saying goodbye

nostalgia is the worst feeling. i am nostalgic to distraction sometimes. i have such lovely hazy memories of summers past, of days that seem to stretch into nothingness, of wonderful warm days and people who seem more interesting than anyone you know in the present.

i never really think about these things except in summer, when I have too much to time to think and remember.

i made new friends this week. friends that do not go to yale and are not between the ages of 18-22, which seems to be the only demographic that I've seen for the past nine months. i met a really great new friend, hamzeh. and i've decided that i generally really like people. the only kinds of people i don't like are people who are very self-centered. not even the extreme of selfishness, but people who only think about their own feelings thoughts and opinions. generally they talk about themselves a lot and i find them terribly boring and want to throw up when i'm around them.

anyway hamzeh is great. he is exuberantly friendly and surprisingly good at reading people.

Faces

Sadly, the face you are born with determines an extraordinary amount of the rest of your life. The way people see you, the way you see yourself, is so much a physical determination that I think we wouldn't really know what to do with ourselves if we woke up tomorrow morning with a new face. It would be like losing an arm or a leg. It's true. Most people have pretty normal faces. Sometimes, though, I see a face and I think...wow, I can imagine her being a mom. or, wow, she really looks like cruella de vil. True story, a prefrosh came in and sat in on my lit class who had these deeply hooded lids and sharp archey eyebrows. The entire class, I couldn't focus because I kept thinking, wow...she looks so much like cruella. I still can't get over it. Anyway, I'm pretty sure that in order to be brilliant, you have to look distinguished. It's either correlation or causation.


Leo Tolstoy. In youth, he looked like Matt Damon, strangely, cute/hot. In old age, he looked like this. Wild child with hair growing all over the place. He looks...intense, barbaric, wise. I feel like if I talked to him, he would be a very gruff man that would tell me to stop reading books and go farm.


Gustave Flaubert. Oh, Gustave the gourmand with his pudgy cheeks and admirably groomed mustache. He would be french... If he were a professor, I would take his class. He looks like the type who would enjoy listening to himself talk. And he probably has a very jolly laugh...as opposed to Leo who probably never laughed.


Bertrand Russell. Possibly one of my fave faces. what a baller! he got married four times and wrote a book bashing on all the other great philosophers ever, and his writing makes sense! and he smokes cigars despite the fact that tobacco makes wrinkles! He probably wouldn't deign to talk to me (him being an aristocrat and all), but one can worship from afar...

ps he is also dead, so that might be another reason he wouldn't talk to me


omg kant...ridiculous in so many ways. let us just consider how much of a worm of a man he looks like. geez. it's voldemort!


oh alexis de tocqueville...such kind eyes. such a gentle soul. what a young, brilliant man writing about the nature of democracy and prophesying about the future of all civilized peoples. marry me!

American Beauty

"I don't think that there's anything worse than being ordinary."

In the film, American Beauty, when Angela Hayes says these words, I think the viewer is meant to hear how paltry and trite these words are. No one wants to be ordinary. Yet, there's something slightly pathetic about saying, "I'm not ordinary, I am extraordinary." Because the odds are against you, and for you to believe otherwise is all a grand delusion.

So true

this is a copy and paste from
http://confessionsofaboytoy.onsugar.com/

"It’s last call. I shouldn’t keep focusing on who approaches whom, who is the predator and who is the prey, who is worthy of the attention and who deserves better. There’s something surprisingly empowering about wearing our hearts on our sleeves and hoping for safe landing.

Maybe I should just start walking in his direction. Not think about what I’m going to say. Not worry about coming off transparent, silly, desperate or drunk (or all of the above). Because I can assume all night long, but I’ll never really know his side unless I ask.

Sometimes, we forget that going out should be about having a good time, not about proving you can find a tipsy guy that will let you shove your tongue down his throat—making the first move as meaningless as casting a net and settling for whatever you catch.

But if we genuinely feel the sparks and believe that the scruffy guy to our right is right, right now, then what’s stopping us from going for it, not like a mindless missile but like on a mission? The worse that can happen is old and rusted rejection. But we’re all big boys here. We can deal.

Any given code of conduct is pointless if it’s rigid, final and fixed, without exceptions and footnotes, especially if sticking by the rules leaves us standing alone, in a closing club, frozen yet reluctant to make a move.

Right after last call, if you still can’t come up with the clever words that will impress… then just kiss him. Anything’s better than watching a guy that makes your heart skip a beat walk out at the end of the night, leaving you regurgitating empty “what if’s” and regretting all your subtle, indirect, absurd moves and thinking: “I should’ve said hello.”

Every first move we make might very well be our last."

Libraries

Some people worry that books will one day go the way of newspapers. As in, people will stop reading them because of various substitutes (ie the internet and tv) that don't get your fingers smudgy and aren't so annoying to fold up again. I personally don't like newspapers. They are boring. I wish someone would start writing news that was more punchy and fun to read, some kind of beautiful hybrid between hard-hiting news and trashy tabloid.

