30 Days to an Almost End - Day 07

Your favorite book

     The same is true of biology. It is no accident that we see green almost wherever we look. It is no accident that we find ourselves perched on one tiny twig in the midst of a blossoming and flourishing tree of life; no accident that we are surrounded by millions of other species, eating, growing, rotting, swimming, walking, flying, burrowing, stalking, chasing, fleeing, outpacing, outwitting. Without green plants to outnumber us at least ten to one there would be no energy to power us. Without the ever-escalating arms race between predators and prey, parasites and hosts, without Darwin’s ‘war of nature’, without his ‘famine and death’ there would be no nervous systems capable of seeing anything at all, let along of appreciating and understanding it. We are surrounded by endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, and it is no accident, but the direct consequence of evolution by non-random natural selection - the only game in town, the greatest show on Earth.

30 Days to an Almost End series list

Monday’s Excerpts - The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins

This Week’s Book: The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins

Preface
. . . I want to inspire the reader with a vision of our own existence as, on the face of it, a spine-chilling mystery; and simultaneously to convey the full excitement of the fact that it is a mystery with an elegant solution within our grasp. . . . (Page xiv)

—————

Chapter 6: Origins and miracles
     If the origin of life were a probable event by ordinary human standards, then a substantial number of planets within radio range should have developed a radio technology long enough ago (bearing in mind that radio waves travel at 186,000 miles per second) for us to have picked up at least one transmission during the decades that we have been equipped to do so. There are probably about 50 stars within radio range if we assume that they have had radio technology for only as long as we have. But 50 years is just a fleeting instant, and it would be a major coincidence if another civilization were so closely in step with us. If we embrace in our calculation those civilizations that had radio technology 1,000 years ago, there will be something like a million stars within radio range (together with however many planets circle round each one of them). If we include those whose radio technology goes back 100,000 years, the whole trillion-star galaxy would be within radio range. Of course, broadcast signals would become pretty attenuated over such huge distances. (Page 165)

—————

Chapter 10: The one true tree of life
     Indeed, it is important to understand that all mammals – humans, whales, duck-billed platypuses, and the rest – are exactly equally  close to fish, since all mammals are linked to fish via the same common ancestor. The myth that mammals, for instance, form a ladder or ‘scale’, with ‘lower’ ones being closer to fish than ‘higher’ ones, is a piece of snobbery that owes nothing to evolution. It is an ancient, pre-evolutionary notion, sometimes called the ‘great chain of being’, which should have been destroyed by evolution but which was, mysteriously, absorbed into the way many people thought about evolution. (Page 263)

Books finished this past week...
★★★★☆ Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
★★★★☆ Mortal Coils by Aldous Huxley

(All title links link back to my webpages of them on Goodreads.com, a great library/reviewing/rating website for readers. Check it out, and add me as a friend if you decide to join!)

I tend to trouble when I doublethink

     Whatever I’m doing, it’s never beautiful enough, it’s never enough of what it has to be and that’s me.

     My “art” is merely projections of people, places, tings, the noun standing alone. To be pro- it would probably need a little more so.

     While it keeps looking I’ll stay searching. The unification could be grand, glorious, perhaps a bit grotesque. I think it’s time I become a little bit of my own grandeur view of this life.

This is the desolate unsharable instead by fours...

     Imagine the discredit I’d charge.
     Project the unbelievable and ultimate betrayal to the biggest thing I’ve ever known onto me on the personal, intellectual level of the preeminent masochist.
     I’d drown in the debt.

     When I jump you jump with me and we collide together again, my antilover. I’d have to break my human laws to escape you, you’d annihilate me if I didn’t protect my body and everybody with me. In that event resisting the horizon, what’s bigger and better for me? You, or the mistress of my thievery?
     I feel as if I’m wronging you, but what if you meet the love of your life and you’re already aboard a ship? Are you supposed to just let them pass you by without cannon blasts of your amour? I’m hurtling through, gazing with wonder and amazement, but… all I have is you.

     Loathing will grow, boredom will mount. Do you want me to be disgusted by you like I already am of so much of the spectrum, not system? I care too much, but, I do love you… I just love you in another.

