oblong thoughts

I hate the days when I get everything done, only to realize that it's 1:35 AM and there is so much more I could have done with my day. I went to Japanese class and did pretty well as far as dialogue and whatever else it is we do in Japanese class went. I found out that we're going to have a dialogue section of our final exam and I'm a little worried about it. As with most languages, including English, I'm great on paper, and can't really get my point across through speech. I chalk this up to the fact that I tend to think about language in a slightly strange way, in that it doesn't always come out in sentence form.

When I'm typing or writing, I can just move things around until they actually form a sentence, but in speech, well, not so well. Also, I do have my moments. I really like public speaking and I really like having conversations in which I actual know what I'm talking about. My biggest problem is making small talk. I always say the most awkward and inane things and it makes me wonder if I just don't know how to talk about nothing. It seems to be a skill which most of my guy friends have mastered, but somehow I just got left behind. I would rather be completely silent than try to talk about nothing, but when I do finally try to say something it comes out like: "This one time I was in high school and..." and I just get blank stares. Perhaps the point is: do not talk about high school, but somehow I don't think that it is an accurate assessment.

Recently, since coming to Kyoto, I have started thinking about my memories from high school, and some of them make me so happy that I actually cringe for not having cherished the memories more as they happened. Particularly senior beach week. I was a little uptight then, but it still turned out to be this amazing experience that will be forever captured in pecan pancakes and going out to dinner with some of the closest friends I had. It is amazing how your best friends just kind of show up to hang out with you at the most opportune moments. These opportune moments happen all the time, even when you're busy thinking that it is the worst possible moment for anything to happen.

So, one thing I wanted to think about in this post is the keys on my keyboard that are particularly worn. First, my spacebar. But only on one side because I only ever press the space bar with the thumb of my right hand. I think that my typing skills would really be helped, or at least my keyboard aided by me learning to use the spacebar with my left hand, but somehow this skill never really developed. The next most worn letter is, of course, the "e." Surprisingly worn was the "d," then the "a," "s," and "f." For the left hand, the "t" and the "c" are pretty up there. The only keys really badly worn on the right hand are the "l" and "n" which makes me wonder if I am just a more gentle typist with my right hand, since obviously I use the period and comma buttons a lot, as would make sense. Then again, despite the fact that I avidly use clauses, I guess that one actually types a lot more letters than they do commas or periods per sentence, so maybe it would make sense for the punctuation keys to not be very worn. My other reason for thinking that the a,e,s,l,a, and f keys are used a lot is because they appear in my user name! and I probably sign in over 6 times a day for stupid reasons, mostly to make sure I haven't missed an e-mail, but often times just to dope around. I actually really miss not being able to use blackboard for my classes. It was really cool to know that if I needed the readings, all I needed was an Internet connection. Lost the syllabus? No problem.

This leads me to my next thought, which is, at least for me, a slightly sad one. So, books can be really inconvenient. I realized this as I was lugging around my newest find in the Friend's World library, a collection of essays from a convention on Eastern and Western philosophies. This book is huge, and there is also only one of them. Because I have this book, no one else at Friend's World can use it. Also, it takes up a large amount of space, and probably killed a tree. Maybe not a whole tree. I actually don't know how much tree it takes to make a book, which would be interesting to know, but I do know that there is a large use of paper. So let's look at an alternative: e-books. These things are very benri (convenient in Japanese). They are mere online documents available to anyone who has the internet and the subscription to a library where you can actually check out these e-books. Also, e-books are available for sale. There are also sites dedicated to transcribing books to electronic form that provide them for free. These things can be read by thousands of people at the same time wherever they are and whenever they'd like to see them. There is (or at least could be) universal access to them. No library has to own every single book in order for them to be available, they can be accessed through a simple Internet connection. Plus, they do not take up any space or kill any trees…at least not in the immediate sense. True, they do take up space on ones hard drive, which I guess is, in the electronic world still considered space, and in a way they kill trees. It seems that to access something electronically, we need power, and to have power, we need fuel, and this causes pollution which is killing trees. Okay, so although e-books are better, there are also sacrifices one must make. And, looking at a computer screen for too long can mess up your eyes…so just as one should not read in bad light, apparently one should not read from a backlit screen. As far as whether I am an e-book or a physical book person, I'd say that I'm still a physical book person, at least when they're available, and preferably when they're mine so that I can curl up with them, write in them, and dog ear their pages. However, I have come to realize the plus of e-books or at least electronic documents. As an English major, I am required to read a lot of theory (in addition to the novels, poems, etc). This theory is usually taken from a number of sources, and provided to me by Blackboard, an online program used by W&M. Some of these documents are 40 pages long, but because of the electronic capabilities, the teacher is not printing out 20 copies of a 40 page document only to have 10 people not read it. It is there, on Blackboard, for ones viewing pleasure, can be printed out if completely necessary, but also can be read on screen. True, on onscreen document cannot exactly be highlighted and written on, but that's what Word is for, right?

