembles that. What we're talking about is, I believe (correct me if I'm wrong, DM), the fact that even using the word 'morals' today can be enough to get you laughed out of a news conference—or perhaps the fact that there are news conferences in the first place, where before you'd have face-to-face interviews. Where perhaps before there was once too much innocence, too much blind faith placed in certain 'inexorable' truths, today we have too little innocence and too little faith in things working out. Being allowed to question things, have different hair styles, etc. is a great thing, but I think we can preserve that freedom of thought without this massive bulldozing of culture that's taking place.

Oh, and as for using Hitler as an example, yeah, that's dramatic and all, but the man was essentially an anomaly. While lots of people talk about so-and-so being 'just like Hitler,' that's really an out-of-hand comparison. His talk of going back to "the old times" was a call to German sentimentality, a form of insidious propaganda. Perhaps he wanted a return to the 'old ways,' but his tech-savvy regime wasn't exactly running for the highlands. Now, the part of the comparison that's at all valid is that yes, the U.S. used similar propaganda to call citizens to 'fulfill their duty' and trust the government. Nonetheless, I don't think I'd mind living in a time where I could at least feel sure of something, rather than having the rug pulled out from under my feet by the continually jabbing media and the wool pulled over my eyes by a government that insists it's being honest. The government today is probably far less honest than the governments of yesteryear, only it has new ways of manipulating the media into believing that it's telling the unadulterated truth. Whichever regime we're under, we're still being manipulated.

I'd just like to be able to believe in something without being laughed at and called a fundamentalist. I'd like the government to stop lying. I'd like to be able to make my way in the world without fighting ridiculous, complicated tax codes. I'd like Big Business to stop imposing its will upon me. I'd like a lot of things, but of those things, only the first one is at all likely at this point. What I'd like is a return to some of the simplicity of life. I'd like to be able to disappear and live somewhere in the middle of nowhere (not that I'm going to, but I like the idea of it) without a zip code or post office or news being piped into my house. I like the idea of learning a trade and being able to take an assumed name if I want. These things could only happen, though, in a society that gives the government those few rights which belong to the government and renders everything else unto the citizens."

That's it for now. I think I win. I'm getting good at decimating all possible arguments with the least words possible, if I do say so myself...

Does anyone know what the hell Josh meant in his letter to the editor today with the sentence, "I seriously doubt that the conversational climate surrounding one's sexual intimacy doesn't get any less chilly as we all get older." Triple negatives, anyone?

Oh, glorious, sweet rock 'n' roll. So yes, two years ago I arrived at this place and since then my music vocabulary has declined steadily in every possible sense. Tonight, I discovered something wonderful that's been out for a good two years—two years!—namely Reel Big Fish's "Cheer Up" album.
"Valerie, you make me wish I was dead....Valerie, you're like a knife in my head..."

Here's a question: Why's everyone so excited about how Wil Wheaton got a book deal from blogging? No shit he can get a book deal—he was an actor. An actor on Star Trek, no less, a famous show with hundreds of episodes. You and your stupid blog aren't exactly Wil Wheaton, now are they? Blogger, however, has added this topic to their official help pages, implying that if Wheaton can do it, so can you! [shakes head] As supermum noted (and I apparently missed) on my birthday, many powers attributed to weblogs, specifically the power to influence the masses and impart "legitimacy" unto one's proletarian ambitions, are rather dubious.

People so often like to assume we're part of this grand new cultural paradigm—most of these cultural turns we're taking, though, just aren't worth celebrating. The music industry, for instance, and its related phenomena are so crass. Apparently, one's not allowed to like music these days without also liking nudity on stage, multiple body piercings, too much jewelry, leather clothing, etc. If you claim to like rock 'n' roll, according to the emails I get from RollingStone.com that I can't seem to stop getting (I've unsubscribed from them more than three times now), I obviously like "phat jamz," Janet Jackson, the White Stripes (whoever they are), and other unsavory things by dint of being on their email list. Another rule—those who like rock 'n' roll aren't allowed to spell, capitalize, punctuate, or use proper grammar, as those are things reserved for corporate suits—never mind the fact that if you play rock 'n' roll you can't get a job without dealing with such people. The "industry people," however, like to downplay that aspect of things, pretending that the money they use to buy the fuel in that "phat" car they're driving while "pimpin' out" and poppin' ecstasy really came from some healthy grassroots movement of fans whose undying love will magically make them millionaires so they can go save the whales. Sure, sure, I sound like someone's parents, putting air quotes around words like "phat" and "pimpin'," largely 'cause those words aren't really current anymore. (That was kind of the point of my using them, though.)