     I’m sorry if our affair ends. I’m sorry for us, not me or not you. We’ve had a great run and who’s to say the finish line is going to be the break in our tightrope?

     Do not shed a tear and you will not become the tear.

Resist your anthropocism for a moment,

     So few pleasures of this world would I define as radiant and labyrinthine. Grasp onto my meaning when I describe the following et cetera: there’s a bizarre pleasure in the tiny things along for the ride with our insignificant existence. An ice cream cone on Sunday from the unexpected truck making the neighborhood rounds, the innocent kiss of a shy child, opening a late birthday present you didn’t envision receiving.

     Studying the cosmos and the astrophysics comprising it all for ten hours straight, missing rise and set of the closest star justifiably blamed on the consumption of an all encompassing existence lacking an intelligent creation—you create the most gorgeous moment that’s undefined in its glorious warrants. Beyond it, magical in the moment of stepping outside the suicide door breaching the murderous world, newly learned and brave to see...
     Alpha Centauri A, B, and C dancing around a Venus lying in wake of a very Sirius Coma, dying for a Milky Way; that’s all we think of when we consider the cosmos—a charming joke of sharable quality, tales of spineless man, at the shoddiest stab of aforementioned animal-in-denial: a gravity-defying candy bar. Reduced to “nothing of bothering importance,” except it’s everything of me and you and the sun and the stars and the dogs, cats, plants, and animals roaming free. It’s the Sol if there ever were within, yet we go spiraling on to the fixed law of gravity as if none of it matters.

My Worries Over Studying

 

     I’m exhausted already and it’s not even 5PM. I really hope all this studying is worth it, how could it not be though? I worry sometimes that I’m not studying the right subjects, or perhaps I’m focusing too much on subjects that aren’t the most crucial for me to be most knowledgeable on.
     I think my problem is that I always want something to worry about, haha. I’m done, back to studying.

     Also, I think now would be a great time to mention that as of beginning and finishing Go Ask Alice this morning, I have read forty-five books in the year 2010. I am so proud of myself already, yet I am more proud of recognizing that it’s not enough just yet.

A General Comparison of Natural Selection

Book 1: Helpful Counsels for the Spiritual Life.
Chapter 3: The Teaching of Truth. Page 3.

2. Why should we concern ourselves with such philosophical words as genera and species? He whom the eternal Word teaches is set free from a multitude of theories. . . .

Chapter 14 ‘Recapitulation and Conclusion’. Page 513.

    It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so differently from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, form famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breached into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Studying: it's already worth it now. :)

Fifteen in the Sun

(From www.MansonWiki.com) 

     Over and over again in my head, the breathy lyric, “Yesterday everything I thought I believed in died, but today is my birthday.” I’m taking this in a different light than how I assume Manson intended it for himself. Allow me to explain.

     Darkness encompassed my yesterday, in a way I believed to be impossible. I didn’t predict my love for another clouding my true love of biology and cosmology to the length of existing nearly in oblivion.
     While drowning in the love I had fallen into, I was never caught in my love affair with the sciences. My love of another human being was a great muse and inspiration to care more for life in its entirety and my personal passions in their individuality. However, I never considered the consequences of letting that person in deep, for them to suddenly leave me under any circumstances—even those that may be justified.
     I learned my lesson, I learned about loss, and it hardly took forever. Now it’s my time to go under, I can only hope from the opinions of others—that I shouldn’t even care about—that I didn’t wait too long before gripping life’s reigns again and taking control of the only thing I can: myself.

     In this way, today is my birthday. I don’t think this is what he meant by the Death and Resurrection Show, although, maybe he meant it for himself… maybe he didn’t consider that it would apply for me too. Well, my rebirth will be different. The arsenal isn’t the same, I’ve been stocking up for a millennium, it feels. I am the motherfucking cosmos today, and nothing’s going to stop me from colliding into every other galaxy I know. I am everything, everything to me. I am driving into the sun because I am the motherfucking sun.

