A note to blogging websites world 'round

If I'm doing a play-by-play of my final finals, and you're down right when I need you to get me through a moment's procrastination in the library, I may never come back.  Or at least it may seem that way.  Think. On. That.

Two down

I wish my GSI luck in staying awake through that metaphysics paper.  I ended up choosing a topic which required a really light treatment of a broad area, and which didn't draw any interesting conclusions.  It was tough to stay focused on that jerky paper.

Preliminary gathering of passages for the Wittgenstein paper has begun.  That's due Friday morning.  I don't have enough time to make it any good, and that's pretending that I don't also have to prepare an essay and study for (and take) a logic final in the meantime.  Don't be too near to me at 10:01 am Friday, at which time my brain will probably deflate explosively.

One down

At last, one of my papers is done!  I will trim around the edges and smear a little lipstick on it until I turn it in on Friday, but all of the substantial work on the logic paper is finally done.  I don't have any other niggling problems I need to chase down--none that are so obviously problematic that I intend to chase them down, anyway.

This is especially good because I have accomplished fuck-all on the others.  Well, I've got half my page count written on the Metaphysics paper (due Monday), but man did I end up carving out a boring topic for myself.  I have no idea how good any of the crap I've spewed for it is; it has become too boring and the logic paper has control of my feedback loop.  Still haven't even 100% settled on the topic for the Wittgenstein paper due next Friday, and that will be the hardest of the bunch.  But no problem, first there's a completely comprehensive logic final to take next Thursday, in which short essays will be written on all topics, and you also come in with a prepared essay on a topic chosen from a list already provided.  Which basically means I have to write another paper for logic and memorize it, while studying for the rest of the final and also writing the impossible Wittgenstein paper.  My lack of God, the Wittgenstein paper is a terrifying prospect.

I'd like to take a moment to congratulate myself for correctly identifying this as the semester to take no 'real' classes in addition to these three.  I thought they would all be bears.  Two of them were.  This is an incredible experience.  Incredibly stressful, I mean.  Here's hoping I don't get so hung over from the prison party (which becomes my birthday party 3 hours in) that I am completely useless the next day.  That's how things went the last couple of times I went to a party.  How about: beer.  I'll stick to beer.  Wine has been a good friend to me historically, but lately it has been sneaking up on me and the next thing I know I'm spraying purple onto the BART tracks.  It's also nice that the party will be within staggering distance from home.

Anyway, it came about way too late but I am intensely relieved to flush the cache of considerations on this paper aside.  It is actually the strongest paper I've written here (assuming I didn't miss anything major).  I was limited to 8 pages, but I got around that by using endnotes instead of footnotes for the first time.  Endnotes are great--they go down to 10-point font and are single spaced.  Yeah, there's a full page of endnotes.  But fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.  If I go insane and apply to grad school, and this paper doesn't get ripped apart, it's probably what I will develop into my writing sample.

No more philosophy lectures

Today I attended my last lecture as an undergrad.  If I'm lucky, I'll audit a million classes in the Fall.  (There didn't seem to be a sufficiently compelling reason to stick around and pay tuition.)  There's the remote possibility of going to grad school (toward which end I have collected zero letters of recommendation).  But, basically, the fun part of my existence as a student ended today.  Where I am now, I can think of lots of ways to have improved on my strategies as a student.  So at least I learned that much.

It occurred to me, though, as I walked away from class for the last time, that I have pretty sweet bookends for my two years at Berkeley.  The first class I attended there was my Theory of Knowledge class, taught by Barry Stroud--probably the best all-around philosopher at Berkeley.  And the final lecture was Barry Stroud presenting a paper he contributed to an upcoming anthology of commentary on Wittgenstein.  You could have worse bookends as a philosophy student at Berkeley.  In fact, I'd say I'm willing to claim that you would have to do worse, if you had it any different as a philosophy student at Berkeley.

Tomorrow morning will be the last tutoring engagement at San Quentin.  It will quite possibly be the last time I set foot in that prison.  Or maybe not--we'll be working on expanding the program to other programs and schools.  Maybe I'll have reason to go back there, who knows.  A large chunk of my identity from the last few years is disintegrating before my very eyes.

No more teaching in prison

Last prison class was tonight.  I go to tutor in the prison Friday morning for the last time.  Then office hours.  A week later, our end-of-semester party.  Then, apart from working to expand the program to other schools and finishing the facilitator handbook--apart from all that extra-extra-curricular stuff--it's over.

I can hardly believe it.  I have been ready to be done for quite some time now.  But of course it's a bit sad and surreal.

School is impossible

3 final papers due in what feels like 5 seconds.  All of which require generation of topic.  I spent the weekend poring over what I thought would be the logic paper topic, and today decided that it was a dead-end.  But starting tomorrow, I must turn in topics for all the papers.

Metaphysics will be something about the relationship between composition and fundamentality.  I am pro-universal composition (for any two non-overlapping objects, there's a further object composed of them).  I am anti-fundamentalist (there is no "bottom level" of matter; it is infinitely divisible).  I will write something about the relationship between these views, or rather which commitments are compatible with which, or something like that.

Logic will probably be something about natural language conditional statements.  But I just threw out the argument I was trying to develop over the weekend--I think I can only make a very boring claim, compared to what I was aiming for.  Maybe there's a way to switch teams and make a paper out of the failure.  Or maybe I can clear up some of my half-formed thoughts about what kinds of natural language statements can't be translated into first-order logic (e.g., "There are some cowboys each of whom shot one of the others in the right foot").

Wittgenstein--who in the hell knows.  Perhaps something about rule-following, and the purported (but plausible) impossibility of explaining a sign with another sign, etc.  Or what that has to do with the possibility of a language being developed in the first place.

Some shit like that.  In short, it will be nifty once graduation has happened.

The recently streamed

Blogs. One more thing to fall behind on?

Watched the movie Agora the other night.  Better than its description had made it sound, but of course a bit loose with filling in the imagined events of history.  Still, always nice to watch someone's take on the darkest moment in human history, and nice to see someone pin the blame on the spread of Christianity.  Not an American movie.  But of course really, given the myriad accounts of its destruction, the Library was probably whittled down in a series of separate events.  But of course from our perspective, there once was a Library and now it's gone, and because of that our view into the past ends a lot sooner (how much sooner? I am tempted to suppose that we'd have accounts stretching a couple of millennia further back) than it would had its works survived.

Have also been watching the occasional episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, which is a great way to feel nostalgic for a time when such a show stood a chance of being put onto television.  Surely I saw some of that show when it originally came on?  But I am not having any strong memory stirrings as I watch it.  Anyway, although its contents are pretty well-known to a nerd like me, the show was quite well put-together, and even if you have a respectably strong grasp on, say, evolution or astronomy, it's nice to hear someone like Sagan talk about it.

Just a few weeks before my final papers are turned in.  Two and a half, I guess.  I am almost ready to get started writing them.  It is a dreadful prospect.