i just watched half of Annie Hall. really great movie. i think it might be a pivitol point for me. what was that line Vonnegut said? blah blah blah..."you are not alone?" now, im not at all comparing myself to Woody Allen. no way, no way at all. but...some of the things are there. actually it isnt his character at all, but just the idea of, hey, what are you looking for? i like intellectual engagement, but maybe right now isnt the time for that. sometimes i think, Dan, you should have majored in biology. its concrete. but then i listen to the anthropological half of my brain, "Dan, nothing is that concrete, you know that." truth? pure gift? nonesense, oh Marcel Mauss. i think im funny, i find it so much easier to write on this blog than to write any paper this semester. this is me, my voice. i feel a little (is that the right word?) dark, calm, mysterious, layered. i write for Nonfiction class and feel myself stifling myself. maybe out of fear of being judged. or that the class wont like it. its no way to live, really. but it would be nice to committ myself to something. im slowly learning that i am actually capable of doing work at the last minute and that it will work out all right. you know, i remember one of my thoughts on coming to Bard. through high school i knew i had this mostly quantitative brain. math was easy for me. calculations were easy for me. the whole creative, intellectual, opinionated part...not as much. certainly there, but not as much. i wanted to come to Bard so that i could unlock that part of my thoughts, or more so, that part of myself. now i find myself, having opinions, but still feeling torn. i just want to do something and its cliche and old by now, but to be honest thats the truth of it. i love writing. i also dont mind calculations. my one biggest gripe with anthropology? obsessive search for meaning. why do we have to analyze it and proclaim it there? it is there. obviously. humans do things with meaning. we face this struggle daily. without meaning its all so pointless. so we take the surroundings, some would say apriori, others not, some given, others constructed, and apply and imbue meaning to it all. i love metaphors from biology. so much so that they are forming my basis for a senior project on collaborative health projects. Darwin says compete, and thats how we evolve and interact. Margulis says collaborate, symbiosis and mutualism. who is right? was it Plato who said its always some of both, some of the cultural, some of the biological? then at the same time i yell at the me who wants to take a bunch of statistics and do social research off that. its not enough. staistics take away whatever information doesnt fit the model. thats what models do-they're exclusionary by their nature and function. to strip down, expose the raw-whatever that means-compile it together, and draw out their own meaning, in the form of p<0.05

but seriously. i love learning. thats why i find myself buying a new book here and there on Amazon.com, waking up at late hours of the night because of my insomnia-which i like-and searching JSTOR for some information. doing the Wiki search. but thats all there is here. the learning, no applying, no experience, no doing. and ive felt the other side and now this is just like Plato's forms to me. you know the story?

there are humans tied to a rock in a cave. behind them is a fire and a bunch of objects, shapes, animals, what have you. the humans chained to the rock dont see any of these things. because of the fire, they only see the shadows cast from the true objects. the shadows are their reality. one man frees himself and escapes the cave. he is overwhelemed by the superabundance of forms, real forms, and goes back inside the cave to explain it to his companions. they dont believe him, because the forms they see are the only reality they know. they refuse to leave. but the man cant. hes already seen what is real. and academia, isnt real, at all. it takes real life, analyzes and extracts what it needs from it, and publishes what it needs from it in a scholarly journal nobody but students and professors and high level experts will read. and so the cycle continues, unable to escape the cave. but thats why you go abroad or whatever, to escape your narrow cave. and ive seen the sorts of things i want to do. do. i grow tired and uninspired by abstract theory. how do they actually operate? or, what am i actually learning? "to think critically, to write, to speak," i am told. bah. i have my whole life to learn that. let me go out and experience the true forms of the world. let me actually touch the forms, not just their shadows. thats all theory and abstraction is-shadows. you go from A to B to C to D to E and finally have a conclusion. you proclaim your theory, and countless students are taught that theory the way you presented it, which is mostly from A to E. not the steps in between. and so we dont actually learn anything. we learn the ends, not the means. we dont learn how they came up with it, maybe the methods of their study, maybe their interests in the subject. but as a whole, we just continue to stumble in the dark searching for some meaning. but we refuse to acknowledge that the real meaning lies outside of the cave, in fact, in zero relationship to the cave. the cave is not at all relevant to anything we desire.

wouldn't that be nice? philosophy has its place; at least it doesnt try to capture reality perfectly. it leaves the abstractions in and makes you search through, just like the philosopher, to find your own truth. because everybody is inherently brilliant. just need to try and find whatever gets them thinking and talking, i suppose. i think i learned more from my host father Leo in four days than i probably learn in a weeks worth of extensive college class.

in sum: all i want is praxis.