So the one thing I learned in High School that I found most interesting was Hegelian dialectics. Maybe I misunderstood and continue to misunderstand. Regardless: push - pull - transcendence -- it's is a pattern I have looked for everywhere forever thereafter.

Here's one, from personal history, teased out of the last handful of years: the push pull between sobriety and intoxication--literal and metaphorical. I'm yet unaware of whatever may be supra to these two things so I'll stick to this potent, sometimes devastating little duality.

Sobriety: The domain of the middle class most of all. money, marriage, respectability. And especially, always strong. A good mouthpiece is Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of something or other, which is on upwardly mobile, obliviously servile (mentally at least...) immigrant bookshelves everywhere: "I doubt that anyone would seriously consider unfairness, deceit, baseness, uselessness, mediocrity, or degeneration to be a solid foundation for lasting happiness and success". Anything has to be tried before it can be so discarded, eh?

Intoxication then, is for kicks, and for clarity. What can be turned so topsy turvy?: nearly anything: economics, gender, orientation, rationality, law. Like the man, beer bottle in hand, at the anarchist rally on top of the picnic table screaming "fuck the police". [Get a motherfucking job, I said under my breath--not that I'm employed myself...]. And then there is consciousness itself. like all the times I spent drunk hunched over late at night pounding that very consciousness away with very loud music over the headphones. You couldn't give me a good reason to stop back then though. I was looking for something, a yet more altered state. Thus the fine line between exploration and escapism, if there is such a line at all. Cept maybe exploration, in order to warrant such a dignified label, always reports back to reality..But then there are stories about poems carved into the mountainsides of isolated parts of east asia--monks that left the human world and never (physically) looked back. wondrous. too many choices. meh.

Hi all--remember Xanga?

Back where I began in more ways than one.
Currently on South Street by the Seaport. Haven't spent much time down here since freshman year of high school--back when the greatest thing ever was watching X do front handsprings on the Battery Park black top. He went away for the summer and learned something wonderful, I thought. Meanwhile I studied topics that only half-interested me, while I looked forward to the time when all of life would be as exciting, because I had shaped it and wanted it that way.

(I did not necessarily anticipate the overwhelming psychological effects of the demands of employability and respectability--a massive chink in the gears--can't spend all one's time perfecting one's front handspring--a fact i've only become more and more aware of as I became older)

Now, Stuy and a college diploma later, I finally have not-much-to-do. And I do feel more than ever that my future is like so much clay in my hands--though the facts may not necessarily measure up to that feeling--I majored in something I won't pursue, and I am unemployed. Meanwhile my bank account leaks away, close to a hundred percent of my money spent on coffee and train-fare. An undernourished (and overprivileged) life, maybe. Regardless-- I am enjoying myself.

I'm also reading a lot. Joseph Campbell, again. I read the transcript of the Power of Myth for the first time three years ago in India, on top of my grandparents' corrugated metal roof, while the sun set in broad swaths of tropical pastel colors. Blown away as I was by Campbell, why I didn't realize then that what I was most interested in wasn't so much social science, but more that unwonted black hole at the center of the universe, and everything that arises from it (which includes social science). I mean I'm most into what is most universal. And then (consciously/subconsciously) you ask that poisonous question--how is that employable--and you continue to study the dirty stunted business of government and economics...blegh.

(intolerable idiot waitress talking to UEdinburough philosophy (of music!) student at the next table. How does one make_contact? By realizing the crushing life-depriving consequences of avoiding it. Not today, though.)

This last biography of Jung was earth shattering. Identification = earth shattering, at least in your own world. That's all I'll say about that. And...that's all for now..