10 similarities between freshman and senior years

Sophomore year, I posted about the differences between freshman and sophomore years. I had full intent to blog about the differences between freshman and senior years, but after consideration, I think it'd be more fun to talk about some similarities. Here are ten of them:

1. I'm still taking classes that make me blog. You can go back to the spring of 2011 and see how much philosophy I blogged, and you can go back in the previous three weeks and see how much I've been blogging about my Gender & Sexuality Studies class. I think Philosophy will win out as my favorite class ever, but to know that I can still blog about classes is fun.

2. I'm still broadcasting basketball. I only started with a few games freshman year, but the fact that this is one of the only things I've done for all four years is pretty exciting. It's awesome to get involved in stuff as a first-year, and it's also awesome when those things are still part of your life senior year.

3. I have the same friends. I think. By "same friends" I mean the people I became really close with freshman year, and either live with them now, or are still very close to them, in different and unique ways. Sure, there was that weeding out process over the first two or three weeks, but I think that it's awesome that I've had a fairly reliable group of friends.

4. I still have the same [expletive] laptop. This would have been an okay thing if I was blogging anytime before the start of this year, but I think my laptop sensed that it was starting its fourth year, and promptly started being terrible at being a laptop. I'd love to say more about this, but I only have 8% left and my laptop is about to shut down on me. More to come later......

5. I still have a Razor scooter. I say "a" and not "my" because the red scooter I had for a few years finally broke, so I picked up a green one that my grandparents had lying around there house from when I was like seven. So I still have an awesome scooter to ride around, which is mega fun.

6. I'm still a Math major. This may come as a surprise to no one, but that fact that I'm in the small group of people who came in with a major and didn't change it also seems cool. Sure, I picked up Psychology along the way, but Math has been there since day one, and will be my primary degree.

7. I still blog. Sure, maybe not as often, and maybe about way different (and possibly deeper) stuff, but the fact that I kept this up and haven't gone for a hiatus is something that I'm proud of. I could come to learn that no one reads this and I would keep doing it.

8. The Party Animals poster tradition is still going strong. I don't really remember how this whole thing started freshman year - I mighta just got the idea and went with it, because I had the poster first. (Since it's an awesome poster, naturally.) Now it's taken on a personality of its own, and will definitely find some space on the walls of future places I occupy.

9. Other traditions have continued on, too. The first is Secret Santa that all of us do, which is a lot of fun, and there's an end-of-semester tradition that I'll leave implicit until I blog about it later this year. Because I know I'm going to, and I know that it will secretly have some of the strongest meaning for me to represent my four years at Stonehill.

10. This place is still awesome. I'm venturing a little away from this particular blog post, and instead towards the general idea of Stonehill and what it means to me, but I'm fine with that. One thing that I know hasn't changed is what I think of this place. There really is something special about being here, and it has presented itself in many shapes and forms over the last 3+ years. I can already tell that there will be hard blog posts to write, especially my fourth and final end-of-a-Stonehill-year blog post, days before graduation. But there's still some work to do before that.

There is no anything

Yes, yes, it's been too long since I've blogged. I'll get to the necessary stuff later this week, but it's time for an impromptu post. All I have is one quick line of thought, and that's that. (I hesitate to use "argument" because this is more a series of leading questions, a la Socrates, instead of an argument.)

So. Think about your [______]. I intentionally leave this blank to demonstrate the generality of this, but when I first began constructing this point (important word choice foreshadowing), I had religion in mind. Use gender, use morality, use whatever you want, as long as it has its own naming system. I started with religion because it has the most recognizable terms - Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, etc. Now. Finish this sentence: "I am (a) [______]." I am Catholic, I am a Mormon, I am Hindu, I am atheist, whatever it is, you can fill it in. Think of someone else who is the same as you in this regard. If you're Catholic, think of another Catholic. Do you both share exactly the same set of [whatever you think comprises religion]? Do you both have the exact same religious beliefs about every single thing there is to have a religious belief about? My guess is not. There's nothing wrong with that; this is in fact my point, that no two religions are alike. By religions, I mean my religion and your religion, not Christianity and Buddhism. So then what does it mean for you to be [______]? For someone else? Probably different things. There are a large enough number of variables that "religion" differs from person to person. So much so that given one other variable, people, that "religion" doesn't even really exist as such. You can have beliefs about religion, you can practice religion, but you call yourself a [______] only because that's what everyone else would call it. By deconstructing (see: previous parenthetical foreshadowing) religion based on language, we can effectively erase it as such. Now, the sentence becomes "My religion is my religion." It's not called the same as anyone else's because it's not the same as anyone else's.

