I have no idea what I'm doing here
1. props to emily for mentioning g!ybe on her lj, because i'd forgotten about them and have rediscovered them and this kind of layered building-up music (aside from being incredible and uplifting and having this oddly religious wonderful visual sense to it) is actually improving my attention span to read and generally distracting me from my other thinking in the best way possible.
2. i've started to develop this conception of people as fitting a few very general and overlapping types thats basically rooted in neurology...like, visual, philosophical, whatever. thats not the important part. the important part is that i think it appeals to me because its tangible(ish)..and bothers me because its a bit resigned or defeatist or determinist or what have you. mostly i'm just trying to figure out which of my thoughts i should be lending credence to (isn't that an odd phrase?) and which I should be dismissive of. sure, the occassional odd thought is interesting, but to entertain it to the point where it has legitimacy and influences the way one thinks just because you thought about it too much? eh. that could be bad.
3. I guess in general i have difficulty distinguishing between what's real in my head and what i've manifested in my head, and then I try to think about it and get confused trying to figure out if there's any difference in all (and i don't mean hallucinations, i mean introspection and self-perception and whatnot).
4. I guess I feel like I'm intellectually changing a lot - its a bit arrogant, but I feel like with almost anything I approach these days, I have a much better sense of understanding than I ever did before. By that I mean, whereas in the past I would've compartmentalized the thing I was looking at/considering, and understood it in terms of itself, I'm getting better at relating things and forming more general ideas. Meanwhile, I'm trying not to buy into these shroomy notions of all-unifying oneness...because I think that whole postmodern/PCliberal impulse to see uniqueness and incomparability/incommensurability in everything is a bit overblown, but to some extent, true. All the same, I'm pretty sure breaking things into successively more general chunks and categories is a natural human mechanism for understanding things, and if we didn't do it, we'd be in childlike paralysis and inability to deal with anything more complex than the answer-back questions on Blue's Clues.
5. I wonder how many of my revelations/realization of the past year have been genuine. I don't pretend they are unique and I'm any kind of great philosopher - in fact, for that reason, I question it. I assume that the procedures and experiences of life mean that everybody sets up some kind of system of understanding thats a bit more concious like the one I feel I might be arriving towards/developing/refining. Its just that my elitist education has given me some intellectual jargon (has it?) to couch it in (or at least an intellectual framework to legitimize something thats otherwise annoyingly intangible and difficult to articulate).
6. Of course, maybe I'm just a philosopher type of brain. I mean, I'm an anxious person. I always have a layer of thought going on above whatever it is that I'm doing, wondering why I'm doing it, what it is, etc. I have a lot of trouble mentally disengaging from things. The worse is when I realize that I'm doing that, I toss another layer on top of thinking about why I'm thinking and why I can't disengage from overanalysis/unnecessary analysis...which ultimately distracts me from the task at hand. Maybe I prefer to call myself a philosophy type person because its a whole lot more comforting than being an anxious person. Of course, its good to indulge in philosophy, and bad to indulge in anxiety.
7. I wouldn't have used the label philosophertype until I started reading Sartre's Age of Reason a few days ago. I'm not even halfway through, so I won't pretend to understand existentialism (in fact, my inability to understand most types of philosophy from actual philosophers leads me to think I'm not actually a philosophyminded person)...but the protagonist can't disengage reasoning and consideration from the things he does which apparently is 'sterilizing' life for him. For him its a pursuit of freedom....that's way too abstract for me.
I think my main mental pathology is a pursuit of understanding, because I've been raised / I've become arrogant enough to presume I could ever understand everything.
I bought a 700pg history of anarchism. I think after a few years of learning more and more about concrete events and economic theory, I de-radicalized...probably out of what started as an attempt to understand the enemy. Now, I think (since I always did split my politics into the categories of utopian and near-term pragmatic), I'm ready to go back to more radical thinking. If nothing else, pragmatism is a lack of ambitious ideals.
Last night I was sitting on our covered porch on cromwell rd, across from the museum, around midnight. It was pouring rain and I was reading my book under the light from streetlamps and the general night-time glow that permeates busy cities. I could barely read...I was distracted by the scene of it all. Not the noise of the cars, just the unlikeliness of the picture, and how I somehow didn't belong there, and needed to take advantage of everything. I already feel like I will miss London when I leave. I'm worried its my chance to understand/be/do/see something greater, and I'll probably miss the boat.
