blargh

I feel like I should have accomplished something by now.

Why am I not already David Foster Wallace? Why haven't I already started my own humanitarian aid company? I'm serious.

I'm lying in bed now. What a stupid waste of time. Most of the things I do are complete wastes of my time; either I'm at my job, which requires compensation in the clearest sense of that word, or I'm trying to convince myself that my job isn't so bad by entertaining myself after my job, usually by reading books that, while often very good, are...being read, and so are necessarily passive.

I should be writing more. Just that would be better. Maybe I should start doing daily writing exercises. Or start a writing project. I like having writing projects. Nonfiction. Maybe I could do some research. What thread do I want to follow...maybe I could pick a question, something I actually want to know, and see what I can find with research? That sounds like something I'd enjoy doing.

Topics of interest: love and marriage. Pride. Memory and the role of memory in self image. Memory and personality. <--specifically, what we remember as oriented in who we are. I became interested in this thinking about the kind of memory I have; I tend to shed a lot of information I know a friend of mine keeps; thinking about the differences between she and I, one difference that seemed important was that she cares a lot more about people and being social than I do, while i spend most of my energy thinking about things she doesn't care about (as shown by the fact that she isn't particularly interested in conversing with me on those topics). I wonder if there's a link, more particularly, between attention and memory. That seems obvious, of course, but I wonder what the actual link is.

Because I've already learned that the fact that I don't know I've looked at something doesn't mean that what I actually saw isn't imprinted in my short and long term memory. I've heard things like that smell is the strongest sense to be recorded in memory (long term memory), but I have no idea why that would be so (it doesn't make actual sense when we consider how little we think about our sense of smell).

Hm. It seems like I'm interested in memory right now. ...Might as well pick something related to that. How to tilt and narrow it. Memory and love? I know of a particular mental disability where the person afflicted believes that the people he loves are imposters, even though he knows rationally that they look, smell like, are identical in every way to the people he loves. This has to do with the fact that the part of his brain that creates light physical changes when he sees people he likes (light sweating in palms, slightly elevated heartrate, things that cause the 'warm' feeling when you see someone you love) has been damaged. His brain rationalizes that because he no longer receives the emotional response to his mother, the personhe sees must not actually be his mother.

I'm interested in that kind of memory. I know that that wouldn't usually be called memory, per say, but I'm very interested in subconscious learned emotional and physical reactions to loved ones.

'His very presence calms me.'

How do people do that to us, without saying a thing, or necessarily even being near us? How does the learned reaction work? I don't want some simplistic pavlovian learned response crap. I know very well how complex the simplest responses become in the human mind.

I've lost my train of thought. Gotten far away from it, and in the process I've become rather unintelligent. Reigning it back in, past the past few paragraphs (which are filled with nothing all that interesting), something related to memory.

Or--I'd like to write a biography of Dante. There seem to be really bad ones out there...

or right a popular account of the philosophy of love. I've already sort of started that one.

I'd also like to write about some number of essays and works a student going into college should read before he/she thinks he/she has an opinion on anything, or just write something for hte beginning philosophy student warning against different kinds of douchery.

I'd also like to write a few short stories, I have some ideas.

I don't know. Somewhere in the middle of this I lost my energy and just got sore.