Doctor Rafa and Dance class

We started floorwork in dance class today. It's super fun. Rolling around, handstands, kicks that go into rolls. This is the sort of thing I'm actually fairly good at, after years of Aikido and before that of gymnastics. And it looks pretty damn cool

Afterward, though, I find my arms and legs are jelly, and I've got cuts all over my fingers and elbows. Pretty sure I bruised my hip.

Whoops.

My mom sent me a link to a job oppurtunity I might have in the DC area for a year that actually sounds pretty cool. It's a research institute, where I can nearly pick my field. One of the fields is higher education, which sounds pretty awesome as a yearlong 'getting our field legs' kind of job. Pretty good benefits too.

Bad thing is--it's in DC.

Which I'm not sure I want to do. Maybe downtown DC's not too bad, once you actually know it.

I'm going to keep looking, anyway. I am aware it can take up to six months to get a job though, in this economy.

Doctor Rafa Doesn't Get It

This is really bothering me. It's made very obvious exactly how much my self image consists of myself as being hyper intelligent, and very capable of grasping any argument a philosophically minded person sets before me (as I understand all the terms, etc.).

Doctor Rafa's Computer is Fucking Up Again

Sleep is a problem. I need to find a better way to need less sleep. I also need to find a way to get more work done faster, but I have a basic solution to that one. That is, I need to get off my ass and just do it.

Amazing how good a cure it is for laziness to stop trying to con and cajole yourself into working and actually do it, right then, no compromises.

Course, it's not as much fun as setting up a reward system, and it takes a lot more willpower...

I think sometime I'd like to do something--immensely practical and helpful for a while. I think that's why I keep coming back to the idea of doing some sort of volunteer work next year.

I'm not addicted to the idea of helping people, necessarily, though I feel that I have a certain duty to better peoples' lives (that inclination itself needs some investigation, and I'm not sure what else to say about it right now).

I do want to see myself doing something skilled (skilled particularly) that directly and immediately contributes to some change, a good change preferably.

Philosophy is the one thing right now that I know for -certain- I love doing, that I feel competent at to a great degree and that I think greatly forms my character out of all the things I like doing. I love philosophy, as a concept, as a striving for the best life, as a general goal of being an excellent human being.

I also think that to be a truly great human being you can't just be a philosopher. You have to be an artisan, and a lover, maybe a politician (read as someone who cares about a communal good, maybe)...a lot of things, basically.

But then, I also think maybe my personal best bet for next year would be doing something that's just fun for a year.

Bartending. Talking to people.

No reason I can't do both and more, I guess. Not really coming to any point, just mulling over an infinite number of possibilities. Good possibilities, most.

Guess in the end I have little to say, except--

I still need to find a way to sleep less. If I can't function with less than 8 hours a night, then I lose a lot of time. Maybe if I drink more water, exercise more.

But then, I don't really want to exercise more, and I drink all the water I want. One has to draw a line somewhere, on self regulation.

Doctor Rafa Found A Cocktail She Likes

I like being twenty-one. It was rather nice to pull Elena out, walk down the street to Da Vinci's, and start a good conversation over gimlets. And holy shit, gimlets are delicious, I wish I'd known about them before. Far as I can tell, it's just...gin, lime juice, sugar, and ice shaken together. Man, it was tasty.

I am worried about Elena, after a few hour long conversation with her. She's--quite depressed. Not in the "she's going to kill herself" way, but in the "if someone killed me, I'd have no regrets" sort of way.

I'm hoping to at least drag her out more, give her the chance to enjoy herself without having to put effort forward.

In other news. Doing work is nice. Getting organized for this paper is nice.

Watching House is nice.

Drinking red wine out of a terra cotta mug is nice.

Scalding coffee with the milk still half sitting at the top is nice.

Right now, I still feel a little down, despite all the nice things around me. I'm thinking it's because I'm by myself, and knowing that I can force myself to unclench, accept the reality, go back to focusing on the...nice bits.