The big idea here is the rife hypocrisy of these supposedly "authentic" musicians who wear whatever is deemed cool by Rolling Stone, who promote their music through inarticulate emails from "e-team" leaders (hint hint, Evanescence) every time their "new" video from an album that's been out for a year is about to appear on MTV, and who, like a lot of musicians here at the university, believe that the unsavory, drug-addicted aspects of "the biz" are integral to their credibility as musicians.

One more annoyance: I read a few blogs that unfortunately happen to be located on Xanga. I even signed up for a Xanga myself (just like I signed up for a LiveJournal) so I could leave comments on the system, as only users are allowed to comment. That in itself, along with the not-so-subtle Xanga branding that appears all over its users' blogs (just like with LiveJournal and Blogger—there are real reasons I didn't blog until Jablog got going this fall), is annoying enough—but then there are the users! I hate the fact that most people automatically leave two eProps along with each comment on a Xanga blog. The system, you see, automatically checks the radio button next to "2 eProps"—hence it's one's duty to be discerning and uncheck it, so as not to inflate the [already dubious] value of the eProp. Yet no, no one ever bothers to uncheck the damned things, and it pisses me off. Whenever I actually bother to give eProps on a Xanga, I put one only, so as not to be confused with those who don't uncheck boxes. The whole concept of an "eProp" in and of itself is stupid enough without these people using them incorrectly.

Love this rant about how Movable Type and its associated blogs are the bane of our [collective] existence.

[ducks as another helicopter flies over low, rattling the entire suite] Grr.

So I had this potato, and I figured I should explain why I had it, considering that it was, well, just a baked potato, which I happened to be cradling lovingly in my hands as I walked in the door...

Anyway, I'll start at the beginning. I went to the cafeteria for the first time this semester tonight with the Rutledge crowd. I got too much food, per usual, hence was running late to copy edit, per usual, so I got this bright idea—I could take my baked potato with me to keep my hands warm while walking and then eat it upon arriving at the offices. I'd heard of such things being done in the old days, with parents putting hot potatoes in their kids' pockets to take to school with 'em on cold days, etc., so I figured it was worth a shot.

So I took the potato along on my walk through the cold to the offices and it did indeed work as expected, keeping my hands toasty warm. When I got there, I figured I should explain off the bat why I had a potato, and I was rather excited that the thing had kept my hands warm, so I exclaimed, "Potatoes are awesome!" and told them how the potato had kept my hands warm on the journey over. I figured that was self-explanatory, but apparently not. My jaded audience of staffers proceeded to mock me at intervals, telling me I must be "on something" for being excited about a potato.

After awhile I took a bite out of the potato, and when no one seemed to notice that I proceeded to eat about half of the potato like an apple, taking big bites. When I was about two-thirds of the way done and had set the potato down on the photo scanner next to me, the copy editor from Ohio (as opposed to the distinguished senator from Ohio, which is what I think she aspires to be) suddenly exclaimed something to the effect of, "Did you eat that potato?" At this point I was rather annoyed at her constant chatter about boyfriends and ski trips and hot tubs, not to mention her ribbing me about the potato, so I simply said, "No shit." At that point, she got rather flustered, stammering some explanation about her question as I patiently explained that yes, I was eating a potato and no, I didn't have any sour cream or salt or butter or crap, I was just eating a potato, plain and simple.

