Matriculated!

So, I've gotten a little card that I can use for ID at the student union and pubs and a couple pieces of paper. I'm now officially part of the university.

And somehow...I actually feel different. Like things are starting to come together, like the panicky excitement of the first week has receded. I can walk by the thousand year old church without gawping, I can go down the street at sunset without staring at the sky. I can tell if someone is from Glasgow or Dundee by their accent. Classes start on Monday, at 10, 11, and 12 in a neat little block that should exhaust me just in time for lunch. Today there is a Philosophy reception at 4:30 which should be good, on Sunday there is a Societies Fayre (thats how they spell it here!) where I need to do what I've been desperately neglecting and check out the arts programs here. So. Life is good. Now that I'm a REAL student I feel pretty in control. And then classes will start. But I've got a couple days until then.

I love you all.

Awake.

I did indeed wake up from my nap. And good call Art--eager to begin SCHOOL, the drinking has been going on for a while.

Today is a bit of an empty day, but tommorow I meet my advisor and finalize subjects. I'm going to take Mind and Reality in philosophy, and then Introduction to International Relations and Psychology 1. I was going to do economics with psychology, but psychology is taught as a hard science with lots of labs and instruction in statistics, and economics apparently isnt a great department and on top of that is all calculus, SO. Everyone and their mother does International Relations, but it does sound interesting!

I got academic parents last night (a tradition, essentially, where 3rd or 4th years "adopt" 1st years...and there are a bunch of activities but its mostly an excuse to befried older people who know the system, and, as with everything, drink). Not yesterday but the day before I went and listened to professors talk about their subjects (in some of the areas I was intersted in) which got me quite fired up.....engaging speakers without acting like they are selling you a product.

I'm off to brush my teeth, take a shower and start the day. God it's cold.

St Andrews

Just a quick post to update you all: I've arrived in St Andrews and am all settled into the residence halls. My parents leave tommorow, and I'm about to catch a quick nap before going out to dinner with them. So, St Andrews. Quite spiffy. The history and beauty of the place that originally attracted me are just as impressive and even more so when I think that I'm living here. My roomates a good Scot, as are most people in my hall. Cool people, and there's a mutual curiosity that is probably quite healthy. Everything seems very "authentic," whatever that means. The culture of drinking is certainly not a myth (my roomates mom packed him off with a bottle of Smirnoff and a few six packs of cider), and everyone is quite eager to begin.

So, I'm off to my nap.

Musings

Not yet in St Andrews, but feeling philisophical so what the hell.

Suppose you want to blow up a rock. No good reason, you just have a stick of dynamite and want to blow something up. There are two rocks in front of you. One is very large, the other is smaller. The stick of dynamite would blow either one up. Which SHOULD you blow up? Who cares! The size of the rock makes no difference, neither, probably, does the type of rock or its history. The rocks are so far away from human you probably couldn't tell one from the other looking at pictures. So, rocks are all the same. Rocks shouldn't matter, and it shouldn't matter which rock you blow to smithereens, or even if you blow multiple rocks to smithereens. As far as we know, the rocks don't mind.

So what makes people any different? Becuase we are a single species we have a level of common empathy, but take that away and how is a human different from a rock. "Thought" and "awareness" and "consciousness" and "life." Rocks may have something just as special which we do not know about. Even if we did, would we start saying that blowing up rocks was a crime? Perhaps killing is a bad example because we have a perception that killing is the worst crime and should only be practiced in self defense when no other recourses are left (I think this must be something like the argument for imprisonment being more humane than torture. Would you rather go through an almost normal life missing a hand, or spend your entire life rotting away in prison? But that's another subject). Still, what makes "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" valid? Sure, it sounds good. But WHY? Why not "the greatest happiness for me?" That's almost patriotic! But seriously, we don't say, "we should treat rocks in such a way that the treatment of each individual rock does the most good for the world's population of rocks as a whole." And on a fundamental level, what is the difference between a human and a rock? If an advanced species arrived and wanted to make a wall out of us, what could we possibly say to stop them?

