godream

After further perusal of the Gimmes site, it looks like they might be playing in New Jersey while my family's vacationing down there! Now to convince my mom that she wants to see them too, really...

There's nothing to do here at work, and yet I lack the guts to just leave.

*sigh*

Having surfed the web for an hour, boredom has gone beyond beginning to sink in. My brain is steeped in boredom, absorbing it at a heretofore unimagined rate. I really need to get a spine, here, and just head out. But instead, I'm wasting time checking every internet site I've ever visited for updates. I just killed five minutes trying to remember my login for collegeboard.com, for absolutely no reason. How sad is that?

One of the philosophers we read in class last year -- Hume, I want to say -- had as one of the principles of his ideas that humans share a basic empathy, that we all want to see each other do well, that (all else being equal) given the choice between an action that hurts someone and one that doesn't, people will invariably choose the latter, the kinder path.

I've got a counter-example to this concept living in my house. Lucky me.

(Unless, I guess, my brother's not human, which I've suspected for a long time.)

Spoiler warning! (for the end of Buffy. *starts sobbing (again)*)

( Read more... )

... it's alllllllll over...

Livejournal just ate two entries in a row. It told me it sent the first one, but it ate it. The second one was full of quotes from Andrzej Szczypiorski's "Self-Portrait with Woman", for illustration of the latest Authors With Style discovery. It took ages to type, and silly me I didn't cut 'n' paste to save it temporarily. As the guy next to me in programming puts it, "The computer said 'NO.'"

So, guess who's next year's Editor in Chief of the school literary magazine?

*does happy dance*

I was totally surprised to be offered the position, since this is my first year working on it, but evidently since I'm the only this-year-junior on the staff, since I understand the technology we use, and since the faculty person also happens to be my English teacher and has a high opinion of my ability... yay! I'm flattered, honored, and psyched. OK, only a little bit now, was way more on Friday when I was asked, but still. Go me! :)

Upon reflection, I've decided school would be far more interesting for all involved if textbooks were written by authors with actual style. This observation stemmed from reading Nietzsche in philosophy, and realizing it wasn't painful. Most of the authors so far -- I'm thinking Rousseau, Locke, all the way back to Aristotle -- maybe some of these folks just have terrible translators, but their writing is boring. Nietzsche wants to tick you off, he wants to make you mad, he writes like every word must be gospel truth. He asserts. I love it. "God is dead", he says, not, oh, "thus it seems the existence of some supernatural transcendental power has ceased". Or something. It's an assault of words, but not like a pummeling, more like a master fencer at work.

Then I was thinking of other authors with style. Neal Stephenson is first to jump into my mind. Scifi, so dramatically different from Nietzsche, obviously. Reading his stuff is like mental cartwheels, like your brain is going on the Superman roller coaster twelve times in a row, and at the same time like that moment when everything cancels out and suddenly the fifth degree polynomial resolves, and you can't believe someone actually thought of putting these equations together like this and at the same time are just awed by how obviously fundamentally well it works.

I think Roger Zelazny is in this category too. They want you to think he writes fantasy and scifi novels, but he doesn't. Really he writes epic poetry in paragraphs, full of brilliantly appropriate obscure offhand allusions, deep meaningful insights, and absurd but perfectly sensible in context sentences like, "Then the fit hit the Shan."

And yet -- with these exhibits A, B, and C -- I can't define what I think literary Style, capital S as well deserved, is. An indescribable way with words. A complete mastery of the language as a tool and/or as a toy. But that -- man, if I could ever have that, ever achieve that -- that's what I think is Real Writing. There are tons of excellent authors, well worth reading, who lack this. I could write a list pages long offhand. There are authors who have it sometimes (IMHO, in order of most-often down, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and Laurell Hamilton fall here). It isn't necessary to have it to write something good. But I think it's this Style that could make any textbook -- devoid of plot, characterization, and atmosphere -- well worth reading for its own sake, its literary merit alone.

Ramble over. I should probably go do homework now.

And I mean really slept here, not counting those airplane naps, so since Saturday night -- since then, let me hit some of the high points of what's been happening, in more or less chronological order.

