Time passing, or else my perception passing along a fixed b-series, ha ha ha cough ha cough cough

[garran]

At Marilee's nerdy dinner party last week, there was somebody whose fake ID said that she was born in 1987. You and I are old! (Old age hath yet his honour and his toil...) Of course, my father, whom I also ate with that day, would be somewhat unimpressed with this claim. Dad was talking about writing some interesting memoir things in a hypothetical weblog; here is some peer pressure encouraging him to do that.

Speaking of being old, today is Rachel's birthday. I approve strongly of Rachel's continued existence.

Speaking of my friends, it's been a few weeks since I got a package in the mail that I still haven't mentioned where it might be seen so that the person who sent it can know that it got here; whoops. That person was J., and he sent me the first five volumes of the manga 'Planet Ladder', in which I'd expressed interest. Thank you! (It is difficult to say something like 'J. is awesome' here without implying that he is awesome because of this sort of sudden inexplicable fit of daunting largesse, but actually he is pretty neat anyway and stuff like this is totally being-awesome-supererogatory.) So far I've only read the first volume, and I admit that I had a bit of trouble following the action and who was whom; maybe I'm not as manga-literate as I thought.

Now the summer has progressed to the point of almost being over, and for people who are going to school as I am (it starts in less than a week!), the autumn is ready to break over us like a wave. Here is my schedule for the term, containing:

• ASTR 311, "Stars and Galaxies", which my Langara's Astronomy professor recommended when I asked if there would be a good course to take at UBC as a followup to hers. It contains about two million students, which is why the 'tutorial' class scheduled after it on my Wednesdays, wherein I understand that some smaller number of us at a time will get the professor's attention.
  
• PHIL 314A, "History of Philosophy in the 17th Century", or something like that; anyway, that's the actual subject matter. Unfortunately the person teaching this this term is my Philosophy of Religion professor from the first part of the summer, whom I found to be somewhat stressfully unparticipatory and bad at explaining things.
  
• PHIL 330A, "Social and Political Philosophy". This is required for my major but presumably I'd take it anyway, because it's probably going to be pretty awesome. I don't know anything extra about the professor or circumstances for this particular class.
  And,
  
• PHIL 390A, the Honours seminar. For nearly all of the summer the university computer system did not believe that I was enrolled in this course; now at last I can stop worrying about not being enrolled in it and start worrying about being enrolled in it after all.

Today I bought textbooks, and I guess that philosophy textbooks are pretty cheap, because I bought eight of them for about $150 and one astronomy textbook for $100. Maybe I chose the right major?

Comments

[synchcola.livejournal.com]

What How did you do that

Here's mine.

[ria-oaks.livejournal.com]

Ahaha, yeah, Astr311... the science course for Arts students who need their science credit. XD It's not even available to Science students... I took it and its companion course 310 in 3rd year; pretty easy if rather dull (and I didn't put as much effort into them as I probably should have... which made it harder, heh). But Peter Newbury, who I see is teaching it again, is excellent and made it at least marginally interesting (and if you already are interested then you should def enjoy it). He also sets hands down THE easiest final exam I've ever written. It had connect-the-dots on it. Seriously. And possibly a crossword. I suppose parts of it were still reasonably challenging and you had to study for it, but it was a heck of a lot of fun to write and I was silently giggling through quite a bit of it. ^^

"Social and Political Philosophy" sounds interesting, though I'm not really interested in taking a Phil course. But the social and political dimensions of it sounds intriguing.

Anyway, hope you have a good term. :) Maybe I'll see you on campus in January!

Btw, I got your email and plan to reply... interesting article; read it, but haven't watched the vid. Plan to, though - Sisabet and Luminosity are fantastic vidders and I'll watch anything they do together. Interesting albeit difficult subject - love SPN though I do, it certainly does have some problems with its representation of women... though there is at least one awesomely kick-ass woman (Ellen rules all!) and they plan to introduce 2 female hunters in s3. Anyway. More in my reply once I've seen the vid. Thanks for passing that along. :)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_quinn/]

So the usual joke ends "... and Philosophy doesn't need the wastebaskets," and now I wonder if there's another joke for the textbooks in there along the same lines...

[masamage.livejournal.com]

What is the usual joke?

[http://users.livejournal.com/_quinn/]

Something like:

"Mathematics is the second-cheapest department: all they need is desks, pencils, paper, and wastebackets. Philosophy is even cheaper; they don't even need the wastebackets."

The philosophers, of course, insist this is because they don't make mistakes. ;)

[garran.livejournal.com]

In this case, the operative punchline seems to be, "Philosophy doesn't even need the colour pictures." Baddum-chsh?


-Garran

[meta4mix.livejournal.com]

Yer not particularly manga-illiterate; the first book takes some effort to get through. It's not as fun or involving as the latter volumes.

You also don't mention how it took me nearly two years to mail that stuff to you. XD

Yay, school! Enjoy it! I would probably be taking accounting and computers classes.