It was fun to see her so flustered—they never expect emotion, you see, and I'm always purposefully emotionless around them. They don't seem to understand the idea of real passion about things very well, so I don't tell them about things I care about very often. What's great is that if I were more self-possessed and/or sadistic, I probably could've gone on to mock the chick pretty harshly at that point, throwing in something about her favorite state, Ohio (she once wrote an entire essay detailing why Ohio is so great, then made the editor add it to one of the production-night emails to make the staff aware of the "contributions" Ohio has made to this country). As it was, though, she left pretty soon after that and is probably a bit wary of me now, which is fine with me.

Edit: Awesome things I found searching for my own name:

1. The Daily Illini at the University of Illinois reprinted the file-sharing article I wrote that made it to No. 2 last year on the wire service.

2. Someone credited me with coining the word "tragesty" here at Langmaker, most likely as a result of my posting here on metaplasm...Unfortunately, someone got my definition of tragesty in Urban Dictionary deleted, or I'd really be in business...*sigh*

Photoshop image to make: dozens of tiny flutter ponies attacking someone...nibbling their arm to the bone. Or perhaps spidery G3s creeping over someone while they're asleep. Ah...innocently violent ponies. Those are the best kind.

From January 6:

Things that amazed me at the high school today:

1. The sheer pace I must've had to sustain to do all the crazy, amazing amounts of things I did in high school, never seeing the sun all winter long in dawn-to-dusk school days. I woke up at 6 a.m. this morning after being up 'til about 1-something a.m. last night, laid in bed 'til 6:20 a.m. or so, then took a shower and went up to the high school and spent all day and then some up there...I was damned tired by the time I arrived home amid the creeping dusk. There just aren't hours enough in the day to have done all the things I once did.

2. The sheer illiteracy of my former physics teacher's advisees. These kids apparently expect to get by on charm, 'cause they sure as hell can't write worth a damn. He offers his paper-writing help services to anyone who bothers to ask (as well as a few who don't ask at all). This one girl didn't even seem to understand that not only had she not written half of her own paper—her friend Aaron wrote about half of it for her—but that the very first sentence was plagiarized, since she "edited out" the quotation marks. Yet she just kept giggling and saying, "But Aaron wrote that part!" when the teacher marked something in red ink or asked her about the flowery thesaurus language she'd used. Further, this paper had supposedly already been graded, no less, with an A across the top, of all things—it was readily apparent that Mr. Hebberd hadn't even looked at it, which is unfortunately pretty standard for him. [shakes head]

They really don't teach—and never really have taught—grammar there at the high school. (Take this sentence here, for instance—that girl he was talking to would've labeled it ungrammatical just 'cause she doesn't understand the subtleties of the language she speaks, and, in fact, she even speaks ungrammatically—I heard her say "un-good" quite seriously at one point to describe what he thought of her paper.) I remember when Larsen tried to teach us grammar freshman year, with a whole unit on that stuff that we all hated with a passion. Unfortunately, she tried to use preprepared worksheets for some of it, which is always a bad move, as the people who make up preprepared worksheets and workbooks are apparently idiots out to make a quick buck, leaving most worksheets of that sort with nonsensical questions and unexpected answers. So yeah, that didn't really take—luckily, I somehow have a natural sense of grammar. A few teachers have that as well and bother to try and teach it...but the vast majority of kids and teachers there suck at it. Most English teachers there simply have kids read stories and "discuss" them, grading essays on content, not grammar.

Sigh. Such corruption. Some call me a grammar nazi, as I mark up everyone's papers, even those written by otherwise good writers, giving the page an almost pinkish cast after I've bled all over it in red ink, but someone needs to do that! It almost makes me want to become an English teacher so I could reverse some of that—I thought I'd seen bad college writing, but the people with the real problems won't even get into college, as they're really not trying, much less being taught anything.

3. The fact that another one of these young male teachers is running this racket out of the workshop in the basement, selling various snacks and sodas for a profit in some vending machines, with a grocery cart he appropriated from somewhere...

4. Just how friggin' hyper the people in the one-act play were...I got a headache sitting there listening to them prattle on and on about nothing while waiting to do their tech run-through after school. How did I ever stand theater people at all, even for a short time? Ugh.

