Accolades for Us

I've been meditating on my first blog.

I realized today that I have a great deal of respect for a person that is challenged by the world, whether or not they fail.  I mean, I guess I think more accolades are in order for someone that wants to fight a storm and drown than safely kick at water in a puddle.

Three conversations I heard today on campus.

Conversation number one: "I heard that if you get hit by a campus bus, your tuition is payed for.  That would be awesome."

Yes, I agree.  That would be awesome if you got hit by a bus.

Conversation number two: "I hate my roommate.  I am always doing his dishes.  He doesn't understand that a dishwasher doesn't clean everything."

No, but apparently you do clean everything.  How convenient for your roommate.

Conversation number three:  "I hate our teacher.  He sucks.  He totally pretends to be a feminist but he isn't a feminist.  You see how he disagrees with me and I'm a girl."

Yes, because he considers you worthy to challenge in class means he has an insincere attitude towards all women.

Anyways, I think accolades are in order for all of these people I overheard.  They have really risen to the challenges of their times, right?

Okay, so a lot of our conversations divulge into petty thoughts.  I don't think there is anything more therapeutic at times than gnashing your primate teeth at the specters of insignificant problems.  And I've come to the realization that I do this all the time.  I'm doing it right now writing this blog.  I have no real problems. I have no profound protest with this world, and often take for granted all the things I have been given.  Ultimately, I don't have to worry about things like invading armies and abusive spouses.

I even have the luxury to dream of abstract, impractical things.  The other night I had a dream that I was reading a passage from Nietzsche by candle light.   I seemed to awaken just as I finished the last sentence, reveling in the vague and oblique truth of this quasi-philosophical metaphor.  Maybe it was my mind working through the problem of the student that killed himself.  Or maybe it was just random neurons firing like he would have believed was at the root of all our thoughts.  I don't know, you decide. This was the dream:

There are those that must prove everything with science.  They are like trees unable to taste the ground water with their roots.  And so they sunder their own bodies and souls into divining rods. 

I think this just means that people abstract the mind into some kind of tool for understanding everything, rather than emphatically exploring the world.  That is, exploring what they feel and how they feel it.  The mountains near home never cease to cause a powerful feeling of wonder in me.

I realize now that I have never really read Nietzsche, and yet I dreamed I was reading his work.  Or, at least, I have only read short quotes from him.  Certainly not enough to justify dreaming anything that resembles his language.  After all, I do not think the content of what I dreamt bears any relation to his life's work.  How funny that this is what I dream; abstract things that are irrelevant to the philosopher they were imagined to be derived from, when across the world there are people that are sick and starving, sold into sex trades and stripped of a decent life.