Life as an Extreme Sport

Category: Academics

Classes and coursework.

every streetlamp seems to beat a fatalistic warning

...and everything else, Academics, blog as therapy, life and living

It’s 11:13pm. Thursday evening. I have a pile of work to the left of me, a pile of reading to the right, a large monster masquerading as a cat draped across my feet, and a slightly smaller cat convinced he’s a monster rather insistently trying to lay across my shoulders as I type.

I am, for lack of better phrase, in a mood. The timing is, of course, brilliant – I always hit these when I’m alone. I mean, genuinely alone, no one really around that I could just poke and chitchat with. Might not be a coincidence, then, that it’s when this mood hits.

Not, of course, that it’s any sort of consistent mood. Rather, just a mood. And tonight’s is, in large part, thanks to the most recent Torchwood episode (Adam), which has thrown me where I am. Without spoiling it for folks who won’t see it until next week, it was one of the best examples of why I like the show – it reminded me strongly of Buffy mixed with Doctor Who, this wonderful blend of high camp and sublime acting, looking at the dark elements and how we live with our lives, our selves, our memories.

And so I am stuck with memory, which has already been a running dialogue with myself. What does it mean to remember, and to forget? To remember again? I suppose it started, thinking about concerts and ones I’ve seen for some online trivia thing. But it’s hard to contain thoughts about memory, perception, seeing the world. We shape memory, something I’m so highly conscious of – we warp and rewrite our own narrative, to suit the story we tell ourselves and those around us. Subtly make ourselves look better, right, more or less victimized. Whatever our narrative is, we adjust the memory accordingly. Some people find this startling or weird to think about, but memory studies suggest this to be the case.

What memories have I rewritten? Can I say with any certainty that what I remember is what happened? Or is it just what I wished happened? Wanted to happen? It is, of course, the Rashomon problem in a nutshell. Do we just hope to reach a consensus on shared experience, or does experience become shared when we share the same memory? Is this why we don’t talk? Is this why we hide what we’re saying, thinking, feeling behind gestures and obscurity and opaque masques? I know I’m guilty of it, of not wanting to reveal, of preferring to leave a small thread of my own narrative, one that can be picked up if you see it and ignored otherwise.

Tonight, I just feel like there has been a lot of thread – and a lot of ignoring.

body has given up and decided it’s time to sleep – before I make any brilliant errors here.

Edited to add: hah, how timely… within 30 minutes, to receive an email that just emphasizes the whole thing. Some people just have exquisite timing. Someone remind me why I do this again? I loved this once, didn’t I? Sometimes I think it’s just being kicked out of me…

lo, on the horizon – there travels a geek

...and everything else, Academics, Doctor Who

Not as though the world really needs further proof of the fact that I’m a terrifically geeky person, but this afternoon I made a Nietzsche/Foucault/robot joke, which hinged on imitating a Dalek. (I can’t really explain it, because like most jokes, that would make it unfunny, but I basically called Foucault Nietzsche 2.0, and it went from there.)

So not only am I geek, but I absorb new pop culture (for those not in the know, I’ve only started watching Doctor Who and Torchwood in the last week or so) at an impossible rate in order to regurgitate it back out into areas of interest. I’m truly, truly pathetic.

…but the people in the room laughed, so hey.

small glimmers

...and everything else, Academics

A few hours later, and at least I got one (rather visible) thing working right. God, reminds me of my CRC days, except without Bennett to keep me company. And this is ever-so-much more fun with someone else around. Especially when there are random episodes of CSI or BSG playing in the background.

And now, oh, dilemma. Continue banging my head against this wall, or switch to the wall of epistemology. Either way, I end up with a headache.

(Lest anyone think that all I feel like doing is taking a break every few hours to swear and complain, rest assured, the swearing and complaining has been pretty much nonstop – I just opt to share every few hours. And a very large portion of the day was very good – the cohesive feeling of the graduate student group at school continues to exist, and yours truly just got herself crowned queen of a committee for an upcoming conference, as the combination of my work and past conference experience made me the ideal choice. It’s just that it’s back to the balance thing, and the start of the semester is a rough time to hold job talks and candidate interviews, since with my academic schedule this semester, it ends up wiping out an entire day.)

a scene in frustration

...and everything else, AMBI, Bioethics

My new mantra:
“That should have worked. Why didn’t that work? Why can’t I make this work?

…why does it hate me?”

Rinse. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat.
I need a white board, or a butcher paper covered wall. An 8×10 pad isn’t large enough to sketch all the code bits and toggles out so that I can actually visualize what’s going on, and see where to fix it. Not to mention it would be harder for Toledo to crumple a white board, or Lunar to decide to eat it. Damn dumb cat.

That should have worked. Why didn’t that work? Why can’t I make this work?

…why does it hate me?