5. How well-respected and well-liked my brother is...lucky kid. Apparently during D&D Club he makes hats and wears them the entire time, letting other people tell him when to move and what to do. He's apparently getting even better than I was at playing the dunce for comedic effect. My brilliant words of the day? "Hey, look, I have four pairs of feet!" as Beth cowered next to me, hiding behind my awesomecoat—I decided to spread my feet apart so it'd look like I had four feet, which isn't quite the same as four pairs of feet.

It's strange to think that these young kids I know, my freshmen, so to speak, are seniors now. They still look like freshmen to me, and it gets harder for me to tell what age/year people are. I can do it, sure, telling a freshman from a senior, for instance, esp. 'cause the seniors swagger and assign undue importance to everything they do, whereas the freshman haven't yet grasped the importance of existing, much less doing things well...but yeah, they're all young.

I realized that I'm actually rather put off now by the silly sappy things these high-school guys do with their girlfriends, continually cuddling and holding each other and generally coming off as disgusting and obsessive to everyone else in the room. Sure, I used to do that, too—it always used to seem like there was never enough time to be around whomever it was I was going out with, hence I'd do the standard ignoring-what-people-think-for-the-sake-of-PDA thing that most high school couples do—but I broke myself of the habit during MSA, if I remember correctly. I realized that I really do come off better when I'm not always hanging all over a guy when he's around, then mooning about, talking to everyone in earshot about him ad nauseam when he's not, neh?

There's definitely something to be said for avoiding gratuitous PDA whenever possible and being a bit discreet. Such things aren't really done at the university—y'almost never see PDA. Everyone's just "cool" about things—and yes, I think that sort of machismo that guys and girls put on about being "so adult" and "cool" about things is pointless, too, but it does work well with my distaste for major PDA beyond, say, hand-holding or a brief kiss or putting arms around each other's waists while walking. In that sense I think the university way may just be better in general, especially considering what I'm finding out watching these high school kids, namely that it's embarrassing to watch people being that sappy on continual basis. I'm all for spontaneity, but some things labeled spontaneity are really impulses borne of a refusal to acknowledge that one is acting like a star-struck idiot...

I had fun earlier in the physics department, though—Beth and I built a fort out of these big things they use in PT (physical technology?), sticking stool legs in the top of the square pipes mounted on the top of them (they're essentially wooden platforms about 2 feet square, 2-3 inches thick, with big, square metal pipes sticking up from the middle of the top of one side to be used as support for various experiments) and people's coats draped across the top of the stools for a canopy. We stole the teacher's box of sugar and put it in the fort for sustenance, grabbed a physics book (never know when you'll need physics!) and put it in the fort along with a phonebook found in the back room, and hooked a heat lamp to a classy power strip and clamped it onto the underside of one of the stools, providing us with both light and heat. Then we propped big sheets of plywood against the back and sides of it, making the fort inhabitable and sheltering us from those cruel basement winds. Beth and I had a conversation about ponies, and she offered me a couple of her old ones, as the teacher muttered something about college and regressing...

I've lost my speaking voice to an extent, I think. In certain settings I'm still sure on my feet when it comes to speaking my mind articulately and concisely, but socially I've become less adept. Talking on the phone this week reminded me that I'm still pretty good at that, at least, but in person I've been having trouble addressing everyone, not just a select few. I come off more direct now, more willing to say what I really think—so that's good, but I think I've lost a bit of the tact I used to have. Some of the tact was inhibition, surely, so in the sense of losing inhibitions I'm a bit better off, but I'm not as well-versed in (or perhaps I've just lost motivation to do this) hiding what I really think about things around other people anymore. I suppose I haven't had to be nearly so articulate as I used to be, not living at home and all—but it was a valuable skill while I had it. I think this probably goes hand-in-hand with the loss of self-confidence I've suffered in some respects (a gain in others, since I'm more outspoken about annoyances now), as I've been demoralized a bit by the past few semesters, but yes, I do need to work on talking to people and having conversations, rather than falling to extremes of A. sitting in silence for lack of things to say or fear of saying too much or too little or B. being overly outspoken and letting my true opinions about things show too much.