I listened today to a David Lynch lecture at Berkeley on i-Tunes. He is terrible. He didn't have a speech, didn't answer the questions asked, did so incoherently, and used the words "beauty" and "consciousness" every sentence. His talk was on transcendental meditation, how to become so one that you reach a different state of consciousness. My question is: what is consciousness? Is it different from the mind (in a western sense) or being, itself (in, perhaps, an eastern sense)? What makes us so sure we have a consciousness? We think, and we see that thinking is centralized in the brain. But to think of the color yellow I must first have seen the color yellow at some point, so couldn't I argue that I "think", in a sense, with my eyes? Then blind people are retarded, and dumb people are cripples! If I'm being blunt and politically incorrect I might as well have fun with it. In which case everything we do that helps our body expands our conciousness--a good diet, sleep (which I will lack in the morning), excercize, occasional indulgence, sex, etc, etc etc. Why is mediation special then? It's our age's spiritual diet pill. Sure, maybe it helps, but only supplementarily. Like sleep. I'm about to take my supplement.

Out of London

First internet access for a couple of days. We went to Westminster Abbey in London (where all the kings/notables are buried...saw Elizabeth, a few Marys, lots of Edwards and Henrys, some poets, and walked over Darwin's grave). Also visited the Tate, the Victorian Albert, and the British Museum again. All incredible, all museum-y. Makes you think though, for whatever reason.

Saw two more shows: The Woman in Black, a very effective stage thriller, and the 3-hour extravaganza-filled Lord of the Rings MUSICAL (!!??!!??) which made me nearly vomit in my mouth when I heard they were making it but was really not bad at all. Tolkien's goal was to create a mythology for a legend-less people, and it is a testament to his success that even condensed into three and a half hours with singing hobbits, a great deal of the power of the story survives.

We are now in Scotland, in a little village called Stonehenge, and my mom is getting exceptionally antsy so we've off.

London, Part 2

Two Days Ago: Woke up early again, ate yoghurt, went for a long walk to a public garden. Went on a river cruise through London (same one I’d been on last year, but still good). At the end was the Royal Observatory, where the prime meridian is located. Some interesting time/longitude facts—navigation before Google Earth was an art. Back where the cruise took off from we went to a Dali exhibit (with a bit of Picasso downstairs as an afterthought) with a lot of sketches and sculpture which was really quite good. Dali bugs me as a person (his obsessions with Freud and Catholicism and his zeppelin ego irk me), but his art is undeniably good. After that I went to see a play called “The Sexual Neurosis of our Parents” with my parents. Off-West End, and excellent, the story of a mentally handicapped girl who is taken off her medication and discovers sexuality—big time. Experimental to no great effect, but a strong script and some excellent acting. I’ve got a theory that British acting depends on craft where American acting depends on “reality within the moment,” but we’ll see where that winds up.

Yesterday: Woke up early AGAIN, did not much of anything, went to get brunch. Went to the Victorian Albert museum, which had a great Eastern art, an interesting floor all of crafts and trades, and a million other things. Honestly, though, you can only go to so many museums in a short period of time. The highlight for me was walking through a room of stained glass and processional crosses listening to Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks.” Talk about an anachronism. Went through the “Mayor’s Festival” along the Themes where we had Argentinean food from a stall on the way to the Globe, where we saw “Love’s Labour’s Lost.” The Globe is interesting…in this one, as in Titus last year, there really were no absolute stand-out performances, but the entire ambiance made the show. The actors update it only very slightly from how it would be performed in Shakespeare’s time, and the outdoor theatre, use of groundlings, and complete understanding and enjoyment of performing Shakespeare make it really good.

London, Part 1

If my last days in LA were tragic and heartfelt and oh-so-momentous, after being in London for a couple days I’ll say the sense of anti-climax is huge. It’s a vacation. Like any vacation. Not a drastic change in lifestyle, not a tremendous leap forward in personal development. Maybe that’ll come in college. But so far, we’ve been to the British museum (where I think I concluded that I’d love to study history if it wasn’t all fucking Europeans…I want Aztecs and Mayans and Egyptians and Vikings!), and seen a show on the West End (39 Steps…a very slapstick British comedy. Good fun, but it’s parody of noir made me wonder, “is there such thing as meaningful noir?”). I had a beer with my parents in a pub, which was not nearly so surreal as I thought it might be.

