2011 begins much better, in many ways, than did 2010. At this time last year, I was involved in helping to put on some events that scared me and my companions witless. My vacation time had been spent working on a paper so I could finish an incomplete. I had a full load of classes [...]
Tagged DoIReallyWantaPhd?, TheAdjectivalCassidyThe first, from an emotional, Buddhist perspective, and the second, from the productive academic’s perspective. Both emphasize being mindful of when you’re in the state of boredom and how to use that as a cue to put the mind in a more curious, awake state. I like Jonathan’s summation of the problem: Boredom is like [...]
I’m currently writing a final paper for my Chekhov class (which has been WONDERFUL). My teacher and I agreed that it would be a good exercise for me to dig really deep into a single story rather than try to survey a batch of stories to prove some conjecture or other. As a writer of [...]
Alex has a wonderful essay up this week on the unexamined life vs the unlived life. I recognized so much of myself in his description of his early college self. And i would say it’s only been fairly recently that I’ve decided to bias myself towards action — even fidgety action — over excessive rumination. [...]
Tagged CommonplaceBookHere’s a quote from Stephen Fry’s novel Making History, one of the few passages that struck me as admirable in that lamentably bad book. If there is a word to describe our age, it must be Security, or to put it another way, Insecurity. From the neurotic insecurity of Freud, by the way of the [...]