Living like my mother

When it is cold and wet I keep a big pot of chi on the stove. I make a new batch every three days. It boils over and making a mess on the stove, but my roommates apparently found it an endearing quality. We have acquired at least one roommate by offering them a cup of spicy honey-laden tea. My mother taught me how to make chi. She did not learn from the internet. She learned from an Indian woman who lived next door to her when my older brother was a baby.

I got it into my head that I should live in a commune at least once during my life. My mother told me about her experiences in a communal house. It seems like she gave me all her dreams about what life can be. I also learned that I never wanted to have children, because that is a lot to give another being.

When I was a child we lived in a little log house and had a huge garden out back where I hung worms on a tree I called a worm tree. I was a heartless child. We had chickens until the raccoons ate them. I cannot remember a time when the moosewood cookbook did not inhabit our homes. I believe I might have been vegetarian as a child but I cannot be sure. I homeschooled until grade five. By the time I got into high school all these things were gone. We moved into an five-plex. Our only garden was on the deck.

I have only lived on my own for a year and a half. It's so short that the halves still count for something. When I moved out I made note to take responsibility for myself. I have took responsibility for my diet and decided to stop eating meat, my health care, my expenses, and all those other things that make some one an adult, so far as I can tell. Every time I reflect I find myself moving towards the life my mother lived when I was a child. My boyfriend convinced me to get a compost program. We both kept little gardens last year and plan to do so again this year. If I get a big enough yard when I move in the summer I plan to keep chickens as well. Someday I will live on a farm. My grandmother commented when my sister stopped eating meat that it seems like it is the thing to do at this age. Mother did it. Sister did it. I'm going it. It's just a phase.

The garden and the chickens, and living in a community of people, not eating meat are all things that my mother did and then stopped doing. It is the same for my boyfriend. Eventually you grow out of it. Eventually you settle down into a normal life. That frightens me. The idea that I can grow out of my ideas frightens me. I will have to work in the great world as Forster calls it and slowly the things I think about what it is to be human and to be me will disappear. I will not live out doors but I will not live in my own home either. Just a impressionless cell. The bright electric lights of a career will make them so hard to see that sometime I will just stop looking. On the other hand I cannot remain a student forever, and some of these ideas I am sure are a product of being a student and young. I will look like a fool if I act the same as I always did. I shall once again be incomplete.

Cross-disciplinary work

There is talk in academia. People are unhappy with the segregation of the disciplines. Philosophy will be my example as it is what I know. Biology, physics, medicine, religion, psychology, astronomy, alchemy and anything else you can think of were once the domain of philosophy. Now our powers lie primarily in ethics, history of philosophy, and metaphysics. Metaphysics is a good foundation on which to work. Ethics is useful in other areas and as such taught outside of the philosophy department, and history of philosophy is blatantly cross-disciplinary.

Professors and students from time to time inform me that a cross-disciplinary approach is best. No one says anything more. Either we must learn as much as we possibly can or correspond with people in other disciplines. It was bad enough that we are out of touch with the lay people, now we are out of touch with each other as well. But whenever people mention cross-disciplinary work they commit an error to which up until now I have been unable to respond.

Cross disciplinary work is useful, I am told, because it is a different way of looking at things. This is not always but often false.

It's a bit romantic. Look at the world through the eyes of another. How different it looks! How strange and new. This implies that we are simply narrow. We cannot see across the hill because we are so focused on the flower growing against this tiny stone. The chemist is not looking at the flower. They are off on the other side of the hill blowing things up. It is not simply a different view, it is a different part of the world. It is not as if I look at the forest and talk to the biologist who looks at a certain tree, it is as if I am listening to the stream and the biologist comes running out of the forest to tell me about something they discovered. We are not just looking at the same things in different ways, we are looking at entirely different problems in different ways. That is why it is useful. A superficial knowledge of the tree will let me see things differently, but I need a deep knowledge of the tree in order to really know it and use it.

