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Currently at Toronto Pearson: -0.6, which is the lowest it's been since April 10. High today: 5. First snow flurries of the season today. It actually did break the freezing mark on the morning of the 22nd, but only by 0.2 degrees. The next two lowest lows in October were 1.1 and 2.2. It was, again, a remarkably warm month. But EC is calling -2 for tonight, which would be the lowest since March 30.
So, the bad guy won again. (And we remain on track for a more-or-less unprecedented right-wing trifecta in Toronto, Ontario, and Canada, due to arrive with the Hudak PC government next fall. Well, there's some bad guys I fully expect to win.) On the bright side: in my more bitter political moments, I think that I should make it my policy to vote for the candidate whose victory would be most hilarious, and, no doubt, this time, the most hilarious candidate won.
And now, a Livejournal Post.
Being a graduate student in a bottom-rung PhD program, having a highly regarded PhD program in town for comparison, deeply impressed on me the importance of self-confidence. The noticeable difference between their students and ours, I felt like, was that theirs generally seemed to think they knew what they were talking about, while ours ... generally seemed to be on the defensive. I'd like to say that this and not "ability" or "intelligence" or whatever was the difference, but those things are often bound up together. That's why the Republic's philosophers emerge from the thumotic class ... although it's not that simple, either. Defensiveness is thumotic, too. (Again I wonder to what extent Plato pondered the two-sidedness (if not the many-sidedness) of thumos. There's loving to win, and there's being afraid to lose. Hockey teams that are afraid to lose are hockey teams that are not going to win. Critias in the Charmides, come to think of it, seems like a thumotic character who is driven more by fear of losing than love of winning. The exuberant Charmides is driven by love of winning. Critias hides his shame; Charmides doesn't. Charmides might be able to learn from Socrates; Critias can't.) The resentful, as Nietzsche says, are devious and clever. (Stupidly clever?) Well....
I don't know if I've mentioned here something I realized a few years ago about my social anxiety. (Some people are surprised that something like social anxiety is an issue at all for me, let alone a sometimes-catastrophic and chronically physically damaging one. On the other hand, some people are surprised that I love to do karaoke.) That's this: what it seems to boil down to is an awareness that I can't justify myself to others (to my own satisfaction?). Often I return to thinking about the conversation I had with a Muslim classmate on a plane once. She wanted to convince me that God existed. I don't know why this particular conversation about God (because of course I've had others with other people that seemed similar on the surface) brought me to despair about the unevenness of the ground we were arguing on: she was sure she was right, and I wasn't sure I was right; I couldn't possibly be that sure I was right, about anything that isn't immediately evident. (But then, to some people, God is immediately evident....)
I don't know why it is that the difficulty of getting along in the world with this kind of attitude has recently come to seem so much more intractable and pervasive than (I think) I had thought before. (It just occurred to me a couple of weeks ago that I hate the TTC for a completely different reason than most people do. What most people hate, or what they claim to hate, is the "customer service" and the supposed unreliability. I hate the crowding. I can't stand being in other people's way; I'm constantly trying to get out of other people's way.) But it has. (Now and then I feel like it has something to do with people generally seeming to be getting more outward-directed, more something-like-manic, running at too high a speed, distracted, unreflective, locked into particular perspectives, uncharitable. I've started to become concerned that a fascist strain is threatening to enter politics across North America and Europe because people are losing their grip on reality. (What's this got to do with Benjamin and the idea of non-auratic art being apprehended in a state of distraction?) It takes some sort of collective trance to enact the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide. I keep thinking: everyone just needs to calm the hell down. HAVE SOME CHAMOMILE TEA, GODDAMIT. But maybe it's just me. I say to people, I feel like the city has gotten much, much angrier over the last ten years, and they agree ... but everyone always agrees that everything is getting worse.) I'm not sure what to do about it, except to remove myself from contact with as many people who seem to be convinced I'm wrong as I can.
This doesn't just mean getting the hell out of academia. This means getting the hell off the sidewalk.
(You know, I realized near the end of highschool, just in the nick of time to save me from going somewhere for a journalism program, that I couldn't possibly be a journalist. But I didn't realize just how much I couldn't comfortably be. The funny thing is, I'm now intending to do pretty much what I intended to do before I quite unexpectedly turned into a Student in my last year of highschool--there is a certain revisionist history of my life, current among some people who have known me for a long time, according to which I always was a Student; it bears only a passing resemblance to reality--and got myself on a path leading to a PhD and academic-career aspirations. Oh the ironies of history, or something. But, as they say, the point ain't the destination.)
