i'm almost done reading gabriel garcia marquez's book the general in his labyrinth, which is about the death and life of simon bolivar. it's interesting before the book even really begins, actually, because marquez starts writing about simon bolivar as simon bolivar starts dying. i maybe read into these sort of things a little too much because my brain starts analyzing it as:
- beginnings in ends and ends in beginnings, circles, loops
- is someone's end a way to encapsulate everything they were or just a period at the end of their sentence
-what is the difference between telling the story of someone's "death" versus the story of someone's "life"
anyway it's a gorgeous book but so populated with general jose's and general jose maria's and general jose maria montilla's as well as historical references specific to simon bolivar's quest for south american independence/unification that sometimes it's hard to sink into the plot itself. but i think that might be the point. marquez, who is famous for magical realism, writes with a prose that feels like he's draping gauze over you and weaving you into the sense, if not the complete understanding, of the story.
what else have i thought lately?
#1 i think jack brought up a really good point about motivation yesterday and how our motivation for what we do is oftentimes more important than what we did. last semester i skipped a lot of class and while it didn't affect my academics, i think it highlights that point: i wasn't motivated to go to class for the right reasons, thus the opportunity cost of going to class was higher than the perceived benefits of not going to class. although immunology which was a flying saucer of a joke and i am satisfied with never having attended it, bar twice. this semester, unless i'm feeling like shit i've started to wake up excited for class (at 8:48 pretty much on the dot the days that i naturally wake up, like some demented cuckoo bird). i love my classes. in neurobio yesterday we actually did a class activity with a lecture of probably at least 300 people that illustrated the principle of hierarchical organization in the visual processing system. you know that moment when suddenly you understand something that was maybe a little hazy at first? BAM my god why did i not see the elephant before it's huge! just like that. and in soil science i learned to truly appreciate the necessity of a water cycle because without water and its characteristic latent heat, we don't have a way to transfer solar energy that falls unevenly across the curved earth. the motivation is to go into class and be constantly astounded. constantly engaging, asking questions, drawing branches off of what the professor presents in class to new ideas or old ideas--that's what learning is. i believe that very often a question is worth much more than an answer.
think #2 i think any relationship is a really important stretch of time from which to learn lessons for yourself if nothing else and thus there's no such thing as "well if it's not going to go anywhere, it's a waste." maybe that philosophy will change if i am 68 and decrepitly alone (fuck that i'd start a zoo) but for now that is what i believe. i've also learned that the saying, you have to love yourself before anyone can love you, is terribly true. but actually what i meant to write about was this: you have to be completely honest with yourself and the important people you have relationships with. you have to think "goddamn it i'm going to say how i feel about this" (provided, of course, that this is a semi-reasonable thought about something and you are not just pooping out of your mouth) and if it aggravates the person you're talking to, then they're not the ligand to your channel anyway. this is true for all the close relationships that you have--because you have to trust that we self-select for the important things.
think #3 "temporary does not mean being unimportant or meaningless"
think #4 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/15/angela-zhang-high-school-_n_1207177.html
she found what looks like a cure for cancer! as a high schooler!
also this: http://blog.tedmed.com/?tag=the-end-of-illness