Too much internal editing. This works out fine when I'm typing at lightning-fast speeds to make up for time spent thinking up answers, but doesn't work so well in person. To a certain extent, I figure I'll be fine—I always am—and I think my increased willingness to tell things like they are may be a good thing. I've become good at denouncing things, for instance. But I should probably talk more, engage in vocal conversation for sport, rather than simply relying on my written verbal skills to carry the day. I know I'm better in written conversation—this goes back to the experiment I tried at MSA, writing the first conversation I had with Jason despite sitting right next to him on the grass at the time, as I had a realization that I might be better at conversing on paper. It was a novel thing to do at the time, sort of a precursor to written online conversation—but it's not so novel anymore.

This post (and the next three posts, for that matter) will consist of pieces of email from over break jammed together into one semicoherent whole. Due to this, references to time and place may jump around a bit. You kids are smart enough to figure out how that works—but to help you out a bit, I'll even put them in roughly chronological order. Good luck.

Note: to certain of you, these emails are somewhat foregone conclusions. If'n any of this shouldn't have been posted, tell me and it's gone. In general, what's posted here should be of general interest to all involved parties, hence its relevance and my posting it.

Edit: What, no replies?

I learned long ago to keep my mouth shut, not to tell people too much, 'cause just as soon as you tell some people things, they think they've got something on you or know you and can use that information to their advantage. They think they've got all your shots called just 'cause you spilled a small secret to 'em...but that's not a good way to go. So I stay quiet.

I'm not all that close to R., in a relative sense—I'm not really that close to anyone at the university, not even the people I live with—but among university friends, at least, she's one of the closer ones, and she's a pretty astute observer of my predilections and habits. I'm glad she called. I'm not sure how long we talked, but luckily everyone else was in the living room, watching The Mask of Zorro. (It was like deja vu, I told her, as pretty much the last time I had a conversation of any consequence with her was while my roommate and I were taking a break from watching the same movie about two weeks ago.)

There are some things I'm still reasonably certain of, like my intelligence, my wit, my ability to write well and lay out arguments, my easy acquaintance with my own physical abilities, my ability to size people up almost on sight, etc. A lot of times, esp. when reading various novels or watching movies, I long for the days (did such a day ever exist, esp. for a woman, I wonder?) when one could just pick up a trade by virtue of one's talents, on the basis of pure merit in the matter and not worry about all these degrees, all this nonsense that I'm cobbling together to meet the requirements to get this piece of paper. I get tired of working for grades, as I've said in posts before. I got tired of it in high school, for that matter.

Heh...It's all so confusing, and needlessly so, I often think. What happened to the days when I knew what I was going to do and went about with bravado, bravely proclaiming my intentions of getting a psych degree and keeping my 4.0 throughout college? Well, what may have happened is that 1. I encountered a new environment, one needlessly full of B.S. and things that sap my energy and test the strength of my convictions and 2. I'm not so sure I was ever that certain of being a psych major and carrying on with all that—but I had to be certain (cognitive dissonance at work, there), or rather act certain, to say all the stuff I did in admissions essays. I'm slowly moving towards my ideal of a lack of pretense, of being able to honestly say what I mean when I mean it, but then I come up against barriers to saying what I truly mean, e.g. the problem of hormones—such horrible things, hormones, neh? They act upon me and I don't even realize it until I look back on a day and piece it together...At least I can do something to lessen the effect of those.

Some years ago, right after MSA and for a few years after, if you'd asked me what my goals were, I'd have told you, "To find a philosophy." I even wrote about that in my admissions essay, about the vast grand questing I wanted to do and how the university would be a great place to do it. So yeah, the past five semesters have beaten a bit of that idealism out of me, especially as I've gotten so bitter about so many things, all this stuff that has gotten on my nerves since I've been here. I came to the conclusion last year sometime that this definitely was not the place to be if you wanted to become a pure soul questing for gnosis, not by a long shot. Then I figured out that most of the people who really quest for that sort of thing, the eternally deluded, are the ones who become highfalutin' professors, haunting the much-vaunted halls of academia...and doing little else. Me, I've always thought that my philosophy would at least be practical, not dusty like these philosophy classes tend to be. Screw epistemology, all this linguistic questing after evolution and the origins of things—much like Richard Bach, I want something that works, something that'll tide me over and make my life work right.