ETA: I just learned that the Catatumbo lightning, which I had never heard of until just now, went out this year. So it goes, like we used to say.
So, the bad guy won again. (And we remain on track for a more-or-less unprecedented right-wing trifecta in Toronto, Ontario, and Canada, due to arrive with the Hudak PC government next fall. Well, there's some bad guys I fully expect to win.) On the bright side: in my more bitter political moments, I think that I should make it my policy to vote for the candidate whose victory would be most hilarious, and, no doubt, this time, the most hilarious candidate won.
And now, a Livejournal Post.
Being a graduate student in a bottom-rung PhD program, having a highly regarded PhD program in town for comparison, deeply impressed on me the importance of self-confidence. The noticeable difference between their students and ours, I felt like, was that theirs generally seemed to think they knew what they were talking about, while ours ... generally seemed to be on the defensive. I'd like to say that this and not "ability" or "intelligence" or whatever was the difference, but those things are often bound up together. That's why the Republic's philosophers emerge from the thumotic class ... although it's not that simple, either. Defensiveness is thumotic, too. (Again I wonder to what extent Plato pondered the two-sidedness (if not the many-sidedness) of thumos. There's loving to win, and there's being afraid to lose. Hockey teams that are afraid to lose are hockey teams that are not going to win. Critias in the Charmides, come to think of it, seems like a thumotic character who is driven more by fear of losing than love of winning. The exuberant Charmides is driven by love of winning. Critias hides his shame; Charmides doesn't. Charmides might be able to learn from Socrates; Critias can't.) The resentful, as Nietzsche says, are devious and clever. (Stupidly clever?) Well....
I don't know if I've mentioned here something I realized a few years ago about my social anxiety. (Some people are surprised that something like social anxiety is an issue at all for me, let alone a sometimes-catastrophic and chronically physically damaging one. On the other hand, some people are surprised that I love to do karaoke.) That's this: what it seems to boil down to is an awareness that I can't justify myself to others (to my own satisfaction?). Often I return to thinking about the conversation I had with a Muslim classmate on a plane once. She wanted to convince me that God existed. I don't know why this particular conversation about God (because of course I've had others with other people that seemed similar on the surface) brought me to despair about the unevenness of the ground we were arguing on: she was sure she was right, and I wasn't sure I was right; I couldn't possibly be that sure I was right, about anything that isn't immediately evident. (But then, to some people, God is immediately evident....)
I don't know why it is that the difficulty of getting along in the world with this kind of attitude has recently come to seem so much more intractable and pervasive than (I think) I had thought before. (It just occurred to me a couple of weeks ago that I hate the TTC for a completely different reason than most people do. What most people hate, or what they claim to hate, is the "customer service" and the supposed unreliability. I hate the crowding. I can't stand being in other people's way; I'm constantly trying to get out of other people's way.) But it has. (Now and then I feel like it has something to do with people generally seeming to be getting more outward-directed, more something-like-manic, running at too high a speed, distracted, unreflective, locked into particular perspectives, uncharitable. I've started to become concerned that a fascist strain is threatening to enter politics across North America and Europe because people are losing their grip on reality. (What's this got to do with Benjamin and the idea of non-auratic art being apprehended in a state of distraction?) It takes some sort of collective trance to enact the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide. I keep thinking: everyone just needs to calm the hell down. HAVE SOME CHAMOMILE TEA, GODDAMIT. But maybe it's just me. I say to people, I feel like the city has gotten much, much angrier over the last ten years, and they agree ... but everyone always agrees that everything is getting worse.) I'm not sure what to do about it, except to remove myself from contact with as many people who seem to be convinced I'm wrong as I can.
This doesn't just mean getting the hell out of academia. This means getting the hell off the sidewalk.
(You know, I realized near the end of highschool, just in the nick of time to save me from going somewhere for a journalism program, that I couldn't possibly be a journalist. But I didn't realize just how much I couldn't comfortably be. The funny thing is, I'm now intending to do pretty much what I intended to do before I quite unexpectedly turned into a Student in my last year of highschool--there is a certain revisionist history of my life, current among some people who have known me for a long time, according to which I always was a Student; it bears only a passing resemblance to reality--and got myself on a path leading to a PhD and academic-career aspirations. Oh the ironies of history, or something. But, as they say, the point ain't the destination.)
ETA: I just learned that the Catatumbo lightning, which I had never heard of until just now, went out this year. So it goes, like we used to say.
