o O ( Tom Waits – Small Change )
Here I am, it’s almost midnight on this Friday eve, sitting at home in front of the laptop clutching a beer like it was some holy relic or something. So why am I at home at this day and hour, a particular day and hour I am usually getting smashed and making the streets of Oslo a dangerous place to be? It’s called education.
I just "finished" my 2nd essay on Kierkegaard vs Zapffe in regards of dealing with the suffering of mankind. Kierkegaard sucks. He presumes God and postulates God. I think the only reason I wrote this thing is because I was freaggin’ pissed off when I found out how much Kierkegaard sucked. I do respect him as a philosopher, though, and you can imagine how hard it was to write the piece. I wrote much of the Zapffe article above, by the way. To be continued..
Anyway.
Education is not a good excuse. My friends, every Tom and Dick and Harry, are all either away, broke or not going out tonight. And since it’s midnight I thought I’d just stay here at home. Having no television makes it easy to turn on the laptop, boot linux and go for a blog post. My hands are still itching, though. Let me get another beer.
Got in conversation with this chick today, she’s taking the same course in Logics and Philosophy of Language as I do. She had a problem understanding Jeffrey’s way of showing the validity of an argument, which is to show inconsistency with the same premises but the negation of the conclusion. A walk in the park. Actually I can thank my former me’s interest in mathematics for the mad skills, and I reassured her that symbols were nothing to be afraid of. In fact, symbols are your friend.
Take the finger, for example. (Yes, she actually laughed!)
We got talking on various issues, it turned out she had been through Psychology, she had brown hair and beautiful, brown eyes… Psychology, yes, and she was hoping to have her master’s in Philosophy next year which would mean that she’d take 6 courses in the Spring. I was all like: I’m doing four now, and with a job on the side, it doesn’t leave any room for alcohol. Or friends, secondarily.
And we were getting along.
It’s not that. I can catch the glance of a passerby or pick up teenage girls at Choice (allthough strangely the kind you are unsure needs some sleep, a ride home or an ambulance), but this particular chick, le chiqué, was kind of intellectual. Yes. And she had pretty deep, brown eyes:)
And we were standing there like normal people, that doesn’t usually happen to me, chatting away about how much time you need to spend on philosophic studies as opposed to, say, law. There’s no strict laws in philosophy, there’s only thoughtexperiments, and when you’re asked to criticise the thoughts of Kant you need to know what and how he thought. To a certain degree, of course. I’m not some German fetishist hooked up on logics and God. But anyway. She dropped the bomb.
"What are you doing for your master’s degree?"
Shit. What was I supposed to do? Lie? No, no, no. Not to those eyes. So I smiled, or tried to construct a charming facial gesture resembling a smile, and said that that was still some time into the future.
She did a shrug-like movement and asked when I was going to finish my Bachelor’s.
"Uhm… I just started it. These are my first courses.."
Bloody mother of Josef you should’a seen the look on her face!
It was like the look of a suicidal fish when it’s just lost its grip on the hook.
Makes me wonder. But, who knows, maybe she’ll come to her senses and recognize me as the Overlord and a Totally Supreme Being, like the rest of the Universe has yet to do. Who knows…
Well, time for bed. Disclaimer: During the production of this post there was a guy taking a piss outside my window. Still love the city, though.