A Few Brief Comments, vol. 2

I find it difficult to stay on topic unless I have a text sitting in front of me on which I am directly commenting. As such, I have decided to revisit the format of the earliest commentary (by no means my first, which should tell you about the quality of those you are missing) -- not quite as short as the aphoristic "My Deeply Held Beliefs" commentaries, but not quite as focussed as "How To Keep a Kitchen Clean."

After I got out of conditioning fitness class, I noticed something bizarre about our civilization: before a certain age, people are required to read, study, and learn, and they can additionally take on the task of lifting heavy things as a hobby. This is completely the inverse of many previous civilizations, where learning was considered something nice for maybe a few people to have, but lifting heavy things was a staple. One could make the same kinds of observations about the hobbies of gardening and hunting.

I think that book reviewers are probably very insecure -- they are expected to produce insightful comments on entire works of literature that will likely influence people's decisions on whether to buy them. I don't know exactly how long a book reviewer usually has, but it doesn't seem like they'd get a chance to read the book more than a couple times. To make up for having only just read the book, a lot of them will attempt to portray themselves as some kind of expert on the topic at hand -- giving an occasional sidelong glance (usually critical) at the book itself while giving a nice overview of the book's subject. It's a really strange genre, but I always feel like I learn something when I read one except maybe in Newsweek or something.

How to be a critical theorist: live a life of privelege that allows you to study at great length; become convinced (through your first-hand reading of other theorists) that the System is utterly corrupt; write wonderful things about the utopia to come if everyone will just embrace your specific cocktail of Marx, Nietzshe, Heidegger, Kristeva, Levinas, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Kurt Vonnegut, Freud, and Bill Clinton; enthusiastically support extreme right-wing political causes, forcing future theorists to come up with elaborate explanations of why we should still believe your theories despite your unappealling political stances and horrific prose style; spend your stay in purgatory having your works graded by your freshman composition teacher.

Most of the time when I get home and find that I have no voice mail and no substantive e-mail messages, I'm relieved rather than annoyed. This is the maturity that develops from the freshman to the senior year of college: rather than being excessively reliant on the approval of other people for my own self-worth, I hate other people.

If I'm going to clean, I want to do literally everything: dishes, laundry, vacuuming, barhroom fixtures, dusting, mowing the lawn, etc. I think I might have the illusion that if I do a good enough job, I won't have to do it again.

A quote from one of my professors: "I think it's important to talk about sex all the time."

I read an article on Salon.com (note how I'm not taking advantage of the Web's special capabilities here) about a book that addresses the fact that a lot of people seem to think that children need to be protected from everything unseemly and that adult discourse needs to be toned down appropriately. It really helped me to crystallize my annoyance with all those "good Christians" who worry about such stupid things as Harry Potter. Characterizing natural curiosity about simple facts of life as somehow perverse or dangerous might -- might -- be worse than allowing a kid to read a scary book or see a dramatized death or witness sexual intercourse.

My method of writing a paper is to do absolutely everything other than write the paper: update my web page, do the dishes, catch up on my online discussion forums, play Super Mario Kart, do push-ups, sit and stare at the screen. It's surprisingly effective.

I think if most people were to read Freud, they would be surprised by how really conservative he is. For instance, he actually believes in the ability of science to preserve and improve human life, which is definitely not cool.

I used to make fun of my sister for listening to CDs repeatedly, but now I've really gotten into it. One weekend, I listened to Radiohead's Amnesiac on repeat literally the entire weekend, every moment that I was in my room. It's not even that good a CD, but there's something very comforting about knowing what's coming up and being sure that if you somehow miss something this time, it'll be right back. Maybe marriage is like that.

I think that when I go to graduate school, I'm going to focus on authors who are quotable and who are widely recognized by the reading public. So far, my list includes Shakespeare, Dickens, Thoreau, and Twain. I figure that will allow me to look smart and to bring the immediate authority of a "famous author" to my side of any argument, while simultaneously allowing me to avoid looking like a know-it-all: "Oh [snicker], you haven't heard of Wittgenstein [pronounced exaggeratedly "German"-like]? Sorry."

Sometimes in boring classes, I start trying to see how much of the random high school knowledge I learned by rote (foreign-language grammar, mathematics) I remember. Once I drew a triangle, labeled the sides and angles appropriately, and wrote out all the trig functions. I'm still not sure if sine is a/c or b/c or which one is b or c. In that same class, I also wrote out a multiplication table, which was surprisingly satisfying. Once I undertook to prove the quadratic formula, which by some miracle I actually remembered, but it was far beyond my abilities. I had pretty much mastered the stuff from third grade, though, so that's cool.

I think I actually hate my computer more often than not.