Thursday, August 13, 2009

Procrastination

I guess my trend for blogging has been a sparse, if regular, creation of new entries. I do read your blogs almost daily, however, and get much enjoyment from them.

I started grad school, and that has required much of me in terms of motivation for writing. Others who have attended grad school would maybe agree with me that it is not necessarily more difficult than undergrad in terms of the intelligence required to succeed...but in terms of the sheer volume of work, it's just off the charts. I have read and written more in the last five weeks than perhaps in 6-9 hours of undergrad work.

That said, I am enjoying myself immensely! I feel like I've already learned so much, and can't wait to get started with the fall semester. But first I need to knock out what promises to be a pretty lengthy literature review paper on Borderline Personality Disorder. Like, this weekend. Because it's due Tuesday. And I haven't even started gathering sources. Oh, my.

And it seems that, just like during my undergrad work, I still believe that there is no motivator like procrastination.

Total change of subject...

Can I just say that I REALLY dislike politics? Or maybe I just dislike the talking heads that endlessly parse and spin every political event, even the most insignificant ones, ad nauseum. Can somebody PA-LEEEAASSEE just tell us what happened, without this compulsive need to tell us what they think about it or what this-or-that expert thinks about it or - worse yet - what I apparently think about it.

It goes like this..."Today, this amazing thing happened in so-and-so with whodilywho and what's-his-face..." And then they'll report verifiable facts (what used to be called news reporting) for 45-60 seconds...and then they'll go to their panel of experts. "Dr. Ambiguously-Qualified, what do you think this means for the American people?" or some other opinion-inducing question will begin a 4-5 minute discussion that is best described as a mini-episode of "The Real World: Washington D.C." And as I see it, this is just the beginning of a chain reaction...

The Right complains about how the Left distorts the facts.

The Left complains about how the Right distorts the facts.

(They BOTH distort the facts, by the way.)

And then we have otherwise civilized people yelling elected officials off of stages in high school gymnasiums...

And the non-yellers complain about the yellers...

Until, as I heard a Republican strategist say on NPR the other day, "This is no worse than the abuse President Bush took at his town hall meetings a few years ago."

That's awesome. The they-started-it defense.

When it comes to politics, I question EVERYTHING. I am uber-skeptical of every single sentence that anyone says about politics. And the more confident someone seems in their own position, the more skeptical I become. "How can you be so sure," I think, "when we possess a cultural disinterest in what actually is?" Maybe that's why I can't really land anywhere philosophically speaking. But can you blame a girl, after she has witnessed this massive comedy of errors for so long?

5 comments:

Rob said...
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Rob said...
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Rob said...

Rachel, you stole my blog post topic. :)

I don't believe the Democrats.

I don't believe the Republicans.

Neither party adequately represents my ideals or values.

I wish we had politicians who would vote THEIR own conscience regardless of the polls and what keeps them elected. How can I trust a man or woman who only makes decisions based on getting re-elected. (I can't necessarily prove that, but it's what I feel is true in most cases.)

What I'm truly sick of is when one side makes a point and the other side responds with a totally different point. I never/rarely hear a legitimate back and forth that responds to the other person. Everyone seems to just rush back to their bandwagon without responding to the other person's...umm...bandwagon (point...I guess).

Rob said...

Sorry for all the deletes. I tried to correct a typo and made another one in its place. 8-)

southernbelle825 said...

rach, i recommend viewing "the daily show with john stewart" and "the colbert report" monday thru thursday nites, 10 and 10:30 PM on comedy central. you will still learn what's going on, but it will be much more entertaining and much less stressful. and it's also on hulu.com. 'see' you in the AM.