For example my boyfriend is a physics student. He teaches me something and we can discuss it, but only through him. I couldn't go and discuss physics with someone who knew less then me, I wouldn't learn or advance in any way, and he does not advance in talking to me.

Ideals and reality

Ideals are not solid things. You cannot catch and hold one except maybe in words, and always there is the danger that it will escape. When Rickie sees Agnes and her lover kissing and calls them the ideal lovers he sees the ideal of the lover momentarily alight on their shoulders. Like a butterfly it stopped there for just one moment. Like a ray of sunlight that chanced from a cloud. It is not solid. It is not permanent, not because it does not exist but because it does not stay.

Some philosophers, whose names I do not remember, hold that the soul does not stay with the body but only visits. I think this is true. The soul is our ideal. It may come to us in certain moments. It may speak to us but it will not stay. We cannot hold it. It is not the same as a chair or as my hand or even as a piece of bark or a melting bit of ice, although to that it is closer. It is not closer because it lacks, although if this is reality there are times when it is not real, but it returns. It will be real again. It will be forgotten and remembered.

I never held to images of romantic love. Candle lit dinners make me awkward and slightly queasy. But there are times when I am with Thomas, such as the first time I met him, when our actions invoke universals, ideals. I first met him Swing Dancing. We did not know what we were doing. I really had no interest in him. But somehow we were dancing and it was perfect. There were no clouds and the stars were bright like stars in the rural municapality where I grew up. Some baby bunnies were huddled by a sign and we stopped and tried to catch them with my beret. I knew if we were not careful the spirits would flit away. That moment was an ideal. That moment was what the writers write about. We are not that moment. It is separate from our bodies. It might even be separate from our souls, although I think they must have been present at that moment.

But maybe there is no soul. It could be that those moments when someone would declare a soul present is a moment when some god or spirit passes by. It is not the same soul each time but a different entity. The body and it's breath, which can give words to those spirits, are as much as we have of a soul.

Trust

I moved out in 2008. I understood that my mother sheltered me a bit and that I did not know a lot about people. I never had the sort of friends who spend all their free time together and never dealt with the sort of fights which arise from that kind of friendship. So I knew that having roommates would be a challenge for me and that I needed to be respectful of them and take care to know their boundaries and realize that hurt feelings do not equate to lasting hatred. I trusted that my roommates, all of whom had been on their own before, would be a reliable source of information on how to act in the world. We all want to be good people and do the right thing, right?

No. We don't. We want to do the easiest thing. We don't want to do something that is seriously wrong. No murder. No cruelty. But what about the grey areas? Rent money is an issue that is slightly grey. How to treat people when they have treated you is an area that is grey. What to do when you break someone's possessions accidentally is an area that is grey. What? Those aren't grey areas. But what if the person is a jerk? What if they had it coming?

I am now very careful who I trust to make judgments. Those are not grey areas. I knew they weren't. But I had never lived on my own before and thought that I just did not understand how these things worked. It is a bit of a nasty lesson, learning not to trust people's judgment. But it is a good one.

My sister phoned me the other day. Her friend was on academic probation. His life was a mess and he was depressed. She had asked all her friends if she should stop being friends with him, because it was creating a lot of stress for her and she did not feel like she could help him much anyhow. Everyone had told her yes. Then she asked a mutual friend of ours. He is a on call teacher and as she put it, 'an authority figure.' He said to wait it out. When she called me I told her to discourage him from discussing his problems with her but to continue being her friend. We were the only people who said she shouldn't drop him. This upset her, because it felt wrong.

It is rather sad. Idealizing people is wrong. People are people, not embodiments of a priori thought stuff. I am happy to say that the issues I had to take up in first year no longer exist. My roommates and I care about each other and want to do right, but this is from natural sympathy. How do you avoid the world becoming grey? Getting into a muddle. It worries me that what seems so clear now could fade in the wrong situation with the wrong people.

