Kason

Howdy to all those loyal souls who still check this thing! Happy summer to all! Today was the first day of work down at the GSB (Graduate School of Business for you non-U of C- folken), and I'd say it went well for what I'm being paid. I don't exactly remember what I did. It involved lots of files and some dead people. I just disappeared into a black hole in a large seminary building between University and Woodlawn and emerged 8 and a half hours later slightly more wealthy than when I came in. But that's the moment that touches off today's rant:

What is it with girls and gossip?

It hit me that I don't understand this at all while walking back from work. Alyssa manages to fill the entire 16 minute walk back to the apartment (we timed it this morning) with a drama-laden story about a coworker (no details here) that only got her more infuriated and distracted with every step. Am I wrong in saying that this is pretty common behavior among the fairer sex? I don't think so but I'm also the one asking. And for every step in the increasingly escalated dramafest, I wondered: why do I think that I did nothing but meet friendly and helpful people today in the office when there were probably tense nerves and catty looks flying all over the place? I met good people today and I could care less about the rumors and backstory surrounding them. Is this so odd? I mean, what has happened to actions over words here? A true "action over words" person would be able to just cooly dismiss talk of people and prove every word by treating others. When I'm the target of rumors, there's never been a better way to shoot them down than to resist shooting back with derogatory words and to shoot them down instead with a handshake, a greeting, and diffusing those tensions with friendliness. If a person treats you with nothing but civility and kindness, why do you not take them to be a civil and kind person? Why trust a few stray words of shameless gossip instead?

And so then I was tempted to say that most girls' softness to the temptation to gossip was a sign of something deeper. The chauvinist in me was begging for vindication, wanting to make this evidence for saying that girls are only interested in trashing other people for the good of their own self-image. That little voice begged for a change in my ways, wanting to find one decent girl and hold on to her like my life depended on it lest all the other sharks in pretty skirts devour me in rumors. But this dones't work either. Though my mom is an irredeemable gossip, she is a wonderful woman. I have many female friends who I really value who can fling 15 minutes of uninterrupted, seething, ranting mud in the form of rumors, gossip, and trite stories about their favorite target of the moment. But I still wouldn't give up their friendship for anything. Truth is, any girl out there has the capacity to be a respectable, loyal, and thoughtful companion and a tirelesss friend. They probably have more of that capacity than most men and for sure more than me! But for the life of me, I can't think of anyone whose life is better because of rumor-spreading or character assasination. What the hell is going on?

What good do rumors serve? What is worth the energy and integrity you give up to collecting and? Why is it worth the stress when you become the target of gossip? That's another valuable lesson from a Texan mom who tried to raise her boy right.

There's a lot more to say and think of on this subject, but I'll leave it to the path the comments take from here.

Cheers.

So I got news on the RA suitemate application. No. This means I am almost definitely not getting back into Palevsky next year through the lottery. I don't know what I'm doing about housing next year and I don't just want to be stuck in a last-ditch shoreland room with a random unknown first-year for a roommate. Maybe Neil and I will get a room in Shoreland, but he still has a chance in the house lottery with Hawk. If you're reading this and you're a snazzy dude and you'll be in Shoreland next year, I want to talk to you. Same if you know someone of said qualification.

Also,

I want to learn a martial art. More on this later.

Hoooooooray!


Thefacebook.com just opened a uchicago section. If you're not familiar, thinkl, sans profs and turf battles. Sign up today so I don't look like such a loner on that thing.

Other than that, it's been a pretty quiet week. I've way behind on math and so it's robbing me of my friday night. But I'd be staying in anyway. This is going to be "no drink, do work" weekend. I have 3 papers due within the next week, and I need to finish all 3 by wednesday so I can scav hunt with merciless focus.

Sundays are irredeemable. They suck, and they don't stop sucking until it turns into monday. I woke up late today, made it to Bartlett 20 minutes before closing, frantically finished my RA suitemate app (this is to hopefully get a guaranteed spot in a single in Palevsky next year), then spent 2 hours on debate drills. wheee. I've also decided to run for a position within the debate society for next year. I'm going to run for secretary and I've been brainstorming on my "campaign speech" for wednesday to introduce to the members. Recommendations for me on this are welcome. So then there was dinner, a little TV, a nap, a house study break, and an assload of work. To do for the rest of the night:

1. About 100 more pages of Asimov's I, Robot for Philosophy of Mind and Science Fiction</i>
   
2. A pretty easy calculus problem set on indeterminate forms and the last of another homework. I missed class friday and probably could have gotten my midterm back, but my grade on it doesn't worry me too much and I told my TA friday that I was feeling pretty sick and would probably miss tutorial.
3. Apply to be an RCA (Residential Computing Assistant) next year. It's pretty easy work, basically I an there to deflect people's panic about computers that don't behave and try to do something about it.
4. 6 chapters of Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation for Sosc.
5. 2 journal articles for sociology
6. A couple of emails, about summer work in Tyler, early finals (because I have to be out of Chicago monday or tuesday of finals week but a calculus final on friday), and looking at a research assistant position with a prof next year (on quantum mind and social science. wheee.

