I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so
What I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me — that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter — except to show how very dull we are ...
September 17, 2011 - 12:10 p.m.
I slept late today so now I'm getting a late start writing. I'm glad I did sleep late. I haven't been able to do that in while. I'd wake up after 6 hours and not be able to fall back asleep then I'm tired at some points during the day.
I stayed home last night so I'd have a day of rest and prepare French toast bread pudding. I rested, too much, I didn't make the pudding. I hate when I do that. Now I have to do it today before I go out.
After class I have office hours on Friday. Nobody came including the student who told me he'd come. I'm not surprised. Did I used the time to get ahead in my preparation? Of course not. I was on the phone with Bad Carey most of the time. I'm seeing him today but we got obsessed with nostalgia. I can't tell you what we talked about because I'll never admit that we used to watch Glow, Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling and I would never get excited reading the Wikipedia article on it. Nope, didn't happen. We got nostalgic for our conversations on transcendental philosophy. Yes that's it. Emerson. We were reading all about Emerson.
I spent a few hours last night playing on Turntable.fm with Carey. We had serious discussions that I can discuss like who is sexier, Perry the Platypus or Morey Amsterdam. I'd like to hear your opinion on that important issue. Perry is the new standard of sexy.
I spent a lot of time last night working around problems caused by the new Facebook lists. Facebook thinks it knows how I want to organize my friends better than I do. It created lists that you can't delete that I have no use for and made my own lists less accessible. It then made it impossible to use my lists as a basis for sending invitations, lists I created for just that purpose.
Wait, I don't want to write about Facebook, I want to write about me. I actually just cut out over 400 words I wrote about Facebook. I'll save that for another time.
I was sitting around analyzing what makes me romantically interested in women. What are the qualities that create the feeling? There is physical attraction of course. The list of things I find attractive seems very ad hoc and disconnected. I'm attracted to women that have almost nothing in common with each other but there are some things I'll always find attractive.
That's not what I was thinking about though. It's more about their personalities. I compared different women I liked and the different feelings they create in me. Some, actually most, are qualities that I appreciate in all friends, not just ones I have a romantic interest in.
But that's not what I wanted to talk about either. That's gets too personal even for me to write about. No what that led me to think about was that I analyze everything. It's not enough for me to feel attraction, I want to know why. I simply find the whys and wherefores fascinating. It's why I love Sabermetrics, the scientific study of baseball. I love being able to quantify a player's contribution. Of course I don't just accept the metrics created just because there is a formula. I find defensive stats highly dubious. They are useful but give the illusion of more accuracy than they have.
I analyze everything around me. It's why I invented the "closeness index" to measure how much one person's social network overlaps with another's. We all have that feeling of domains in our social life. I try to figure out who is in which domain and how close our worlds are too each other.
I try to figure out what like about music, art, literature and drama. It isn't enough for me to say, that's pretty. I want to know why it makes me feel the way I do.
I work at avoiding the trap of liking something because it meets some theoretical criteria. That's putting the cart before the horse. It's about deciding why I like something not if I like something. For instance, last night I was listening to Deni Bonet's cover of Please Please Me. It's wonderful. She reimagines it as Gypsy Swing. That's one of the things I love in a cover, making you hear the song differently. Now that doesn't mean that every cover that does that is good.
This desire to analyze has always been with me and set my career path. I always wanted to be a scientist or mathematician. I analyzed why. It's because I love to analyze.
I signed the Pro-Truth Pledge:
please hold me accountable.
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Horvendile September 17, 2011
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