Well, since this past week was just not a very good week in the grand scheme of things, I was doing some thinking of why exactly it was so terrible. I, of course, was helped along by a great many things that lend themselves to philosophical thought (though perhaps I was just taking the time to think about them. I'll get to that later)
These appear in chronological order of events/musings.
-Stress
So really, the thing that got me down the most about this week was the stress. Or rather, I should say, the perceived stress. I had more than the usual amount of work and activities to do, and less than the usual amount of time. It didn't help that quite a few of the things I had to do would be considered non-school related and also rather important.
The administrators also decided to schedule a nice school-wide in-class discussion about stress (it works, somehow). Since I know my own brain relatively well, and I never listen to its input anyway, this was a chance to hear about other people's insights on stress. I heard some interesting thoughts, and formulated a few of my own in addition to that which boil down to:
- Stress is all relative
- it is not conducive to productivity at all (which begs the question, why is it there? (but that is a discussion for another post about psychology vs biology))
- It doesn't work when you tell yourself not to do something.
- How long does it take before a person learns from past experiences?
I don't know how often I've been stressed, and it all amounts to nothing, all the time. Telling yourself it'll all be okay is the same as trying to tickle yourself, though; it never works.
Therefore my stress relief mechanism is caffeine! Makes me twitchy and shaky, but helps me not focus on stress and the constant desire to procrastinate.
-Luck and Fate
One part of the stress was having driving test on Thursday. Stress was caused more by the concept of the test and the fact that it is something that will play a role (however minor) in the rest of my life rather than by the test itself.
Well, anyway, after a string of misfortunes involving my SSN, I finally got to drive and did fairly well until I failed the test in the last 5 seconds of it. With no logical explanation, I managed to crash into the curb about 10 ft from the parking space.
On the way home, my mother insisted that it was because it was a bad day, according to the fortune-telling pages in the Chinese newspaper. She had mentioned that fact during the SSN debacle, and had called my dad to pray to the little buddha statuette (which is weird, because we aren't even remotely religious....). On the way home, she called again and said that he had prayed for the wrong thing (a solution to the SSN problem vs. passing the driving test)
So.....did the Chinese fortune-telling pages have any effect on this? Would praying to the buddha have helped?
What if that day was a good day and I failed? Ostensibly it would then just be my fault, or a fluke.
It is, also, the idea of the self-fulfilling prophesy. Did I fail because my mother said the Chinese newspaper said it was a bad day, thinking that something was bound to go wrong? Someone who knows they are about to die usually does things they'd normally regret, then make sure they don't by fulfilling the prediction (or maybe their last futile chance to take matters into their own hands)
While we're on the subject of futility, let's continue on to the next bit!
-Futility
This tidbit is from my APUSH test on Friday. Hooray for Progressivism!
Is it better to have a reform pass and then have people ignore it (e.g. Prohibition) than to have never passed it at all?
- One argument would be that if it never passed, people would always try again, with more success each time until there is a point where society has changed enough to be able to accept it and sustain it.
If it had been passed and then ignored, it would be far harder to renew it, because other people would say that it already passed once before and failed, which just goes to show that it was never meant to be.
Of course, this leads to the distinction between changing times and learning from mistakes. Is the reform more likely to stick now than it was when it was last passed?
Or is it an exercise in futility, where doing the same thing twice and expecting a different outcome is the definition of insanity?
-Self-Reproach?
Today we all took the SATs as Hawky mentioned in the previous post. I was reading the passage in one of the critical reading sections, and I recognized Oscar Wilde which made the test just a little bit less dull.
Part of the passage included this line:
"There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us."
-Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
(Oscar Wilde, by the way, is fantastic. If you're looking for pithy quotes, he is the absolute king.)
A lot of people will immediately blame themselves for things just so that other people will not. This is not entirely intentional, and is quite often subconscious. When one blames oneself, the other person now cannot, as an unspoken rule, blame that person (because that's bad sportsmanship)
There are the people who genuinely blame themselves, who wouldn't even think to use the pity ploy. Guilt is a natural reaction, and quite often, the first one.
And then there are the people who are extremely sensitive to criticism and just don't like to be reproached, so they swallow their pride and act for the camera.
As a little add on to swallowing pride, reverse psychology is a great way to manipulate people, the only thing that people balk at is the injured pride (that may or may not outweigh the benefits)
-Abjection
On another note, I stumbled across this earlier in the afternoon, and thought the concept was very interesting.
Wikipedia: Abjection
"When one encounters blood, excrement, etc. outside of the body, one is forced to confront what was once a part of oneself, but no longer is...A dismembered finger or limb is identified as belonging to one's own body and is 'missed' while at the same time repulsive to the viewer for no longer being a part of the whole"
Or
"For example, upon being faced with a corpse, a person would be most likely repulsed because he or she is forced to face an object which is violently cast out of the cultural world, having once been a subject."
This, I think, is a large part of the detachment in life, especially in dealing with death.
Meursault from Camus' The Stranger (great book, by the way, though some people find it strange) was probably heavily affected by abjection, for reasons unknown, beginning with his mother's death.
I had more to ramble about there, but it disappeared from my mind.
Oh wow, this was quite a bit of rambling from my end. Well, I guess this was my method of procrastination for this week. I came up with about half of it while writing the other parts, so it took about an hour (of writing time). Thinking about thinking gets the thinking center thinking!
Hmm, while I was writing this, this rather interesting song/social commentary came on. I normally don't listen to hiphop (in my defense, I didn't even know I had the song), but this one was interesting. I cut it short because I couldn't concentrate and write my post at the same time.
I wonder what that says about me.
Edit: For a little inspirational pep-talk and warning for the future, read this, the 'mission statement' that started everything, from the movie Jerry Maguire (watched it earlier this evening). Just pretend to ignore all the sports references and concentrate on the rest of it.
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