I smell like lemon sugar. It's another of several perfumes I own.

Hoping to have a chance to play soon, as I really have an itch to scratch in this regard...

Clawing for an outlet,

Rafa

Doctor Rafa and Philosophy Bites

I've been trying out a bunch of podcasts this week, and so far my favorite is this podcast called Philosophy Bites (philosophybites.com). It's a 13ish minute show where these two guys (one of whom is apparently the author of Wittgenstein's Poker, a book I happen to be reading now) bring in specialist philosophers on various subjects.

The ones I've listened to so far have been on "what is an emotion?" and "morality without God."

Pretty cool.

Doctor Rafa Plays with the Internets

God, I love coffee. Of course, since I spent all my meals for the day on coffee, I'm a little stumped about what to do about food.

...but who cares. I have coffee.

I haven't really been able to eat much lately. Something about the feeling of being full is unsettling. Not unsettling in an upsetting sort of way, but I feel like I can't move, and I don't feel hungry all that often. Perhaps it's because I've been sleeping more? I do feel tired a lot more. I took a nap today for two hours...then got more coffee.

So, I've been trying to understand some fetishes that are very alien to me, lately. Just because--the topic interests me, and I like to know how sexual associations work, especially if they're ones I don't at all have. Right now I'm trying to understand a disease and pestilence type fetish. As in, someone who gets off looking at pus, boils, vomit, I guess scat would go here. It's not something I feel really at all, and imagining myself in those scenarios is pretty nausea-inducing, but I think I'm starting to get the idea anyway. How do you think it works? The mindset is--interesting.

I don't mean to freak anyone out with all this alternative-sexuality stuff lately, it's just been in my mind lately as an area of interest. Like, take people who are into amputees? What is the mindset there that makes a lack of limbs sexually attractive, makes that the important feature? Is it the helplessness, maybe (in the case of all four limbs, as seems to be semi-common). But then, wikipedia said that such people prefer only one limb, or one of each. Maybe it's just the mutilation? I'm curious, since again it isn't something that I automatically understand.

How about insects? Maggots in particular seem popular. Perhaps it is just sexual associations with the grotesque, or fear-adrenaline-fascination with death and the mechanical degradation of our bodies after death?

I admit I sort of think all this is sort of cool. Not sexual, for me, but cool.

Oh, and my professor brought up Body Identity Integrity Disorder (I think that's the official name) in Bioethics last class, and it was pretty amusing to watch the looks of absolute horror on the faces of my classmates. "There are people...who voluntarily chop off their -limbs-!" It strikes me that such people don't seem to think that mental illnesses are actually real. Their reactions are always something like "but why don't they just--not do that and get a real job, and a real girlfriend, and everything would be better!" It's idiotic, and easy to brush aside such people as ignorant, but I wonder at the average person's conception of what a mental illness really is. In my experience, people seem to see it as weakness, or a cry for attention. Also interesting, but in a slightly more depressing way.

Doo bee doo

Dear Andrew,

A quotation my friend Ryan shot at me. I thought it was great.

"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)" --Walt Whitman

Did I mention Ryan's a Buddhist monk in training?

Heh.

Just wanted to share that,

Rafa.

Doctor Rafa Gets to Work

Well, I have my first homework assignment. Florka sent it for our first class, Body Knowledge. It's a seminar class, but looks to be quite difficult indeed judging by the preliminary assignment.

Here's the assignment: first meeting Tuesday September 1.

I want you to look at the opening couple sections of Chapter 5 from Part Two of O’Shaughnessy’s The Will, pp. 179–87 (see attachment).

expect to hand it in.

background and explanation. In Part One O’Shaughnessy explored the limits of basic physical action. (I can’t just will that cup to move “with my mind,” as we say. Why? On the other hand, I can just will my arm to move.) A basic bodily action is, for example, raising your arm, and he counts that as an exercise of the will. He uses uppercase F (big phi) for the basic action, which is something you will, and lowercase j (small phi) for the movement of your limb. So, F may be raising your arm, while j is arm-rise, that is, the arm going up. Obviously, these are closely related (you can’t successfully raise your arm without your arm rising), but they are not the same thing: j (arm-rise, my arm going up) can occur without its being a willed action (i.e. without my raising my arm).

