January 2001
January 11, 2001
Classes have started here at Texas Tech University. Another semester to survive. Closer than ever to the Real World,tm.
Sometimes I still manage to be (rather arrogantly) surprised by the things people miss. I've grown up in the same (pop) culture as everyone else, here. Television, movies, music, etc. But I've developed what I consider to be a refined sense of what is and isn't sap. I also came to a couple of realizations fairly early on that I think most people have never quite reached.
1) Romantic love is not an irresistable force compelling me to do things against my will.
2) Romantic love is not the reason for my existance. There are bigger and better things in life.
If romantic love isn't some cosmic plot device, and it isn't the meaning of our lives, then it seems to eventually follow that "living on love" will not work. A friend the other day told me that she thought marriage partners could work out a particular difference we were discussing "if they loved one another." I've no doubt they could, and indeed should if they are already married. But the discussion was about whether people with this particular difference of opinion should marry to start with. She believed they should, implicitly reasoning that their love would be enough to carry them through the difficulty. Supposing it would be, why should they try? Why should two people marry with the full knowledge that the things they firmly believe in (beliefs that have regular, practical manifestations in their lives) are contradictory? Romantic love does not irresistably compel them. There is more to life than romantic love.
In the end, the disagreement between my friend and I boiled down to a difference in priorites. If she were married, and the issue we were discussing came up, I guess she would be moderately willing to compromise. I, on the other hand, consider it to be black and white, something I could never compromise.
January 23, 2001
I could get back in the habit of writing if I ever had anything to write about. I have been offered an internship with a petroleum/chemical company in Lousiana. That's pretty exciting.
Fighting certain types of sin is like beating my head against the wall. Sometimes it seems so difficult that it's pointless. The tounge is a difficult thing to master. That's what I've read.
January 24, 2001
I spend several hours about once per month completely intrigued by nature. I'm not talking about beauty or complexity. I am awed by the fact that nature appears to be governed by laws. I am further staggered because the laws of nature can be described (and sometimes even predicted) using mathematics.
Mathematics are really an a priori persuit. If I'm saying it correctly. I mean that independent of experience, we can do mathematics. It's all based on logic. Pure logic can be used to describe the material world.
I am aware that someone will come along and tell me that I am placing a divider between self and not-self that doesn't exist. That it's "modernistic" to believe in objective reality.
I look at it like this, though. Suppose we had a member of an entirely different culture. I use a stop watch and a measuring stick to approximate the acceleration due to gravity at sea level, then I explain the procedure to our test subject, and he repeats it. If he follows my instructions closely, his result will be nearly the same as mine. His culture will not lead him to obtain a different result. Perhaps the methods he uses or the care he takes in making or recording measurments will be influenced by his experiences, but to claim that the acceleration due to gravity is actually different for he and I is nonsense. The uniformity of measurements obtained by a variety of people bears this out.
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Contact me: adam.stephens@ttu.edu