where is: - my navigation - where is it
Back in the TA room of the CIT drinking crappy tea again. Writing this is a form of escapism and is symptomatic of a general condition that I've had for the past week and some more. I think my autopilot has gotten out of kilter. I'm behind on work--way behind--but haven't been able to shake myself into doing anything much about it. At every given moment I'm doing what feels natural to me, but instead of this creating a steady stream of productivity from me, it's just been leaving puddles all over the place. They are great for the fascinating cultivation of microscopic and insectile ecosystems, of course (see mention of Spore, below). But not so great for putting out the fires that are being lit, one by one, under my ass.
Zach and Piotr, with a small entourage, came to visit Friday night, and it was grand. Saturday afternoon Piotr was saying something apologetic about it on the phone which I couldn't hear, since there was a lot of noise on his end. But I thought that in a way its non-epicness was kind of encouraging. It was casual and short because, maybe, there wasn't much distance to be cleared. Just old times. No big deal. Piotr also went to sleep earlier than Zach and I, who kept the conversation going for a while. For some reason we got onto the topic of academic methodologies, which Katie has made me self-conscious about being too obsessed with. Zach put up a good fight for the problems of applying quantitative scientific modeling, or, as he put it, "pseudo-math," in the social sciences (Government, in particular), as opposed to the value of case studies, which is why, he says, he switched to being a History major. More power to him, I think now. History seems to be sufficiently free of bull to me, and yes, the way he presented it, quantitative modeling of some of the social sciences is a bit silly. One day, we may get far enough to do it well. But for now.... (However, I'm not going to discount Zach's general persuasiveness here. If I try to factor this out, I might be less (but still reasonably) willing to bite? I dunno.)
Anyway, the things that are of most interest to me these days are of no on-paper-official short or medium term practical value. Instead, my head is either in the clouds or focused on people, the latter which would mark a significant personality shift from more productive, task-oriented days. I'm not objecting, except that I'm starting to worry about the efficacy of my autopilot (see figure 1)
At some point, out of either sympathy with or rejection of some Eastern philosophy I read last year in that crazy class, I started to cultivate an attitude of deliberate unreflectiveness--letting action simply flow from me without inquiring as to its cause or motivation. Even writing this, although maybe a projection of an inner monologue, is not being produced (except in the rare moment) consciously--do you understand? Well, actually--now I am attending to this. But.... There have been many times in the past few months when I've attempted, when going from here to there, to attend to myself in what the mystic fringe here might call a 'contemplative' way, but found myself eschewing myself; found myself with too many other things of interest. Cognition not just embodied, but intensional (with an 's')--unswervingly about other things. There was an exception to this on a bright day when I was walking downtown through Providence, and it felt enlightening to enter that alternative state (was it really an alternative state? Am I just tricking myself into believing that that was the sort of self-attentiveness that gets glorified so much by these people? And why do I care? (Because my secret aesthetic tastes are, despite all my rational impulses, for the solemn and mystical--like the Rachmaninoff Katie sang at her concert; because despite the robustness of pragmatics and the richness of this real and fluid earth I'll admit I sometimes yearn for something either celestial and transcendent or chthonic and essential--it doesn't matter which in the end, although the two have very different flavors (or would if they existed?) (on a completely unrelated note, check out this video clip, advertising Spore, a game being made by Will Wright, who made all the Sim games, whose concept is about the most ambitious ever and which might very possibly fail to be anything noteworthy because of it, like Black and White--how did I get on this topic? I don't remember? How many parentheses have I nested here? I forget. Christ. See what I was saying about my auto-pilot no longer being able to manage these things? It's like its calendar broke. I'll try to salvage this. I'll close the parentheses, then change the subject to the other things I was going to say, then close, because this is getting ridiculous. Time to count: 1,2,3...just 3: )))
Noteworthy things I've done in the past week: Talks with the enthusiastic freshman who runs Democracy Matters (I don't know what to call him here) about political theory, which is a nice refresher since I've been lost in epistemology land for a while; talking with Alan 50's (remember him?) about one of his areas of interest, Zhungzi, the founder of Daoism, who I like much more now (than before, when I would have been happy to dismiss him, out of ignorance) because he seems to be nihilistic in all the right ways (although without quite the reinvigorating reformulations of what-needs-to-be-reformulated to make life meaningful again--this is a side project which I'm still pretty serious about, despite its pretentiousness (sorry!), because...well...it's important, right? Anyway, this is why I keep arguing with the Kantians, even though they are very rude); today I went to a Unitarian Universalist 'worship'(? Can it be called that?) meeting to tell them about RI's clean elections legislation and held my tongue when they got to items of doctrine (which I'm still not down with: on the one hand, the meeting was centered around a discussion of the UU Principles although I was told afterwards that this is unusual), but there seemed to be an extreme reluctance to define the terms in the principles, which looked to me like a clinging to a text without any commitments whatsoever to its interpretation, which I still can't fathom...)...
