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April 6th, 2009
10:37 pm - Thought on history
I have been thinking a lot lately. The joke here is that I have a lot of catching up to do (ha ha!) , but to be fair, these are things I've always toyed with.
So there is one question that always comes up with history: Why do we study history?
My answer is usually something along the lines of, "I love studying history. People fascinate me." This is true. There are many truths. Also, this is scarcely the sort of answer acceptable to an academic funding board. One of my professors, who I call "Dr. Marx" to my friends who will never meet the man, came up with the best answer I had heard. We study history to answer the question of "Why?" with "How did that come to be?"
I was speaking to Shweta about narrative, and how people process memory in terms of narrative (that's what I took from it, anyway), and it struck me what a very good approach answering "Why?" that way was. History is a narrative, and history is the verbalized or written memory of our past.
We study history, in brief, not to study it like some poor dissected frog, but to create our own narrative of it: to more fully live our own story.
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November 5th, 2008
11:46 am
Today, I am proud to be an American, and I am hopeful that that feeling may continue in the next four years.
I am, however, embarrassed to be a Californian. Way to go, California. Legislating discrimination in our very own constitution. Shall we next forbid Muslims to marry, maybe, since the majority of Christians don't agree morally with them? How about Jews? We wouldn't want people to think it's okay to be Jewish. They don't believe in Christ, or in Hell! Stupid, frightened, guilty, arrogant fucking asshats, and they're the majority who voted!
IT IS A LEGAL CONTRACT, NOT A RELIGIOUS STATEMENT! The government has No Religious Authority. Marriage is religious only so far as it is made thus by people's individual choices.
Fuck you, 52% of California voters. You might have been mislead and frightened, but fuck you all the same. I am ashamed that you think it is okay to treat people this way.
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August 30th, 2008
10:22 pm - More history class blogging
I don't like academia, generally speaking. Its abhorrence of mysticism, its fascination with idiotic details at the cost of a broader picture, and its politics and elitism all rub me the wrong way. Only in academia could 'post-modernist' literature interpretations exist.
That said, it has some really good bits, like the insistence of making a point only once you have -evidence- to back up that point. It is tedious, it is painstaking, and at times, it is eye-opening. If you cannot find evidence for your preconceived ideas in the source material, your ideas might be -wrong-, and best of all, you should have a sense of what ideas might fit better. I love that about good research. I love good research.
I'm taking a class on the Mexican-American perspective of American. The professor is a consumate story-teller. He is a self-described 'old fart', and he has an engaging manner, a good balance of questioning and talking in his teaching, and an excellent sense of timing when he talks. I suspect that he helps a lot of people get their footing in college. He made it pretty clear that he'll help anyone who puts out effort.
But he is not academically rigorous, and the thought patterns that he is teaching his students are -destructive- to learning critical observation.
I got that niggling sense of something-being-off the first day of class, and so I wrote down exactly-what he said so that I could think about it later. He said, "I see a lot of blacks, a lot of whites, but I don't see Latinos or Asians panhandling. Latinos are hard-working people." Now, I don't mind a certain amount of generalization, when the generalizaiton is -based on actual evidence-. Really, saying that Latinos have a strong cultural ethic to go to work is not inaccurate, but to justify it based on his individual observation that he doesn't see any Latinos begging is .. incredibly sloppy, and his off-hand comparison to black and white people almost makes it racist.
He seems to make assumptions without asking questions on a regular basis, however. He also said, "You're from a working class background just like me" to our class, assuming that most of us were Latino. Obviously, I'm not Latino, and I would hesitate to make that particular assumption at DVC, which is located in a fairly affluent, middle-class area. A fair number of his students, I suspect, are not from working-class households. He did not even trouble to ask.
That was the first day. On the second day, he was talking about the Spanish and their culture. He showed us an utterly appalling video, which included about 10 minutes of a bull fight while the voice-over discussed the glory and the challenge and the sexuality of such an event. Now, animal cruelty, especially -glorified- animal cruelty, is sickening. I'm big on respecting cultural differences, but that respect does not extend to torture. Being critical of such practices, even if they have a long history and religious significance, is necessary. (And it does not mean that we condemn the people / culture as a whole as barbaric / uncivilized / savage. It we means that we criticize the one point.)
