The Will to Be Myself

[ericjherboso]

The class was an utter disappointment. I had had such high hopes for that class. Every time a new semester begins, I always find myself optimistic that this time I will find the class that turns everything around for me. Every time, I fool myself into believing that I've finally reached that point in my academic career where I will find a class

Comments

[blessedlunatic]

I might have some more to say later about all this, but while I am formulating a response the question still remains: what is the song?

[ericjherboso]

Actually... To be completely honest, I had played through FFVI to kefka's final form in 'wait' mode, and then let it sit there and play the music for hours on end. "Dancing Mad", is the title, I think, by Nobuo Uematsu. For me, the osv song sounds more real when you also have the menu sounds and whatnot interspersed, with an occasional cure spell after watching kefka casts 'fallen one'.

For me, video games define aspects of my life much more than individual songs. I remember the chrono cross phase, and the xenogears phase, and the bomberman phase. But I figured others wouldn't identify with this so easily, so I stole the whole 'songs define phases of my life' thing from you for the purposes of this story.

I deliberately left the title of the song out, because I knew listing a video game track would take attention away from what I was really trying to get at... But perhaps not listing the track title distracts even more?

[picarpo]

I had several reactions while reading this. Despite the fiction of parts of your entry I assume that you stand behind the substance. (I get the feeling that you intended to stand behind the substance, but in focusing on making your entry more exciting you sacrificed some accuracy in your statements.)

The Wind and the Sun. As an aside, I have seen the moral translated as either "Kindness effects more than severity" or "Persuasion is better than force", which really are very different. I unfortunately am unable to read the original text

[picarpo]

"I often think that he's the only one of us who's achieved immortality. I don't mean in the sense of fame and I don't mean that he won't die some day. But he's living it. I think he is what the conception really means. You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with every day that passes. When you meet them, they're not what you met last. In any given hour, they kill some part of themselves. They change, they deny, they contradict--and they call it growth. At the end there's nothing left nothing unreversed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out on an unformed mass. How do they expect a permanence which they have never held for a single moment? But Howard--one can imagine him existing forever." (AR, The Fountainhead) Your entry reminded me of this excerpt so I thought I'd post it

[ericjherboso]

Y'know, I was thinking of Roark when I wrote this entry. So either that's a big coincidence, or else you really caught on to what I was trying to say

[ericjherboso]

I agree that the 'mask' terminology was a poor choice. 'Mindset' does indeed work far better

[kevinsparakeet]

This is a very interesting peice of nonfiction you have written here. Having observed these events in third person, it seems fairly accurate and provides some good insight into what was really going on back then from your viewpoint. At the moment, I want to respond with something really important and profound, but as you know that isn't usually my style

[ericjherboso]

I think that's the first poetry anyone has posted on my blog since harm's way introduced me to ts eliot _years_ ago.

[kevinsparakeet]

Actually, this is hardly Eliot here. This is Guns n' Roses, from a song called Locomotive.

[ericjherboso]

My main complaint with applied mathematics is that it's so very useless. It doesn't get at the core of what is, but instead tries to fudge things into mimicking reality. For all that it works on a regular basis, it still feels to me like biology from a physicist's standpoint, or psychology from a psychiatrist's standpoint. It isn't helping anything _real_; it just deals with reality in a horridly obscure way.