Word Xing

Finally got my hands on a crossword in an attempt to relieve the stress of compounding exams, one of which I feel I did poorly. Not that you care, but it is difficult to derive equations when the equation goes to zero...it is tough. Crossword was greta though...I seem to have lost my touch a little, I went from a NY Times crossword taking about 25min to taking off and on an hour, which is horrible, but I finished it with two mistakes (I figured them out, but I had to rewrite, thus a mistake).

Now to the question of the day. Is it human that we seek to identify and even emulate something which we admire? I see myself as a combination of Joyce's Stephen Dedalus and Austen's Darcy--simply based on the personality types and similar emotions and ideas about particular things in life. Do I base my life around these people. No not at all, however I do use them to anticipate actions and reactions. That is one of the great things about literature, that we can use it as a kind of test run of events. We can liken situations to plots, instances in a story and predict the outcomes. This isn't always true of course, but literature is a medium for seeing everything really, you just must look past the fiction and realise that fiction is a medium to understanding the world.

But to people emulate people who they admire. I would answer yes. My heroes are Camus, Richard Feynman, and Patton, if I were to have any. Camus because he was a genius, a rebel and lived what he philosophised. Feynman because he was a free spirited brilliant physicist who could explain nearly anything complex into something anyone could understand coupled with his free style and affinity for everything outside of his job, a lover of life they say. Patton because he too was intelligent, but he didn't sacrifice his principles for anyone and knew what it took. My life is most certainly not modeled after theirs. I am my own person, a product of what came before me, maybe, but I must make choices myself and my history will be different than theirs simply because I have knowledge of what they did. The past is piling up behind me and pushing me forward.



Quote of the Day:

As a young man, Mr. Derrida confessed, he hoped to become a professional soccer player. And he admitted to being an inveterate viewer of television, watching everything from news to soap operas. "I am critical of what I'm watching," said Mr. Derrida with mock pride. "I deconstruct all the time."