Filosofizin'

This past week, I've been preoccupied with school. I dropped my Power in the Modern Age class, leaving me with my final four, and I'm increasingly realizing that it will not be as low key as I'd thought. After I get back from winter break, I'll feel the crunch of papers, projects, and finals all right away, unless I actively fight the illusion of infinite time that this side of Christmas creates. For example, contrary to the stereotype, studying ancient philosophy to the level of being able to explain it myself is significantly more challenging than getting stoned, eating Cheetos, and wondering if our universe is a grain of sand under a giant's fingernail. Despite the challenging levels of abstraction, it's fascinating to see the conclusions of the first people who tried to explain the world through deduction, without invoking mythology. For example, Thales, one of the very first Western philosophers (~500 BCE) concluded that all matter was one substance at its core, which he determined to be water. We can laugh, or we can consider: while all matter is not water, all matter is atoms. Although misguided, he proposed the idea of the fundamental building block. Given the lack of modern science, even some Greek myths show surprising, albeit anthropomorphic corollaries to the modern theories, such as the idea of an initial vague 'Chaos' from which the earth, the oceans, the sky, and everything else, including the gods, and later humans, was born. It's not quite the Big Bang, but the Chaos concept seems closer than the far more recent Judeo-Christian Genesis.

I don't have much to tell about my other classes, except for that they're going fairly well despite the general wow-this-will-be-harder-than-I-thought. But tomorrow I'm going to the Feria de San Lucas in Jaén, the capital of an adjacent Andalusian province through an Erasmus trip. The bus leaves at noon tomorrow and gets back in the wee hours of Sunday morning, so I'm sure it will be quite the adventure...

The other day I had a great conversation with my mom (Hi Mommy!) and I told her that I didn't feel like I was, ah, changing, the way study abroad is supposed to do to you, although I told her that now, the idea of moving across the country for work or whatever comes after seems totally reasonable whereas before it seemed super scary, almost unimaginable. According to her, that's a big deal. So it has been noted :)