Book of knowledge

At West Point, the cows (juniors) will be hazing the plebes (freshmen) a lot... There are lots of different methods of hazing us. They range from restrictions on how to eat my food, who I'm allowed to date, and even how much sleep I get. The most infamous method of hazing, though, is the book of knowledge. The book of knowledge is (you guessed it) just a book filled with facts and songs and poems etc. It's about the size of The Stranger, and we have to memorize everything inside of it. This includes how many lights are in the lunch hall, how many lights were in the lunch hall 20 years ago, word for word and letter for letter the preamble to the constitution. If I'm ever asked certain questions like "How is the cow, plebe Murray?" my answer has to be, "Sergeant, she walks, she talks, she's full of chalk; the lacteal fluid extracted from the female of the bovine species is highly prolific to the Nth degree!" That's a little ridiculous isn't it!?!?!?!?!?
That's just memorizing stuff, the hard part is when I can't answer. If I ever answer a question wrong or don't know an answer, I have to accept whatever punnishment that cow wants to give me. It might be 20 push-ups, it might be 70 push-ups, it might be two minutes of plank. Whatever it is, it's bound to suck... I'm terrible at memorizing things so I better get in really good shape soon ^^

my pre-college checklist

These are things that I need/want all my friends to help me finish before I go to college.

1. Reach my fitness goals
2. Make sure that everyone I care about knows that I care about them
3. Write a will
4. Have a hell of a lot of fun at prom
5. Learn how to surf
6. Learn how to dance
7. FTT
8. Play a baseball game
9. Go hiking a lot
10. Figure out  how to ask my mother to let me go to war.

my bucket list

Lemme start by sayin that if I had to die tomorrow that I wouldn't have any regrets. These aren't things I have to do before I die, just things I want to do before I die.

1. Climb a mountain
2. Go camping in the arctic tundra
3. Get married
4. Have kids
5. Make something happen with my mind
6. Drag race a car on a dry salt-bed
7. Stay up all night watching a meteor shower
8. Visit Death Valley while it's in bloom
9. Go to Canada, Russia, Chile, Egypt, Brazil, the Vatican, Greece, Mecca, Japan, Australia, Mongolia, India, China, South Africa, Alaska, Ireland, Madrid
10. Go on an epic, All-American road trip through the rockies, the great plains, and the deep south
11. Spend a day chillin with the monkey herds in the plateaus of Ethiopia
12. Go spelunking in kokoweif mountain
13. Hang out with Ravi way more

Day at the beach

I've been to the beach a lot. Most often people are surfing or swimming or building a sand castle. Usually people are having fun with their families or sun bathing or are preoccupied with something, anything. This is not the case with Monsieur Meursault. He insists on making the most crass comments about a woman's appearance at the beach, a place where families generally go to have fun, not where a relatively young man goes to publicly display his lack of concern for others. Marie, a misguided girl, is Meursault's partner in crime, french kissing him in the waves where I can only assume at least fifteen people with their small children are feeling very uncomfortable while building their sand castles. To me, it's odd that this mismatched couple even exists, but the fact that they exercise excessive liberty in family settings is odder.

Crew

          I died today. Or last year maybe. I don't know. I got a text from the coach: "2k will kill you. Won't get any homework done tonight. Faithfully yours." That didn't mean anything at the time. Maybe it was last year.
          The boat house is in Marina Del Rey, about 20 miles from Sherman Oaks. I'll take the 2:30 bus and get there at 4:15. That way I can change at home, come dressed for the vigil, and be back in choir the next morning. I asked my teachers for the night off and they couldn't say yes. I had no excuse. And they weren't happy about it. I wanted to try "it's not my decision," but it is, somehow. They were collectively silent. Then I thought I shouldn't have asked at all. After all, I had no reason to slack off. I'm the one who should have prioritized. But I'll probably catch up the day after tomorrow, when I have to return from mourning. For now, it's almost as if I hadn't died. After the funeral though, I can get back to work and everything will be turned in.

