walkingshadow (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
walkingshadow) wrote2002-06-13 02:48 am
walkingshadow) wrote2002-06-13 02:48 am
oh, just thinkin' again
I like the random play option for my mp3s. More than seventeen hundred songs shuffled like an exceptionally big and digital deck of metaphorical cards, and probabilities are fun to play with, but they boggle my mind after the first one or two selections, because the numbers get too big. It's strangely democratic, or maybe just incongruous and therefore amusing: Modest Mouse, then Dropkick Murphy, then Ella Fitzgerald; Tchaikovsky, DDR remixes, French Celtic rap. Cumbersome all angsting and growly and so, so serious, followed by the Animaniacs' Ballad of Magellan. I think of it as life's gentle attempt to finely hone my sense of the ridiculous.
A Murder of One keeps coming up.
I wonder sometimes if the random feature is purely random or if it pays attention to the songs I select the most often and therefore like the most, takes note of the songs I skip past when they get suggested in their turn, and constructs playlists that try to somehow conform to my preferences and moods, a dim and limited kind of sentience. It's the kind of thing I would have it do, were I the software designer. Probably a good thing I'll be hanging out in the history department for a while longer.
*
I was folding laundry and thinking that laundry is one of those soothing repetitive tasks that lend themselves to streams of consciousness and wandering thoughts. So my thoughts streamed and wandered like something out of a Tom Wolfe narrative, to two weeks ago when Jules and I went back to Nova and watched Iggy's Shakespeare class perform and then sat in on Ehnes's Philosophy II final. The students had written and were explaining their personal philosophies, and there was some earnest stuff and some interesting stuff and some pretentious babble, and some platitudes that made me wince and write a note to Jules: What is a philosophy of clichés? But one kid expressed annoyance, or maybe just impatience, with people who were trying to find the Tao, or trying to not try to find the Tao, people who were searching for that one big epiphany. He said that if before enlightenment there's chopping wood and drawing water and after enlightenment there's chopping wood and drawing water, why not just go on chopping and drawing? And he's right, and it's exactly what I was arguing about with Jules months ago, when I kept insisting that the world does not depend on your worldview. I believe in a subjective truth, in relativity, I'm skeptical of an absolute anything, but I also have some sense of a universe that isn't really impressed with our opinions and perspectives and philosophies. You can switch your view from optimist to pessimist, say the world is about to be saved or damned, humans are apes or angels, but it doesn't change them, everything goes on just as smoothly or roughly as it ever did, and the only thing that changed is you feel better or worse about it.
Somewhere in Piaget's pre-operational stage, at around three years old, we all figure out that water poured into a bowl poured into a glass poured into a graduated cylinder is the same amount of water: the concept of conservation. The world isn't static, and our perceptions are our realities, but those perceptions are just filters, and it's a kind of abstract conservation that's easy to mistake as a change in substance, because the containers look so different. I still seek epiphanies, but I try to keep the egocentrism to a minimum and let the universe be as vast and indifferent and bigger than me as it really is.
*
It's been raining for the past four days. It makes me want to move to the Pacific Northwest. Or maybe England.
A Murder of One keeps coming up.
I wonder sometimes if the random feature is purely random or if it pays attention to the songs I select the most often and therefore like the most, takes note of the songs I skip past when they get suggested in their turn, and constructs playlists that try to somehow conform to my preferences and moods, a dim and limited kind of sentience. It's the kind of thing I would have it do, were I the software designer. Probably a good thing I'll be hanging out in the history department for a while longer.
*
I was folding laundry and thinking that laundry is one of those soothing repetitive tasks that lend themselves to streams of consciousness and wandering thoughts. So my thoughts streamed and wandered like something out of a Tom Wolfe narrative, to two weeks ago when Jules and I went back to Nova and watched Iggy's Shakespeare class perform and then sat in on Ehnes's Philosophy II final. The students had written and were explaining their personal philosophies, and there was some earnest stuff and some interesting stuff and some pretentious babble, and some platitudes that made me wince and write a note to Jules: What is a philosophy of clichés? But one kid expressed annoyance, or maybe just impatience, with people who were trying to find the Tao, or trying to not try to find the Tao, people who were searching for that one big epiphany. He said that if before enlightenment there's chopping wood and drawing water and after enlightenment there's chopping wood and drawing water, why not just go on chopping and drawing? And he's right, and it's exactly what I was arguing about with Jules months ago, when I kept insisting that the world does not depend on your worldview. I believe in a subjective truth, in relativity, I'm skeptical of an absolute anything, but I also have some sense of a universe that isn't really impressed with our opinions and perspectives and philosophies. You can switch your view from optimist to pessimist, say the world is about to be saved or damned, humans are apes or angels, but it doesn't change them, everything goes on just as smoothly or roughly as it ever did, and the only thing that changed is you feel better or worse about it.
Somewhere in Piaget's pre-operational stage, at around three years old, we all figure out that water poured into a bowl poured into a glass poured into a graduated cylinder is the same amount of water: the concept of conservation. The world isn't static, and our perceptions are our realities, but those perceptions are just filters, and it's a kind of abstract conservation that's easy to mistake as a change in substance, because the containers look so different. I still seek epiphanies, but I try to keep the egocentrism to a minimum and let the universe be as vast and indifferent and bigger than me as it really is.
*
It's been raining for the past four days. It makes me want to move to the Pacific Northwest. Or maybe England.