Opening a door is NOT a willed action, though it requires a willed bodily action, namely intentionally moving your hand and arm in a certain way. Opening a door is an instrumental action (which he symbolizes as F¢—big phi prime). (If I could open the door just “with my mind,” that is, without moving my body, that would be a willed action.) It is instrumental because it can only occur because I engaged in a basic bodily action.

First assignment. What he concluded in Part One is summarized in the first couple pages of Chapter Five. It includes some difficult claims about our knowledge of our actions and our limb movements. For example, our knowledge of j is “immediate,” it is something we “just know.” That is to say, our knowledge of j (when it is intentional) is not derived from knowing something else.

Thus—your first assignment here—consider his argument (p. 180) that “our relation to willed j [e.g. my arm’s rising when it is willed] is most unlike that either to unwilled j [for example, lifting my arm due to wind] or a willed j by another [my relation to your arm rising because you willed it].” His claim: our relation to our own willed j is not that of observer to what he observes. (That is, our special relation to our own willed limb movements is not that we observe it happening.)
Why is it not that of observer? He first considers three attempts to explain why our relation to our own willed movements is not that of observer and dismisses each one. (So, his discussion takes the form: the relation is NOT that of observer is “not because …”). Finally, he settles on the explanation he favors.
Your task: explain all of these, failed and successful, candidates in terms of necessary or sufficient conditions. (Wikipedia has a decent explanation of these terms. Learn it: make it part of your regular philosophical vocabulary: we will use it in every discussion.)
In logic, the words necessity and sufficiency refer to the implicational relationships between statements. The assertion that one statement is a necessary and sufficient condition of another means that the former statement is true if and only if the latter is true.
A necessary condition of a statement must be satisfied for the statement to be true. Formally, a statement P is a necessary condition of a statement Q if Q implies P. For example, the ability to breathe is necessary to a human's survival. Likewise, for the whole numbers greater than two, being odd is necessary to being prime, since two is the only whole number that is both even and prime.
A sufficient condition is one that, if satisfied, assures the statement's truth. Formally, a statement P is a sufficient condition of a statement Q if P implies Q. Thus, jumping is sufficient to leave the ground, since an intrinsic element of the concept jumping is leaving the ground. A number's being divisible by 2 is sufficient for its being even.

Your second assignment. Play out what are or are not necessary and what are and are not sufficient conditions for some material object’s being “immediately present” to you. This is a matter of understanding O’Shaughnessy’s claims in section 2(a)(1) pp. 181–82. He does a lot of the work for you, but I want you to get comfortable with the use of this vocabulary and get some idea of what he has in mind by the “immediate presence” of a phenomenon j or a limb L.

Third assignment. O’Shaughnessy’s discussion in 2(c) (pp. 184–85)—of the epistemology and metaphysics of the self—is staggeringly complicated and subtle. (It is brilliant philosophy, setting up the answer to why the notion of the soul is so attractive and so close to the truth, so to speak, while yet being an illusion.)
Your assignment: figure out what he’s saying here, all of it. Beware that he (mostly) distinguishes between awareness of something and knowledge of it, and between immediate givenness and immediate presence. (Here, unlike pp. 188ff, O’Shaughnessy mostly restricts himself to the notion of the given as something that is not derived (it is immediate) and also something that we know with certainty, something that cannot be denied. Here he mostly wants to contrast what is immediately given/known but not experienced with what is immediately present as experienced. (You will not need to hand anything in for this third assignment.)

