Eavesdropping

I've recently become a bum and have succumbed to the cold and rain, and frequently take the bus to class in the morning. I think its pathetic, but its better than skipping class all together.

Anyways, the conversations transfers and freshmen have on the morning bus usually just make me roll my eyes and hope to god I've never been that shallow, which I'm sure in my freshman year I was. But today I overheard two upperclassmen (they got on at Sage coming from c-town) lets call them Bob and Mary, talking about their identity at Cornell. Mary was telling Bob that she didn't have too much work this week and that made her unsure of what to do with herself. She said that she based her whole identity on studying and working, so she had no idea on how to cope when a major factor of her personality was stress. Bob agreed saying that a major part of his personality was based on his stress level and business and not sleeping.

I wanted to stand up slap them both over the head with my nalgene and scream "YOUR PERSONALITY CAN NOT BE A FUNCTION OF STRESS THAT JUST MAKES YOU SICK" but what kept me from doing so was the knowledge that I once felt that way. However, stress is not a part of personality. Stress can affect how you express your personality, but it is not the same thing! It made me so sad to see two presumably intelligent Cornell students caught in this trap, and I can't help but feel that Cornell is promoting this type of environment - where students confuse their own personalities with their stress level.

On a side note, today is my last day of class for almost 9 months. I'm psyched, but really sad that my one education class is ending. It's by far the best course I've taken and I know the concepts will stay with me much longer than I can probably anticipate.

Frustrated

Its so much harder being home than I anticipated. I expected difficult questions and attempts at dissuasion from my parents, but I didn't realize I would be getting it from all my relatives. It hurts to have those I love most being un-supportive of something I feel so passionately about. Worst of all its had me questioning my decisions and feeling unsure of myself and my own beliefs. I've worked so hard to establish my own identity and its somewhat comforting to know that I'm still able to maintain it when being challenged from so many different perspectives.

While I've resolved most of my own insecurities and feel better now, the frustration and the circular conversations aren't something that will go away - at least not until I return this summer in one piece and prove my family's beliefs wrong.

Now all I have to do is finally get matched...

The Good Kind of Busy

When asked how things are going, I usually respond one of two ways: "ok/good" (aka I don't know you or we don't have time to talk) or "crazy." And things usually are crazy. I sometimes struggle with whether or not this is by design. While I do feed off of the craziness, I kind of think its a "chicken and egg" question because I can't separate my past experiences from who I am today. And unless I find a way to time travel, I don't think I'll ever get the chance to ask my 4 year old self "Is your life crazy because you like it that way, or do you like your life crazy because that's all you know?"

I used to think I didn't know how to relax. Now that I (sort of) know how, I still find that I do like to maintain a certain level of chaos in my life. I function best when I have a laundry list of things to do, but only if its the good kind of busy. So what is the good kind of busy? Well for me its dancing the fine line between the positive stress and the negative stressed out. It's spending hours in the library and actually accomplishing things, taking an hour break to grab coffee with a friend before calling your mom on the way to 3 different meetings. It's sending 14 emails, crossing 3 things off your "to-do" list, and finding time to read the news just between classes. It's feeling mildly overwhelmed, and tired, but accomplished at the end of the day.

That's my good kind of busy.

Food for thought

Guest Lecturers: Usually I can take them or leave them, but today I walked into my educational psych class expecting to either nap through class or doodle all over my notebook. Instead I found myself glued to my seat and smiling throughout lecture. It was awesome.

The topic was Erikson's theory of development and how everyone is striving for integrity, not because they feel they can get there, but because compared to despair it is the better alternative. The way Dr. James Merideth Day described the struggle of finding your own identity within the World (capital W according to him...) in terms of going through the stages of trust/mistrust and intimacy/isolation made a lot of sense. Being someone who doesn't have a lot of faith in developmental models and trajectories, I'd say he made me much more likely to give this model a chance.

Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim of living. ~John Dewey

And absinthe is back...

Read the whole story here: NY Times

But recently this anise-flavored spirit has been seeping back into the mainstream. In 1994 a museum devoted to absinthe opened in Auvers-sur-Oise, outside Paris. With its limited availability and exotic reputation, the drink inspired cultish devotion. It tantalized with its promises of visionary consciousness, so elaborately celebrated by a century of artists and writers.

Now absinthe has been widely restored. The European Union gradually jettisoned a hodgepodge of bans and widened absinthe’s availability. And this year two brands of absinthe made according to traditional recipes have been legally imported to the United States.

Last spring a French brand, Lucid, made its debut here, using 19th-century distilling methods and replicating chemical analyses of pre-ban absinthe. A Swiss absinthe, Kübler. appeared on the American market a few weeks ago, using a 1863 family formula.

One reason legal barriers have fallen is that, as The New Yorker reported in 2006, the regulated chemical thujone, found in wormwood and once thought to have been the cause of absinthe’s lure and its dangers, did not show up in any significant quantities in analyses of historical absinthe. So these authentic replicas, despite containing wormwood, do not pose a legal challenge. And the alarmed pronouncements about absinthe made from the beginning of the Belle Époque have been proved groundless, which was decisive, a Kübler spokesman said, in swaying United States government regulators.

Hmm so it seems as though Mel might be seeing more giants when she makes it back to the U.S....

Google continues to take over the world...

As speculation about Google’s efforts trickled out over the last several months, expectations that the company would build what has been called a Google Phone or GPhone have mounted.

But for now at least, Google will not put its brand on a phone. The software running on the phones may not even display the Google logo. Instead, Google is giving the software away to others who will build the phones. The company invested heavily in the project to ensure that all of its services are available on mobile phones. Its ultimate goal is to cash in on the effort by selling advertisements to mobile phone users, just as it does on Internet-connected computers.

Read the whole story