Thursday’s Thoughts - Theme: Time

     For the past few days I have been reading Stephen Hawking’s A Briefer History of Time and it has completely captivated me. (One of the reasons why not much has been posted on COSA18 lately, still!) His beautiful explanations make the wonders of physics so easily graspable. My dad keeps joking, “So are you going to go become a physicist now instead of a sociobiologist?” In reply I say, “Why would I need to? Hawking has already answered every question I’ve ever pondered about physics!”

     As if it weren’t obvious from the title, time, specifically space-time, is the central theme of the book. It’s led me to think a bit about time, and I find it most appropriate for this week’s theme.

This Week’s Theme: Time

“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” - Albert Einstein

“There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go.” - Tennessee Williams

“There is only one you for all time. Fearlessly be yourself.” - Anthony Rapp

     The final quote by Anthony Rapp made me tear up. It’s something I “needed” to hear today.

Advice of the Unwarranted

     My father constantly tells me the same things in a broken record repetition as if I didn’t already know the garbage he’s recycling. It’s something I don’t think I’ll ever logically understand.

     Here I am studying some hardcore topics of biology, and he remind me that I need to be careful with my laptop directly on my bed because the lack of ventilation could cause the fan to burn up.
     I get that he’s a father and he’s looking out for me, yet in my opinion my reasoning for why it was absolutely unnecessary outweighs why it could have been. Not only has he told me this same advice in mimicking context time and time before, but I’m fairly sure that anyone studying a subject as intricate as biology—especially using a laptop for all of their notes—can piece the not-so-jigsaw puzzle together of, “Hey, I better be careful with the laptop fan being placed directly on a blanket for long periods of time.”
     My point is that I know this. I do not know biology, so studying the subject is stressful and strenuous enough without distraction, criticism, or any other form of disturbance the world’s inhabitants like to offer me.
I feel like I’m hardly given a break by people that shouldn’t even be harassing me in the first place. They portray themselves in a way as if I’m doing is never good enough for the unwelcome opinions I don’t care to even hear.

     “You need a job.”
     “You need to read more.”
     “You need to study less.”
     “You need to hang out with friends more.”
     “You need to call more and email less.”
     “You need to remind me more often you care about me.”
     “You need to be careful with your laptop on the bed.”

     As I went through the list of suggestions, I realized I can fire back every single one of them justifiably at the person that shot me with an elaborate explanation.
     Perhaps if they bothered me less, they could work on themselves more with a result of unconcern for my life, plus maybe an actual understanding of why I do the things I do.
     If you question whether the “advice” above escaped from your lips, it likely did or it likely will. Taste your own advice before you try lodging it down my throat. It goes without saying that if you do nothing, you’ll never understand someone that does everything.

My Current Work Load

     People have this misconception of me doing nothing with my time. If I shed light on them about my personal life, they’re either surprised and dumbfounded into being speechless, or critical in a variety of ways.
     To clarify for as broad a single audience I can reach: I study all day, every day. A few months ago when I realized I had the time and capabilities to study to this degree, it became my life. I don’t need a job—although I am trying to get one now, for pretty obvious reasons that exist in California until the latter part of this year—and my focus has become paramount to before after my diagnosis of ADD alongside a prescription of Vyvanse (Adderall). My constant attitude is that all knowledge unknown won’t be for long, and nothing is impossible of being held in my grasp.

     Tonight I organized my book “work load” after tidying up my room a bit, and took a picture to show my boyfriend. Before sending it I thought, instead of just sending him the photo with a detailing of what all is pictured, why not share with COSA18 and elaborate a little further than the limits that would likely have bored Jonathan anyway? So for a little proof that I’m not useless or lazy, here we go.