A warning. You will find the reading and the assignments difficult. Your frustration, along with your natural urge to do some philosophy of your own, may lead you to seek out what is wrong in what O’Shaughnessy says, what you disagree with. While that’s always worth doing, avoid focusing on your objections. He may be wrong, sure, but, believe me, there’s a lot to be gained from trying to understand what O’Shaughnessy is saying (even if you can’t understand all of it). So put your energies into that at the start.

A good shot at completing the reading and these assignments would involves 10–20 hours of work. So don’t leave it until the last minute.

--Roger Florka

Yep. And taking a look at the material, I can vouch for its difficulty.

Still. ...Doesn't that topic sound -awesome-! I want to read an intelligent account of the illusory nature of the soul! ...having trouble getting to that part, but I will!

Eager to do a good job right off the bat, since I feel like I need to work on Florka more now, since I didn't go to any of his little parties this summer. need to remind him I'm his girl. Competent, sensitive, insightful. Rawr.

Doctor Rafa Talks Shop

I'm stuck in an airport for some time (flight delayed because of...well, a hurricane. Should be here awhile), so I'm thinking about what I want to do for my thesis next year.

I was talking about it in some detail with my mother over lunch, and I thought I needed to write down what I said before the wording went out of my head (as I thought the wording sounded...not eloquent, but at least somewhat sane).

Ultimately, I want to talk about a government's role in creating citizens capable of fully experiencing love. That is, I want to talk about a government's role in creating good citizens, and define a good citizen as someone fully capable of recognizing their ability to love and fulfilling their human nature. To do that, I would start with something similar to my paper for summer fellows (but more extensive and better written), talking about what it means to love and how it is one of those unique features of humanity that allows one to be ennobled, to be fulfilled. I'd talk about the character of partnership, what it means to incorporate someone into your definition of self--that kind of thing.

Nesting egg metaphor. Go with me. Next egg, I'd talk about government, how the government forms citizens, and then next egg what a government does to make someone capable of loving and loving well. I'd talk about what kinds of things need to be taught, what kinds of insitutions need to exist, what can't exist, what needs to be guarded, and give an opinion as to the best structure.

Ultimately, I would talk about my own government, the US, and do a full critique of the US's ability to prepare its citizens for love and fulfilling their nature, w hile noting of course that I'm not taking into account the other things a government must be able to do. I'd have to talk about those things too, of course, but with a note that they aren't what I'm talking about and that I consider them secondary governmental functions.

I know I can't do this in an undergraduate senior thesis, I should note. It's too much. Way too much. I intend to send my whole plan to Stern and Florka, however, and see what they think, and pick one or two of my 'layers' to write now. Then I'll take those and do the third layer with my MA thesis, and then...with the benefit of a lot more knowledge and experience years later, the last as my disseratation maybe?

Other projects I want to do: I want to write a casual nonfiction book on the philosophy of love meant for a general audience. I want it to take a modern conception of love in some detail, and relate it to classical definitions (likely Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Locke, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Aristophanes, those guys), with the intent to think through the consequences of thinking of love in various ways.

Ultimately, as my TRUE work as a philosopher: I want to write a philosophical novel. This would be my opus. In the tradition of Camus, Dante, and Plato. A real work that comes at my true message through a work of fiction.

Thoughts?

Thinking rather clearly today,

Rafa.

Doctor Rafa Discovers a Fish

It’s been an eventful day. It all started at 5:20, an hour that usually only exists for me as the tail end of a particularly good night (or a particularly lazy one).

A shuttle picked me up at my house, and proceeded to drive around all corners of Maryland for two and a half hours (which, by the way, is a longer time than my actual flight, especially since my very cheery pilot landed us fifteen minutes early). He was nice enough, with a very attractive Turkish accent (I think, I’m not great with non-obvious accents, a skill I’d like to pick up), but obviously didn’t know at all where he was going as the trip usually takes about an hour.