However, I know how to look at history. History is history. We cannot change the past, and we should not try to change the past. We should understand it, and why it was the way it was, and observe the same conditions in the modern day.
The professor did not tell us whether he meant the video to be historical or modern when he showed it to us, and he did not seem to much care about the distinction, though when I asked (and I -had to ask-), he supposed that it was historical.
Twitch.
Day three, he was still talking about the Spanish again. He had said, repeatedly, that the Spanish had no sense of humor, that they were a very serious people. More ungrounded stereotyping, oh good-ee. However, then he brought up Don Quixote. Don Quixote is essentially the story of an old man who goes mad, decides to become a knight errant, and goes about the countryside with his servant, attempting to do good and brave deeds. He embodies (according to the professor) all the Spanish virtues: purity, bravery, machoism. He also imagines that a prostitute is his lady, and tilts at windmills, thinking them some enemy to defeat. It's funny!
So I raised my hand and pointed out that really, the Spanish must have a sense of humor if one of their greatest authors wrote a book wherein a crazy old man embodied all their greatest virtues. He gave me a look, then asked me if I thought insanity was funny? Then continued speaking without waiting for an answer.
This is a rather exhaustive post, of course, but I wanted to illustrate rather than just -state- how stereotyping and lack of critical thinking work. People are often warned about how it is 'bad' to stereotype and to make generalizations, but it's less often that they are shown 1) how one ought to observe instead and 2) how ones perceptions can be affected by accepting such stereotypes. I mean, Don Quixote is a wonderful satire, and this professor is so stuck in his rote way of thinking that he will not even consider it. It's not cool, and it's not academically rigorous, and I do not approve.
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09:55 pm
I am taking an African American Perspective of US History at DVC this semester, and on Thursday, our professor gave a brilliant lecture. This is a sense of it, from my memory and notes.
He was talking about Nathaniel Bacon's rebellion in 1675. A member of the gentry class, Bacon travelled to the colonies, to Jamestown, to make his fortune. At the time, tobacco production was flourishing. Rolfe had brought back a new strain of tobacco the contained more nicotene, and it had accordingly become more popular. Thus, the tobacco farmers were striking it rich, and land was of premium value. The farmers, accordingly, were encroaching even further onto Native American lands, and the Susquehannock nation were raiding and trying to drive off the farmers. The rich farmers, however, were not generally as accessible. Indentured servants who had been freed from their servitude were supposed to be given land in return for their service. Their former masters often gave them land which had been overexhausted, or which was on the fringe of the settlement. So, the Susquehannocks most often ended up launching attacks on the former indentured servants.
Not a pretty situation. Nathaniel Bacon, however, had aspirations. He spoke to the Royal Governor of Jamestown, Berkeley, indicating that he would like to become Royal Governor himself. Berkeley, unsurprisingly, told him 'no.' Bacon, at this juncture, became interested in the growing plight of the indentured servants and proposed to form a milita and launch an attack on the Native Americans. Indetured servants, freed and unfreed, black slaves and Bacon went on the attack -- only to find themselves entirely unable to locate the Susquehannock. So, instead, they attacked a tribe of Algonquin, who were living in relative peace with the colonists. They traded deerskins to Berkeley and his friends in exchange for certain favors and rights.
Berkeley told Bacon to stop attacking them, and Bacon refused, and launched a campaign against Berkeley and his staff. By 1676, he had driven Berkeley out of Jamestown and burned the city to the ground. It might have ended there, at least until reinforcements from England arrived, except that Bacon contracted dysentery and died a month later. The rebellion lost its leader, and Berkeley and his staff were able to seize back control. They put to death many of the rebels.
However, they were ...concerned. The indentured servants and the black slaves had banded together fiercely, had started families together before that, and were forming a very close alliance. The indentured servants and slaves far outnumbered the Gentry class. And so, Berkeley and his own responded to what they considered a dangerous alliance. They responded by drafting certain laws, laws which distinguished how people should be treated on a basis of race, as determined by the color of a person's skin. This, our professor said, is when the illusion of 'race' began, and the purpose of it was to drive apart those who found common ground in the abuses that they suffered.
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July 28th, 2008
03:27 pm - While it's on my mind...
