I am now officially a D2. Physiology final grade == A! Now off to taste wedding entrées with my lovely fiancée. Tonight, Legally Blonde the Musical. Tomorrow, more things!
Originally, I said “Tomorrow, the world”, but I’m trying to avoid clichéd language in my writing. Good luck with that. See what I did there?
Some real thunderstorms, maybe‽ We wait with bated breath.
This finals week isn’t as brain-meltingly insane as the one we had before spring break, but I do find my brain a bit mushy these days. Does that mean a ready-to-rock brain is crispy? Sharp, maybe. Hmm.
This low quality post does seem to prove that my gray matter has become gelatinous.
Between my finals in neuroscience, physiology, and prosthodontics, my brain has been working on an interesting, rather troubling exercise: understanding beauty. Lord knows why my mind gets preoccupied with the ideas it does. Nonetheless, here I am: I can’t wrap my head around the concept. I am, in many ways, a prototypical nerd; as such, an unknowable system or domain irks me. Cf. the aforelinked article:
The nerd has based his career, maybe his life, on the computer, and as we’ll see, this intimate relationship has altered his view of the world. He sees the world as a system which, given enough time and effort, is completely knowable. This is a fragile illusion that your nerd has adopted, but it’s a pleasant one that gets your nerd through the day.
See where the problems begin for me? Beauty is not a finite system with rules, it is not completely knowable. The idea is so broad. What other adjective conjures very specific imagery on such a wide variety of topics? Math, painting, music, sculpture, landscapes, animals, humans.
To some, a perfectly bored engine block is beautiful. To others, it is a lawn of fresh cut grass on a late summer evening. Still others find their true beauty aurally. And of course, for large swaths of males succumbing to their limbic systems, nothing is more beautiful than the graceful contours of a woman’s torso.
Because beauty is how we describe something else, not something intrinsic in that other thing, maybe it is based on emotion. I would propose that, just as loss, joy, and betrayal produce emotions, there is an emotion for beauty: peaceful satisfaction.
A step on the path toward my understanding, I hope.
God Talk - Stanley Fish Blog - NYTimes.com:
By theological questions, Eagleton means questions like, “Why is there anything in the first place?”, “Why what we do have is actually intelligible to us?” and “Where do our notions of explanation, regularity and intelligibility come from?”
The fact that science, liberal rationalism and economic calculation can not ask — never mind answer — such questions should not be held against them, for that is not what they do.
And, conversely, the fact that religion and theology cannot provide a technology for explaining how the material world works should not be held against them, either, for that is not what they do. When Christopher Hitchens declares that given the emergence of “the telescope and the microscope” religion “no longer offers an explanation of anything important,” Eagleton replies, “But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”
Eagleton likes this turn of speech, and he has recourse to it often when making the same point: “[B]elieving that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world … is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.” Running for a bus is a focused empirical act and the steps you take are instrumental to its end. The positions one assumes in ballet have no such end; they are after something else, and that something doesn’t yield to the usual forms of measurement. Religion, Eagleton is saying, is like ballet (and Chekhov); it’s after something else.
I asked a fellow dental student of mine what he was doing this weekend. “Going to get a cavity filled.”
Mykala and I are busy, busy. She’s gone all weekend for a dance competition and I have a straight set of finals starting Monday. It’s times like these, when you think you haven’t the time, when you absolutely must take a moment to make your significant other feel special in any way you can. It’ll save your relationship, so you can weather the times you both forget to nurture.
Visited home today; it felt great. I haven’t been able to help with the wedding as much as I would like to, but I can relay all the things Mykala has accomplished in the planning. In many ways, there’d be no wedding without her.
Thinking about what it will be like to have a house and a dog. I’d like a spot where I can play outside with my family. It’s nice to have that vision toward which to look ahead.
Thinking a lot about that DFW piece I linked the other day. For example:
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.
Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it’s hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.
But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness.
That’s not just food for thought — it’s like organic free-range health food for thought.
Listening to some great music. I’ll outline that after I get through these finals. I’m 6 days from becoming a D2. 10 days from next semester. It’ll be a full 4 day weekend.