Physics

In Kafka's the Metamorphosis Gregor and his father were always pressed to make enough money to pull their family out of a constant struggle to keep paychecks flowing. Unfortunately, Gregor's father's business went bankrupt and Gregor is forced to continuously work at a job that he despises. Him and I are so similar... To me the process of going through high school is just like Gregor's process of performing a job he hates until the family is out of debt, THEN he can finally quit! Unfortunately we all know that Gregor was massively disillusioned, and honestly the race of taking classes that we hate until we get to college THEN we can quit classes like Physics! Unfortunately, for all of us who have to take a core curriculum, we're all just as disillusioned as Gregor was when he was trapped in his own rat race, deceived by his father who had kept a little wealth from previous times. Our parents are keeping nuggets of knowlege that our journey through (what we see as unnecessary) core classes is only half finished.

Freedom and conformity: the complex dynamic between dependence, independence, and conformity

In a setting where a person is given responsibility, their singular option for getting a positive reaction from society is to conform to society's rules. This makes sense because on the whole there's no reason that any person would voluntarily give another person what they want without getting something in return. Examples of this range from relationships to economics. In all of these cases, people expect a consistent (or conformist) pattern of behavior. This dynamic changes once a person is no longer responsible for their own actions. When a person isn't held accountable for their actions, they have no reason to conform to expectations because there are no rewards for that conformity. This is an extremely complex topic and there are many nuances that exist within the accountability/conformity dynamic. Resources that deal with this issue range from biblical, the creation of Adam and Eve, to modern, Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis. In Metamorphosis as well as in Genesis, both stories explore the consequences and rewards of conformity, and come to the same decisive conclusion that conformity on the whole is more rewarding for individuals and society.

education and conformity

There is a large tendency among poor teachers to let students deny responsibility instead of accept consequences for their actions. Those who teach with with the opposite goal in mind encourage individual growth. The idea that success is defined as earning a high-powered job is something that schools and society are also inserting into the goals of students. If multiple people are inclined to achieve the same goal, and they're encouraged to grow individually, they will tend to grow in the same way. They will all try to be better than the rest in the same fields of study, they will be encouraged to conform while growing as individuals. Those who don't mature in the same way as the rest will fall behind in the quest for the same goal. So to give a person freedom by trusting them with the accountability of their own actions, causes them to conform to the expectations put on them by their society-imposed goal.

two questions on Kafka

I'm answering questions 1 and 4 in Jago on page 977.

1) The story opens, "When Gregor Samsa awoke in his bed one morning from unquiet dreams, he found himself transformed into an enormous insect." When you first read those lines, did you find them humorous? When did you begin to understand the serious intent, or did the fantastic or surreal situation make it difficult for you to take the story seriously?

I read those lines entirely seriously. The fact that Gregor is a bug didn't startle me because, although his reaction was extremely unreasonable, I knew exactly what the novel was about before reading it. It also doesn't help that most characters in novels are more like caricatures than they are like actual people, so Gregor's lack of shock didn't surprise me. I knew that Kafka was painting a portrait of a man whose most important trait was illustrated by his under-reaction to his metamorphosis. The story was serious from the very first word.

4) Among Gregor's responses to his transformation, we see anxiety, frustration, and surprise, but not shock. Why doesn't Kafka present Gregor as being horrified by the discovery that he is an insect?

