Dec 17, 2006 01:02
I've decided not to allow myself to be restrained my numbers any longer. They are an artificial constraint placed on human life that is only useful in their ability to organize and synchronize both concepts and behavior. As I near the end of my History of Psychology paper I have been freaking out over the fact that I will most likely exceed the recommended 7-8 pages, venturing onto *gasp* a 9th or even a 10th page!!! This is ridiculous! I have always gone over page limits (including assignments for this class) and that has never had a negative effect on my grade. (For all I know, it's helped.) I will say what I have to say and stop when I'm done.
[tangent] I'm very very happy to say that I am almost done. I have 2 more historical topics to cover and then I get to spend a page or so debating with myself whether psychology is actually a science. I think I know what I'm going to say, but I want to surprise ya'll.
(I'm debating whether to include cognition in my discussion. It's more work that I really think is unnecessary, but the field has had a great number of technological advances that contribute to a greater ability to study the mind empirically than previously existed. I know - this is covered in the article on Freud that I was going to reference anyway. I might just pull another sentence or two out of the textbook chapter on cognition to support the idea. Rock!)
On a completely random note, there are guys in my quad using my bathroom and speaking rather loudly. I hope this does not become an issue. I'd be in the library right now except that they closed at 10:00pm for some odd reason. I don't imagine a lounge would be much better, to be honest. At least here I have some privacy. [/tangent]
Furthermore, I have been putting off this entry because it is my 1,999th and I had wanted my 2,000th to be a review of everything I've written so far. Such a review would be an enormous undertaking and I just don't have the time right now, so I wanted to put it off to a point where I would have that kind of time. BS! The whole reason why I've managed to write almost 2000 entries in 3 years and 2 months is that I've never cared much about how many entries I wrote, or what number a given entry was. Sometimes I'd write one entry a day, sometimes I'd write four, sometimes (though rarely) I'd go for a week or more without writing at all!!! The point is I'd write when I felt the need and say all I had to say, then stop. 1999 entries. Many of which are private, most of which are protected, and I'm not sure whether that number includes ones that have been deleted. After writing so much, am I going to let the fact that my next entry will be #2000 keep me from participating in this endeavor that has added so much to college experience*? Hell no!!!
What is it about 2000 that makes it seem so special, anywho? The end of the year is a good time to reflect on the year, but I've still got half a month before that's really relevant. I most certainly think it would be appropriate for me to reflect back on my college experience once I've graduated (or when I'm nearing graduation, whatever makes more sense at the time), especially as up to that point EVERYTHING in this journal will have been written during my time here. Doing such a reflection now just seems really out of place and I don't think I'm ready for it. The most I should do at this point is get back to archiving memorable entries. I've been working on Spring 2005 the past day or so (as an escape from writing my paper) and it's been a rather interesting experience (unfortunately many of the insights are too personal to share). So far I'm about halfway through April.
[tangent] That leaves Summer 2005, Fall 2005, January 2006, Spring 2006, Summer 2006, and by the time I get that far it'll be time to start looking back on Fall 2006 and archiving this semester as well. I like having a bit of time between writing entries and marking them as memorable because I wouldn't write about something if I didn't think it worthwhile but with the cushion of time it's easier to pick out the entries that are really worth re-reading. [/tangent]
So, yeah. Don't get me wrong, numbers can be extremely useful. They enable us to understand the world through math and no matter how much one protests about the arbitrary measurement of time imposed by civilization the bottom line is if one is expected to be somewhere at a given time one had better make proper use of a clock or potentially suffer undesireable consequences. But I think there's a tendency in our culture to take that to an extreme, and I've offered a prime example in my behavior this past week or so. It's driving me nuts and I need it to stop.
So I'll accept some arbitrary transitions created by numbers (such as what time my shift begins or the transition of one year to the next) because 1) they affect the behavior of others who have an impact on me and 2) they signal appropriate behaviors (getting to work - and thus being paid - or reflecting on the year) that benefit me in some way. But other numbers (such as the fact that it is currently 1:39am, the 7-8 page guideline for my psych paper, and this being entry #1999) will go unheeded as they are not really all that important in the grander scheme of things and worrying about them can only cause me stress, thus having a detrimental effect on my life.
*Keeping a journal has helped me reflect on my experiences, etc. and learn so much from them that probably would have been lost without the opportunity for reflection. If you want to know what I truly learned in college, read my LJ. Ignore any academic papers ... though many of them also appear in my LJ, so I guess they've contributed to my education as well.
livejournal,
academics,
fall06,
healthy_lifestyle,
the_change,
drew,
work,
writing,
new_possibilities,
psychology