David Foster Wallace - Commencement Speech at Kenyon College
So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.
“Good lord, you guys look like you came out of a war zone — it’s just a test!”
— The fantastic Dr. Tautin, after our 4 hour prosthodontic lab practical
This man, one of the bench dentists who evaluates and guides us through labs, saved my sanity in Oral Anatomy lab first semester. In a class with the purpose of weeding out those who didn’t want to be in school (and the distant second goal of teaching oral anatomy), he did his best to get a new flock of uptight students to settle down. On waxing up a tooth: “If it looks like a tooth, you’re on the right track.”
You see, Dr. Tautin insists on clarifying our understanding of how dental school fits into the rest of our lives: make it through, move on. He once called the experience “job training”, which did more toward clarifying my perspective than 40 hours in therapy ever could. Having never given therapy a try, I think knowing more people like Dr. Tautin, those with their perspective and priorities at a wonderfully realistic, humanly-attainable level, does wonders for the psyche.
Closing in on the end of the semester…
The public archives of tumbledry go back to my embarrassingly rudimentary scrawling in October, 1999. By that calendar, we’ll turn 10 in October of this year. However, I only registered the domain tumbledry.org on July 22, 2003. At the time, I was smack in the middle of leaving high school times for college life. My intensely narrow understanding of the world around me expanded agonizingly slowly; however, something during that time made me think it would be a good idea to hop on the evolving internet and get a proper website going. Before that, this space was called “Alex’s Website.” I’ve some mortifying splash pages from that era. Perhaps I’ll share those if I get time. Before that, dating to sometime around the beginning of 1999, I put together a site called TI Chip. It was mostly an archive of 1200+ calculator programs. I loved piecing together websites on Angelfire and Tripod, two free hosting sites of the day.
A calculator-carrying geek was I.
Computers were a domain exclusively talked about with my close friends, and I tried hard not to talk to my classmates about my love for programming. This tendency persists to this day, and it gets rather lonely sometimes. I wish I had a peer group (Justin only has so much free time) with whom I could discuss different caching systems for database driven websites, the challenges of non-greedy regular expressions, or the merits of different languages. With my near total immersion in dental school, I know my knowledge about these topics will be hopelessly out of date when I finally have the time to reconnect with any community like this. Oh well, eh? The time just isn’t there.
I will, however, always look back fondly at redesigning and/or recoding this website about 17 times, learning HTML by trial and error over winter break in 1998, getting hacked by a Russian computer gang, and so on. I look forward to many, many more years online. I wonder, nearly 10 years into this endeavor, what life and this space will be like in another 10 years… in 2019.
A great Minnesota poet died recently. His name was Bill Holm. Alas, I did not know of him until after his death, when I heard a wonderful tribute to him on April 19, on Minnesota Public Radio Presents. I had just jumped in the shower and (thanks to the shower radio from Kourtni) heard a beautiful poem by another Minnesota poet, Robert Bly. Mr. Bly was reading (with musical backing) some of his works, to honor the late Bill Holm. One of these pieces was particularly beautiful, so I had to give you the opportunity to listen:
The name of this poem by Robert Bly is “Stealing Sugar from the Castle”. And it goes thusly:
We are poor students who stay after school to study joy.
We are like those birds in the India mountains.
I am a widow whose child is her only joy.The only thing I hold in my ant-like head
Is the builder’s plan of the castle of sugar.
just to steal one grain of sugar is a joy!Like a bird, we fly out of darkness into the hall,
Which is lit with singing, then fly out again.
Being shut out of the warm hall is also a joy.I am a laggard, a loafer, and an idiot. But I love
To read about those who caught one glimpse
Of the Face, and died twenty years later in joy.I don’t mind your saying I will die soon.
Even in the sound of the word soon, I hear
The word you which begins every sentence of joy.“You’re a thief!” the judge said. “Let’s see
Your hands!” I showed my callused hands in court.
My sentence was a thousand years of joy.
The music, the words, and the performance are, to me, perfect. I love the way Robert Bly tosses his lines out — his phrases are not precious; they are living, breathing. His inflection is dazzling, yet free of pretense. “My sentence was a thousand years of joy.”
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