Super Fast Melt Down

Everything seems a little overwhelming right now. It's race against time with pretty much everything. Hope I'll manage to keep it together

Motivation issues

Things that I should be doing:

• Reading 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood'
• Writing my reading journal
• Going through source material for my two philosophy essays
• Getting ready for my Fall of Athens exam
• Catching up with Literary Genre stuff

And all I want to do is to drink coffee, read shit on the Internet, watch TV, smoke and sleep.

Someone needs to give me a good kick.

What I thought about today

Did I already mention how addicted I am to this webpage ?

The ongoing (never-ending, eternal, pointless?) debate over doing what you enjoy/like versus what is needed. I still can't place myself on either side, I dislike society too much to do what I should as a citizen of the "common good" and I'm scared of not being good enough at what I want to do. I do however dislike the odd, Leviathanesque convo going on in UCD forum on boards.ie.

Descartes' dream argument and the clear and distinct perception. It's pretty clear that one can't logically prove that we are not dreaming (ie. Matrix-like situation). But what if reality is dimensional and what we call dreams and reality are just different levels of existence? Maybe there're other ones too which are as "real" as "reality" but we're currently unable to see/acknowledge them. Even if we're deceived all the time, and say, unable to ever wake up, doesn't that make "reality" as we know it just that? Maybe (and I don't mean destiny as such here, nothing's designed or assigned by any supernatural thing IMO) we are not "meant" to experience this real reality.

Business plans - I sometimes entertain myself (too much bus stop waiting time) with imaginary business plans. How much of the successful profit-making is down to market research? If one had a supernatural ability to know everything about every customer, would it be possible to persuade them to purchase shit all the time, within their budget of course?

Brain manipulation - say we have a hypothetical situation in which we have test subjects (people) and endless resources of experimenting with their brains with no moral dilemmas attached, how far could we (obviously after many failures etc) manipulate and "open" new sorts of abilities. I sometimes think it's a shame all these obviously horrendous people (Hitler etc) who conducted experiments, did not use these opportunities to look into things like these rather than the much more pointless (in scientific terms) ones. It's the possibly hidden "brain power" I'm interested in in a purely scientific way, I do not believe in any of this New Age shit.

Too fast

Maybe it's the simple life that makes one happy

I've finally admitted my problem of not being able to sit down. Don't get me wrong, I can sit down doing nothing for a whole day but I seem to be unable to relax or leave the worries/tasks/important stuff aside. I keep waking up at ridiculous hours and can't unwind and get back to sleep. I also find it very hard to fall asleep and often stay up half of the night. This inevitably leads to worries etc becoming even more painful in my head.

Everything seems to be on standby. Problems X, Y and Z will be resolved after I've sorted out A, B and C or when N months have passed. The only way I can keep myself sane these days is just telling myself, it'll all be ok when X,Y...

I know I should probably let some of the steam out and talk to someone but even the little bit I do, makes me feel like a piece of shit. I hate being this way when I'm around friends/loved ones. I have enough alone time to be miserable and anxious, why do I have to waste good time for stupid worries. On some days I feel like I'm gonna crack or start to cry for no reason (that could be hormonal too though) but I still feel talking is a waste of time. It never helped before or it doesn't last very long.

It's silly but I even feel stupid about moaning here time after time but I guess it's my blog and I do wahtever the hell I want with it.

It'll all be ok. I hope.

Busy

Recently I've kept myself busy with these themes:

Richard Dawkins: The Oxford professor has a very amusing but educational channel going. I specificly like the interview with a former member of the exclusive bretheren. She has some pretty sensible arguments about the effect of cult religion in the development of children. The amusing part of the channel are the life in universe lectures given for the child/teenager audience.

Thomas Nagel and "What it's like to be a bat?": Nagel brought out a theory of the mind/body dilemma in the 70s (?). It's a very good read and will definitely make one question about the duality a lot. We had a lot of good arguments against his conclusion as well.

Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War: it is extremely hard not to fall asleep while reading his account of the events but it's amazing to think how old the book is. Thucydides does not escape bias but compared to many other authors of the time, he was able to leave most of his personal opinions out.

Irish history in the 19th c. : The more I read, the less respect I have for the English at the time. I've often criticised the Irish for not having a clear plan on how to do things and how to conduct politics in the past (with the exception of Catholic Emancipation), but the English are getting their fair share of the disapproval the more I read about their bad politics towards the Irish

Late/early thoughts

I've been attempting to study now for the last hour or so. Descartes can be very draining I tell you.

Something that caught my attention though and which I had discussed with someone not too long ago. Descartes talks about the mind-body dualism which is a very interesting concept. Basically he's saying that the body is linked to the mind but they are not the same etc.

This reminded me of a conversation I had had about existence and out of body experiences. When one "exits" the body, it in a way breaks the boundaries set for human beings. It gives us a new perspective to life. If we go Descarte here, one could say that if our body wasn't so poor and our sensory perception was better, we would be able to understand and to see the universe better than we can know. So therefore, there could be a whole new level of things that we just can't perceive. I guess that's partly why people sometimes see things that are considered not to exists.

I remember perceiving a lot more when I was a child. I remember seeing things that I couldn't explain. Now I was very rational even in my young days, and was never scared of monsters etc because I could reason to myself that they did not exist. I perceived things that I could not understand and had no better knowledge or experience to explain.

Sometimes I wonder if I really did just get wiser or whether I just stopped perceiving these things after I got older, who knows

Just a quick update

Yeah, so as some of you have not heard of me in a while, here's a quick update.

I'm still in Ireland and for the moment living in the dear old Wicklow. Relocation will happen soon though and I'll return to my roots as a sub-urban girl. This will hopefully allow me to cut down my travelling time to UCD where I'm hopelessly trying to get some sort of a piece of paper to prove I'm somehow academically adequate.

Relationship-wise a lot has happened. I'm not gonna feed your hunger for gossip and will brutally skip the details.

Apart from that there isn't really that much to tell. Hopefully there will be something fun and exciting happening soon.