mindfuck.
My "math" class is messing with my head. I was planning on taking up a crack habit, but after 3 sessions of "Space: One Word, Many Concepts" I have decided it won't be necessary.
Let me preface this rant by stating the important fact that my professor is all of 5' 3", intimidatingly energetic and has this crazy accent that sounds like someone threw Mexico, Russia, Spain and Germany in a bag, shook it up and made him swallow it. Everything he says in therefore that much more entertaining. Especially when he says things like "Class....Infinity, it is...it is fucking big!".
Ok, that being said, these are more or less the thoughts I wrote down in my notebook:
When I was a kid, I remember lying on the grass, staring into the sky and thinking about the concept of nothing. What if I had not been born? Where would I be? Can one avoid being trapped on earth, or are we destined to inhabit a body and live out the natural life of our fleshy shells? Sometimes I'd do this for an hour, and think about the fact that I cannot help the fact that I am here, alive walking this planet. Not that I wished death, or even another life...just kind of a humbling thing to consider. We are here, and conscious and in a constant state of simoultaneous decay and rebirth. Kind of intense for a kid, but I guess I was always a bit pessimistic. This got me thinking, is there such thing as a soul? If so, where do they come from? I never believed in God, nor was I raised to believe in any higher power, so I imagined it as a nothingness. A big, dark, nothing. The one thing my mom planted in me very young was the idea of reincarnation. Not in the cheesy, Hollywood, someone-dies-and-a-baby-is-born kind of way, but the idea that if souls do exist, that some are older than others. That some people are wiser and more tuned in to themselves because they've been recipients of old souls. Call me a hippie, but I think it's a kind of beautiful concept. I still believe that one's personality is formed by the life they live, and their memories are all their own, our foundations are just different. Memory gets me, too. The human brain is amazing. We have the ability to catch a whiff of Jiff penut butter and suddenly be right back in kindergarten, sitting in the sandbox eating lunch. (a girl in class even told a story about her Grandma, who has althseimers(sp?), that fell and broke her hip but recovered 5 times as quickly as most people because she didn't remember she had injured herself and was consequently unafraid to use the limb in question. Maybe it's bullshit, but still kind of cool.) We remember so, so many things. Our minds are constantly taking note of even the smallest of details and cramming them into our subconscious. Some people believe that's why we dream; that our brains release some of the excess while we sleep. But what if it wasn't just memories? Imagine if within each dream we entered a different reality. That dream you had about having a fight with your friend over something you didn't do, or about getting up and going to work, even though you don't work there anymore, or spending time with an ex you are no longer with...maybe you did do all those things, just not this time around. Maybe you made different decisions that lead you to that end in another demension of your existence rather than the one you think you're in all the time...like a constant triple helix of past, present and future that we waltz in and out of. Although that might mean that a fair amount of people honestly forgot to wear clothes on the day of that big presentation..hmm. Ok. My brain hurts.
The last thing we talked about was the idea that numbers are infinite and that the number of numbers between each number is infinite. I never paid attention in math class when I was in grade school and I'm sure we learned all this then, but now I find it fascinating. Especially in the context of the class. I can't really explain how awesome the class is, you'll all just have to come to CCA and take it.
Did I mention he brought us Zachary's pizza and homemade cookies? Because he did.
Let me preface this rant by stating the important fact that my professor is all of 5' 3", intimidatingly energetic and has this crazy accent that sounds like someone threw Mexico, Russia, Spain and Germany in a bag, shook it up and made him swallow it. Everything he says in therefore that much more entertaining. Especially when he says things like "Class....Infinity, it is...it is fucking big!".
Ok, that being said, these are more or less the thoughts I wrote down in my notebook:
When I was a kid, I remember lying on the grass, staring into the sky and thinking about the concept of nothing. What if I had not been born? Where would I be? Can one avoid being trapped on earth, or are we destined to inhabit a body and live out the natural life of our fleshy shells? Sometimes I'd do this for an hour, and think about the fact that I cannot help the fact that I am here, alive walking this planet. Not that I wished death, or even another life...just kind of a humbling thing to consider. We are here, and conscious and in a constant state of simoultaneous decay and rebirth. Kind of intense for a kid, but I guess I was always a bit pessimistic. This got me thinking, is there such thing as a soul? If so, where do they come from? I never believed in God, nor was I raised to believe in any higher power, so I imagined it as a nothingness. A big, dark, nothing. The one thing my mom planted in me very young was the idea of reincarnation. Not in the cheesy, Hollywood, someone-dies-and-a-baby-is-born kind of way, but the idea that if souls do exist, that some are older than others. That some people are wiser and more tuned in to themselves because they've been recipients of old souls. Call me a hippie, but I think it's a kind of beautiful concept. I still believe that one's personality is formed by the life they live, and their memories are all their own, our foundations are just different. Memory gets me, too. The human brain is amazing. We have the ability to catch a whiff of Jiff penut butter and suddenly be right back in kindergarten, sitting in the sandbox eating lunch. (a girl in class even told a story about her Grandma, who has althseimers(sp?), that fell and broke her hip but recovered 5 times as quickly as most people because she didn't remember she had injured herself and was consequently unafraid to use the limb in question. Maybe it's bullshit, but still kind of cool.) We remember so, so many things. Our minds are constantly taking note of even the smallest of details and cramming them into our subconscious. Some people believe that's why we dream; that our brains release some of the excess while we sleep. But what if it wasn't just memories? Imagine if within each dream we entered a different reality. That dream you had about having a fight with your friend over something you didn't do, or about getting up and going to work, even though you don't work there anymore, or spending time with an ex you are no longer with...maybe you did do all those things, just not this time around. Maybe you made different decisions that lead you to that end in another demension of your existence rather than the one you think you're in all the time...like a constant triple helix of past, present and future that we waltz in and out of. Although that might mean that a fair amount of people honestly forgot to wear clothes on the day of that big presentation..hmm. Ok. My brain hurts.
The last thing we talked about was the idea that numbers are infinite and that the number of numbers between each number is infinite. I never paid attention in math class when I was in grade school and I'm sure we learned all this then, but now I find it fascinating. Especially in the context of the class. I can't really explain how awesome the class is, you'll all just have to come to CCA and take it.
Did I mention he brought us Zachary's pizza and homemade cookies? Because he did.