| Oh yeah, baby. I'm on fire lately. In the senses of:
- overheating
- burning
- being in questionable amount of control of myself
- being visibly in such a state, to the widely varied reactions of those around me
- affecting my environment by shedding large amounts of energy into it
- dependent on fuel
...I need some coffee to get over this hangover. | comments: Leave a comment   |
| | Security: | | | Subject: | Success | | Time: | 12:05 am |
|
| Grad school feels like this constant process of evolution. Molting this old skin, bursting that bubble, finding myself pitted against myself only to burst the dams suddenly. Every day feels like a life-changing day.
Earlier this evening I was at a point of hating who I was. Then I went and had dinner with some friends. Now I feel like I am exactly who I want to be.
What's strange is that I don't feel like this is just a change of mood. It's as if in the course of a day I learned enough to condemn myself and then learned a way out of the problem, because everyone I talk to during a day is one some kind of life quest and we're all negotiating it together.
Life is great. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| One interesting effect of I'm guessing the therapy but maybe maturity or the low-stress environment is that I'm getting much better at feeling and expressing emotions.
It turns out that I'm a very emotional person. There have been times in my life when this has not be apparent to me, but those times have been very silly. They tend to have involved a lot of time spent fantasizing about things in either an escapist or deluded way.
I'm more likely lately to, for example, think about somebody and feel a pain in my chest, and slow down a bit. I'm sad. I miss the person. I regret things. It passes, and I move on.
I'm also more likely to speak up when I'm angry and then be over it, rather than stewing about it and then blowing up. I can laugh heartily when I find something funny, rather than giggle maniacally or do any other wide range of odd laughs I've gone through in life.
It's a bit embarrassing writing this out; I imagine that it's awkward reading it.
I saw a lecture by George Lakoff the other day. It was objectionable in a lot of ways, but one of the few good parts of it was the part where he mentioned research about how important emotions are to reasoning. I think I grew up being told or learning or believing that reacting to something emotionally meant that you weren't reacting to something intelligently. Pure reason is detached and logical, Spock-like, and all that. And being in cultural milieu's that prized intellectual power kept me burying a lot of stuff.
That was, in retrospect, a weird way of going about things, especially if you're an intrinsically passionate person. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| I've been taking a lot of naps lately.
I've been telling myself that they are therapeutic. I get to daydream, think about things, emote. A lot of times I think about the past and come to terms with it. Other times I find out new things about myself by looking at things at different, challenging angles. Sometimes I drift to sleep and dream.
It is very lazy but also very rewarding and cheaper than any other form of entertainment I can think of. It reminds me of my father and of my own childhood.
One strange thing that happens when I do this is that very often, when I have a new insight into something, I will involuntarily twitch in the neck. I've always had a bit of a tick but I had never been able to pinpoint its cause. Now, it seems to happen almost exclusively when I've figured out something new and surprising. Often, the discovery is subtle, but the presence of the tick is a signal to go back and explore what it was that I was just thinking about.
The other thing that happens, which I have come to realize is characteristic of how I think about things, is that sometimes when I come to a sort of visual or geometric solution to a problem, my motor system will kick in and I will suddenly move in the way that is the solution. It's like I'm dancing out the problem, in a tiny way.
My grandmother on my father's side was synesthetic, I've been told. Noises would look like colors to her. She would occasionally talk about how a sound was brown or mauve, but mostly didn't mention it because nobody knew what she was talking about. I think I may be mildly synesthetic as well, but with some connection between abstraction conception and the motor system. Does that count as synesthesia?
I used to have what I thought were pretty good theories about causality and its connection to embodiment. I thought that our understanding of causality was due to the affordances of objects, and so an interventionist theory of causality could be derived in a more or less foundationalist way from our phenomenological experience. In other words, the ready-at-hand was sufficient ground for our understanding of causation.
But maybe that theory, which don't think I ever convinced anybody of ever, was just based on peculiarities of my psychology. Maybe it's true that for me, causation is grounded in motion, because for me, those aspects of reality are linked. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Now I'm in Berkeley, CA. On Thursday I will move into a new residence. I will be a graduate student!
Questions:
- At this point in my life, my unaccountable, pseudointellectual ramblings are going to have to being legitimate, intellectual ones. I will also want to take personal credit for them. LJ is not an appropriate forum for this sort of thing. What is?
- I am actively trying to figure out ways to keep bouncing ideas off the smart people I've met on LJ but don't really want to keep using this medium.
- On the other hand, what about things that are really just notes and not well-formed enough to 'publish', even informally? Should the venue for those be different from the venue for better formed essays? | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=91.7){kind=small}
paulhope's journal