Conflicts between Colleges

As stated in this wonderful article from The New Yorker, there seems to be two major types of college education.

The first is the small, liberal-arts college in which students learn for the sake of learning. They develop a broad foundation in a variety of mostly humanities-based subjects, and they graduate with changed minds and changed viewpoints about the world around them and themselves.

The second is the more utilitarian college degree. I include the word 'degree' in this second description and not in the first because I want to emphasize that the learning that goes on in this second college is learning towards a product: a degree, a job, and success. Of course, I don't mean to say that the learning in this second college is less valuable or less sincere than the learning of the first college. I only mean to say that the second college is more practical, more rational.

I don't know which one is more worthwhile.

For the actual article, please follow the link below!
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/30/120430fa_fact_auletta

Should a post-secondary decision be

rational or emotional?

Sleepovers

My best friend M invited me over to her house for seder (the second night of passover) with her extended family. It's always lovely getting together with M, and it was, of course, a pleasure meeting her family. I especially enjoyed our sleepover afterwards... It is FUN to have slumber parties! I wonder whether people have slumber parties after graduating from high school. Although maybe living in residence at university is just a giant mesh between an actual lifestyle and a giant slumber party. Or perhaps it depends on the residence and the person. I hope we'll have just as good (or better!) times when high school is over!

a person who thinks all the time

a person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about
except thoughts
so,
he loses touch with reality
and lives in a world of illusions.

-Alan Watts (1915-1973)

If you don't have something to live for, how will you have someone to play for?

1984

About a week ago, I read George Orwell's 1984. I did the majority of my reading on in the airport, in the plane, in the car, and in the hotel in Halifax. Living in in the GTA, I would have thought I would have spent more time enjoying the outdoors of Halifax (especially considering the spells of nice weather that we had for two of the four days spent in Halifax), but I spent most of the time indoors at Dalhousie University and the University of King's College. The time I spent outside was mostly the 20 minute walks to and from the university and the hotel. I would have gone out more often, but it always seemed to be quite late when I finally came to the hotel, and by that point, my parents were quite tired to go with me, and they did not want me wandering around an unfamiliar city on my own at night.

So, I spent my evenings reading. Orwell's 1984 is a captivating and fast-paced dystopian novel. It is a social critique. Published in 1949 and set in the then-future 1984, the novel follows protagonist Winston Smith as he quietly attempts to challenge the oligarchical dictatorship of Big Brother's Party.

The premise of the dictatorship is the Party's ability to limit all thinking. There is no critical thinking in the society of Oceania. The language, Newspeak, is so limited in its vocabulary that it lacks all the beautiful subtleties and colours of today's English, known derogatorily as Oldspeak. Newspeak users speak in a quick staccato, and the language's quickness makes it so much easier to rush over the meanings of the words. You don't dwell on the words meanings because you don't have time. The word "Minipax," for example, which refers to the Ministry of Peace (which, oddly enough, concerns itself with war), is so easy to roll off your tongue that you don't think about the word "Ministry" and its meanings of institutions and hierarchical judgement. You don't think about the word "Peace" and its corresponding ideas of contentment, values, safety, security, and its opposing associated ideas of war, violence, discontentment, etc.

The book makes me wonder about Tumblr. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good (few hours?!) spent on Tumblr -- there are some posts that are absolutely hilarious! I wonder whether the pace at which we scroll through Tumblr though means that we don't have time to actively think about the images and text that we see and read. Instead we just digest it, without any sort of critical thoughts. We talked about this in English class a bit. It stuck with me, and came up again while reading 1984.

There's no such thing as a setting sun.

Canadian hip hop musician Shad is the man behind Keep Shining, a beautiful video with beautiful music. As someone who listens mostly to Classical and contemporary music, smooth jazz, indie pop, alternative rock, and pieces that can only be categorized as easy-listening, I was surprised to find myself so enraptured by Shad's hip hop piece. The music and video is centred around eliminating prejudice and empowering women to speak out and speak up; having only men in the rap industry means that only half the truth is being spoken.

My favourite part of his lyrics are posted below.

Well, you can’t be everything to everyone,
so let me be anything to anyone.
The world turns, and there’s clouds sometimes,
but there’s no such thing as a setting sun.
It always keeps shining.

Listen to his work on YouTube at this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3nbTB2KHuM

On voluntary writing and blogs

It's a curious thing to find the blog of one of your teachers. I suppose I'm just not used to reading my teachers' writing outside of the context of handouts, assignment feedback, report cards, and the occasional e-mail.

