debitage
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 15.3.02
She asked, "Why do you have that big grin on your face?" "I could hear you whistling 'Sunshine of Your Love' when I was coming around the Student Union."
And my first thoughts were "Oh crap." I should be excited about the possibility of going to New Zealand. I should be looking forward to all the cool stuff I'd see and do down there. But I'm not. Maybe it's that I had been thinking so long about grad school that I'm just disoriented by everything changing. But I think it's also doubts about my project. I came up with it as a Fulbright project, assuming that much of my time would be spent taking archaeology and Maori language classes at the University of Otago. But the Watson forbids you from taking formal classes. So I altered my plan for the Watson application, assuming that if I got the Watson (which as far as I could tell looked less favorably on the type of project I was planning) I would also get the Fulbright. I can make a convincing argument to myself that, upon further consideration, my project wouldn't do justice to the Watson fellowship and that my time would be more productively spent at Clark or Wisconsin, and that the first runner-up would make better use of the money. But is this just rationalization of my fears? People are going to be congratulating me. What do I say to them?
14.3.02
When I think about why I go barefoot, the thing that always comes to mind first is the tactileness of it. When I'm barefoot, I feel the ground with every step, instead of just feeling the inside of my sock. It adds a level of sensory experience to something as mundane as walking up the hill. I can appreciate the difference between the smooth slate steps and the grass pulling my feet in and the rough pavement where I have to watch out for scattered bits of gravel. It's similar to the way I feel annoyed when I see people walking around with headphones on. I did that once, going up to 'Gate House to see if Marty was around late on my last day of sophomore year, with my walkman on so that I could listen to Dave's radio show. And even though it was one in the morning, every time I saw any people I would have this impulse to rip the headphones off while I passed them, so that they wouldn't see what I was doing. I feel like having headphones on means that you aren't really paying attention to what's going on, that you have made a conscious choice not to care -- the path is just something keeping you from where you're going, and you need to insulate yourself from it. But that's kind of a hypocritical attitude for me to take. I don't wear headphones, but when I walk around I can get just as absorbed -- deliberately or not -- in whatever song is stuck in my head. Instead of listening to snatches of conversations, and the wind ruffling the trees, and my own feet on the stones, my ears are full of "yum, yum, Bumblebee, Bumblebee Tuna, I love Bumblebee, Bumblebee Tuna..." And I'm always thinking about the next thing I'm going to do -- the chart I'm going to make for The Maroon-News, the amount of time I have to eat before the lecture, the book I have to read tonight because I can't renew ILL materials. Much as I try, I can't quite experience.
He finally does something I can approve of.
13.3.02
Great. Just great.
12.3.02
Sometimes you just need to see someone say something that puts it all in perspective. I figured I should count myself lucky that I can't truly understand what that's like, that my middle class heterosexual white male American scale of experience (and I've been exceptionally lucky even for a MCHWMA) doesn't reach that far. So I went to read about it in the Post, so I'd at least know what was going on even if I couldn't really understand or feel it. And what do I notice when I get there? This. So all of a sudden I'm whipping out the atlas and running an image search on Google to see if I'm right in thinking that the Dead Sea is normally one body of water, not two. And wondering what sort of processes -- climate change? increasing withdrawals for urban drinking water? irrigated agriculture? -- are causing the sea to shrink, and how they may be similar to what's happening to the Aral Sea, and what the implications are for the Israeli/Palestinian/Jordanian environment. Completely forgetting the 17 people who died today.
11.3.02
I hold no grudge against dotcomments. I'd sincerely love to continue using dotcomments. But it's not worth the effort when there's not a single reliable host for them out there. So let's see how long yaccs lasts.
I think you know what to do with this.
In terms of ethics and code of conduct, the Bible contains two basic types of statements -- specific rules and general principles. Granted, there is more of a spectrum from the most specific rule to the most general principle, but I think my analysis still stands. This means there are two ways of looking at how they fit together. The more common way, especially among people who take the literal truth of the Bible very seriously, is an inductive approach. In any situation, they would look first for a verse that specifically addresses their situation. If none can be found, they look for more and more general principles. Principles fill the gaps between specific commands, which can operate as exceptions to the principles. But I would take a more deductive approach. To me, the principles are what's key. We can then reason from the principles to more specific rules for whatever situation we encounter. The rules in the Bible, then, are attempts by the authors to do just that. They can be useful as far as giving us the answers to tough problems (which we can later verify for ourselves). But this deduction is context-specific. So it is important to always be checking St. Paul's reasoning, to make sure that he wasn't either thinking of a slightly different situation, or simply mistaken. EIther way, the principles always supersede the rules. |
I ran into Chris, who was coming down the Persson stairs.
