The best way to the heart is awkwardly.

Well. It's only 10:36. This has been one of the longest days (week and month) of my life. Surely, I cut my hair about 3 weeks ago, but the greys are always the fastest to grow back. I unequivocally sold my life to a bank today by accepting the loans that I need to attend graduate school here at Boston College. Of course, it is worth it, but fuck. That's about as far as I get when I think about it: fuck. Also, it rained here all day, and was cold, and I had to take a midterm first thing this morning. All of this might explain why I have been drinking for the last 5 hours. Oh, and they are calling for snow tomorrow. I guess a glimmer amongst all of this is that I got my absentee ballot notarized today, and I wrote 2 pages on my Imagination paper, so 6.5 pages down, 7 to go. I just had an immediate realization that I might have to insert some fluff into this paper, as I expected the exigetical portion to be at least 11 pages. Shit.

In other news. I saw Deerhoof last Thursday night. It was a badass show at a bar called The Middle East over by Harvard and MIT. Just a little comparison as to clubs and alcohol between Boston and Denton. There was about 200 people at this (sold out) show. Normally, at Boston College I don't see many people who look familiar to me (compared to Dentonites). Well, The Middle East might as well have been Haley's with two bars and a bigger floor. Draft beers ran about 4 to 6.50. Personally, I was drinking Budweiser from the can for 2 dollars. Hey, don't hate, I had to pay 8 dollars for parking. But, all in all, it was a positive experience, though 29 degrees in the middle of October is definitely an odd experience for me.

Oh, I bought my plane ticket this weekend: officially, I will be in Texas December 16th through January 7th. If you are reading this then I probably want to see you, so do your best to contact me in that time frame! If you are reading this and don't want to see me then I don't know what to say; you are living a conflicted life! I plan on spending most of the time (read just a little more than half) in Garland with my family, and the rest in Denton. My vehicular situation is suspect at this time, but I'm sure it will work itself out. I will definitely be in Denton December 17th: my brother Jonathan will have just turned 21 and I will be bringing him to Denton to get him stupid-drunk. Be there!

Sometimes I wonder at the barries that we put up to deter communication and relation between ourselves and other people. Whether it be something as artificial as a cellphone, or something as constructed as a fake persona, the idea is still the same: we don't want people to come into our lives. True, we let them experience a little, or maybe even a lot of our fabricated selves, but the conscious act of commitment is foreign to us. We do not let people in because we are scared of what the means: they will take part of us with them and our self will disappear in the singularity of an "us." Try it. See how hard it is to meet someone this week. And not just small talk, but really, try and get to know them. Our society is moving in the direction in which everyone exists inside their own artificial and technological worlds and human interaction will be superfluous, and at best, a bonus. We are finding it more and more appealing to try and find our humanity in our differences rather than sameness in our humanity. It troubles me.

Daylight is the enemy,

--Philip

A Person from Porlock

So, I'm sitting here waiting for an episode of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" to load, and I figured I would write something. I am ardently avoiding homework and enthusiastically inebriating myself: it's a wonderful life. I mean, I really don't have that much homework, just a midterm in my Symbolic Logic class to study for for next Tuesday. I really don't feel like it though; I did earlier, but now it's later and that gumption has been jettisoned. Was another beautiful day in eastern Massachusetts: I woke up and it was about 30 degrees, it was overcast by noon, drizzling at three, and raining at four. I love it. It's good thinking weather.

In other news, I went to Connecticut this weekend to visit my brother and his wife, and her family. It's a beautiful state, with the same kind of scenery as Massachusetts, but more hills. I had a good time, as I spent the entire time (sans the trip there) either drunk or hung over. But, it was good to see Andrew and Amy, and my now (more) extended family. The town I was in was Cromwell, CT (named after Sir Arthur Cromwell I'm sure) and it was about as small-town as small towns get...except with better bars. The weather was brisk, the people were nice, and the alcohol was in great supply. What else could one ask for in a weekend off?

Speaking of time off, I will be in Texas from Dec 16/17 to Jan 6/7. I will spend most of my time in Garland with my parents and brother and niece, and the rest in Denton. Though I will try my best to make it Sulphur Springs, as there are people there (or that will be there) that I dearly miss. So, if you miss me, or hell, even if you don't miss me but still want to see me, that is when I will be there.

Well, I guess that's it, my episode is loaded and I have no other news to impart. Oh, I found a pretty cool website that will host my papers, so look for a link to that as soon I get them formatted accordingly. Until then, a little more William Blake:

An aged shadow soon he fades,
Wandering round and earthly cot,
Full filled all with gems and gold
Which he by industry had got.

And these are the gems of the human soul:
The rubies and pearls of a lovesick eye,
The countless gold of an aching heart,
The martyr’s groan, and the lover’s sigh.


