aspirations.

One day, I hope I will be able to write like this:

"The long miseries and vanquished heroics of Troy inspired the world for millennia, though there is not much in the tale to offer comfort except the spectacle of futility on an epic scale. I am not sure we have at the moment any notion of comfort in that sense, of feeling burdens which come with being human in the world lifted by compassionate imagination. Our always greater eagerness to describe ourselves as sufferers makes us always less willing to identify with suffering as a fact of human life...This being human -- people have loved it through plague and famine and siege. And Dante, who knew the world about suffering, had a place in hell for people who were grave when they might have rejoiced." > Marilynne Robinson, "Facing Reality"

zeitfreude.

Grad school, I've decided, is one long subject convergence continuum. I've written about this before; about how there are constant strange subject convergences that occur again and again, somehow randomly and yet unsurprisingly. Case in point: a couple weeks ago during my office hours I had a long discussion with an undergrad and and my fellow TA about Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt. Neither of them had read Schmitt, and I was attempting to (badly) summarize The Concept of the Political and how it may (or may not) relate to Arendt. This was, by the way, the first time anyone has mentioned Schmitt since I started classes here.

Within the next week, in three separate classes, three different professors mentioned Schmitt and Arendt in the same sentence. Not exactly earth shattering; talking about Arendt and Schmitt in a political theory class is hardly off-topic, after all. It's not like all my professors suddenly became obsessed with Britney Spears, or the best way to clarify butter. But still, Arendt and Schmitt just happened to come up, in totally organic ways that had nothing to do with me. It was awesome; like I had somehow introduced the topic into the political theory universe, and it started to bounce around and into other people's brains and conversations, only to get repeated back to me within days. Totally ridiculous, I know, but...fun to imagine.

I mentioned to one of my fellow grad students that I think there should be a word for this kind of thing (prefereably some German noun that would be both fun to say and randomly capitalized, like Schadenfreude or Zeitgeist) and not only did he look at my like I was possibly insane, but he suggested that the word "coincidence" already had that covered. Coincidence! A coincidence is when you run into someone you know in the street, or you happen to own the same pair of shoes as the person sitting next to you; what I'm describing is academically cosmic. I don't think he quite got my point, though. And, unfortunately, I don't speak German, so someone else will have to come up with the appropriate word. I bet Arendt and Schmitt would know.

old schoooool.

I Wish Undergrads Would Learn How to BE QUIET in the Library, Mix #4.

(And in honor of undergrads, all the songs on this list were songs I loved in college. MAJOR FLASHBACK. Also, the songs are arranged in rough chronological order, according to when I started listening to them. And, yes, yes, I should actually be writing a paper right now. Whatever.)

1. El Scorcho - Weezer
2. Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk (Reprise) - Rufus Wainwright
3. As Is - Ani DiFranco
4. Take Me Anywhere - Tegan and Sara
5. The Past and Pending - The Shins
6. Us - Regina Spektor
7. Such Great Heights - Postal Service
8. July, July - The Decembrists
9. Jesus, Etc - Wilco
10. With Arms Outstretched - Rilo Kiley
11. I'm A Cuckoo - Belle & Sebastian
12. Like Eating Glass - Bloc Party
13. Lloyd, I'm Ready to be Heartbroken - Camera Obscura
14. The Funeral - Band of Horses

my brain, a strange place.

I went to the symphony last night, and instead of actually listening to the Beethoven and Bartok being played, I thought about Hobbes' materialist philosophy. In my defense, I had spent several hours reading Hobbes, and thinking about how everything we do is merely a series of reactions to the physical world. So, as the older gentleman on my right dozed off, I tried to picture what sound waves look like, and how we hear them, and the amount of pleasure we derive from the experience. I considered explaining all this to the friends I was with, but then I realized that nobody actually wants to think about this stuff. Except me, maybe.

And if I actually derive pleasure from being in grad school (which is not necessarily the case) what would Hobbes say about that? I think he would say that I'm still living in the state of nature, and my passions are definitely not consistent with natural law.

Oy.

an open letter to a very dead philosopher.

Dear Aristotle,

Why do you keep insisting that things are "evident," "clear," and "obvious"? No, it is not clear to me that "the law is impartiality," nor is it exactly evident how "the virtue of the good man and the good citizen is the same or different"! It may be obvious to you, Aristotle, that happiness is the same for an individual and a city, but some of us are still a wee bit unsure on that particular point.

Seriously, Aristotle, if anything was at all obvious, clear, or evident about your work, do you really think I would be reading it 2,300 years later? Do YOU? Yeah, I thought not. Now quit trying to make me feel dumb.

My deepest, most sincere philia,

Julia

the good, the bad.

The good news: Lockers at the library here are opened with keys, instead of combinations. My brain is very thankful that it has one less thing to remember.

The bad news: Lockers here are the size of a shoe box. A shoe box that only fits flats. So I guess this means I can't store my gym clothes in my library locker anymore.

More good news: I am finally reading the Nicomachean Ethics, Calvin, and Luther. Turns out that grad school might actually make me smarter! Useful!

More bad news: The City of God has come up approximately seven zillion times in the last three days. My adamant refusal to read Augustine in college is really coming back to bite me in the ass. If only the damn book wasn't so long.

mind vomit.

Grad school makes brain mush. But here are some thoughts:

1. 97.6% of the undergraduate student body here wears flip-flops and JCrew, simultaneously. And roughly 88% of the female undergraduate population carries a Longchamp bag in brown or black. (I also have a feeling that irony is not widely understood here.) My question is: Who are these pod-people, and what should I do with them?

2. I am not smarter than I was as a senior in college, and yet as a grad student I think people expect me to be smarter than seniors in college. This is problematic.

3. I need to find a 4th class that won't make my brain explode. PhySci is, sadly, no longer an option.

4. Junior mints: brain food or poison?