(not too hard)

shake your butt!

(not too hard)

so this morning i saw my almond eyed coffee angel again and he remembered that i take my coffee black. i think you know what that means.

we had a (brings fingers together in a motion like holden in chasing amy) moment, the other morning.

i have been listening to doolittle all morning. i totally forgot how much i love this album. the pixies are like that sometimes, which just means the rediscovery process is that much more sweet.

i slept so totally horribly last night. i think it was because i was so hyper from my conversation with miss l. sometimes when the two of us get going, it's a nonsensical hour or two of laughing, snorting (IT'S ALL HER I SWEAR!), coughing and pleads for a time out to breathe.

you know what i'm saying, the good stuff.

also, i thought a lot more about going to grad school...i am getting progressively nervous and excited. i told my brother and he was so happy with me. apparently, everyone was a little worried about the fact that i had been so into philosophy while in school, and then seemed to stop caring altogether. it's not really that i stopped caring, it's more that i was tired. i had been in school, non-stop, for pretty much 20 years at that point, counting all the different phases of elementary and junior high and high and junior college and college. and what's more, i put myself through college, sometimes working 3 jobs and taking a full load of classes (ok, that only happened for like a month one semester, BUT STILL, it was during finals and it was, to put it thurstonly, tough gnarl. FINALS, PEOPLE.).

it was hard, it was tiring. i was burnt out on it.

plus, philosophy grad school? hello intimidation! i mean, i didn't even bother to try for a honors thesis while i was at cal, so i felt like, at least at the time, i had no chance anyway.

so, i just laid the idea down for a little bit.

but i can't see how i got the grades i did at cal but would not be at least sort of prepared for grad school. i am sure it's going to take a lot of work, more work than i can imagine.

but i would be all immersed in philosophy!!!!! i get dizzy just thinking about it!!!

man, you cannot understand the kind of full absorption that happens when i am working through an argument. it's like my mind starts mapping words and structuring the argument in my mind. and it just works it over and over until it makes sense.

oh god!! that feeling you get when what you are working on makes no sense at all, it's all written in swahili and you are pretty sure you are never gonna get it, that it will never makes sense to you

and you start dreaming about the problem, about reading the text over and over,

you dream about libraries and talking things through with your professor and your friends and once i even had a dream that i talked to frege, but i never told anyone about that, because that's weird. [besides, the whole dream was mainly about how i couldn't for the life of me (and still can't) pronounce "Begriffsschift", or, for the english speaking, "Concept Script, a formal language of pure thought modelled (sic) upon that of arithmetic". right, english.]

anyway, you go through all this mental work, and it starts to seep in everywhere and then all of a sudden

out of nowhere

you feel this shift in your brain...it's almost a physical feeling...and then everything starts to slip into place. i mean, i might not have always understood the fullness of the issue, but i at least would understand the structure of the problem, and have a good understanding of the worries involved, etc.

that happened my first semester at cal. my first semester at cal was, in a word, inSANE. it was UNSANE. i didn't know anything about the courses or the professors or the order in which i should take classes or any of that, so i just signed up for whatever looked interesting.

i had gone to the orientation earlier in the summer and the professor that spoke to us told us that there would be a visiting professor from oxford who was very good, so if we could we should sign up for a class with him. taking his advice, i enrolled in metaphysics with BB.

well, let me tell you, on the first day of class i was smitten. shifting around in my chair nervously, i looked up and down the large lecture hall (i think it fit 100-150) and saw all the students, most of whom looked like they knew each other. i just kind of straightened my clothes a thousand times and turned up the volume on my walkman, which i don't think i ever was on campus without; if the teacher was not doing lecture, i had my headphones on. because i'm anti-social.

and then this little guy in his thirties steps up onto the stage in baggy corduroys, a sweatshirt with frayed cuffs and skateboarder's sneakers.

this was BB.

and then he opened his mouth and the voice of thom yorke comes out, talking philosophy.

this was me in the grips of my first and only professor crush.

so, of course i signed up for the other class he was teaching as well, foregoing pretty much my only chance to study at cal with her professor curmudgeon of the hour, john searle, who is a cranky rude man, by the way.

now, signing up for BB's other class was a good idea EXCEPT for the fact that it was...dun dun dun...epistemology. this class started with like...40 people in it...by the end of the 3rd week there was maybe 25...by the end of the 5th, there was maybe 10...by the end, there was like 6 or 7.

BB was a visiting prof, like i said, so he was used to the oxford way of doing things, which is like, a professor works with about 5 students one on one for an entire semester on a single problem. really in depth, i think the right way to do it, actually.

so, his classes were really different from what i was used to, coming straight from a junior college. apparently, it was really different from what most of the undergrads were used to, because no one really asked questions. the minute class began we would start scribbling in our notebooks furiously, trying to get down every single one of his words in hopes that later we might be able to make sense of it. even the grad student instructors were like that, though they definitely understood enough to ask questions and try to flesh things out for us.

i remember i used to come home every tuesday and thursday and spend about an hour writing BB an email, piecing together the arguments he laid out that day in class as i understood them...i would sweat and toil and drive myself crazy trying to make heads or tails and then send it off. i'm sure it took him all of 5 minutes to read through to correct, but still, i thought it was awesome that he did.

that whole semester was like big change and hard work central. in addition to working through metaphysics and epistemology (which even my grad school instructors would say "HOLY CRAP" when i told them the courses i was taking), i was also taking a class in socio-linguistics (which BLEW DONKEY COCK) and a class in probability and induction, which was pretty much a class in the philosophy of science, though the first half was all sorts of probability calculus that i didn't really understand, but still got through somehow. in addition to that i was working part time, and riding the train for commutes to and from school a total of almost 3 hours a day.

and i remember this point in the semester, about halfway through...when the shift happened, it was like the most dizzying thing ever. i stopped writing in my notebook so much during lecture and was just able to listen and absorb. the texts i read stopped looking like a foreign language written in a different alphabet and suddenly turned into english.

i think it was probably the most exhilarating time of my life, even though it was probably one of the hardest. but the great thing was that i was doing only what i wanted to do, studying only what i was interested in (minus that crap socio-linguistics class, but i'm blocking that whole thing from my memory, k, thanks, bye.), and living with my best friend, who was also taking philosophy, so we could discuss our courses. it was the best.

thinking about that time, and the rest of my work at cal, which while i beat up on myself that i could have studied harder and gotten more a's vs a-'s (which apparently is a big big deal there), i feel more confident now. i am sure that when i go to grad school it is going to kick me in the ass like it did my first semester at cal.

but i am so excited for that feeling of understanding, i am getting hungry for it.

i am so not challenged by what i am doing now, and by what i have been doing since graduation, that i forgot about what i could do.

i'm starting to get my things in order, i am starting to get it all together.

ps, here is an email i got my from sister this morning. aww guys! we made up!

"Hi girlfriend. Just wanted to say hi and let ya know that i love you. i'm glad we talked the other night, so thanks! see ya tonight for a little while as i breeze thru our house eating dinner and getting my stuff together for tomorrow. hope you're having a good day...well you're at work, so i hope you're having a decent day. see ya tonight! LOVE, ABIGAIL "