Emo utilitarian

The idea was better then the execution. I meant for him to be jumping off the roof after some villain. Emo amuses me. It seems like a sensible way of displaying emotions that otherwise end up hidden or ignored, but the poetry! Oh, the poetry. Also it encourages attempts into the land of mispelling and impossible grammar.

Talking too loudly on the bus

I am a loud person. When I am in a crowd of people I do not know or do not feel comfortable with I speak quietly and politely. But as soon as I have a friend I get loud. I know it is rude and I try to be considerate but sometimes I am so interested in the conversation that I forget about the people around us who may not really want to know about carnivorous tomatoes.

One episode particularly stands out for me. During National Novel Writing Month I talked about my novel a great deal. My roommate and I were on the bus. We were going to a Butcher's shop to buy five quail for a potluck. We were both in good spirits having just attended a talk by a brilliant teacher of mine. But my novel was giving me a bit of trouble. My characters lost motivation and my antagonist was mostly reacting at this point and as such could not himself be a motivation. So I was running through various was in which I could get my novel started again, with intermittent bursts of conversation about the talk on biomedical ethics we had just attended. I had just solved the problem with help from my roommate when a man a few seats away said, 'excuse me, do you realize you are very loud?' He was antagonistic. It is understandable because he had not wanted to hear our conversation. Say 'shush' or 'you're being loud' in a firm, quiet voice.

Understand that I do feel a bit guilty about the following. I do not always react well to people being angry at me and this is definitely an example of a poor reaction.

"I'm sorry," I said, "did something I said bother you?"

Here I learned that my poor reaction was somewhat more understandable. I don't mind people shushing me. I do mind them misjudging me. "Yes," he replied. "You think you are intelligent. But you're not. You're stupid. You are pretending to be intelligence and you are so stupid."

I was a little bewildered at this. "I don't think I'm intelligent," I said. It's true. I have rather low self esteem when it comes down to it. It's something I'm working on. I am happy when I understand something and unsurprised if I don't. But that conversation had not been one of self-awareness. If it had I would have known to keep quieter. As it was I was entirely wrapped up in ethics and stories and had no idea of myself or anything else, except possibly my roommate.

"Then why would you be talking so loudly?" He asked, "Obviously you want everyone to hear you because you think you are so intelligent. But you're just pretentious."

Now what he says has a bit of merit. In first year I had Latin 101 at 9:30am. I lived far away and the bus ride took an hour. Every day my friends and I would give up studying for Latin and have absurd conversations. More than once I was approached when riding alone by people who had heard our conversations, found them interesting, and thought it pleasant to speak with me. I was embarrassed by these encounters but also slightly pleased. So I had good reason to suppose that if people overheard our conversation they would know it to be what it was, two happy university students discussing things they loved.

I muddled the poor man, I think. I kept quiet until I stood up to get off the bus. Then I told him not to be afraid of intelligence, and pointed out that it is only a danger if misused and that ignorance on the other hand should always be feared. He disagreed and informed me that intelligence was dangerous and ignorance right way. He actually said that! I think he was terribly confused at this point or he would not have made such a blunder. I do realize that I was in the wrong, but I also see him as an example of a failed attempt to control the thoughts and speech of others. He felt threatened by me and that was why I responded so poorly. Had he known that he was in the right in asking me to be quiet I would have responded positively. That brings up an disturbing issue of how easy it is to control people with the right attitude and at the right moment.

I'm a witch, burn me!

Today in our Rationalists class my roommate and I discovered that I am a witch. The teacher commented about how in the past witches were supposed to be people doing harm or mischief and now it tends to be people into organic gardening.

I organic gardening. I attend old growth rallies. I am a vegetarian.


All these things are presently the activities of witches in BC. Therefore I must be a witch.

I am also a dualist and a moral realist. I think this is why I have problems talking in my philosophy classes. Because I'm crazy.