I lost track of what I'm saying again. All of this is distraction from things I'm supposed to, must get done (spring break plane ticket purchasing, resume altering, applying for jobs, working on major, untouched projects due this week, finishing a very late short story, oh god, oh god, oh god....
Zach and Piotr, with a small entourage, came to visit Friday night, and it was grand. Saturday afternoon Piotr was saying something apologetic about it on the phone which I couldn't hear, since there was a lot of noise on his end. But I thought that in a way its non-epicness was kind of encouraging. It was casual and short because, maybe, there wasn't much distance to be cleared. Just old times. No big deal. Piotr also went to sleep earlier than Zach and I, who kept the conversation going for a while. For some reason we got onto the topic of academic methodologies, which Katie has made me self-conscious about being too obsessed with. Zach put up a good fight for the problems of applying quantitative scientific modeling, or, as he put it, "pseudo-math," in the social sciences (Government, in particular), as opposed to the value of case studies, which is why, he says, he switched to being a History major. More power to him, I think now. History seems to be sufficiently free of bull to me, and yes, the way he presented it, quantitative modeling of some of the social sciences is a bit silly. One day, we may get far enough to do it well. But for now.... (However, I'm not going to discount Zach's general persuasiveness here. If I try to factor this out, I might be less (but still reasonably) willing to bite? I dunno.)
Anyway, the things that are of most interest to me these days are of no on-paper-official short or medium term practical value. Instead, my head is either in the clouds or focused on people, the latter which would mark a significant personality shift from more productive, task-oriented days. I'm not objecting, except that I'm starting to worry about the efficacy of my autopilot (see figure 1)
At some point, out of either sympathy with or rejection of some Eastern philosophy I read last year in that crazy class, I started to cultivate an attitude of deliberate unreflectiveness--letting action simply flow from me without inquiring as to its cause or motivation. Even writing this, although maybe a projection of an inner monologue, is not being produced (except in the rare moment) consciously--do you understand? Well, actually--now I am attending to this. But.... There have been many times in the past few months when I've attempted, when going from here to there, to attend to myself in what the mystic fringe here might call a 'contemplative' way, but found myself eschewing myself; found myself with too many other things of interest. Cognition not just embodied, but intensional (with an 's')--unswervingly about other things. There was an exception to this on a bright day when I was walking downtown through Providence, and it felt enlightening to enter that alternative state (was it really an alternative state? Am I just tricking myself into believing that that was the sort of self-attentiveness that gets glorified so much by these people? And why do I care? (Because my secret aesthetic tastes are, despite all my rational impulses, for the solemn and mystical--like the Rachmaninoff Katie sang at her concert; because despite the robustness of pragmatics and the richness of this real and fluid earth I'll admit I sometimes yearn for something either celestial and transcendent or chthonic and essential--it doesn't matter which in the end, although the two have very different flavors (or would if they existed?) (on a completely unrelated note, check out this video clip, advertising Spore, a game being made by Will Wright, who made all the Sim games, whose concept is about the most ambitious ever and which might very possibly fail to be anything noteworthy because of it, like Black and White--how did I get on this topic? I don't remember? How many parentheses have I nested here? I forget. Christ. See what I was saying about my auto-pilot no longer being able to manage these things? It's like its calendar broke. I'll try to salvage this. I'll close the parentheses, then change the subject to the other things I was going to say, then close, because this is getting ridiculous. Time to count: 1,2,3...just 3: )))
Noteworthy things I've done in the past week: Talks with the enthusiastic freshman who runs Democracy Matters (I don't know what to call him here) about political theory, which is a nice refresher since I've been lost in epistemology land for a while; talking with Alan 50's (remember him?) about one of his areas of interest, Zhungzi, the founder of Daoism, who I like much more now (than before, when I would have been happy to dismiss him, out of ignorance) because he seems to be nihilistic in all the right ways (although without quite the reinvigorating reformulations of what-needs-to-be-reformulated to make life meaningful again--this is a side project which I'm still pretty serious about, despite its pretentiousness (sorry!), because...well...it's important, right? Anyway, this is why I keep arguing with the Kantians, even though they are very rude); today I went to a Unitarian Universalist 'worship'(? Can it be called that?) meeting to tell them about RI's clean elections legislation and held my tongue when they got to items of doctrine (which I'm still not down with: on the one hand, the meeting was centered around a discussion of the UU Principles although I was told afterwards that this is unusual), but there seemed to be an extreme reluctance to define the terms in the principles, which looked to me like a clinging to a text without any commitments whatsoever to its interpretation, which I still can't fathom...)...
I lost track of what I'm saying again. All of this is distraction from things I'm supposed to, must get done (spring break plane ticket purchasing, resume altering, applying for jobs, working on major, untouched projects due this week, finishing a very late short story, oh god, oh god, oh god....