...I want to break apart a sentence which my grandmother said to me. She said it as though she were joking, but it's not funny!
"Yes, I guess that your parents and I are being supportive. After all, every parent wants to see their daughter walk down the aisle with her own man."
The most interesting bit about this is that it supposes that my polygamous relationship is about Daniel and my relationship with him. It supposes that Michealle and I are in competition for his masculine affections. It rather misses the point that I am bisexual and in a relationship with both people, not with one of them.
I understand that this is not a standard cultural paradigm, I do, and I understand that my grandmother is from another era, so to speak, and that she is trying, but being uncomfortable and making snarky jokes is not a good way to try.
Also, she does not take responsibility in this sentence for her feelings. She does not say that she is uncomfortable, or that she does not understand how the dynamics of my relationship work, or that she is concerned about Michealle and I being jealous of one another, although thinking about this sentence, one can -assume- all those things. However, she does not even admit that she has a problem with things. She says that 'parents in general' feel this way, and implies that my parents, and she, too, feel this way.
That's not nice.
I have no desire to shake up whatever worldview that she is comfortable with, narrow-minded as it may be. I talk about my relationship, my people, because they are important to me and because my grandmother has expressed that she wishes to spend time with me and to be a part of my life. I am down with this. Family is great.
I am not okay with my family making cutting remarks to me when they don't like something. I am not okay with them being happy to hear only what they are comfortable with hearing. I am weird, I am eccentric, I get it, everyone else should get it because it is not subtle, and if they do not care to deal with it, I am content to ignore them, and they can ignore me.
I do not expect anyone to be overjoyed at my oddity, but it would be nice if they also looked at me and realized how happy I am with it.
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July 8th, 2008
11:05 pm - And now, a deep sigh of relief.
I finished my semester. I passed everything in my semester, including organic chemistry. I enjoyed certain moments of my semester.
And after teetering on the precipice of applying to pharmacy school, I am going to go get a Masters in history and teach at a community college. I was dreading pharmacy school. I tried to figure out if this was the streak of avoidance that I have. I thought it was. I was mostly convinced that my not liking the sciences too much and that my sense of nervous resignation to applying to pharmacy school was that I tend to dislike pressure and obligation, regardless of where it comes from. Even if I like something, I tend to stop liking it if I am sufficiently stressed about it. Also, my grades were not great, and I tend to prefer doing things which I excel in.
But I'm looking forward to getting a Masters in History. I am looking forward to teaching it, and to taking inspiration from historical sources for stories. I am looking forward to learn more about the twists and turns of cultures and individuals and showing that to people. It is something I adore. It is what I majored in.
So. That was a year and a half of science. It was not so fun. I think, I hope, I am done trying it now.
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May 5th, 2008
10:44 am - An Accounting (aka, "And what planet did -you- fall off of lately?")
I have finished reading about special relativity for the moment. I think it is rather ingenious of the professors to introduce such a concept at the end of the semester when most of the students have already had their brains melted into puddles of goo. In such a state, it's much easier to look at ideas like "time dilation" and "length contraction," blink drowsily, and go yeah, whatever.
Anyway, finals week is coming up, as well as the usual end of the semester crunch. I presently feel a need to detail exactly what this will entail, and so, here we go:
May 5th, 1:00pm-2:00pm: Physics Quiz on Special Relativity
May 6th 8:00pm-8:15pm: Biology Oral Report
May 13th, 9:30am-11:45am: Organic Chemistry Exam 4
May 14th, 11:00am-1:00pm: Physics Exam 4
May 15th, 2:00pm-4:00pm (or so); ACS Standardized Organic Chemistry Exam
May 15th, 6:00pm-8:00pm: Biology Exam 5
May 20th, 6:00pm - 8:00pm: Biology Final
May 21st, 8:00am - 10:00am: Physics Final
May 22nd, 7:00am - 10:00am: Organic Chemistry Final
May 22nd: Unknown Substance (which took 8+ lab periods to do) Lab Report due.
May 19-23rd, evening: Medical Terminology Final
So, it was nice knowing everybody! I will return (triumphant!) in June.
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April 21st, 2008
12:01 am
Okay, then.
Guilt is apparently a problem.