So, back to my general claim. We can deconstruct anything in this way. My gender, however masculine/feminine you want to claim it is, is different from yours. Different from my friends, from my parents, from my sister, and different from anyone else. Because we can construct an infinite amount of genders, we can essentially remove gender. Because we can construct an infinite amount of religions, we can essentially remove religion. (And now, for the real mind-blowing part.) Because we can construct an infinite amount of deconstruction, there is no deconstruction. BOOM!

If you have any thoughts about this, please leave comments below! It's not often I ask for comments, but this is a really fascinating line of thought to me, and I want to see what you all think. Thanks for reading!

Privilege is invisible to those who have it/The Cave

For starters, I love songs that have two parts to the name ("Beth/Rest" and "Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise" are the two I'm thinking of). So, I'll do (what I believe to be) my first blog post as such. "Privilege is invisible to those who have it." That's a quite from (none other than) one of my Gender Studies readings. And it's a really cool quote, and also incredibly true. As cool/true as the other phrase from Gender Studies that I've blogged about. Contextually, this was spoken by a white male, who has the most privilege out of all of the categories of race/gender. Out of context, this seems true everywhere. I wish I had more to say about this, and I might have had more, had I blogged about this last week when I first read it. Alas. It's a cool quote, so think about it and think about how it relates to your life.

Now, for The Cave. This is, on a very minute level, relevant to what I just talked about. Doesn't really have anything to do with privilege, though - more for the notion that what feels natural may just be invisible. When I'm referring to The Cave here, I mean Plato's. (Editor's Note: "The Cave," by Mumford & Sons, seems to be an allusion to Plato's Cave, which makes the song all that better. Check it out here.) You can read the allegory here, but in an attempt to briefly explain it, I will say that that which seems to be our reality may be the furthest thing from it. There's a quote out there that reads something like "We don't know who invented water, but we know it wasn't the fish." How can the fish invent water if that's what the fish has been living in? The fish can only know what water is when the fish realizes what water isn't. It's a really cool line of thought. I've extended this idea to myself in thinking about a scene from Anger Management, which I've posted below. To answer the question, "Who are you?," I would now answer, that which I am not.

Halfway home

For starters, watch this video, starting from 6:15.

Now you know where this blog post/stream of thought is coming from. A point on the whole suppression of qualities in men and women....I completely agree with this. From literally birth, there are social influences about how we're supposed to act, given our set of biological circumstances. If we're a male, then our room as an infant will be baby blue - if female, then a pale shade of pink. A female who plays sports goes against the gender roles as much as a male who likes playing with dolls. One point that Kimmel (the guy in the video) makes is that half of human qualities are suppressed. Men are supposed to be leaders, be the ones working and supporting society and households, while women are the ones staying home as caretakers, hesitant to pursue leadership reasons for a myriad of reasons. This is only half the picture. I'll leave Kimmel to talk about it, because he says it in ways better than I could come up with, but there's a huge chunk missing from society, and it's all because of the presumed gender roles that are immediately imparted upon us.

I'm starting to believe the philosopher John Locke with his tabula rasa idea that we are a clean slate when we are born, and then everything that makes us who we are is written from there. I'm finding it to be hard to come up with qualities that are absolutely unchangeable outside the constraints of biology - height is the only one I have so far. Sexual orientation, depending on who you ask. Point is, the social influences around us are far and wide, and as long as humans do nothing with the "men are this, women are that" idea, we won't go anywhere.

Language belongs to those who use it

Damn, did I miss discussion-based classes.