-Philip

My Brother, where do you intend to go tonight?

So I started writing again tonight. It was a lot harder than I thought that it would be. Surely, I haven't written a substantial piece of philosophy since last November, but it was more difficult than I expected to gather my many thoughts into tangible, communicable ideas. I began work on my paper for my Philosophy of Imagination paper. As mentioned before, I am writing my paper on the idea that ethics find their foundation in the imagination. I am using the myth of Cain and Abel to extend my point that even though Cain has been historically and theologically construed as a villain, and as a character that should act as a foil to our own behavior. I am attempting then, to reconstruct Cain as an imaginative revolutionary that defies God and creates his own reality. While some of the passages of Genesis that I use are bare in their information, my method of deconstruction and historical application essentially "beefs up" some of the verses and gives a new meaning to the idea of sibling rivalry and role reversal. My eventual goal is to establish the idea, or discovery of an ethical framework that tempers our outlook and decision-making process. While some may oversimplify this and say it is just our "nature" or "disposition" or "that's how he/she is." They are missing the point as that is exactly what the Greek word ethos means: nature, disposition. We actualize our imagined realities and thus create our own future. We can be immortal through ideas and our actions. True immortality is legacy, not just not dying.

"All great problems require great love...It makes the most difference whether a thinker has a personal relationship to his problems and finds in them his destiny, his distress, and his greatest happiness...for even if great problems allow themselves to be grasped by them they would not permit...weaklings to hold on to them."

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Love for the one you know more,

Philip

The Sparseness of Our Speech

So, not too much going on. Went to my first party here in Massachusetts last Thursday night. Had a pretty good time: tried Anheuser-Busch's new American Ale (it really is pretty good, reminds me of Yeungling), whipped some ass at beer pong, had some undergrad girl point out my grey hairs, and talked some drunken philosophy. Not a bad night at all.

On another note, I think that I have found an additional angle to my Philosophy of Imagination paper. I have slightly re-aligned my thesis into an exploration of the formation of ethics in the imagination. I am still going to start my paper with a new analysis of the Cain and Abel myth, but I think that I am going to make Jean-Luc Nancy's philosophy from Being Singular Plural. In this book he takes Heidegger's Da-sein one step further and insists that being is always already a mit-sein, a being-with: to be is to relate. So, it seems at even the most primordial reckoning of existence we are thrust into an ethical sphere. If to be is to be with, then to exist is to relate, and relationships demand an ethic. So, yeah, here's to the equiprimordial notions of being and ethics.

Also, I think that I may have found some fertile ground in one of Heraclitus' Fragment 92 for my Plato paper. I just hope that I can turn these ideas and notions into a cohesive twenty-page paper.

Here is a website that I have found humorous and somewhat accurate and makes for good light reading: Stuff White People Like

Here is the next section of the "the mental traveller" by Blake:

She binds iron thorns around his head,
And pierces both his hands and feet,
And cuts his heart out of his side
To make it feel both cold & heat.

Her fingers number every nerve
Just as a miser counts his gold;
She lives upon his shrieks and cries—
And she grows young as he grows old,

Till he becomes a bleeding youth
And she becomes a virgin bright;
Then he rends up his manacles
And pins her down for his delight.

--Philip

Don't keep appointments with disappointments.

Well, I know that a good amount of the people that read this haven't experienced how brilliant the transition from summer to fall to winter can be in a region with seasons. So today I took my camera to school and took some pictures of some of the fall foliage and some other views of campus. I would have taken some better pictures of the Gasson Tower, but they are currently doing construction on 3 sides, so I was only able to get some far away pictures of one side; you will have to look closely in the middle of the album: you can see it sneaking in the top-right corner. These are just a few photos, and they may seem redundant, but I was doing my best to capture the brilliance of the colors whether by contrast to the green leaves, on their own, or up-close. Oh, and the house at the end of the path is the Murray Graduate Center, a renovated three-story house where the grad students hang out and drink free coffee and study. There is also a flower collage of the BC monogram that I thought was pretty cool.

So here is the link to the pictures:

Through Autumn Leaves

Well, the semester is almost half over, and I still get so surprised at how fast time moves. I was able to procure 5 days off for Thanksgiving, and that is right around the corner, and right after that will be the end of the semester. So, expect updates soon regarding papers, notes and rough drafts.

--Philip

Corn, Turnip, Asparagus

Well, finally got the internet installed in my apartment. Gave me something to do for the four days of constant rain that we received. Though, I did brave the elements on Sunday for a conference on Merleau-Ponty. Was an awesome conference, with many insights onto M-P, especially on passages from his magnum opus Phenomenology of Perception. Had about 9 PhDs giving papers, from Boston College to Harvard to University of Freiburg. So, all in all, well worth venturing into the rain. On a sidenote, via one of the papers (given by John Sallis) I was introduced to the art of Paul Klee. I would encourage everyone to check out some of his artwork, it's very good to say the least.