I acknowledge that I have known this to be true for a while. My episodes of crushing unhappiness are characterized by avoidance: I don't want to deal with things. I don't want to deal with them At All. I want to crawl under my bed and hide there, and I am revolted at my lack of self control. At the lack that led to me procrastinating about things, at my lack that makes me want to avoid pressure and hide under the bed, and at the lack which finally results in my being too emotionally overwrought to force myself to do the things I have committed myself to doing.
I am avoiding pressure. I am avoiding obligations. It does not matter if originally I enjoyed the obligations; I come to dread them because I have to do them.
I thought that this was because I had issues with anxiety, caused by my super procrastination powers that I learned in high school. I would let projects and homework and whatever build up until I had no choice by to deal with them. Simultaneously, I would gear myself up for this mentally speaking. I would remind myself constantly that I should do such and such, that it was coming, etc. etc. and then, in a flurry of desperate activity, I would get stuff done.
At some point, this stopped working. Instead of getting stuff done at the last minute, I would do something creative, like sit there and cry, or play video games for sixteen hours straight and ditch school the next day because getting out of bed wasn't worth it.
Clearly, I thought, the difficulty is my study habits. If I had not been procrastinating, I would never have let the pressure get to that point. I thought my guilt was driven by a sense of not doing as well as I thought I ought to do (and it is, partly). I thought if I just did stuff in small pieces, it would be manageable.
Somehow, this did not happen. I did not want to do stuff, even in small pieces. I just didn't want to do stuff. Stuff was not fun. Stuff was unpleasant. No one is forcing me to do this, I reminded myself. There is no pressure and no unpleasantness save that you are creating yourself. Look, let's have tea and play good music and have fun with this. Stuff continued to be unpleasant and to make me feel anxious, at which point I got to wondering what was wrong with me.
And - well. I talked to my boyfriend last night, and he made the observation that perhaps I might find other ways to motivate myself to do stuff than guilt. This surprised me for a moment. My mental state was somewhere between: I'm doing that? and How else would I get myself to do things. It was followed by a sense of - bleary enlightenment, because, oh, that explained a lot. Honestly, threatening myself into doing things because otherwise I would be a disappointment would easily enough make even things I enjoyed doing into something thoroughly unpleasant.
But I was convinced that I needed the guilt, because otherwise, when things got tough, I would quit. But that's really not true. I tend to stick with things because I want to do them, even if I want to throw them away in utter revulsion because of how guilty I feel about them. See that? The guilt was not helping me stick with things. It was making me desperately want to _stop_ doing them, and I was working on _in spite_ of the guilt, not because of it.
So this is enlightening. It's also different. I have not thought about things this way before, and it feels like my thoughts are clearer. It feels like I untangled some sort of emotional knot that's been choking me for a while. I'm not sure. It warrants more thinking...
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April 20th, 2008
02:33 am - Things you do not wish to say
When someone is upset over their circumstances, whatever those circumstances are, I do not want to tell them that some other unfortunate would be grateful to be in their position. I do not think that it is the point at all.
I am curious of those reading: What would you not want to tell someone?
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April 19th, 2008
01:51 am - Also.
Some people would be delighted to be able to be in school, and so am I, on some level. I am lucky, and I know it.
I suppose if I were not doing this, I would be doing - what? Selling toner and taking service calls for a laser printer service?
That actually does make me feel better about O-Chem. I need to remind myself that not only I could I be bored, I could be bored and doing something which perpetuated the cycle of me doing boring, frustrating things. It is not as if I would be doing something more interesting than O-Chem if I had not gone back to school.
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01:37 am - I am drawing the line, however...
....at organic chemistry parodies of Muppet Treasure Island.
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01:22 am - Self-justification
This is the stuff I am procrastinating about.
"An aldehyde or a ketone reacts with a phosphonium ylide to form an alkene. This is called a Wittig reaction. Overall, it amounts to interchanging the double-bonded oxygen of the carbonyl compound and the double-bonded carbon group of the phosphonium ylide."
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12:57 am
Current form of procrastination: Muppet Treasure Island
I think that explains itself.
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April 15th, 2008
04:35 pm - Thinking things through
I am in a thoughtful sort of mood.