I did this last year and I’m doing it now—waking up really early (like, 6:30! No joke!) and walking around London. It’s really pretty cool seeing the city wake up. Yesterday I saw two foxes, in the heart of the city, around a private garden!

Finished Kafka’s “The Trial.” It’s about a man who is on trial in a terribly inefficient legal system for a crime which they certainly don’t tell him and it seems unlikely if anyone really knows why he is on trail. I wish I knew why the hell Kafka is so good. I still have “The Castle” left to read and I’ll try to emulate his style while reading that, but it seems to me that his action is so minimalist around the central theme or plot that it’s hard without a great premise to be Kafka-esque. I have to say that “The Trial” and “In the Penal Colony” are my two favourite works of his right now. Both have an intense realism that makes their strangeness even more terrifying than the outright near-magical realism of “The Metamorphosis.”

The last days

These past two days have been incredible. I will regret forgetting them.

It is one thing to know that you have friends in an abstract sense. It is another to leave and see it realized. Sunday was a great going-away party thrown by Mette with my parents, Grandma Peggy, and William. Yesterday I went up to the school with Rez and saw my favorite teachers and various students. We went for lunch with Cheolseung, and then Brittni (who I have always known was an incredible liar) tricked me to a surprise party (She is shamelessly straightfaced. She told me we were going to a Ja-Booty-en restaurant with Kathy. And I believed her). Brittni, Kathy, Rez, Holly, Clare, Libby, and Deepika were there. Kathy and Brittni had made me four pages of pictures around the letters of my initials (BASW, one page per letter, as many words as they could think of for each letter illustrated. My favorite? Stereotype illustrated.) I went home and had my Mom's spaghetti with my parents and William, who had a great coat he gave me (greatly relieving my Mom and, therefore, me). From there I went roofing with Rez (climbing around on roofs....try it sometime!), went to Cheolseung's house where he gave me a couple books he's been talking about and a letter, and from there to Robbie's, where we watched a movie and he gave me a copy of a videogame--not sentimental seeming at first glance, but I know that it is one of the most important things to him, a major part of his life.

Today I spent the morning packing, and the afternoon seeing Rez, Cheolseung, Clare and crew for a last time. And now we are waiting for the cab...

Two days left (one full one!)

Woke up absurdly early. 6:45. Okay, 7:00. Went to Ms. Wisdom-Teeth-Puller, who said everything looked honkey dorey and ta-ta. That last sentence was a bit on the odd side. Came home, played brain-killing video games, threw more stuff in the respective piles in my bedroom/bathroom, went to lunch with my mom at Virginia Lee's house. Good people--she and her husband make me somehow look forward to old age. They are so involved, so active, so intellectual, so kind. We'd closed a couple bank accounts and ran by to consolidate them afterward. Mom dropped me off at Clare's, where we made cookie cake (literally, baked a cake with chocolate chip cookie dough in it....delicious, if underdone). We headed for the school for her to do the Academy auditions, and ran into Ms. Michel and Lissa, who I chatted with before Rez came out and I snagged a ride home with him. Ate dinner and, with a 'lil help from the parental units, ACTUALLY PACKED (Huge hold-ups at the UN....apparently, most world leaders have dropped dead of shock. One senior aide was reported to have said, "This is a moment we never thought to see in our lifetimes! World peace seems suddenly inconsequential!"). Now I'm headed off to see Chris Narrie and hopefully watch "300" with Robbie. If "300" is not all I remember it being and more, there will be tears. There will be agony.

And apparently I'm in light-ish spirits. There is humor! There is mayhem! This is more the pace of life I've grown accustomed to.

Today

These last couple days I've gotten out of being bored/mopey by now frantically rushing to see all the people I put off for a couple of weeks. Yesterday Lisa was down and we all went out to lunch (Dim Sum). We came home and I went and got ice cream with Clare, then headed over to my last voice lesson (well, not EVER), and from there to Cheolseung's for dinner (Korean food--squid, raddish, kimchi, and boiled cabbage, mushroom, beansprouts and meat), and from THERE to USC where I spent the night with Jessica, Andrea, and Alex. This morning I ate with Jessica, Andrea, and Emily, then came home in time to go to a grown-up goodbye party with Mette, William, my parents, and Grandma Peggy (delicious, thank you Mette if you're reading). Ahhhhhh the goodbyes are just beggining....and almost over.

