A couple friends and I started back at the gym, and oddly enough, two of us-myself included-ended up with some weird issues with our left arms. I felt great after finishing the work out, as it seems my friend did, but we’ve both struggled to move our left arms much since then. Apparently, his arm has gotten much better. I have not been so lucky. My ( Read more... )

Today was the first day of the semester and the class that I teach had its first meeting this evening ( Read more... )

I finished Ernest Becker's The Birth and Death of Meaning today and have logged my favorite quotes.

If the reader gets a feeling of pathos in all this, it is only logical: after all the humanization process is one in which we exchange a natural, animal sense of our basic worth, for a contrived, symbolic one. Then we are constantly forced to harangue ( Read more... )

My life has largely become one where I read, write, attend meetings and classes, teach class, and look forward to my breaks so that I can do more reading. My little spare time is often spent playing table tennis with a couple of friends in my program. I enjoy this all a great deal and sometimes look back and wish that I had immersed myself in this ( Read more... )

Here I am re-reading Becker's older "The Birth and Death of Meaning" and am in awe of his perspective on society.  His chapter on culture reads like a Derrick Jensen book... (even though Jensen was a toddler when this was written in 1971)

As anthropologists have taught us, primitive life is characterized by a great mutuality with nature. Man takes ( Read more... )

Hello all. I have created a community for people interested in social psychology ( ( Read more... )

I recently re-read Ernest Becker's famous posthumous collection of almost journal-like musings and was awe-struck by it once again, possibly more so than the first time I read his famous trilogy of existential dialectic of human nature.

Some of my favorite quotes from Escape from Evil follow.

And it is only by contrasting and comparing himself to ( Read more... )

From Fred Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church hymnal:

America The Burning
O wicked land of sodomites
Your World Trade Center’s gone
With crashing planes and burning flames
To hell their souls have flown

America, America
God showed his wrath to thee
He cursed this land with a terrorist’s hand
To show his sovereignty

O wicked land of sodomites
Your Pentagon is ( Read more... )

I was entering some data today and one part of the survey packet that participants fill out consists of open-ended questions asking people to reflect on their own mortality. I read these to ensure that people are responding appropriately, but I don’t usually pay much attention to them. However, a number of them caught my eye today. Many of these ( Read more... )

One year ago, this very night, I was having a blast with some wonderful people in Pittsburgh, PA. Board games, champagne, the best friends one could ask for, and five adults trying to sleep on one pullout sofa. That was an amazing night. It was one of those moments for which I live ( Read more... )