I dragged myself back to UC Davis to finish the Library Project for O-Chem. As expected, I did not have all the required information. Come to think of it, I still don't have all the required information. This is a combination of me being rattled and therefore forgetful and the information simply not being there. High on the list of things I Don't Handle Well At All is putting a great deal of time and effort into something and having nothing to show for my efforts.
However, I remained relatively calm this time. I am deliberately prying the notion that doing exceptionally well at school is a necessity out of my head. This does not mean that I am going to neglect school, that I am going to fail to turn in assignments and so on, but it does mean that a B or even a C is not the end of the world. I am smart enough to do that without school devouring every spare minute of my time.
The fact is, school does not devour every spare minute of my time (although, I admit, it has been a very busy semester). The fact is more that if it does not, I feel guilty and anxious that I am not studying, and then when I am studying, I am tense, resentful, and unhappy. I have known this for a while. I know that it is unhelpful. It is a difficult mindset to break out of, however.
I was wondering if my attitude toward school was a reflection of it being something that I did not want to do. I think - not so much. I got exceedingly upset about my medieval studies papers. I procrastinated about them, turned them in late, and never, not on any of them, did the kind of job I wanted to do. I always wanted to do a brilliantly researched, sentence by sentence cited, eloquent paper - one that read as though it had come straight from the mouth of the person whose position we were supposed to be taking. That never happened. In the end, I wrote a lengthy comparison on religious views of science, and I couldn't remember a few months after I graduated what it was about.
Likewise ... for six months after I graduated, I was supposed to be writing. I was working part time for my dad (what a dreadful idea) and working partly exercising horses. I wrote nothing of note. I thought a lot about my dad's business, which was not making enough money, and thought a lot about how to deal with my dad and his employees. Essentially, my dad is not organized and is not too concerned about being organized, beyond knowing that it is something he should be. This resulted in people not being called as promised, in people not showing up where they needed to be, in a lack of communication that simply made my skin crawl -- and I spent my downtime fussing about it, since I was supposed to be Helping and Fixing these things, so that we would do better.
And, naturally, I decided that chemistry was preferable; that not depending on my dad and my parents, even as an employee, was a Good Idea, and lined myself up to grad school of some sort. (Originally, the idea was pharmacy. Med school was a later idea)
Part of it, though, was thinking that I did not have the self-discipline to write at all. Since I had blown off six months without writing, really, I might as well treat it as a hobby, because I certainly was not convincingly serious about it.
(Insert interlude where I look consideringly at Pharmacy School because I could actually do that without having to take an extra year - but it would still be a three year program, and I don't really approve of entirely drug-based medicine)
And. .. and. I thought that - I still think that. I broke out of it, somewhat, getting the stories together for Clarion, because I damn well wrote, and I also figured out how to finish stories. I have always written, even the interlude where I didn't write. I make up characters, and I write them down. But that is different than finishing stories. I managed it when I went for a walk with Michealle (at her instigation), and we talked out the scenes, and the plot, and I wrote them down. She also, mm, told me to make up a point, any point, where the story was going, and then we figured out how to get there. I don't imagine that this will always be the Right Thing to Do. When I look at the story now, it lacks a certain impulsion from the MC. But, instead of flailing around getting more and more agitated, I finished the story, so it might not be a bad trick for a first draft.
In any case, most of my friends, upon learning I was dropping the med-school thing so that I could write, went oh, good, you realized it.
But I don't trust the writing thing. More specifically, I don't trust myself. I remember an idea I used to treasure in middle school, high school: the idea that passion was a necessity, that I needed something of my own which could not be giving up; something that was that important. At the time, I decided that acting was the thing. In particular, I decided musical theater was the thing, but focused on acting since I had never learned to dance, and my particular mindset of Being Serious About Acting did not lend itself well to the embarrassment of working out my lack of coordination.
Even then, though, I spent far more time reading and playing with story ideas than I did practicing my singing or memorizing monologues, so---
The point is, though, that I wonder why or if I have created, or invoked, this sense of needing to write. It's an odd thing to have in my head, since it does not make sense to me. I have been reconciled with the idea that people are deeply passionate about the sciences, whether they are medicine or research, and since my brain can do these things well, I wonder if I could not turn my passion to that, if I chose the direction of the passion to begin with.