I'm back to just excited. Which is a good place to be.

But, given the way my of-so-predictable mood-swings work, now that ive been mopey for two weeks I'll be ecstatic for two more and then back to mopey just in time for move in! Are the four week up/down cycles (two weeks each) that I noticed at the beginning of last year and now possibly again this year really biologically in there, or is it just the coincidence of what's going on? Only time will tell.

So

It's been a while since I've posted. I've had a busy time of it withdrawing and detaching from everything without doing a bit of packing. I got my drivers license yesterday and visited with Uncle Joe and Aunt Angie. Today I finished up a Psych experiment I agreed to take part in at UCLA for $150. It's my non-job, but good money for sitting around taking a few tests around my schedule. Hopefully I'll see everyone I want to see over this weekend and spend Monday and Tuesday packing and getting ready. I've been having a somewhat unexpected reaction to this leaving shit: one week of dreadful boredom, now one week of incurable mopiness and detatchment. But I plan to make the best of this weekend and next week.

We leave nighttime on Wednsday. Lots to do...

From a discussion on what makes my generation

THOUGHT: In the 60’s, activists were as concerned with poverty in their neighbourhoods as with global affairs. Now, though, an “activist” is one who goes to Sudan, who goes to the Middle East—we go to college for international politics, international affairs. Because the homeless in the US almost never starve, we turn our eyes outward to look for what “good” we can do in the world. We have outsourced our labour. Now, we are outsourcing our caring.

A follow-up: This is, of course, only maybe 10% of the population—the upper and middle classes, college bound kids. Do we really care or do we just need something to look good on college/job applications? Good question. But the fact remains: the majority of people are just trying to make a living, have some rudimentary happiness, and live without affecting the larger world. I am worried about going to college, about picking my major and figuring out what to do with my life. But I’m 18. For every college-bound kid like me, there are people my age who are already pregnant, already married, people who have been working and living on their own for years.

MY GENERATION: When we (white, middle-class Americans) were small children, we were told we were special—we could change the world. When we were small children, we were told our education was important. But college costs are the highest they’ve ever been and a degree is a guarantee of only one thing: entry into the bourgeois white middle-class American society. We have no purpose. There is no “great cause” of our generation. Since we remember, even our own government has lied to us. We have become cynical. We know that money is important—we borrow it for everything (for college, for cars, for houses, for everything) and have a terrible need to pay it back. This problem is not unique to our generation. Another common American problem is the question of are we doing worthwhile work? The American dream is the self-made man, but we own nothing, we make nothing, we do nothing.
So, cry past generations a river. They’ve been dealing with all the same crap. What’s new? Technology, for one. Our entire means of communication is different. Virtual identities (ala MySpace) and instant communication (IM and phone text messaging) have changed our personal dynamics to enable us to keep in contact without great effort or even great interest. Such programs also delete many ideas of privacy—we don’t hide our “bad nights”, we put them on the internet for everyone to see. We don’t keep private journals. We have blogs and status updates. Being connected to the internet means that you have myriad communities living in your house.

What are your thoughts? What constitutes my generation? What is our identity?

God save me

Onto day three of excruciating restlesness! I've been getting out, doing stuff, reading, etc etc, so why do I continue to be so bored? Last night I went to Robbie's and spent the night there playing World of Warcraft and watching the first Die Hard movie (Bruce Willis has hair! It's the 80's! It's...not a bad movie, for an action thing), the night before I finally gave into a friend of mine and went to a gay club in west hollywood with her. It was awkward (especially at the beginning...I imagine going with a decent number of people would've helped that), but overall it was just interesting. I was suprised at the number of hispanics (it is LA, of course), but aside from the flaunted sexuality everyone seemed to be fitting very neatly into my stereotype of what a club is. I went with my parents to Chinatown today to eat--I really have been decently busy, but something feels...missing.

I would say it's a sense of purpose, but it's not like I've had one all summer and it certainly hasn't stopped me before. I think it might be because so many people are gone in college. But whatever it is, I don't like it, and makes me mopey, irritable, and unproductive.