Whatevs, newspapers could go extinct and I probably wouldn't even notice for about a week.

But books...

omg books.

Now, I know there's this newfangled contraption called a kindle which I understand to be like an ipod for your books. It sounds dumb. I hate it. I hate machines, they are taking over the world. They are so evil, and I haven't charged my sonicare toothbrush, so I just use it like a normal toothbrush, and I haven't charged my camera, so it just sits in my drawer, and I broke my laptop cord, so it doesn't always charge my computer. Also, I have an ipod with no itunes. This is why machines suck.

There's also movies made from books, which are pretty cool. But if the movie's good, I always want to go read the book. Which always turns out to be better.

There's just something so ineffably satisfying and lovely about the weight of a book, the smell of a book, the process of turning pages and making progress toward the end. Old books, especially, are so inspiring, to know that you are reading the real thoughts and words of someone who wrote them and captured them, the real thoughts and words of innumerable someones who have read and thought the same thoughts.

I especially like going to the stacks and picking random books off the shelf, books you'd think no one would ever read, only to open them and find that someone did check out that book about the Chicago census of 1892...like thirty years ago. Who? Why? I wonder.

I like books because they are real. Real-er even than life, maybe. Because how often do we go through life without being fully conscious of how we feel, of the interiority of our mind, of how things really are, of both the piercing awareness of the slightest nuances of your own thoughts coupled with the detached omniscient panorama of the big picture? Because how often do we wish we could live in a book, live with the same conviction, live as a modern-day Don Quixote who is going to rescue the cruel (technology infested) world with the sword of chivalry (and truth)?

Some cool things you may like to know about sterling memorial library:
Rogers created the library in the image of a Gothic Cathedral, even going so far as to model the circulation desk after an altar. He even required that the library be seen from the street. As a result, Berkeley College was divided into two sections in order to create an unobstructed view of the cathedral-like library.

The amount of stone transported for the construction exceeded the amount used, and as a result, myths and legends abound on the Yale campus regarding fanciful structures claimed to exist on the roof, built of surplussed stone and metal. One story has a small castle hiding the air-conditioning system. Another claims that there exists an entire miniature city up there, complete with its own stone golf course. In reality much of the fanciful design that exists on the roof was present in the original design.

In total, there are some 3,300 hand-decorated windows in the library. They depict everything from fiction to history and even small insects on otherwise unadorned panes created to look real. In 2000, one former librarian published a book about the windows.

THINGS I THINK ABOUT

when i am sitting in the library, and supposed to be studying stat

1. i wonder how come people don't miss each others faces more when they kiss. i mean, if both of you have your eyes closed, how come people don't have more kissing accidents? this perplexes me.

2. i wonder if this sentence was a typo in my psychology book, "people are attracted to symmetry. in fact, people are so attune to symmetry that they can smell it."

3. i wonder what exciting things i will do these summers.

4. i wonder how many animals have failed to die off because they are cute.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we9_CdNPuJg

LOL moment: DS edition

I go on facebook, and this is what I see on my minifeed of status updates...

last sentence of his last DS philosophy paper: In the end, Kant failed.

is done with Kant. And DS philosophy papers FOREVER!

I don't understand

...which was met with, "you kant comprehend kant?"

is watching some guy on youtube talk about Kant and is trying to figure out how the fuck to write this paper.

...which was met with, "same, except replace 'youtube talk about kant' with america's next top model"

ich komm zurueck und der fuchs ist weg=)

...i actually don't know what this means, but i hope this is some german diss on kant

thinks the DS Philosophy professors are cruel and sadistic.

asks why kant why

...which was met with "Because Stephen, idealism assumed that the only immediate experience is inner experience, and that from that outer things could only be inferred, but, as in any case in which one infers from given effects to determinate causes, only unreliably, since the cause of the representations that we perhaps falsely ascribe to outer things can also lie to us!
Duh."

Kuck Fant.

wishes people would be nicer to Kant... he can't defend himself because he's dead. That said, he is a bit maddening.

...which was followed by "Claire, according to a facebook quiz I took, Kant is the philosopher that best fits my views!!!" which reminds me i might have to blog about what is wrong with facebook these days.

anyway, i personally think that even the fact that he is dead does not negate the fact that he is still torturing DSers from beyond the realm of the living.

::: Death by Kant.

Thats a this and thats a this and the consciousness tries to stabilize this

...this is verbatim from lecture this week, about Hegel, actually. to which i say, "this" sucks.

thinks that kant should take his categorical imperative and shove it up his you know what.

...this was met with "see my status," which I can't because we're not facebook friends. but i think we can safely assume it was another derogatory facebook status about kant.
...also met with, "this proposition is not universally supportable because if this were a universal maxim, we would all have huge CIs up our you know whats. we probably won't be able to sit down ever again.

-thanks to me and eliot"

anyway, after seeing all of this madness, i decided to change my status...

Wendy

is jumping on the kant-hate-train. choo-choo!