Certainly, my sense of perfectionism latches on, death-like, to random enough targets. I have been -really wanting- to do the laundry for a few months now. It is more comforting to me than going out to my favorite restaurant, or hanging with the horses, or various other things. I lure myself along studying biology or o-chem by telling myself that only after I have finished this chapter can I do more laundry. I think that this is probably indicative of stress more than a passion to be a housewife, though.
So perhaps that is not a helpful line of thought.
It has been a while since I've written anything thought-like down in this journal. I had imagined this to be because I was tired of whining in public (and this is true, to an extent), but also possibly symptomatic of not listening to myself. I do not think that it is my natural inclination to be continuously unhappy, so maybe there was something to my feeling that way every time I had a break. I am still not sure.
However, I have decidedly thought myself out for the time being.
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March 31st, 2008
01:27 pm
Ah, well. I did not get into Clarion. I consoled myself by a drive with blasting music, crepes, and excellent green tea. So it goes. I also polished off Alan Moore's edition of Batman, which was gratifyingly dark. The stories will get edited and submitted to writing markets this weekend, and I will write my O-Chem lab report and study physics tonight.
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March 11th, 2008
07:45 am
I like when textbooks show a jot of personality. As below:
"Amides are very unreactive compounds, which is comforting, since proteins are composed of amino acids linked together by amide bonds."
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06:54 am
Ursula Vernon, whose blog is one of the funniest things ever, once described her 'muse' as being similar to a bladder infection, as somewhat embarrassing and inconvenient. She said something along the lines of it feels like: "I gotta art, and I gotta art NOW!"
I laughed, and then I thought I was a bit jealous: Ah, to not have to back my muse into a corner with whips and chains when I finally have the time and energy to deal with it!
But actually, I realize now, my studying would be going much more smoothly if my mind were not incessantly wandering off in directions more creative than memorizing the reaction mechanism for transesterfication and aminolysis and all those fun things. On Fuglyhorseoftheday.blogspot.com, I posted four equine "personality types." I do not need to be doing that sort of thing. Also, my mind is wandering off into the minds of my characters. n particular, the novel has returned. Little does it know that spring break is coming up, and it might well get more than it asked for. That would serve it right.
Other things are going on, but I shouldn't be dickering around with livejournal in the first place. Away, away.
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March 1st, 2008
10:43 pm - I did it!
Two short stories written, given a sound editing, and sent in to Clarion.
I will now sit here in blink stupidly while my brain catches up to reality.
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February 16th, 2008
12:50 pm - *grin*
I have a boyfriend, and he got me -good- chocolate. Decadently good chocolate. I am not much for Valentine's Day (commercial-hyped holiday, etc.), but I feel pleasantly spoiled.
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February 11th, 2008
12:12 pm
Whenever I haven't posted for a while, I start having trouble posting anything, since so much stuff has happened that writing all of it down would be an Ordeal, and really all I want to do is comment on something fairly inane and unimportant, like the creepy-weird song from Thomas the Tank Engine, which has been stuck in my head for a week now. My propensity for getting little kid songs stuck in my head might be a good reason to never have children. An excerpt:
"Accidents happen now and again, just when you least expect Just when you think that life is okay, fate comes to collect." (sung in cheerful little kid voices with a bouncy tune)
The British are morbid. This is nothing new. Just consider the Victorians. In particular, their penchant for post-mortem photography: http://ame2.asu.edu/projects/haunted/ISA%20index/book%20of%20the%20dead/book%20of%20the%20dead%20photos.htm
I am also morbid, which might be why I appreciate this stuff.
Anyway, other stuff is happening, and I am happy about that stuff. I don't know how to write about it properly, though, or I might be being shy or tired or some combination thereof, so I will leave it for the nonce.
For those who know from dressage, though: Feather can now officially do flying changes. She also does canter pirouettes and piaffe and half-pass. Damn, my horse is cool. The real challenge is going to be getting her to do passage, however. She does not have much natural spring to her movement, so we need to figure out how to get her to fake it. Hmm.
I have three exams this week and two short stories to finish and polish by March 1st. Times are a little bit crazy. Still, I imagine this will seem positively idyllic by the time I hit medical school.
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