0 Frankly Speaking

Dear Mr. Frankl,Thank you. I recently read your book, Man's Search for Meaning, in my Philosophy class and even though I can't know for sure, I'm positive that it has changed it. In my education for outside of it, I have read many books on the Holocaust. There is little that surprises me about it, yet the terrible acts that went on still affects me. Yet, your book was not a rehousing of gas chambers and torture. It was something more, about man and the potential of humanity and how we play with the cards we're dealt.There are so many points where you stop just talking about life in the concentration camp and examine life as a whole. For example,...

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,...

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...

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...

1 Have Sex and Make Babies...

"To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering."  - Friedrich Nietzsche  A few years ago, I decided that life is meaningless. Well, less decided and more realized. This did not go over well with few-years-ago Sydney. It's hard to realize that everything you've done, everything you will do, has no rhyme or reason. Everything was hopeless and miserable. That is, until I also realized something else. Yes, life has no meaning. There's no set assigned meaning. Our purpose in life isn't to have sex and make babies anymore. Life is a blank slate. But that's the point. It's a blank slate. It means that the world...

0 A Weird Version Of Mean Girls...

"Fear follows crime and is its punishment." - Voltaire Okay, so lets say that I kill someone. Let's say his name was Aidan and he was Irish or something along those lines. Now lets suspend reality even more and say that I got caught. The evidence is airtight and noncircumstantial. And there's no hope for my lawyer for getting me off (and me shouting that he deserved it, that he was asking for it, that I won and that's all that matters didn't really help either) and this is his only defense: that I am insane. And they'd diagnose me and say it was true and lock me up in the big white room with the fluffy everywhere. And why? Because I'm...

1 In A Game Of Chicken, Cars Always Win...

"The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing." - SocratesOkay, think about something you know. Something you're super sure that you know and you have little to no doubt about. Something that is undeniably true. Not something like your name or your address or the best school in Chicago. Something else. Got it? Got that undeniable fact that you absolutely know? Okay? How do you know it? How do you know what you know? Can you trace where you learned it? And, most importantly, how do you know that it is true? For most things, it's easy enough to trace back to how you know what you know. Your parents may have told you why you look...

0 A Distinct Buzzing...

"He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." - Friedrich Nietzche It's funny to think of the fact that everything that has ever been synonyms with fly has been annoying. Flies are these insects that buzz around the back of your head, filling your ears with their nonsense. It makes sense that a gadfly would be someone who spent their time buzzing around, filling others with questions they don't even want answered. And as all insects and everything else in the world, the gadfly has evolved into what we know as the modern fly. Modern day slavery gadflies are in a higher abundance and are just as written off as they once were....

0 It's the Issue of Diluted Lemonade...

"But I say: 'Why invite stress in?' Stop studying strife and learn to live 'the unexamined life'." - "Dancing through Life" from Wicked: The Musical I won't segue in this time with a long winded introduction, with the history of philosophy and human questions and life styles and quotes and general rambling and the like. Not this time, I just won't do that. For once I'll be getting straight to the point. Which may or may not happen again. I wouldn't count on it. [/not so hidden introduction and stalling] I'm not one to say whether or not your life is worth living. I don't think that is my place, or the one of anyone else for that matter. How...

5 Dearly Beloved, We Have Gathered Here...

"Funerals are for the living." - John Green, The Fault in our Stars Once, in her biology class, the teacher started the year by telling the students that someone was going to say "orgasm" instead of "organism", just as someone did every year. The students did not believe her. Sydney did not believe her. Needless to say (for you may have heard it from someone else), Sydney was the one to say it during a presentation on genetically altered food. Also needless to be said (but will be said regardless), she had yet to live it down, nor did she expect to. She took it in stride, tried to forget about it, and avoided the subject of biology like the...