- Lost one of my favorite necklaces in a hotel room. This upsets me.
- Saw the amazing redwood forests of California.
- Received with the rest of the robotics team an award for last year's bot.
- Failed to receive anything for this year's bot, unsurprisingly. We had fun in spite of the robot's dismal failure though...
- Embarrassed one of the team members with a group hug in a random Chinese restaurant in San Francisco.
- Got asked to prom by the school genius, who's also a really nice guy. I hadn't been planning to go -- dances are completely not my thing -- but he asked, and I figured 'why not?' I mean, besides the fact that I can't dance and don't know anything about the rituals revolving around the prom and am antisocial by nature and am not usually too fond of the music and in a moment I'm going to get myself into a big stress fit over this event which should be a good thing so I'm stopping now.
- Flew across the continental US.
- Went to class, lit mag meeting, work, home.
- And now I have homework and essay revisions to do before school tomorrow, so I'd better get going to do that and then (finally!) get some sleep. Night, all!

so long as i sing with inflection
that makes you feel that I'll convey
some inner truth or vast reflection
but i've said nothing so far
and i can keep it up for as long as it takes ( more lyrics... )

There, see, that burst of song made me feel better, as bursts of song often do. Not much, but better. I love singing, I love playing, I love music -- yet this evening's rehearsal only made me feel bad, despite the mood jolt music gives me. I have concluded that this is because I hate people. *sigh* Unfortunately I include myself in that -- I made a bunch of stupid mistakes I shouldn't have, but nor should I beat myself up over them, that's also a mistake, and I don't think I even have to point out the circle here so I won't. Plus I'm pretty sure that once again I have all the fun and games of PMS to magnify all of this to ridiculous proportions...

On the plus side, when my stepmom showed up to pick me up after work to go to rehearsal, she brought me dinner, which made me very happy 'cause I skipped break and didn't get random baked goodies then, and I was starrrrving. Also I finally celebrated my birthday, and recieved an electric guitar (!!!) so I will now bask in the joy of acquisition.

...

OK, basking done. Guess I should think about the AIME tomorrow morning, my big paper due Wednesday in philosophy, how I did on today's test on same, everything I have to do before battlebots next week, all that good stuff... ack. :/

Is there anyone out there who would like an extra helping of stress? Because my cup runneth over and I'm really more than willing to share.

I am now off to read Kate Elliot's Jaran instead of thinking about the myriad range of homework I have to do; good night!

We lost, and it was at the very least partially my fault. I don't wanna assign percentages of blame cause that would be bitter and depressing and bring the cynicism in this journal to possibly heretofore unimagined heights, and we can't have that.

The annoying thing about losing: The judges evidently had a list of points they wanted to hear, and so far as I could tell this was the key to winning. Not whether you argued well and creatively -- heck, creativity would be a bad thing under the circumstances -- but whether you guessed what the judges wanted to hear. *sigh*

The bizarre and slightly amusing thing: In my little piece, I started off relating the beginning of the tale of the seven blind men and the elephant. You know, they come upon this elephant in the jungle, and one touches its ear and says oh, it's a blanket and one touches its leg and says aha, a tree and one runs into its side and says must be a wall and one gets its tail and says hm, a piece of string and so on and so forth. This, I announced, was an example of how one's senses can be deceiving, and building philosophy and a code of ethics upon them therefore a bad idea. Then the other team asked ok, what would Kant, Mr. Reason, say? And I floundered and flustered and screwed up, and finally said ummmmm... well reason can't tell them either, the blind men are kinda screwed. Which was right, except that I failed to relate the reasoning behind it: that according to Kant neither the blind men nor anyone else can know for sure what that elephant is, because like everyone they lack access to the noumenal world, the real world, being limited to the phenomenal world that we percieve through our senses.

Anyways. The point is: although that wasn't all I said, evidently it stuck. It was the ONLY example from the formal debate that the judges mentioned in their explanation. It was the ONLY example they mentioned when telling us how we failed to make the points they were listening for. Possibly it was the ONLY example they heard.

I think there's a lesson in here, but I'm not quite sure. I think it might have something important to do with philosophy and the real meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Or possibly merely with the fickleness of teenagers. :P Ah well. At least, given this day or two of separation from the verdict, I can smirk at it, if not outright laugh yet.