Another man we picked up was rather good conversation. Especially for 7:20 in the morning (which it was, by the time we got him in silver spring, usually about twenty minutes away). Spent most of the time talking about health care reform, generally not my topic of choice in the morning hours, but he was entertaining enough and had that new York caller personality to him that makes it fun to speak boldly and passionately.

Flight was uneventful, except that I lost my government ID somewhere in the time between getting off the plane and getting to the hotel in Tampa. Ah well, I’ll get back to Maryland somehow.

The rest of the day was great. I went to the aquarium, and I must say—I’m a sucker for aquariums. I don’t know what it is.

Or rather, I do I guess. I love the water. I’m fascinated by all water creatures. Especially those at the bottom of the ocean, but not by any means limited to just the bottom.

They had lights that shown through jellyfish (a creature I could just watch move for hours), and turned them all different, brilliant colors (I took pictures with my phone).

They had these sea dragons from somewhere in south eastern Australia that looked like they were made out of leaves. It was the most beautiful thing, I never imagined creatures could look like that. Or—well, I’ve seen stick bugs and toads that look like they’re fashioned out of wood, but this was different. There were ridges exactly like leaves and seaweed, in foam blue and translucent green and yellow-lime. It was so delicate, and they moved so slowly, every bit a waving tendril—it was like something out of a fae legend.

There was another sea dragon I loved too, but it’s particularly difficult to describe. I ‘ll post a picture of him, when I get a chance to charge up my phone.

I also fed stingrays (petting them is like stroking a wet feather; curious sensation), messed with crocodiles (glass between us, I’m not that stupid), looked over a great, burnt-sienna octopus that looked like every inch of its flesh was waving with constant, feather-in-the-wind motion…

Mm. I love aquariums. I have far too many pictures of fish on my phone now.

Other than go to the aquarium, I just sort of wandered around Tampa. Went to a movie theatre here to see Julie and Julia with my mother, we both got cocktails and then beers right in the theatre at our seat. It was awesome.

Movie was good too. Of course, now I want to cook…

Then ice cream, and torrential rain, and talkative cab drivers.

Now I’m in the hotel room, ordering room service soup and trying to work out how to make the room a little less frigid.

Get this

Morning now, not usually a propitious time to write anything. I slept alright, but had the strangest thing happen this morning. When I woke up, my right eye wasn't working. Or rather, it wasn't completely dark, but it felt odd, and I could barely see anything through it (left eye was fine). Still half asleep, I was looking around the room, and I must have spent five minutes staring at my mirror across the room (the gold one that hangs above my bookcase). With my eye screwed up, I swore I could see a pale, dark-haired face in the mirror, elongated with this impressive hawk nose, features blurred out (as everything is blurred out, since I didn't have my contacts in). For those five minutes, we just stared at each other, the face and I, until I remembered that I should be frightened of faces in mirrors. Then I scrambled up in my bed, still staring, and started rubbing my eyes like I wanted them out of my face. A little bit later, there was something like a click, and my vision came back. Now I have contacts in, and everything's normal.

I wonder what happened.

Going to see District 9 with my dad today; that and clean. Exciting day, ne? Heh. Exciting and normal.

Hoping to see you,

Rafa

This

Dear Andrew,

Think I'm sick. I can't get to sleep. Can't think. Feel like I'm paralyzed, but I think I'm just exhausted.

Where are you?

Rafa.

Someone stop her

Can't sleep. Feh.

Channel 137

People are making it hard for me to honor my goal to be more positive and not complain. I'm not going to stop, but I have this annoyed feeling in my stomach.

I'm not really having that much fun with St. Vier anymore. I don't like Zyke. But it's not important.

I'm watching the Haunting in Connecticut. It's interesting. Just started, but there was a man cutting words into every inch of some body. The hilarious thing was that the body was still oozing/gushing blood, I presume for effect. Silly. The man also cut off the man's eyelids. Something particularly disturbing about watching anything happen to someone's eyes: Aya and I used to have these...affectionate tortures for each other. For some reason. Hers for me was to have me stay exactly still while she pushed a needle through my eye. I wouldn't go blind unless I moved...

