Thursday, April 16, 2009

What a Nice Day

It's absolutely beautiful outside right now--so much so that I am actually debating whether to play video games or go walk to the park and read under a tree. And it's been a very productive day: I was up at 6:00, went for a run (7.2 km in 39 minutes, not too shabby), then walked to the university. I talked to my prof about my one remaining essay, wrote a quarter of it (which puts me at half-done), and had lunch with a friend on a restaurant patio.

Walking in such weather is actually really nice; for once, I felt like I was privileged to do so, rather than being punished for owning the World Most Accident-Prone Bicycle.

And the essay's going great--more on that when it's finished, but I figured out what I was writing about on the walk to school, and I nearly broke out in giggles over how cool that was. You know what's fun stuff? Applying Rousseauvian educational theory to turn of the century moral novels, that's what's fun stuff.

Lunch with the friend was great too. I haven't really got a chance to talk to her in a while, so it was interesting. Both of us picked up threads from our last luncheon that the other didn't quite remember until it was mentioned. It's funny how that works. I do it all the time--although usually, the other person doesn't remember the original conversation at all. It really drives home how a conversation is really a subjective experience--if I had been asked what we talked about a week later, my answer would have been totally different from hers. And a week after that, my answer would be different from original answer. Even though the words we said are still the words we said, as the context they are recalled in and the recollector shifts, the discourse itself shifts. And the best part is that this, this constant shifting and churning of meaning, happens all the time, with every conversation we have--up to and including this post.

Okay, that's not the best part. The best part is that I get paid to think stuff like this.

Later Days.

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