     On the left are the books I have already read, but have yet to completed the excerpts for. From top to bottom they are as follows:

• The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins
• Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley
• Island by Aldous Huxley
• The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis
• Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
• Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins

    In the middle and on the right are books I have yet to read, but hope to within the next month and a half. The middle stack is science and non-fiction:

• A Reader’s Guide to T.S. Eliot by George Williamson
• The End of Faith by Sam Harris
• The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin
• Evolution for Everyone by David Sloan Wilson
• The Book of Animal Ignorance by John Mitchinson and John Lloyd
• A Briefer History of Time by Stephen Hawking
• Brave New Worlds by Bryan Appleyard
• Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins

     To the right is strictly fiction:

• The 120 Days of Sodom & Other Writings by Marquis de Sade
• Jacob’s Hands: A Fable by Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood
• After Many A Summer Dies the Swan by Aldous Huxley
• A Clergyman’s Daughter by George Orwell
• Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
• The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson

Monday's Excerpts - River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life by Richard Dawkins

     River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life is a great read for anyone with an interest in Dawkins’ methods of the public understanding of science. Whether new or old to the man’s explanations, you’ll be refreshed with Dawkins’ style of presentation in a compact space of roughly one hundred and fifty pages, or introduced to his elaborate, yet simplistic explanations of the wondrous world and universe we inhabit. River Out of Eden is bound to leave you thirsty for more of his elegant writing style, and science in general.
     I haven’t read a book faster than I read River Out of Eden. From cover to cover it took me around three hours of a morning. Admittedly, I am a huge fan of Dawkins and had a relative understanding of nearly every topic he discussed in River Out of Eden, which might have quickened my pace. However, by reading his ideas in a space designed to be minimal, I got a deeper understanding of certain topics that already grasped my interest—such as dendrology—despite his discussion of it in other books. (For the curious: I believe Dawkins elaborated at length on dendrology and dendrochronology in The Greatest Show on Earth, which also happens to be my favorite book of all time.)
     If you haven’t read this yet, I highly recommend it for any audience. This is by far his easiest book to understand that I’ve read, which is quite a few. (I might even be nearing having read the majority of his works, but I shan’t count now.)

This Week's Book: River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins

Chapter 2: All Africa and Her Progenies
     We get our mitochondria from our mothers only. Sperms are too small to contain more than a few mitochondria; they have just enough to provide the energy to power their tails as they swim toward the egg, and these mitochondria are cast away with the tail when the sperm head is absorbed in the egg at fertilization. The egg is massive by comparison, and its huge, fluid-filled interior contains a rich culture of mitochondria. This culture seeds the child’s body. So whether you are female or male, your mitochondria are all descended from an initial inoculum of your maternal grandmother’s mitochondria. None from your father, none from either grandfather, none from your paternal grandmother. The mitochondria constitute an independent record of the past, uncontaminated by the main nuclear DNA, which is equally likely to come from each of four grandparents, each of eight great-grandparents, and so on back. (Page 47)

—————

Chapter 3: Do Good by Stealth
     In the light of Nilsson and Pelger’s results, it is no wonder “the” eye has evolved at least forty times independently around the animal kingdom. There has been enough time for it to evolve from scratch fifteen hundred times in succession without any one lineage. Assuming typical generation lengths for small animals, the time needed for the evolution of the eye, far from stretching credulity with its vastness, turns out to be too short for geologists to measure! It is a geological blink. (Pages 82-83)

—————

Chapter 4: God’s Utility Function
     Why are forest trees so tall? Simply to overtop rival trees. A “sensible” utility function would see to it that they were all short. They would get exactly the same amount of sunlight, with far less expenditure on thick trunks and massive supporting buttresses. But if they were all short, natural selection couldn’t help favoring a variant individual that grew a little taller. The ante having been upped, others would have to follow suit. Nothing can stop the whole game escalating until all trees are ludicrously and wastefully tall. It is ludicrous and wasteful only from the point of view of a rational economic planner thinking in terms of maximizing efficiency. But it all makes sense once you understand the true utility function—genes are maximizing their own survival. . . . (Page 121)

Books finished this past week...
★☆☆☆☆ The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis

(All title links link back to my webpages of them on Goodreads.com, a great library/reviewing/rating website for readers. Check it out, and add me as a friend if you decide to join!)

