Andy H.

It's difficult to do archaeology on your own former self, like studying an ancient settlement people have continually lived on and built over. I have some memories of the people I used to be, but they're partial, selective, and already in the context of the narratives that are explanatory to me now. Things that didn't matter to me, that contradicted me, that I didn't realize, are all elided. Without external landmarks with which to orient myself -- public records, intersubjective corroboration, things I wrote down at the time -- it would be close to impossible to check or complicate these memories, but even with those things available there is so much in my relationship to them I have to guess at, what I was unable to acknowledge or articulate at the time, or just forgot.

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I wanted to write a big post about IDEC, but apparently I didn't get around to it before school started so who knows whether I'm going to. It was awesome, though! I met and hung out with a bunch of the current generation of WH teenagers, who turn out to be pretty cool, and went to several workshops that challenged me usefully, and stayed up late vocally jamming with musicians from around the world (!), was made to cry by Yaacov Hecht and got very grumpy at Dr. Gabor Mate. Helen is starting a new school, and I am seriously considering trying to be on its staff once my fourth year of university is done.

This past month's fiction:

Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
Charles Stross, Halting State

This concludes my second year of keeping track of novels read; I'll figure out the stats later. I definitely read fewer things than I did during the first one.

Rachel wanted my school schedule, so here it comes, from memory because the UBC website doesn't want to let me log in to look at my timetable for some reason. It's kind of a ridiculous schedule.

On Monday Tuesday Thursday Friday I have Japanese 102 at 9 AM, which means I have to be up before 7 to get to school on time. Also I haven't really practised Japanese since the last course I took in late 2006, so basically I am insane. Today is the first day of school and I got here on time to find that it was cancelled. Well, nevermind.

On Thursdays I have Philosophy of Law at 11:00 (it is a three hour class). The textbooks include a book co-edited by John Russell, whom I used to take classes from at Langara. Then I get a half-hour break and at 2:30 I have Philosophy of Language, which has a very good reputation here.

On Fridays there is the Honours Seminar at 10. They alternate each year between focussing on ethics and focussing on metaphysics; this is an ethics year, which I'm rather looking forward to because last year was pretty metaphysics-heavy, except that it's being taught by the other Dr. Russell so we'll probably be spending a certain amount of time on the metaphysics of free will.

And I'll be working MWF, 12-6, 12-6, and 2-6, respectively, unless I get a better job.

Some other pretty awesome things have been going on, but they're probably not suitable for talking about in a public livejournal entry. Sorry, public.

I've been seeing some people do that thing where one reposts the first sentences from the first entry of each month. It occurs to me that if I did that, every single one would be a variation on 'here are some books I've read'; there is something kind of heartening in that. I didn't know if I was going to stick to this book-tracking thing, when I started. (Of course, there has been that paucity of other content to moderate my sense of achievement.)

Which reminds me, somewhat belatedly: Brendan asked me about Bull's Territory and Vernor Vinge in general. I spoke in carefully vague terms about the former, but the first paragraph of my response does contain a spoiler about the general direction of the plot in A Deepness in the Sky.

As many Bobs already know, IDEC is going to be in Vancouver this summer. David, who is (surprising no one) one of the major people taking charge of the organization, has asked me to write a short page for the rather inchoate website, explaining the notion of a democratic school; I'm having some trouble working out the phrasing. The effort has me thinking about my tendency to habitually underestimate just how radical a notion this actually is.

( It's been a long time since I talked about Windsor House in my weblog. )

I've finally replied to all of last month's book report requests.

Today was my birthday! I had a midterm (for the second year in a row! I guess it's that season), ate Chinese food, went to a Windsor House philosophy meeting, and thought about how it had been a year since J. was here. However did I pay attention to studying for the Sociology midterm I had last year while J. was here? But I must have, at least a little, because I remember that I got an A- in that course. I have received no presents yet (the presents my mother bought me got tangled in Amazon), but a surprising number of people wished me well, and my day as a whole left me with a warm general fondness for humanity such that it would be difficult for me to complain.

I had some other things that I wanted to write about, but I do not remember what they were. Oh, except that cola asked me a while ago to report on the Sufjan Stevens concert that I went to, since apparently a writer for the Straight pronounced it one of the two best Vancouver concerts of the decade (the other having been something in 2003). I didn't personally think it was as good as the September 19th Final Fantasy concert, but it was pretty good.