I have greatly gone off subject, but I am getting intellectual ideas into an otherwise dry description of the past few days.

I had wanted to discuss my current academic project, which involves documenting all of the books that I have read for my independent projects in evaluative form, where I talk about the good, the bad, and the indecipherable in an attempt to provide a document that other people interested in the same independent projects could access and read, hopefully pointing them in the right textual direction. I think that this very "selective process" of texts is what I have missed in doing independent work. For those of us in most high schools and institutes of higher learning, we have had a syllabus handed to us, so that we know what we will and will not read, and with the exception of a few research projects, have not had to scour the face of the earth for worthwhile literature on the topics that we're interested in. All of this is thanks to the help of very excellent professors who have already read everything on the subject, thus are able to direct our attention to the better books and essays. I never realized how completely useful this was until this semester. Of course, I have not always liked the readings that my professors have assigned me, but at the same time, I at least found them moving in one way or another, even if it was towards frustration. Here, I have probably read as many bad books as I have good, although I've done a lot of pleasure reading, which has mostly been good, and though, inevitably, I've gotten something out of every text, I miss the logical, structural organization that comes in an instructor guided course. I have tried to be organized, but there's only so much you can do when you're reading a book that you've never read before in a subject which you only have a limited understanding of. This is why teachers are great, but at the same time, you don't necessarily need a teacher to set you on a path of learning. I realized in reading about tribal religions in Huston Smith's The World's Religions that one of the greatest untapped resources that we have are our peers and elders involved in different fields of study. I know that you know at least one person who knows more about at least one thing than you do. That is a gross understatement, but I wanted to ensure that everyone could agree. If we all went to these people to learn a little, then we would increase our knowledge. If, at the same time, we were helping others who knew less about something than we did, we would be increasing someone else's knowledge. When we were done learning what one person had taught us, inevitably, life would lead us to someone else from whom we could learn a lot. Now, it is true that some of us do this, but I have found that at a lot of schools and particularly at W&M, there is not enough dialogue going on about what people actually know. In fact, we talk about papers…but only like "man, I have a 15 page paper due tomorrow." Never, "Right now I'm writing a paper about Edmund Spenser's defense of sexual chastity within The Faerie Queen." If someone were to tell me this, I would be able to say "Awesome! I wrote a paper about that freshman year. If you want to talk ideas and get some passages from me that might be useful, let me know!" That would be academic dialogue. I feel like what I get from most of my friends should just be called whining, myself included. I am making an effort this semester to really start communicating the ideas that are going on in my head in the hopes that someone will benefit from them or that I will benefit from talking about them. I also have realized that I have too many friends who speak different languages not to start learning some of them. If you know a foreign language and you are a friend of mine, try teaching me "hello" or something in the language you know…and if I already know hello, teach me something new. This world is too full of rich languages for any of us to be restricted to one.

So, what I wanted to get done with my day, but didn't, was send more people e-mails, get together some mail to send out, finish up some more work for my independent projects, and tidy up my room a bit. What I did get done was get 6 pages of writing done for my Philosophies and Religions study, and get some KD business halfway taken care of. Oh, and I took a nap and ate way too many cookies. Ah, sometimes you just have to have those days.

Anyhow, this is me, for now, signing out with a Japanese poem:
This perfectly still
Spring day bathed in the soft light
From the spread-out sky,
Why do the cheery blossoms
So restlessly scatter down?
- Ki no Tomonori. Kokinshu. Keene. Anth. of Jap. Lit., p. 80