Monday's Excerpts - A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs

     When I read A Wolf at the Table last December, I was beginning to delve heavily into sociology, and what all the study contains. Sociopathy especially had become a high interest of mine after reading The Sociopath Next Door. I believed I had found what has always been wrong with my birth mother, and strands of me still tug towards that hypothesis.
     After reading A Wolf, I couldn’t help but speculate that Burroughs’ father had a likelihood of being a sociopath as well; I related so closely to how he was treated as a child and in his later years. The excerpts I have chosen today remind me most of what I experienced growing up the few years my birth mother resided in my young life.
     Although now exiled from the gift of enjoying my existence, my horrors of her still pang at my sides, ratting about my ribcage begging angrily to be freed of my prison skin. I imagine this is close to how Burroughs felt, by reading his descriptions of self-agony after the fact of his father’s absence. I can only hope alongside my willpower that someday I’ll find the solace I seek, too.

This Week's Book: A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs

     I came to think that maybe God was what you believed in because you needed to feel you weren’t alone. Maybe God was simply that part of yourself that was always there and always strong, even when you were not.
     And if I put everything in God’s hands, wasn’t that a copout? If I didn’t get what I wanted I could use God as an excuse, I could say, “He didn’t want me to have it.” When, in fact, maybe I hadn’t worked hard enough on my own.
     If I wanted to be free of my father, it wasn’t up to some man in the sky. It was up to me. (Page 163)

—————

     I knew I had an ugly life. I knew I was lonely and I was scared. I thought something might be wrong with my father, wrong in the worst possible way. I believed he might contain a pathology of the mind—an emptiness—a knocking hollow where his soul should have been. But I also knew that one day, I would grow up. One day, I would be twenty, or thirty, or forty, even fifty and sixty and seventy and eighty and maybe even one hundred years old. And all those years were mine, they belonged to nobody but me. So even if I was unhappy now, it could all change tomorrow. Maybe I didn’t even need to jump off the cliff to experience that kind of freedom. Maybe the fact that I knew such a freedom existed in the world meant that I could someday find it.
     Maybe, I thought, I don’t need a father to be happy. Maybe, what you get from a father you can get somewhere else, from somebody else, later. Or maybe you can just work around what’s missing, build the house of your life over the hole that is there and always will be. (Page 177)

—————

     Another thing was clear to me in this moment: I was not him. I was me. Whatever wrong thing he contained, he had not passed it on. (Page 229)

Books read this past week...
★★★★☆ Lord of the Flies by William Golding
★★★★☆ Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
★★★☆☆ The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
★★★★★ River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life by Richard Dawkins

(All title links link back to my webpages of them on Goodreads.com, a great library/reviewing/rating website for readers. Check it out, and add me as a friend if you decide to join!)

My Priorities

            Everyone’s priorities are different, but often it seems like some people have theirs in a constant scramble, or they’re completely lacking. I’ve never understood people like that outside of a sarcastic comment. I cannot fathom traveling through life without a set plan or set of rules for myself (outside of my instincts). Where would I be? I’d be lost, aimless, I’ve been there before. I reached my lowest of lows when I had nothing to live by or for. I lost all hope to create anything for myself, so I simply didn’t. Destruction wasn’t creation in the form I practiced.

            Today I decided it might be a good idea to publicize my priorities to help others realize the importance of their own. I’ve also come across a frequent issue in regard to how others perceive my priorities. Outside of my obligations to others, for those that feel the urge to quiz me or even ponder my doings when they should be focusing on their own, I do not want anyone to ever be confused as to what’s on my mind as far as my daily and overall plans go. I hope these listings will give the inquisitive a better insight as to why I do what I do, and maybe they will grow to understand the way in which I do them. By opening my mind to every element, I hope to crack the surface of others’. My practice isn’t typical, but I should never be doubted on serious matters, it’s a shame when I am. I never seriously doubt myself.

