An Evening With Joau
Dear sirs and madams, please make my headache go away. Signed with love, bryan.This week was productive, and this weekend too. I've once again mastered my personal space by cleaning it, and I am quite happy to see the floor and tabletops again.
This evening I discussed the relative merits of the US constitution, objectivity, and SAT tests with a Portuguese man who is staying in the cottage. I'm sure the port had nothing to do with my wild arguments. I swear it!
Specifically we discussed the American habit of making subjective issues into objective questions in an effort to make things more fair. That is, subjective questions are, well, subjective to a number of things. It depends on who is grading the tests, what they did the night before, and what kind of mood they're in. Objective machine-graded tests are treated the same all the time (though, in the recent wake of the Chad invasion, even this may not be so true) and are thus more fair. Supposedly. There seems to be an American tendancy to refuse to accept even the slightest margin of error. Everyone will have a fair case, everyone will be treated equally, everything will be fair. Towards this end, it seems that we prefer hard logic and explicit rules: yes or no answers. Anything more fuzzy gets accused of being "washington talk" (c.f. GW Bush) or purposely confusing. What I wonder is if we're losing depth and quality of analysis to (supposedly) reducing the margin of error. That is, in an attempt to make questions as binary as possible so that they may be as fair as possible, have we defeated the purpose of inquiry by making the answers worthless?
Pictured above on the right are the three most important jars in my life. I hate change, so I have two jars for change. And I hate keeping track of receipts, but my accountant calls me every few months and issues threats until I agree to save them. "Make a place for them to land, and they will land there." No better place for receipts than a mason jar, I guess. There are two change jars because, of course, we have to seperate Good Change from Bad Change. At any rate, these three jars are part of my nightly ritual and they have greatly improved the quality of my life. I arranged all of my books and magazines into an Offical Bookshelf today, too. And above that is a shelf of pictures and film. It's all in order.
The thing is, I dont like an ordered room so much as the act of putting it in order. It will be a mess by the end of next week, and will stay like that for a long time.
It's the process, right? ...Right?
--Posted 02/19/01 04:21AM