...I guess he probably wanted more report than that. Okay, a bad thing: we all (who got there ahead of time) had to stand in line in the cold and sometimes raining for long after the doors were supposed to open, and indeed, as it turns out, well after the show had started; by the time I got inside, from somewhere in the middle of the line, My Brightest Diamond's set was halfway through. Also, I had to sit near the back. Good things included My Brightest Diamond themselves (herself?), who were pretty cool, and the way that Sufjan's band/orchestra, which included a guy playing the saw, were all dressed as butterflies, and he was dressed as a bird, with paper wings that flapped. He also gave several-minute-long and totally arresting spoken introductions to some of his songs, including a rambling story-behind-The Predatory Wasp... that I have no idea how much of which to believe. The performances of the songs were also very nice (I knew only about a third of them, which only served to make me pretty happy that I still have so much to discover), though I think that he might have done well to temper, a little, his fondness for ending them all with huge crescendoes.

Man, what else did I want to talk about? I guess I'll remember sometime after sleeping.

Here's a new poem I wrote.

The night before last, I had a dream in which I was writing an exam (in a crowded restaurant, with my father and sister), and had not read any of the last several chapters of the relevant textbook, so that the questions on the exam made no sense to me. There was no system in place to actually penalize me if I were to open the book and find the answers, so I was expending a lot of energy to resist that urge, which didn't seem to be in the spirit of the thing. This is the first time I have ever had any version of this dream; I think that there's some metric by which I am now officially a college student.

(My waking finals, which grew progressively more challenging and earlier in the day over the first part of the week, until finally for Sociology I had to write two essays at 8:30 in the morning, are all done with now. I think they went okay.)

On Thursday, which was very sunny and calm, cola was at my house, and I watched and laughed as he sat at my computer for an hour or two, playing intently with various absurd modifications of some photographs I'd taken. It made me very nostalgic for the multimedia room.

Helen's retirement party was so packed with awesome people that I didn't even get to talk to all of them. And I like everyone who was there so, so much, even the people I just met today (and especially Helen). I don't quite fit in at Windsor House the easy way that I used to, but it still buoys me up.

I wrestled and sang and told silly old multimedia room anecdotes that didn't go anywhere with Cody and Conor a bunch of others, and argued genially with a snarky little girl on a unicycle (yeah, my school is awesome). I learned that Sasha and Vanessa read this sometimes (hi!), and that Karen and I, entirely by coincidence, are about the same way through reading the same book. Afterward, I went with cola to eat Chinese food and talk about the art of pulp science fiction, and my fortune said, "The rainbow's treasures will soon belong to you." (Cola's, which I forget, was at least as entertaining in a similar way.)

Does anyone want to go with me to see Howl's Moving Castle?

Tam Lin, and buying islands. I think of that house, with Karen and Cody, and of J.'s Netside.

I seem to have gone through this a little earlier than most people, because of Windsor House. Tam Lin is a lot of the reason that I've wanted to go to college - a "real" college, where I am immersed in not just a curriculum but a community, because I have always been a sucker for community, for the sort of membership that I felt from that book. Now I'm in Langara, which isn't really that - I would say that I've made friends, but it's a sort of sideways bonding; nothing full-on and intense. And I will probably eventually transfer to a proper university and do heaven-knows-what and I have no idea to what degree I'll feel a part of it.

It can be both unhealthy and kind of heady and glorious to consolidate most of your emotional life in a single, small, insular group of people. Which is a subtly but importantly different thing from being able to give yourself wholly to the love of a specific time and place and fellowship, even knowing it cannot endure for long. I don't know if I want the Tam Lin university experience the way I once did; I think I'd probably value it if I had it, but I don't know if I'm yearning for it. It's been a little while since I lost the constant presence of the Windsor House community in my life (which is sort of my own fault as much as anything, though it could not help being lessened); it could be that I'm wary of another home which I'll inevitably need to leave.

On the other hand, it's possible that I don't feel the need for such a thing very sharply because what I've got now is pretty good. Though I hadn't consciously marked the transition, I'm not nearly so lonely or frightened right now as I was during the Summer or Fall (which observation is intended as no slight to the various #hinotori and #waitility folks who formed the main bulwark against that loneliness at the time); I have AD&D and school and the play and the Philosophy group and various people throwing occasional parties and periodic excursions with Andrew (although he may be leaving for a distant university soon, and I will miss him). I'm not entirely content, but it would seem that I am happy.

When I visited Rachel the last time, or maybe the time before, I followed her around her high school and we attended a class on American Politics and Government, where the group discussed a proposal to lower the Oregonian voting age to 16. I was rather fascinated by how dismissive the students were, even though they would many of them be among the so empowered! The general feeling was that high school students are not responsible enough to vote; they would squander it, they would misuse it, they would vote for jokes and vote while drunk and generally make a mockery of the nation.