But perhaps I'm still on the quest! Or if I'm not still on the quest, I can get back into the quest, as these experiences here have been valuable. I haven't really even thought about it for awhile, but I always come back to it when I get to read for awhile and see ideas of mine reflected on the pages—my philosophy is being built as we speak. Perhaps I needed to be stripped of idealism—that's just the part of the process, perhaps, that these past few years have provided. A phrase comes to mind..."You told me you'd say that. You told me you'd say that, too." Oh yes, from Fight Club, as Tyler Durden laid plans so that his other self couldn't undo the whole enterprise, making sure that no one could call off Project Mayhem, not even he himself. I set myself on this quest, and even when I thought I'd abandoned it and forgotten it and was ashamed that I'd become uninterested in it, well, perhaps I've still been on it this entire time. Does any of that make sense?

I really liked the book Siddhartha when I read it, as it seemed like that was the idea—that's the idea of Buddhism, albeit bound up a bit in existentialism, supposedly, in Hesse's form, that all the experiences you go through are necessary, the stripping away of layers of pretense, the suffering of continually knowing that no matter how much self-knowledge you've attained, there's always some other level to know yourself on, you're always chipping away at pretense, always realizing that what you thought was progress was simply leading you down yet another false avenue of experience. Yet even the false knowledge was necessary, as you move to another level of falseness that's perhaps less false, overall...even the depths of depravity have something to teach you. Also, there's the idea of hitting bottom, which is part of both existentialism and Buddhism, albeit in different ways.

The Buddhist take on it is simply what I already talked about, nausea of existence-provoking situations. The existential, nihilist Fight Club view of it is that hitting bottom is necessary so that you can see where you are and go from there. It's necessary to know the limits of your depravity and to give you a foundation to build from, so that when you build you're not working with the spongy ground of your psyche, but a simpler, more solid psychic foundation. You can't build a solid life, one free of pretense, 1. without figuring out at least some of your limits, how far you can fall given the chance, 2. afraid of failing, having never tried it (3) working from the litany of excuses and fears that approach near-failure. Some people have to learn things by trying them—which I realize is a line used to justify a lot of things, and a line to which there are many exceptions, but nonetheless, I think it applies in this case. There are many good reasons I can think of to justify failing a bit this semester, and perhaps the experience will serve me well.

Heh...when I think about being back on the quest, it gives me this surge of pride, then a pang of guilt, as I know someone like me shouldn't be indulging in silly vain pride at jumping back on the quest for a philosophy. Then again, perhaps that means that I've gotten a few battle scars, necessary ones, and will at least be seeking along a higher plane this time. Each plane has its perils, apparently, and one can slip from plane to plane...perhaps I'm not on a "higher" plane as such, but I've gotten more experience, whatever plane I'm on and whatever that plane's destination.

After just reading a few novels, getting back in the swing of reading, I'm recalling that yeah, the idea in Good Will Hunting was quite a valid one, really, that with just a few bucks in library fines you can come a lot closer to establishing yourself a good bit of knowledge than you can with $100,000 worth of fancy-ass classes. Yeah, some philosophy, the practical sort, like my Biomedical Ethics and Present Moral Problems classes looked at, is tolerable and perhaps useful, especially for my argumentation skills, but man...reading and real-world experience count for a hell of a lot, too.

I don't even see words when reading. I see pictures—it's almost like being in a trance or dream state, I suppose, hence how I can read for hours and not hear what's going on around me.

What sucks is that I'm going to be a psych/English-type major, but I really despise people of those castes. I consider myself more technically able, more capable of deep thought, than most of the bubbleheaded hacks I see in these classes. I'm definitely more self-aware than a lot of them, despite the looming fog of unconsciousness that overtakes me each semester. I don't know if you know many psych/English majors where you are, but you know the type at least, neh?

I'd like to think that whatever depths I've fallen to, I'm still standing upon a high plateau compared to the depths inhabited by many of these people around me. Then again, perhaps this is "malignant narcissism," as Richard Matheson would have it, a kind of belief in one's utter infallibility that leads one to become delusional and belligerent.