But shit like that never happens when you wait for it or try to make it.
2. i've started to develop this conception of people as fitting a few very general and overlapping types thats basically rooted in neurology...like, visual, philosophical, whatever. thats not the important part. the important part is that i think it appeals to me because its tangible(ish)..and bothers me because its a bit resigned or defeatist or determinist or what have you. mostly i'm just trying to figure out which of my thoughts i should be lending credence to (isn't that an odd phrase?) and which I should be dismissive of. sure, the occassional odd thought is interesting, but to entertain it to the point where it has legitimacy and influences the way one thinks just because you thought about it too much? eh. that could be bad.
3. I guess in general i have difficulty distinguishing between what's real in my head and what i've manifested in my head, and then I try to think about it and get confused trying to figure out if there's any difference in all (and i don't mean hallucinations, i mean introspection and self-perception and whatnot).
4. I guess I feel like I'm intellectually changing a lot - its a bit arrogant, but I feel like with almost anything I approach these days, I have a much better sense of understanding than I ever did before. By that I mean, whereas in the past I would've compartmentalized the thing I was looking at/considering, and understood it in terms of itself, I'm getting better at relating things and forming more general ideas. Meanwhile, I'm trying not to buy into these shroomy notions of all-unifying oneness...because I think that whole postmodern/PCliberal impulse to see uniqueness and incomparability/incommensurability in everything is a bit overblown, but to some extent, true. All the same, I'm pretty sure breaking things into successively more general chunks and categories is a natural human mechanism for understanding things, and if we didn't do it, we'd be in childlike paralysis and inability to deal with anything more complex than the answer-back questions on Blue's Clues.
5. I wonder how many of my revelations/realization of the past year have been genuine. I don't pretend they are unique and I'm any kind of great philosopher - in fact, for that reason, I question it. I assume that the procedures and experiences of life mean that everybody sets up some kind of system of understanding thats a bit more concious like the one I feel I might be arriving towards/developing/refining. Its just that my elitist education has given me some intellectual jargon (has it?) to couch it in (or at least an intellectual framework to legitimize something thats otherwise annoyingly intangible and difficult to articulate).
6. Of course, maybe I'm just a philosopher type of brain. I mean, I'm an anxious person. I always have a layer of thought going on above whatever it is that I'm doing, wondering why I'm doing it, what it is, etc. I have a lot of trouble mentally disengaging from things. The worse is when I realize that I'm doing that, I toss another layer on top of thinking about why I'm thinking and why I can't disengage from overanalysis/unnecessary analysis...which ultimately distracts me from the task at hand. Maybe I prefer to call myself a philosophy type person because its a whole lot more comforting than being an anxious person. Of course, its good to indulge in philosophy, and bad to indulge in anxiety.
7. I wouldn't have used the label philosophertype until I started reading Sartre's Age of Reason a few days ago. I'm not even halfway through, so I won't pretend to understand existentialism (in fact, my inability to understand most types of philosophy from actual philosophers leads me to think I'm not actually a philosophyminded person)...but the protagonist can't disengage reasoning and consideration from the things he does which apparently is 'sterilizing' life for him. For him its a pursuit of freedom....that's way too abstract for me.
I think my main mental pathology is a pursuit of understanding, because I've been raised / I've become arrogant enough to presume I could ever understand everything.
I bought a 700pg history of anarchism. I think after a few years of learning more and more about concrete events and economic theory, I de-radicalized...probably out of what started as an attempt to understand the enemy. Now, I think (since I always did split my politics into the categories of utopian and near-term pragmatic), I'm ready to go back to more radical thinking. If nothing else, pragmatism is a lack of ambitious ideals.
Last night I was sitting on our covered porch on cromwell rd, across from the museum, around midnight. It was pouring rain and I was reading my book under the light from streetlamps and the general night-time glow that permeates busy cities. I could barely read...I was distracted by the scene of it all. Not the noise of the cars, just the unlikeliness of the picture, and how I somehow didn't belong there, and needed to take advantage of everything. I already feel like I will miss London when I leave. I'm worried its my chance to understand/be/do/see something greater, and I'll probably miss the boat.
But shit like that never happens when you wait for it or try to make it.