And miles to go before I sleep.

I woke up today to the sound of my phone ringing. It was my dad. I felt like answering the phone with "Dad.... what the hell are you thinking? It's 1 in the afternoon! uuughaprgghp."

But my sensibilities got the better of me.

At long last, I'm writing in this again. So I realize that I've never been a great fit for livejournal because I don't discuss my personality and directional uncertainties in public a lot. It's stuff not worth airing. But, I don't have the effortless self-control I give myself credit for. So here's for another shot at criticism for all the times I show myself differently than I think. Have at.

From Rusticus I derived the notion that my character needed training and care, and that I must not allow myself to be led astray into the Sophist's enthusiasm for concocting speculative treaties, edifying homilies, or imaginary sketches of The Ascetic or The Altruist. He also taught me to avoid rhetoric, poetry, and verbal conceits, affectations of dress at home, and other such lapses of taste, and to imitate the easy epistolary style of his own letter written at Sinuessa to my mother. If anyone, after falling out with me in a moment of temper, showed signs of wanting to make peace again, I was to be ready at once to meet them half-way.

--The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, 1.7

I've been re-reading the Meditations for the umpteenth time and still find it the manual for a graceful internal life I thought it was as a precocious sophomore in hs. I just wish it would stop making me arrogant.

(The rest of this is writing not worthy of a narrative with polishing like transitions and body. Bullets keep shit disentangled and blunt.)

• For the first time I can remember, I'm nostalgic. Nostalgic about myself. It's difficult to think that at age 19 there existed some previous Kason which now-Kason has lost sight of and needs to regain. But surely I've lost something of that kid who would stare at the screen all night googling obscure historical and philosophical phenomena. I've lost something of the kid who didn't get anything done until he had read the day's newspaper. Now I'm doing good just to make it to my 9:30 calculus on time without looking obvious to the fact that I just stumbled out of bed to make it. What happened to the kid who found the University of Chicago the highest affirmation of the way he looked at the world? I think I've long lost the frame of mind needed for one of the most ecstatic experiences in my life: a drive under a beautiful Texas night where the most intense joy was found in merely reminding myself that I am alive. An awareness of the fact that you are alive is the highest bliss, I still hardly doubt that, but the difference between agreeing with and living out the principle has grown larger.


• My plans until next school are pretty shaky. I was going to do summer school at UT Austin and work in a typical Austin summer job, but plans fell through there. Unfortunately, I'm probably going back to Tyler and risk a summer sitting at home, lapsing old habits. But that's more common than I'd thought. More fundamentally though, I feel like this year in college is a wash. I'm not the person I expected a year of college would give me. That's no fault of my own. But that's another story. Let's just suffice it to say I won't have a down-home character-building summer nor one that belongs in a bad novel.


• I met a girl. Her name's Charlotte and she blows my mind. She has all the artistic flourishes I don't, rocks out to Underworld, speaks directly, and looks great in a skirt. Trouble is, progress here is slow at best. We haven't spent an appreciable amount of time together in a couple of weeks but the interest is still mutually there. I just worry that things won't get very far before we all adjourn for summer and things have to ferment at 2000 miles' distance (she lives in Boston). I want to be up front with her and say that I want things to go further, but the opportunity has never presented itself because we've communicated via phone tag and a few chance encounters on campus. But hopefully there are beautiful things to come.

Life goes on.

In Hobbes' model of the pre-state society (commonly called the "state of nature" but Hobbes never uses this term in Leviathan), he seems to make the same error that Adam Smith misstepped on with view to emerging market societies. Hobbes' stress on eminence and competition assumes, like Smith's model of the labor market, that markets and market societies are composed of self-sufficeint individuals independent of their activity in economies and societies. In Smith this presumption leads him to overstate the freedom and self-willedness of work and reward. In Hobbes the error leads him to understate the role of cooperation and cohesion in pre-state and nonhierarchical societies. Granted, we have much stronger anthropological record of this than Hobbes had. Nevertheless, Hobbes argument about an irreversible transfer of rights to the sovereign to prevent wanton disabuse of fellow man is damaged by the realization that some dignities are not threatened by ahierarchical living.

I've been thinking about this in international terms, since International Relations is the field where a hypothetical State of Nature is closest to an accurate description of power structure. I'm not anywhere close to a conclusion about it. Given that there is an expanding array of global-scale problems which impels nations into cooperation to solve on a global scale (see Robert Wright's Nonzero), I don't see a huge gulf between the international and the anthropological in this arena. Not quite sure what to make of this yet, but open to suggestions.

For the curious:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1103/p01s02-usju.html

Maryland v. Pringle.

Watch for a decision.