I have also been trying to get my paper for my Philosophy of Imagination class underway, as I have all of these ideas bouncing around in my head and I need to write them down before they bounce out of an ear and escape into the ether. I did manage to write a few lines the other night, thus beginning the path that I think the introduction will fall, and thus creating the road that the entire paper will traverse. I am working on writing the paper on Cain's legacy via the revolutionary use of his imagination, and use the Cain and Abel murder story as the beginning of ethics qua imaginary ethics, or primordial ethics. I begin with a quote from Nietzsche his Gay Science:

“ Good and evil are the prejudices of God” - said the snake.

To enter into the realm of the moral, to discuss good and evil in light of a past event, or the possibility of a future consequence, to conjecture on the implication of a particular action in a particular time and in a particular context, is to enter into the realm of the ethical and the historical: both ethics and history find their foundation in the imaginative, in man's central position in the midst of imagined omni-possibility, in the necessity for man to simultaneously live and create. For this is the fate of man as seen through the foci of imagination: our doom is to create our future. We can become immortal in what makes us ultimately human: the fact that we exist historically allows our actions to become our immortal scions and through action and consequence we attain an immortality that is separate from the mere notion of immortality as not dying.


Again, this is just some ideas that I have, and I wrote this more stream-of-consciousness than actually planned and carefully constructed. It is of course, subject to change, but I think that it's a good beginning, or at least fertile ground upon which to plant a good beginning.

More as it develops.

--Philip

Holy Rattlesnakes

Well, so much, and so little has happened since my last post. I have since: contracted and gotten over a cold, become addicted to the US version of The Office, found a Blockbuster (about 4 miles away) and started exercising (jogging a couple miles a day).

First things first. The average temperature here has been around 55 degrees in the last week; it reached the highest at 70 degrees and lowest at 42. Needless to say, my Texas immune system hasn't adapted to this kind of climate so I got a minor head cold. But, 4 days of rest and lots of fluids have nixed that cold. I am also signed up to get a flu shot, and encourage everyone else to do the same, as my experience with the flu last February was terrible.

The original version of The Office, starring Ricky Gervais, is a classic; but. in being a classic it is untouchable in its place in history, and yet is worthy of homage in the greatest form of flattery: imitation. Now, the US version of The Office has similar components, and yet is an entirely different beast. I think that I may be one of the last people on the earth to have watched the US version, but I just started last Thursday or so. I have since made it through the first 3 seasons, and half of the fourth season. It's a wonderful show, and while it lacks in the utter despondency in the "boss" character, it makes up for it in the depth of the supporting characters, and the contradictions that are posited in the main cast. Jim is ultimately the most likable person ever, and yet has an almost non-existent social life outside of his job; Michael is one of the most inept, self-unaware, irresponsible people and yet he has managed to attain his position of Regional Manager and be the most successful salesman ever for Dunder-Mifflin. Pam obviously has talent in her art and a measure of drive, as she has a college degree and is fully aware that she could do better, yet she is fully comfortable keeping the lowest position at her place of work. And Dwight, he is overtly a fascist, a nerd, and openly takes survival of the fittest literally, yet he hero-worships the 'least fit' Michael, and the biggest problem that he encounters is an emotional problem, and though he tries to stay aloof, he yearns to share his problems with others, and yet creates a facade in order to maintain his facade that he created by allowing for the first facade...Anyways, the UK show vs. the US show is like Fight Club the book vs. Fight Club the movie: the original is seminal and classic, and yet the re-make takes the spirit of the original and re-creates a vision that stands on its own. On a side note, I think it's interesting that both B.J. Novak (Ryan Howard the temp) and John Krasinski (Jim Halpert) were both born and raised in Newton, MA, the city where I currently live.

I rented EXistenZ this week, and it was definitely worth seeing: it operates on several levels, but ultimately asks many questions about reality, existence, and our perception of both. So, go rent it! or download it!

I think that I've talked about how it is just more expensive to live here in Boston than in Texas, and I finally got a concrete example that I think all will be able to relate to: frozen pizzas. If memory serves me correctly Tony's Pizzas (not Totino's) cost around 1.49 in Kroger's in Texas; well those same pizzas cost 3.19 at Shaw's in Massachusetts; California Kitchen Pizzas cost around 5.00 in Texas, and about 7.99 here in Mass. So yeah, that seems to be about the relative shift for the cost of things here. I would have done beer, but they don't sell the same beer here as in Texas.

Oh, and I am finally getting my internets installed this Sunday, so expect more frequent posts! Or dread them, or ignore them, whichever you already do. I will still write them.