What I love about them is that they stretch across multiple disciplines. In a lecture-style class, everything stays in that room. What went on the whiteboard last year in math or physics classes was a conversation from professor to student. Here is what you need to know, and find a way to know it. This is something completely different from my Gender & Sexuality Studies class, which is turning out to be my favorite class of the semester. One of the readings we had for today included the phrase "language belongs to those who use it." I immediately fell in love with this sentence. Wrote it in my response paper, talked about it in class, and I might adopt it as a life outlook. Language belongs to those who use it.

Historically speaking, our society has been male-dominated. "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." We can no longer ask him, but I'm curious what Neil Armstrong was thinking when he said those words upon landing on the moon. I'm guessing nothing - I'm guessing that that was what came to him. But think about it. One small step for man. Spoken by a man landing on the moon. In Hamlet, Shakespeare claims "to each his own." Again, as a male author...to each his own. We talked about a lot of these examples in class. Firemen, mailmen, busboys, all of these have male-oriented names. A nurse is a nurse is a nurse, yet we often find ourselves referring to a male nurse as a male nurse, despite the fact that "nurse" has no gender bias (at least linguistically). A group of people, perhaps all male, all female, or a mix, is usually referred to as "guys." Pronouncing two people "man and wife." Wife is contingent upon another person (that of a husband or wife), whereas man implies standing alone, not requiring another for definition. I'm sure you can think of more examples, but the point is, our language is still stuck in the roots of the patriarchs.

One final point about my new favorite quote is the world of mathematics. I actually attended a Philosophy of Math presentation when I was in San Diego for the Joint Mathematics Meetings, and this question was brought up there, too. Who's to say anything about math? Is 2+2 equal to four because it is four, or because enough people have claimed that two and two makes four, and enough people have believed it? In my GenEd Philosophy class, we talked about what would happen for 1+1 to equal 10. Clearly it's not, but what if enough people started saying that it was 10? If our society accepted one and one as ten, then wouldn't it be? Language belongs to those who use it.

Time, pt. 9

Oh, the ever-growing paradox of time. For the first time in a few "time" blog posts (you can search "time, pt." to see them all), I'll be relating it to myself, instead of pushing some general idea. Right now, I feel that time is like a wall, one of those Indiana Jones brick walls that close in on each other and you're stuck in the middle. Maybe not with metal spikes, but it's still there. I'm someone who's very next-oriented in the small picture, now-oriented in the grand scheme of things. Which sucks for something like senior year, because the larger, more important things to consume my time, energy, and thoughts are the things that are farther down the line. Figuring out what I'm going to do after senior year is a long ways away compared to the homework I have due on Tuesday, but what I'm doing post-Stonehill is far more important in the big picture. Maybe I'll just have to learn to somewhat reverse that process, to take care of more important things first, even if they're more in the background. It's hard, stressful, and not fun, especially when I think about all of the different ways that life can go after Stonehill. It's scary and I'm afraid that being freaked out about after senior year will make this time during senior year less enjoyable. I can feel it and I have a bad feeling that this isn't the last time I'll be feeling it. But I'll take it one day at a time, keep what's important close to me, and do what I can to enjoy my life.

"I urge all of you, all of you, to enjoy your life, the precious moments you have. To spend each day with some laughter, and some thought, to get your emotions going..."
 - Jim Valvano

Psychology rock band names

As an avid fantasy sports player (baseball and basketball these days, but football in years past), I'm all about awesome, catchy names. Same goes for possible band names. In fact, I just came up with another one, thanks to Jack Link's Beef Jerky - Messin' With Sasquatch. One of my friends from home said that Occam's Razor would be a great one (the name of a House episode), and today, I came up with the brilliant (unbiased opinion) band name of Notorious Piaget. Hooray psychology! So, I googled (Editor's Note: Is this capitalized?) "psychology funny group names" and somehow found something close to what I was looking for. Further investigation yielded "The Jung and the Restless," which I thought was hilarious. If you're looking for some other witty banter, check out what Mental Floss has to offer. No seriously, this is the kind of stuff that amuses me.