#44.1: Name three things you take for granted.

I am thankful to live in an age of aluminum foil, toilet paper, and global commerce.

#63: Make an encouraging banner.

I thought the plants in my kitchen window could use some encouragement.

Oh, you think that's ridiculous? Well at least I know where I stand with them.

Learning To Love You More

(A) Aside from the aforementioned reading-related goals, I want to spend much of my free summer time harnessing the creative urges that tend to get smothered with a pillow, clubbed to death, or gagged & tied up in the basement while school is happening. I want to be writing, doodling, making, or photographing something every day.

(B) I was a bit sad to learn that this project is essentially over with. Like anything Miranda July touches¹, it was quirky, often poignant, and generally delightful.

And so... in the interest of fulfilling (A) I will be completing assignments from (B). SO IT SHALL BE WRITTEN, SO IT SHALL BE DONE!

If you know what I mean.

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1. see also ))<<>>(( and this here (including, especially, the interview). I also think she's rather beautiful. I've got a pretty major girl crush going on here, which is rivaled only by my Maggie Gyllenhaal infatuation.

2000 years before Adam Smith

Yo A! That patina really sets off your rippling biceps and six pack abs.
So, ah...whatcha doin' later?

"...money is as it were our surety; for it must be possible for us to get what we want by bringing the money. Now the same thing happens to money itself as to goods--it is not always worth the same; yet it tends to be steadier. This is why all goods must have a price set on them; for then there will always be exchange, and if so, association of man with man. Money, then, acting as a measure, makes goods commensurate and equates them; for neither would there have been association if there were not exchange, nor exchange if there were not equality, nor equality if there were not commensurability. Now in truth it is impossible that things differing so much should become commensurate, but with reference to demand they may be come so sufficiently. There must, then, be a unit, and that fixed by agreement (for which reason it is called money); for it is this that makes all things commensurate, since all things are measured by money."

Oh! Yes.
By which I mean YES YES YES YES YESSSSSSSS! (And so on.)

My goal for the next few weeks is to get through the Nichomachean Ethics. I've read various parts of it at various times, but not the whole thing start-to-finish. Until now. I plan to sneak up, catch it in a flying tackle, wrestle it to the ground. There will be kicking and biting and hair pulling and scratching and ninja throwing stars and muskets and mustard gas. I will emerge victorious, and I will own it. Then I'll beat my chest and roar out my triumph as I absorb its powers while being struck over and over by lightning because, after all, there can be only one.

If you know what I mean.

Dear Sufjan Stevens,

Everyone else may have forgotten... but I have not. You promised fifty states. You delivered two. Since then: pretty much nothing else. This is totally unacceptable.

"Chicago" is a song I can't find adjectives suitable to describe. Ditto for "Casimir Pulaski Day". "John Wayne Gacy, Jr" gives me the shivers. And the one about Ypsilanti with the outrageously long title? That shit gives me all manner of goosebumps. Even if it's August. I could go on, but the point is: you're kind of a genius. You're good at what you do. You should do more of it. Then you should release more of it so I can stuff it in my ear canals and feel all shivery and shimmery-strange and incandescently ecstatic and sad and also like my stomach's riding on a tilt-a-whirl. Even if it's just songs about names you recorded in a closet or a bathtub somewhere in 1998. (Because yes, even that was pretty good.) Really, at this point, I'll take whatever I can get.

Please? Thanks. Have a nice day.

This just makes me smile.

I imagine Thoreau would have liked them too.

I found these little guys a few weeks ago on a thrifting excursion.

I am inordinately pleased by the sight of them on my bookshelf.

I am a bit of a nerd. That is all.

Oh, nature...

So yesterday I saw something startling: there's all sorts of green leafiness covering trees and shrubs. Also: a variety of shit is blooming. Whoa. I mean, this is totally unprecedented, right?

I guess I haven't had the time to notice this...since the past two weeks have been a haze of nyquil, phlegm, freud, nietzsche, cytoskeletons, constructive empiricism, mucus, scientific realism, benzene, chi-square analyses... oy.

Also, the weather is increasingly bearable.

And then this morning, I saw a miracle.

Well, ok. It wasn't really a miracle. (The consequences of abnormally elevated testosterone levels rarely, if ever, are.)

But it was a very agitated male robin wildly pecking, flapping, and (for a few moments) riding on the back of an extremely bewildered and panic-stricken squirrel who kept craning his little neck around to try and figure out what the hell was happening to him. It was, in a word: awesome.

So thanks, nature. You made my day.

I am at war with randomness.

Rudolf Clausius originated the concept of entropy. Originating concepts is sexy.

I think you should be too. But I won't go getting all pushy about it.

From a thermodynamic standpoint, though, we are all at war with randomness. Our existence is made possible, on a molecular level, by the localized reversal of a universal law. Life just is order.

The things in the world that have the most meaning for me--science and philosophy--are at their root premised on finding order in ourselves and in the world around us. And yet, it would seem that much of the thoughtmatter that traverses my brain on any given day is indeed quite random.

I don't believe this is true: it is not random. I believe that my human brain is a fan-f*g-tabulous machine capable of integrating and cataloging information in a quick, efficient, orderly manner. This is the wellspring of emotion, gut feeling, precognition, deja-vu. This process often occurs without my express consent or awareness, so it doesn't necessarily appear to be orderly¹. That's the nature of the beast. But, man, it would be incredible to get a look under the hood. To see what my subconscious is up to. To understand how it works. To fine-tune that mofo, and make it the best perception-integrating abstraction-generating mechanism it can be.

I feel that it is my job, as a person, to reduce everything to ideas. Cruising the classified ads and searching monster.com yields the conclusion that this is in fact not an actual career, however. To that end, my future is anything but certain. I don't always know², in any great specificity or with an ironclad certainty, what it is that I want and what will become of me. But, I do have one ovearching goal: to fulfill my job as a person. To have a mind like one of those invincible infomercial knives³ that will saw through logs and cans and boots and cinderblocks and still be able to dice a tomato. If you know what I mean.

Realization of my ginsuknifebrain aspirations will undoubtedly require that I first understand me as well as I can. A firm foundation of introspection is called for. Certainly, at 25, this is not an area in which I am particularly lacking. But to recall that endless refrain⁴ of my childhood: "you can always do better."

That's what this space is, for the most part, going to be about.

This is me, sharpening my knife.

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1. Similarly, I expect that the overall nature of this uh, blog, will be that of non-apparent order; i.e. of ostensible randomness. This is likely to include doodles, open letters to various persons or entities, and actual instances of randomness and absurdity for the purposes of entertainment.
2.I do have a general idea. I'm a philosophy major who is planning on going to vet school. Getting into vet school is goddamn hard, though. If that doesn't happen, I'm not particularly interested in going to grad school for philosophy, since it'll be pretty hard to find an institution that won't be bent upon turning me into a mealy-mouthed Kantian-Kuhnian mess. Also, being named Dagny and going around advocating the sort of thing I'd be advocating is bound to look ridiculous from a certain angle. Specifically, the "oh look at that poor, crazy, brainwashed girl" angle.
3. I realize that ginsu knives are not invincible, and are actually pretty crappy. It's a metaphor. If you don't like metaphors, then you'd better run along. They'll be raining down around here like Old Testament fire and brimstone.
4. In the interest of glasnost, the most repeated phrase of my childhood was actually "mutual benefit for mutual exchange." But "you can always do better" runs a pretty tight second place.