My Last Reading Journal Entry?

[philthecow]

Today I went through 350 backlogged e-mails and managed to delete 300 of them. This is a sort of reading that's not much fun--a lot of looking at subject and sender and deciding on that basis whether it even needs to be re-read, a lot of feeling guilty about not having responded to people sooner, but also a cleaner inbox when it's done, a cleaner

Comments

[radanax]

It sounds like you're saying that narrative is more reliable in how it contextualizes experience than abstraction, if you'll permit an abstraction regarding the essence of narrativization. I think this is why novels exist - that and the ability to communicate a lasting impression of an idea through an experiential context. Oh, and for entertainment.

[gerbilicious85]

Two things about myself:
I'm optimistic
and
I like dark humor

So when I look back through my own lj archives and I see myself making an optimistic prediction (i.e. if i work really hard on this assignment, i will finish it on time and to my satisfication) and I now know that this did not come true, I laugh. The narrative view makes me feel better, it makes the bad things in my life seem more like the bad but funny things that happen to sitcom character or in webcomics. If I were taking a strict theory/analytical approach, those entries would feel doubly horrible because not only did something bad happen but I also failed to make the correct prediction. Of course, there are other ways of narrativising human experience and your own personal experience that wouldn't work so well. Hmm...