Ego, Novelty, and Paper-Towel Dispensers.

My sixth week of grad school comes to a close tomorrow afternoon, and I've come to the conclusion that, if I want to write anything in this blog, it's not going to be about rad-ass adventuring, parties, and mayhem. Sure, I'll write about those things if they happen, but life has turned toward writing proofs on Saturday afternoons and waking up at 5am to walk Roger before going to school. As such, I feel my time in the blogosphere will be better spent discussing introspective notions and perhaps bizaro observations.

For Example:

I'm a TA for a huge lecture math class called Linear Mathematics and Probability; it's a class that most business majors have to take, so they hold the lectures in the business building. The building itself is pretty new and up to date with all the new touchless gadgets, like touch-free-paper-towel-dispensers. There's a bathroom close to the lecture hall, and as I usually drink a ton of coffee in the morning, I usually hit that up before going to my next class. The touch-free paper towel dispenser has never worked. On the other hand, the Math building is one of the oldest on campus. The bathroom stalls are tiny, barely wide enough to get appropriate leverage, if you know what I mean. In the bathrooms, they have old, haggered, mechanical paper towel dispensers. You crank a little wheel, and the paper towels come out. The devices are probably 60 years old at least, maybe more and they still work fine. In fact, they work better than fine, they work flawlessly. The squeaky, old dented paper towel dispenser has outperformed the new, touch free device, day in and day out. I get a strange sense of satisfaction when I use the antiquated contraption, as though establishing this preference says "Fuck You" to technology. Of course, it doesn't, all it really says is that I think about paper towels too much, but I do think that we can learn something from these bathroom differences.


...


When I start a new project of any sort, be it moving to a new place, starting a new job, or assembling an Ikea desk out of a box, I start out full of enthusiasm - or piss and vinegar, as some might call it. Before the project, and at its outset, my ego builds ontological castles, no, FORTRESSES - built upon sturdy foundations of wild fantasies and romantic fallacies. These constructions do not withstand the test of reality. How could they? This part of myself that doesn't have any positive affect on life builds them out of societal impressions and external pressures. That is, my Ego (in an New Earth sense of the term rather than Freudian), somehow tricks the "real me" into thinking things like, "Oh yeah, Grad school will be hard, but not too hard. You'll still be able to shred all the time, and go out to listen to jazz and play pool with your homies every Thursday, and you'll woo women with your amazing personality and wonderfully charming dog." What a fucking joke. I don't know how I let myself get convinced by such hideous fantasies, but at a few points during the last few weeks, I started to get down on myself and thinking things like "You're not doing well enough in school" (I'm doing just dandy), "your're not talented" (maybe true, but it's not a bad thing to suck), "you don't socialize enough" (why do I need to socialize more?). I beat myself down with nay-saying thoughts for a week or so, until, while talking to one of my closest friends, I realized exactly what was happening. I was letting my ego dictate my life and control my emotions. I took a step back from it all, and had one of cliche realizations:

This is what's going on right now. It's the way it is, and there's no way to place a judgment on the present. Judging the past (whether positively or negatively) and comparing it to the present is equally as futile.

Yeah, I know, it's painfully cliche. So cliche it's hard to remember, or value. Acting up these cliches is even harder. I had a blast over the past summer, galavanting around with my closest friends, having summer romances, riding bikes, crashing bikes, raking pine needles, shooting, drinking whiskey, smoking spliffs... Why shouldn't I judge that as one rad-ass-time? There are a few reasons.

1. Judging past experiences as such makes one susceptible to being that washed up 30 something year old that's only washed up because they think "the best years of their lives" were their college years. I don't think anyone wants to be that guy.

2. Thinking that the past summer was a good time makes the present seem... not as cool. It's interesting, sure, but mathematics (thus far) doesn't have the same sense of adventure that sleeping on couches and road tripping around the Western U.S has. There's no real qualitative difference between now and then, there's just a now and then. Any sort of qualitative evaluation is a sign of an ego running rampant.

3. Most foundationally, there's no such thing as good and evil. Most everyone agrees - "good" is subjective. Robert Pirsig (author of Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) doesn't, and I think many people would agree with his interpretation. Essentially (correct me if I'm wrong), he thinks that there's a notion of 'quality' that sort of lies beneath everything. Somethings have and some things don't. Some people see quality in some things, others don't (which is where you get the subjective natue), but the fact of the matter, in Pirsig's eye is that there is this thing called "quality" and it does exist. I disagree entirely. We don't get anything but existence. We exist. That's all we can conclude. Nothing is universal (not even that claim - uhoh, paradox), there's no greatest common divisor. Just existence. Descartes should have stopped at "I think, therefore I am." Analtyic geometry? He wasted his time. Cartesian coordinates? Who needs that crap? We should all be able to be happy doing whatever we're doing, and find solace in the triviality. The Zen Monks do.

I'm gunna embrace well-functioning paper towel dispensers, chuckle when the skuzzy casino on my bike ride to work has the same "Soup de Jour" every day for two weeks, and stress out about being overconfident and royally screwing up a proof in front of my adviser and fellow colleagues, but I'm going to avoid placing qualitative judgement on any experiences or anything - since that's just about all we have.