Mine was to cut her legs off and make a cane out of her femurs. Heh. Twisted, I don't remember why it was supposed to be romantic. We always laughed.

Cultural Ethical Relativism

Reading Bioethics today, I came across a topic that never ceases to annoy me, that I bring up again because I do have difficulty understanding your position on it: relativism.

Specifically in this case, cultural relativism, and retrograde relativism.

For the latter...Remarks such as "It was a different world then" and "We can't judge the past by contemporary standards" are revealing. The assumption must be that the validity of moral judgements depends upon their cultural context, and that cultural contexts change over time. In other words, skepticism about retrospective moral judgments is simply a special case of the more general position known as cultural ehthical relativism. Acoording to this position, the validity of all moral udgments is culturally relative. This position implies that moral judgments about the past are invalid if they are applied across cultural boundaries.

According to cultural ethical relativism, moral judgments applied across cultural boundaries are invalid because moral judgments can be justified only by reference to shared values, and shared values are found only within a particular culture. We cannot

Postscript to a Twenty Cent Picture Card

Sometimes, I just want to be soft.

Is it so bad to not be prideful? To not be so fierce, so intimidating?

Would it be so bad if I was just quieter, and kind? A little more gentle? Are there people who respect strength that isn't so blatantly ostentatious?

I don't know...I think I'm just tired. And I like to think that it's desirable to just be a good, sweet person.

Dim the Lights, She's Overheating

I spent the last hour detailing what it feels like to truly be hit by someone who actually wanted to hurt you. To be fair, I don't seem to have had as many experiences of this kind as many have, but I also think that because of that the few times I have had--shall we say physical encounters--have stuck in my memory all the better. Because of the way my mind prioritizes information, shucking the useless or the mundane, perhaps I wouldn't remember the exact patterns behind fetal-red light if I had been beaten more than I have.

I was really struck today by how often people lie about their physical prowess. Especially their ability to "kick ass." I went out for crab legs, and after that found myself in a car with several hormonal twenty year old girls and two guys (one of whom had a fairly impressive death-hawk, actually...though I didn't like the color, and his face wasn't really shaped for it). The guys, being in a mode to impress (I've met these guys several times before--they seem intent on proving to me that they could take down anything I could point at. It's an ego boost), regailed me with stories of fights they'd been in.

Everyone was nodding along, and I just sat there asking the most ridiculous questions (Yeah? And when you punched him in the nose, did you hear his brain crunching?) because it was just...obvious to me that these people had never had to defend themselves in their lives. Had never been in a situation where they truly were in danger. Their "fights" were spanking sessions; the kind of half-assed brawling where the worst someone will ever get hurt is maybe a broken jaw.

Usually I'd find it hilarious that they were lying to impress me, but today--it pissed me off.

It was nice to see Stephanie though. And Amy. I like her. And Stephanie's matured a lot. We talked about you. We talked about school. About cosplay, of course. She might have gotten me a job at the Music Cafe for the next month...that would be pretty cool. I kind of wish I was going to be in Damascus longer, a coffee shop would be a really good place to work.

Back to my original subject.

No, perhaps not. Perhaps I don't have anything else to say.

Except, I guess, that I'm well past being the sort of person who lives vicariously through her lies. I should probably be more forgiving of the trait in others, considering it was me.

But it's difficult.

I saw a movie today, with this group of people. Romantic comedy. The Ugly Truth. Pretty terrible. We saw the commercials together. Storybook ending. I don't mind chick flicks, really. I suppose for the same reason that you like shonen-ai. It's nice to think that there could be situations where someone would rescue me from something, would treat me like a woman, someone worth fighting for and winning.

I like the other side too--the striving, the protecting, the dominating when appropriate, the winning--but you know my rant on the subject. And it's good to pretend.