I think I am finally beginning to understand that syntax tree business from Linguistics that was shutting down my brain last week.

It’s just a matter of beating my head against the problem until my brain is forced to come up with the pieces of the puzzle necessary for me to understand the picture.

Like I said before, that kind of thinking does not come naturally to me. I can usually comprehend the whole instantly and then understand the parts in relation to that whole. That has taken me a long way in nearly every subject I have ever taken in school.

Idea are easy. Details are hard.

This video is helping me a lot :

But clearly, that’s not going to happen here, so all I can do is keep trying to grasp what is going on (and what is keeping me from getting it) and let my mind solve the problem piecemeal. Hopefully, if I keep at it tonight and tomorrow before class, I will understand it well enough to survive tomorrow night’s class.

After that, I won’t have another class until Reading Week is over. So I will have two weeks to figure it out.

Ah, Reading Week. It means that I don’t have a single class between Feb 20 (Saturday) and Feb 28 (the next Sunday). It says something about how stressed out I am this semester that I am actually looking forward to it as a time to catch up as opposed to dreading it as a time when my life will lose structure and purpose.

And the thing is, I am perfectly capable of ending the stress just by taking the time and effort to get my life organized and develop just a little more self-discipline when it comes to entering assignments and things into a central calendar-type program so, at a glance, I could know what is due when, and plan accordingly.

It’s a special kinda tragedy to be able to know exactly what you should do but be seemingly incapable of doing it.

I guess I need all the time in Useless Mode that I can get and to hell with anything that makes me give up even ten minutes of it. Or at least that’s what I think I need. I can keep myself together for long enough to go to class and that’s about it. Anything else, and I am lost in that magic amusement park and not looking to escape.

This is a problem. If I want to advance in life (and I do), I am going to have to learn to function as an adult for more than three or four hours a day. I am going to have to learn to leave my comfortable womb for long periods of time without freaking out because I feel like I just cannot keep myself together any more.

It should be that I am solid most of the time, and a puddle only now and then. Not vice versa. But I guess I don’t know another way to fill my time and cope with reality.

I am pretty sure that if I got going with purposeful, focused action, I would want to keep it going. It has happened in the past. It feels good to be up and moving and activated. But that only lasts as long as I am able to keep busy. Any significant downtime, and I go back to being a puddle of laziness and ennui.

Guess I need to learn to contain myself.

Today in Ethics, we sank our teeth into Kant. That dickwad. I have to admit that, this time through, he’s not quite as infuriating as when I took him in College v.1 : The Early 90’s. Presumably this is because I am older, wiser, and less hotheaded. And less arrogant too, come to think of it.

But he is (was) still a git.

Today I learned that what set him on his path to (gasp) original thought (before he’d been an unremarkable follower of the philosophical dogma of the time) was an encounter with the works (and later, the person) of one of my fave philosophers, David Hume.

Kant was utterly horrified by Hume’s critiques of reason (or rather, reason’s pretensions) and his daring to base his ethics on, of all things, emotions. He concluded that the whole of philosophy, reason, and morality itself were under attack by this fat Scotsman who loved to drink, hang out in royal courts, and make it with the ladies.

Can you see why I love Hume so much? Fat, drunk, and stupid might be no way to go through life, but fat, drunk, and very smart can be damned fun. I really want that kind of life, where basically all you have to do is travel around and be very smart on demand. And for that, you live the good life.

It would be laddies, not ladies, for me, but otherwise, keen gear.

So of course, the fact that one of my favorite philosophers (Hume) sent one of my least favorite (Kant) into a sputtering fury pleases me to no end. Deal with it, motherfucker!

And the prof once again informed me that my flippant and bitchy joke about Kant being on the autism spectrum might just be the truth. I mean, who else but someone with at least a little Asperger’s in them would try to base a system of ethics on “reason”, let alone have no idea how badly they had failed?

I’m with Hume. Reason is not an end unto itself, it’s just a highly effective tool for achieving emotion’s ends. Any attempt to take emotion out of the question is ludicrously wrong-headed. We are human beings, not automatons, and everything we do, we do for emotional reasons.

Pretending you have somehow escaped that is far more delusional than any religion or dogma or self-serving egotism. It’s the sort of thing that gives rationalism a bad name.

My prof said that Kantianism only works for Vulcans.

Nah. Vulcans don’t need Kantian imperatives. They are smart enough to be full time Utilitarians.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.