2010-03-15
later, winter!
why do i have floss in my backpack. why. that is not something i would do in public, even in a bathroom.
taking this class has made me realize that i don't really appreciate aesthetic things until i know the context/motivations surrounding them. and furthermore that i cannot derive those commentaries myself- i can organize and emulate the work of other secondary sources, but it's hard for me to come up with my own original contribution that is both unique and insightful.
but nothing's really that unique anymore. this new york time article i read at breakfast the other day, it basically said that people have said all there is to say about michaelangelo, and that caravaggio is the latest thing. talking about works, be them art or philosophy etc, at some point it feels like an old conversation, like when you're stuck in the car on the ride home with a person you don't know that well and it's just you and them and all you really have to talk about is one mutual friend and you eventually end up exhausting everything there is to say in the limited conversation topic so you end up just repeating stuff that's already been said in different ways. of course that's not the perfect analogy because you could always talk about innocuous things like the weather and the president and etc but nothing is really a perfect analogy that's why it's not a metaphor or even the thing in itself.
would anyone listen to me say this shit out loud?! fucking give me the time of day to ramble on like this? likely not. that's what this is a domain for, a haven where i can spew out random and innane things and get the gratification of self-presentation and expression without either the rewards of another person affirming or acknowledging my thoughts, or the punishment of someone ignoring me or scorning me and telling me to shut up or that i'm pretentious or that my thoughts are boring and suck. i get neither of those here. and sometimes i resent this space, as i've mentioned before, because it's riddled with egoism, and there's something about it potentially being read (or at least able to be read) by other people that makes it slightly obnoxious. but i guess you could say the same about a Bronte or Grisham: who the hell do they think they are, making their works public? expression is a good thing in and of itself, even if there is no willing or actual person on the receiving end. i sing for myself.
something you can't do if you're a boy or girl with short hair is twist the hair into a bunch real tight and feel the pull on your scalp. it is a sensation for sure, not one you feel so often, and sometimes the novelty of it feels real good.
i do want to study schizophrenia, i do. but i think i might be more interested in investigating the narrative frames that individuals create, the delusions that they construct to justify and make sense of their hallucinations, than the biochemical, neural, and genetic components of the disease (this preference probably stems from my desire to study "sexy" behavioral science, that might be more ostensibly attractive but won't be empirically sound unless it is first established on more firm, biological bases... i should address this more at some later time). i think that this process of delusion construction evident in schizophrenics can be used to illuminate the nature of our information processing and our (ie our ego's, i suppose) relationship to this processing, like how we create schemas, our sense of self versus other, how we construct "reality," etc. the salience and responses granted to inner versus outer stimuli get obfuscated by the disease and sometimes they are treated as one in the same, and it would be itneresting to explore how people respond to these stimuli.
this might end up requiring more of a "social" approach because i am sure it is all highly individualized and subjective based on each patient, but it would be fasicnating to develop some kind of vague model that explores our treatment of information and how we make sense of the worlds with which we interact (both real and "false" ones)... it might also give us clues about the delusions formed by a supposedly non-clinical population, like self-deception and denial and delusions of grandeur-- but that would be examining the truth/false dichotomy rather than the overall structure of how we make sense of the world and our relationship with it, regardless of the veracity of the stimuli (since, fasincatingly, many schizophrenics are zealously oblivious to the errors of their delusions).
Do you ever feel like
"This Modern Love" by Bloc Party
Do you ever feel like
your exes treat/treated you as if they were god in the sense of philosopher george berkeley's epistemology, esse est percipi, where you only existed when they witnessed it, insofar as you satisfied their needs and desires.
do you ever feel like
you hate it when other people do things, but you do them anyway, like whistle and not hold the door open behind you if someone is a few steps in your wake
do you ever feel like
this. yeah, sometimes you do. you must.
leesah-likes at 4:33 p.m.