Perhaps it is even odder when you find yourself thoroughly enjoying your teacher's blog, and reading pages and pages into the blog's archive.

Regardless, blogs themselves are a curious sort of medium. They aren't quite journal entries in the sense of a diary, but they are more or less a published journal. Anyone can read them, but few do. I doubt that there are many people who read this blog, and of the people who do read this blog, I doubt that any are 'regular followers.'

Still, people blog all the time, without a huge concern for who might or might not be reading their words. It is somewhat of a consolation to be able to write and then to go back and see that what you have written exists somewhere, even if the Internet is a somewhat abstract and elusive canvas.

I wonder if there is an art to blogging. If there is such an art, I am sure I have yet to master it. There are surely lots of blogs that are poorly done; blogs with ridiculously informal language, laden with grammatical errors, rude content, etc. Many blogs are pointless -- this one is perhaps one such pointless blog. However, the pointlessness of such a blog is maybe what attracts the writer to create it. We write so often because we must write; we write assignments, we write business e-mails, we write messages to people because we find it is socially acceptable to keep in touch by talking about the weather (and often also because we do actually want to keep in touch with them, but we just don't know how to go about it, especially when they live halfway across the country or halfway across the world). With a blog, though, you write because you want to write; there is nothing 'forcing' you to write.

I wonder when this blog will fall under and fade away. When will I forget about it? When will I stop going back to it and posting the occasional song lyric, ramble, or poem?

I think I will always write for pleasure, be it in this blog or elsewhere.

Homo sapiens to Homo narrans, the storytelling person

"I heard... two men talking about a third old man who had recently died. One of them said, 'I was visiting him at his home. He started to tell me an amazing story about something that had happened to him when he was young. But it was a long story. Night came, and we decided that I should come back the next day to hear the rest. But when I arrived, he was dead.'

The man fell silent. I decided not to leave that bench until I heard how the other man would respond to what he’d heard. I had an instinctive feeling that it would prove to be important.

Finally he, too, spoke.

'That’s not a good way to die — before you’ve told the end of your story.' "

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/opinion/sunday/in-africa-the-art-of-listening.html?_r=1&src=tp&smid=fb-share
By HENNING MANKELL
Published: December 10, 2011

On school and motivations

Are you living for the weekend, or are you living for the week?

The cities that we build

The other day, a friend and I were discussing human perceptions of the world. We settled on the idea that each of us build cities in our minds. The cities that we build exist as a result of our experiences, our memories, our admiration for our mentors, our perceptions of ourselves, and much more. Essentially, our cities are reflective of the world as we each see it, as well as how we see ourselves within that world.

Cities, however, are not stagnant. With the development of new technology, the immigration and emigration of residents, changing media values, growing personal values, and the occasional and unexpected storm or natural disaster, our cities are constantly having to be repaired, renewed, and revised to suit our needs and the needs of the rest of the world. An issue therefore arises when we, as the architects and engineers of our minds, fail to allow our cities to grow and change as they must. Inflexibility is a serious issue; in many cases, inflexibility goes hand in hand with brittleness and fragility. The collapse of our minds' cities is not an easy task to bear.

Objectiveness and Emotional Investments

I'm currently reading Shakespeare's masterpiece King Lear and have been thinking about how emotional responses to characters and empathy with characters can often cloud our argumentative judgement. If we're trying, for example, to analyze the character Cordelia, it is difficult to remain objective if we have emotionally invested ourselves in liking her character. Such is especially the case when viewing a well-acted and well-made film interpretation of the play, such as the PBS Great Performances series of King Lear directed by the talented Trevor Nunn (which can be watched at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/tag/trevor-nunn/). We are often moved to empathize with all of the characters in the play; the relationship between the Fool and Lear makes our hearts wrench, and some sympathy can even be felt for Lear's antagonistic eldest daughter, Gonoril.

The same can be said for life outside of literature. Our ability to empathize with the people around us is what makes us more kind, more compassionate, and more human. Empathy is often the basis of philanthropy. However, empathy is also often the basis for bias. How can we objectively analyze a situation, a person, or ourselves if we have become emotionally invested in a certain viewpoint or perspective?

choice emotions

Is happiness a choice?

And if so, is sadness likewise a choice?

What is depression, if emotions are all chosen?

And what is the feeling of spontaneous joy if or sudden heartbreak if it is all by choice?

What is life with emotions by choice?

And what is choice?