Daily Priorities

• Waking up early, around 8 AM. What time I go to sleep matters less, I will always wake up at 8 without excuses the next morning. If I’m tired the next day, well, a lesson was provided to be learned from.
• Studying a beneficial subject, physical and social sciences, to my future formal education. Science will always come before philosophy studies. I read chapters or entire predetermined books, then do citations and excerpts in respective files on my laptop.
• Writing. I strive to write something every day if the inspiration strikes me If I don’t write, I’m thinking about writing. Actually, now that I consider it, I’m constantly thinking about writing, the English language, word painting, etc. I also write five things I’m grateful for each day - different than what I’ve written before - if I remember to do so.
• Exercise. Bike riding, group sports if an opportunity presents itself among my friends having similar interests that day, dancing, work out videos, walking my dog(s), etc.
• Eating right. I never eat when bored, a feat in itself considering I’m home alone all day. I only drink water and green tea. I’m happy with my body, but this and the latter are done to better my health and to tone my shape.
• Talking to each of my best friends at least once. Too many times have I been self-consumed by my personal activities, only to lose touch with those that meant the most. (Unfortunately, one I lost for what I imagine will be forever.) It’s not that I don’t care about my friends enough to go out of my way to contact them on a daily basis, I just get so focused on my bigger plans. Sometimes that focus blocks out my daily priorities, but not just this one.
• Share my thoughts of the day with at least one person willing to listen. Whether it be an idea, a concept, or something else to do with future writings, it doesn’t matter. I simply hope that those I share with enjoy listening.
• Spending time with my father for at least an hour a day, if he is available. I try to spend as much time with him as I possibly can. It’s easy to get along with him, we never run out of things to talk about because our likes and dislikes are nearly identical, our thoughts in sync to a scary degree. I cannot even think of any dramatic difference of interest or opinion, I could only measure it by our levels of passion for things we both like.
• Speaking to my mother at least once a day, if she is readily available.

Overall Priorities (In Order of Importance)

• Helping others to the best of my present capabilities. Everything I do and strive for in life is to better my skills in doing so. Constantly improving myself for the greater good makes me happiest above anything else. Family, friends, pets, even writing and learning. Of course, to help I exercise the things I just described, but this gives me an absolute joy, never to be diminished.
• My formal and private education. Formal, for credibility. I still have faith in learning formally by teacher and school. Private, for gaining knowledge on subjects I am personally interested in that may not be formally taught to the length I would prefer to comprehend them.
• Overcoming on a daily, yet lifelong basis, the sexual and physical abuse I endured as a child. I place this second on my overall priorities because I feel that if it were my number one priority, it would consume me.
• Writing memoirs. This ties into my third overall priority to a lengthy degree. Writing every story I know, from every horror I personally faced and witnessed as an outsider, every joy I felt and the ones I later resented… these will be actions that set me free, this victim crime will liberate me no matter the expensive cost.

Recognizing Darwinism

            I get it now, how important it is to know of the world before you attempt to know of anything else. Within that, fully understanding process of evolution through natural selection (the obvious truth), and realizing there is no sky-god reclining on a cloud mapping out my life. I believe in evolution, I disbelieve in gods, but I don’t really know in-depth what all that entirely means.

            So now I’ve come to the conclusion that to grasp anything of the world to my fullest potential, I need to grasp why I’m here, and unfortunately but especially why I’m not. Instead of reading on with my list of famous fiction and sociology non-fiction, I’m going to head in the direction of Darwinism and read The Origin of Species after I finish 1984.

            For a long time I thought it was silly to prioritize reading Dawkins and the like before anything else. I regard religion—or lack of religion, depending on how you play with words—as a hobby when practiced beyond principle belief or disbelief. By reading The God Delusion with priority over Huxley or Orwell, I considered that hypocritical because it appeared to me as a hobby— entertainment if you will.

I was clearly wrong. If I believe in things I know little of, or don’t have a solid list of the truths I’ve recognized,  it will affect everything else I do in one way or another, sometimes big, sometimes small. It would be impossible and ridiculous for me to hold a sociological argument about why people are a certain way when I don’t even know why the world is a certain way.

            I’m not sure how I conceived the idea that not knowing of the world before knowing of its inhabitants wasn’t the most important thing I could be focusing my studies on.

In the very least, we are fortunate I didn’t need much convincing or evidence to recognize reality. I wonder if that says something of my character?