Kafka establishes Gregor's unusual bug-like personality immediately. Instead of focusing on the obvious fact that GREGOR IS A BUG, instead he focuses on things that no logical person would focus on in that situation, such as his inability to go to work that day (just the way that the reader would expect a bug to react to a grave situation, nonsensical). Gregor's mind is so preoccupied with everything but his own well-being that he can't focus for even one instant on the clear and present danger that he is in. This is why Kafka neglects Gregor's shock reaction. If Gregor reacted in the same way that a normal person would react, the reader would assume that Gregor is also a normal person and the character of Gregor is meant to illustrate more than just a story, it's meant to exaggerate certain characteristics in the hopes of making some comment on the self-destructive tendencies of over-conforming, just like in Gregor's case.

group discussion dynamic

In discussing conformity, the least interesting aspect was the discussion about conformity. In fact, the most interesting thing to observe was the dynamic between four men discussing an issue that they didn't necessarily agree on. Generally when people know they're being watched, they try to behave in the way they're asked to behave or in order to give good impressions to people. That didn't happen with this group, instead the only thing that happened was the development of a courtroom type situation of all things. Hear me out, this analogy might get weird. Brian is the witness, Jeff is the examiner, Ravi is the judge, Eddie is the jury. So as soon as Brian took the stand, he made an assertion. That assertion was immediately challenged by Jeff, who was trying to create reasonable doubt in the mind of the jury (Eddie). Ravi will come into play soon, I promise. So Jeff continued his line of questioning, while Brian defended his logic (fairly well in my opinion), and Eddie was charged with deciding whether Brian can be trusted or not. So every once in a while Jeff will ask a question that itself was questionable, meaning that Jeff said something that was a little illogical, and Ravi steps in to clarify that Brian has grounds to disregard the question. Isn't that way more interesting than conformity! By choosing to start the discussion, Brian pitted himself in a battle to save the reliability of his point of view. Eddie is still in deliberation, but I expect the verdict to read thusly, "I the man of the jury find the defendant Brian Daneshgar... still reliable."

Marlow id a biased narrator

In Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, the idea of restraint is explored in depth. Marlow spends much of his time throughout the narrative wrestling with his own ideas of what he thinks is restraint and what he thinks is indulgence. When psychoanalyzing the narrative using ideas put forth by Dr. Freud, Frederick R. Karl makes it clear that both the id and the superego strongly influence Marlow throughout his journey. Marlow's narrative becomes fragmented as he travels up river, deeper into an area where the superego has no presence. In the deep areas of the jungle, Marlow struggles to maintain the standards of his superego. When Marlow is recalling parts of his journey where he is struggling to fight off his id, his language becomes difficult to understand. These areas of the narrative are where Marlow's id becomes visible through the fragmented text. The reader disagrees with Marlow in these sections of the narrative because Marlow's personal bias is included with Marlow's id in these sections.

the Heart of Darkness's symbols: dream vs reality

In Marlow's narrative, he paints a picture of the Africans that crew the steam boat as scary, mob-like cannibals. In reality we know from a modern perspective that the African crew can function as a literary symbol that represents the picturesque practice of restraint. After being virtually enslaved, subjugated, beaten, and starved, the Africans that crew Marlow's steam boat are able to restrain themselves from mutinying. From Marlow's point of view, we see that the sequence of events can appear to be much more dream-like than the reality of them. So from Marlow's dream-like perception the Africans represent fear and looming danger. The clash between the dream interpretation of the African crew and the reality based interpretation of the African crew are a great example for a psychoanalytical assessment of Heart of Darkness because of the large gap between what Marlow sees, which could be considered the id, and what the reader sees, which is considered the ego.

Conrad discussion question #6

The blind woman is supposed to be justice who is carrying a torch instead of the scales of justice. By carrying the torch, she is bringing light to the darkness of the jungle but is unable to see the light that she brings because of her blindfold. She is blind to the light that she has brought and because of the sinister shadow that is cast on her face, she is unaware of its unflattering quality. The light's sinister shadow is symbolic for the violence and immoral practices of the "light bringers."

Conrad discussion question #2

Marlow wants to recognize that darkness has existed on the map for ages, and is not a new phenomenon. Even the industrial center of the world (which was arguably Brittain at the time the novel was written) was nothing more than a frightening blank on the map thousands of years ago. Maybe Marlow means to warn his friends and crew members against prejudice and excessive fear of the jungle that he will be narrating for them.