1 Five Fat Turkeys Are We...

"I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose."
- Woody Allen

Every year in September, I'm faced with the terrible task of figuring out how am I going to survive classes when I don't know the people in there. And this year, in philosophy, that was kind of a no brainer. Somehow, I fell into this group of people who are funny and smart and only sometimes unstable and it's a great change from me being alone in the corner like in the past.

The point of this week’s assignment is to be grateful for a classmate but I have no idea how I'm supposed to choose just one. There's Katherine, who keeps me wonderfully unhinged at times, and Chris, who is my constant reminder of life outside of class and of class in outside life. There's Jack who never has a freaking pen, even when he has one, and is part of my island when we’re somehow seperated from the rest of our continent, and there's Dan who actually wants to focus on the task, that is, until he realizes that Chris’s water-bottle is really fun to hit.

But if I have to choose, if I have to pick just one, there's Sonia, dear Sonia, who plays count the black people when it comes to theater, who actually is paying attention to the assignment, who moves us forward and is willing to go back when we get ourselves lost anyway. Sonia, who makes the weirdest noises most randomly and is the one out of us six who participates the most. She offers interesting perspectives into assignments and puts the most effort into them. She’s the navigation on our miserable little ship, and without her we would have been lost all the way back in Candide.

0 And Now, a Pause.

"The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future in life."
- Plato

 Today, (the 8th of November) is the last day of the first quarter of the 2012-2013 school year. Today is when we take a pause and look back over what we've accomplished, what we wish to achieve, and where we generally want to go from here.

My answer (and one of the easy ones), is forward. We must go forward.

I mean that in as many ways is  humanly possible to means things. I mean that we must further ourselves in our intellectual thoughts. We must continue on reading and discussing and helping and trying to understand. We must try to actively participate in our thoughts and understanding. We must debate more and think more and not get each other on the first go. We must comment a lot more. We must, above all else, learn.

We can only do that by proceeding down the people mover of life. We cannot level off (deemed, "sideways") or even recede. We don't have to agree on what forward means in relation to this class. Forward can be whatever you think it is. It can be anarchy if you're curly haired and want that, go for it.

It doesn't matter as long as it's up and forward. Positive slope and whatnot. I think that's how it goes in math or something.

You know, as long as your forward includes more debates. The debates are pretty great. It's the best way to try on ideas for size and exercise thoughts and they leave the participants feeling mentally exhausted but at the same time totally fulfilled in a way wr don't get in our other classes.

1 Not a Game of Heads or Tails

 "Thinking isn't agreeing or disagreeing. That's voting."

- Robert Frost

It's that magical time of the year again and no, not Christmas. There's slinging mud in the air and propaganda everywhere. And, just like with the remixes of classic Christmas music playing far into January, everyone is absolutely, positively sick of it. And Voltaire and Camus? They'd be the sickest.

Well, not the sickest. But some of them.

Voltaire would not vote at all. The last theme of Candide is that we must cultivate our own gardens, not to have the government cultivate it for us. The characters no matter what happens determine their own fate, separate from societal influences. We are not what society is onto us and thus voting would not matter.

Camus definitely wouldn't vote. If he was as detached as Mersault was, he wouldn't even think of voting.