I think the law of diminishing marginal returns is starting to kick in -- the more hours I'm sticking into studying for this "optional" econ midterm, the less I'm getting out of it. It's probably less me and more than the extremely detailed example they used to teach Chapter 6 involves the fascinating world of bottle manufacturing. They don't even tell us what they're bottling. How are we supposed to get excited about the prospect of producing wealth and the sexy lifestyle of the stock and bond brokerage if we don't even know what we're bottling? The Warren Buffet School of Investing taught me that much, which really does tell you a lot about the Oracle of Omaha because the only quotations of his I know were stuck on our fridge at home by my mother. Now that's disturbing. What's even more disturbing must be the slightly dirty feeling I get creeping under my skin, because I know Carl Marx must be spinning in his grave (and on that figure of speech -- it's probably getting used so much that we could solve the world's energy problems by harnessing these rotating coffins to turbines, but I digress) at how we alienate the means and product of consumption.
Marisa and Calvin asked me today what we study in English, and the only answer I could genuinely give was that we talked a lot about what's wrong with our world and why people were so angry all the time. It sounds like something out of psych or poli sci, and I had to try to frame the entire department in this hokey cross between a moral conduct think-tank and activist training camp. The 'English' label doesn't help much either. I'm thankful English has moved beyond canonical literature -- and literature, period -- and lets me do great stuff like watch Buffy episodes in the name of cultural research, but it's slightly depressing when you listen to perspectives on the world's messed-up-ness without any well-timed breaks for constructive comments. Everyone seems to have forgotten the idea of the happy fiction, for one thing. I'm thinking about doing a paper on what a hermeneutic approach not based on a singular Godterm (like the European tradition) might look like; we had a short seminar on First Nations worldview in Rgla, invocations in Buffy already overstep speech-act conventions and the most recent reading for that class (Chinese Buddhist myth) doesn't seem to lend itself well to Occidental interpretation. Hmm. A lot of random threads, and probably too much for a term paper...
Why do we bother asking these impossible questions of right and wrong, beginnings and endings, when we live and breathe each day without knowing the answer? Hence my need for the happy fiction, the acknowledgement that we don't know everything but that life works despite that. Maybe solving ordinary problems -- getting groceries, making tea, saving the whales -- don't have the same grandness of potential for posterity, but the deeds can be done; half my life, I swear, is making the other half of my life more difficult for me. I should take a poll sometime and ask who feels this way too.
Marisa and Calvin asked me today what we study in English, and the only answer I could genuinely give was that we talked a lot about what's wrong with our world and why people were so angry all the time. It sounds like something out of psych or poli sci, and I had to try to frame the entire department in this hokey cross between a moral conduct think-tank and activist training camp. The 'English' label doesn't help much either. I'm thankful English has moved beyond canonical literature -- and literature, period -- and lets me do great stuff like watch Buffy episodes in the name of cultural research, but it's slightly depressing when you listen to perspectives on the world's messed-up-ness without any well-timed breaks for constructive comments. Everyone seems to have forgotten the idea of the happy fiction, for one thing. I'm thinking about doing a paper on what a hermeneutic approach not based on a singular Godterm (like the European tradition) might look like; we had a short seminar on First Nations worldview in Rgla, invocations in Buffy already overstep speech-act conventions and the most recent reading for that class (Chinese Buddhist myth) doesn't seem to lend itself well to Occidental interpretation. Hmm. A lot of random threads, and probably too much for a term paper...
Why do we bother asking these impossible questions of right and wrong, beginnings and endings, when we live and breathe each day without knowing the answer? Hence my need for the happy fiction, the acknowledgement that we don't know everything but that life works despite that. Maybe solving ordinary problems -- getting groceries, making tea, saving the whales -- don't have the same grandness of potential for posterity, but the deeds can be done; half my life, I swear, is making the other half of my life more difficult for me. I should take a poll sometime and ask who feels this way too.