The professor agreed that it's true that many people do seem to vote irresponsibly; he related an anecdote about how many housewives who were polled at the time remarked that they were voting for Kennedy because he was so charming and good-looking. The class seemed only to take this as reinforcement; did we really want to see this trend exacerbated? But it seems to me (although I didn't say so at the time, both because I was an outsider and because it took me a while to work it out) that they had spectacularly missed the lesson of the story. Nobody in the room, I suspect, would even have conceived of suggesting that the vote be taken away from women because some of them were foolish about it; why is the standard different for minors? The thing is, if you do believe in the traditional standard of democratic equality - that each person gets one vote - then you have to live by that; you can't go around saying that people you think are stupid can't have it. Part of what you get is the right to treat your vote in a way that appalls other people, if you choose. That 16-year-olds may be, by and large, a goofy bunch (which I think is a perception which is both exaggerated and self-fulfilling) is not a compelling argument here.

I'm thinking about this especially lately because Seth David Schoen wrote something typically fascinating about ideological differences within libertarianism, and he talks a bit about the rights of children:

... I have said for years (from since when I was a radical libertarian) that families and the status of children are one of the deepest sources of paradox and internal conflict in libertarianism, and in other kinds of political thought that aspire to radicalism.

Partly, I think this is because most people have experience being somebody's child and being in some kind of family, and they have ideas and attitudes about family that they learned from that experience, and sometimes in opposition to that experience, prior to and apart from any kind of political ideal. So you can see oddities like people who are otherwise radical advocates of free expression -- "for adults" -- simply assuming that children have no independent rights to free speech or access to information.

When we were talking about Kant, in Philosophy class, we spent a lot of time on his most troubling aspects (for example, the assertion that one should not lie even to save a life, which prompted Abby to deem him 'a nutball'), but I did find one of his basic arguments very attractive - that we ought to consider people as ends, rather than means, and to treat the goals of others, and the reasoning of others, with as much respect as our own. This is only considered to apply, though, to our dealings with what Kant calls rational moral agents; one can hardly respect the reason of someone who doesn't have the capacity for it. When we came to this in class, Dale (our professor) remarked briefly that Kant had not really addressed the case of children, who, arguably, begin without rationality, but later achieve it. My own feeling would be that childhood is a sort of a moral larval stage - it's true that there are some decisions and responsibilities for which one is not yet equipped, but on the other hand, this is the time of learning to make those judgements, and so one should hardly be shielded from them entire. A certain degree of preliminary rational respect is warranted; a certain degree of freedom and autonomy, to teach you the moves. (cf. My ideological fondness for systems of education which emphasize self-determination.)

It is so difficult to try to quantify when a person is mature enough to make informed and autonomous decisions, and especially to try to do so universally. On the theory that it ought to be a conscious personal choice, Rachel's church won't baptise anyone under eight; I wonder how many Mormons would support giving eight-year-olds the right to vote?

I got up yesterday at 11 AM (which, believe it or not, was a nearly intolerable earliness), and by the same time PM was feeling comfortably exhausted. I was asleep by shortly after 12, and now I'm up, before dawn, and it's early-not-late (okay, now it's later - I got distracted). I feel proud of that.

Another mundane triumph: I've finally remembered to replace the bulb in my bedside lamp, so I can read in bed again.

I've been thinking about how, for all my occasional protestations to the contrary, the livejournal seems to have become this weblog's primary incarnation, and the different ways of being that promotes. A little while ago, I wrote in my head a brief entry about how recently I've been watching a whole bunch of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I thought, "That is not a thing I will actually post"; it wasn't that I was ashamed of its nerdiness (though for a time I wondered if I might be), but rather that I assumed that most of those likely to read it would be bored by it. A weblog is (at times uneasily) both diary and performance, and livejournal seems to encourage the latter aspect especially; as my words, with the advent of Friends pages, are no longer just set down for my own amusement in an environment I control, I feel a considerably greater obligation to be entertaining. (Not to mention engaging - as J. has remarked on recently, it's very easy to be lured into patterns of writing that you know will encourage certain readers to comment. There's a sort of symbiosis that develops, which I find rather pleasant, from both ends, though I'm not sure I like what I may be giving up for it.)

(This phenomenon isn't entirely new - those few readers who were present when this weblog collapsed from the grace of regular updates may recall that that had a lot to do with the feeling - and the crippling self-consciousness - that I may have acquired somewhere a lot of readers, and was serving them poorly. There is, of course, some difference between a general pressing sensation of audience and an active, participatory audience. I seem to do best when I believe my audiences to be hypothetical.)

When I went to see the Windsor House play yesterday (which was non-bad, but not among our best), I talked to Sylvia for a while, and she mentioned that she was writing about 600 words a day; just, you know, journal stuff. I felt a twinge of regret for the time when I wrote in this weblog daily, and could probably have said the same.