back to blasé
Okay, I'm feeling better now. I was totally staggering around in a foggy daze yesterday, and my notes from my two classes are completely unintelligible. Gah!
Part of this was probably that I was dehydrated from Burning Man, as Brooke and I practically finished 2.5 gallons of water on the drive back and I've been needing to drink a lot more water than typical in the last few days. I really tried to consciously drink a lot on the playa, but I wasn't peeing every 2-3 hours like you're supposed to. Still, I seemed to be drinking a lot and felt fine, so thought nothing of it, but I definitely needs to get a CamelPak for next time and do a much better job of hydrating.
But my feeling is also that this was because there were just so much to see at Burning Man. No matter which way you looked, there was something that was interesting and often utterly beautiful. But back in the urban environment, everything you look at is harsh, and even the interesting and/or beautiful things are designed that way in order to draw your attention so that somebody can sell you something. I guess I had opened up my eyes and attention while at Burning Man, and so I was actually kinda sad to "recover" and go about my day by shutting out most of everything, like most people do. Sociologist Georg Simmel in The Metropolis and Modern Life talks about the overloading of people's senses by city life and how people react to this by adopting a blasé attitude about everything as a defense mechanism. I think this is exactly what he was talking about.
Surprisingly, even though I was in this weird stupor and probably looking like a slackjawed idiot, the one chick in my History of Economic Thought class was totally checking me out (and when I say "one chick," I mean that she's the only female person in the entire class -- yeah, that's econ for you). Pretty sure I wasn't hallucinating, as she was doing the whole looking at me and looking away and then playing with her hair. We even made brief eye contact and smiled before she shyly looked away. She's kinda cute, and seems on the ball (which is more than I can say about me in that class). Hopefully it's not the tripped out look that she's into, so we'll see if I still keep her attention next week when I'm well-rested and am back to my alert normal self.
I guess I'll never be blasé about flirting. :)
Part of this was probably that I was dehydrated from Burning Man, as Brooke and I practically finished 2.5 gallons of water on the drive back and I've been needing to drink a lot more water than typical in the last few days. I really tried to consciously drink a lot on the playa, but I wasn't peeing every 2-3 hours like you're supposed to. Still, I seemed to be drinking a lot and felt fine, so thought nothing of it, but I definitely needs to get a CamelPak for next time and do a much better job of hydrating.
But my feeling is also that this was because there were just so much to see at Burning Man. No matter which way you looked, there was something that was interesting and often utterly beautiful. But back in the urban environment, everything you look at is harsh, and even the interesting and/or beautiful things are designed that way in order to draw your attention so that somebody can sell you something. I guess I had opened up my eyes and attention while at Burning Man, and so I was actually kinda sad to "recover" and go about my day by shutting out most of everything, like most people do. Sociologist Georg Simmel in The Metropolis and Modern Life talks about the overloading of people's senses by city life and how people react to this by adopting a blasé attitude about everything as a defense mechanism. I think this is exactly what he was talking about.
Surprisingly, even though I was in this weird stupor and probably looking like a slackjawed idiot, the one chick in my History of Economic Thought class was totally checking me out (and when I say "one chick," I mean that she's the only female person in the entire class -- yeah, that's econ for you). Pretty sure I wasn't hallucinating, as she was doing the whole looking at me and looking away and then playing with her hair. We even made brief eye contact and smiled before she shyly looked away. She's kinda cute, and seems on the ball (which is more than I can say about me in that class). Hopefully it's not the tripped out look that she's into, so we'll see if I still keep her attention next week when I'm well-rested and am back to my alert normal self.
I guess I'll never be blasé about flirting. :)