2012, I don't want to say you were completely awful.
Here is Charles Mingus and his band playing the title-song. Background music for this post.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sfe_8RAaJ0
Monday, December 31, 2012
MFA / PhD Applications...DONE! Also, Three Lists
*giant exhale, not a sigh*
Woke up super early to mail packets before the holiday cut off for overnight shipping, glad I asked about it on Saturday. Mailed rec letter sent to me for me to send to program. Called around to places to make sure they had everything assembled. Checked up on rec letter submissions, everything is as expected. Called clearinghouse about transcripts. Checked bank account to see if the GRE folks (ETS) had taken out their money yet, samesies for transcript folk. Crossed off last items on last lists.
Everything made it in on time! The statements of purposes; the transcripts unofficial, the transcripts official; the single goals statement; the rec letters; the GRE scores; the poetry work samples; the nonfiction work samples; the combined-but-not-interspersed poetry-and-nonfiction work samples; the writing samples critical, expository, and analytical; the teaching assistant applications; the teaching philosophies; the teaching statements; the statements of interest; the CVs; the cover sheets and cover letters; the pdfs; the pdfs that couldn't be filled out electronically and thus were printed, filled out by hand, scanned, and emailed; the documents uploaded, the documents mailed; the documents literally cut and pasted on top of one another and scanned (thanks Ben!); the online graduate college applications; the paper department applications; the payments!
Speaking of the payments...
A list for those who may want to do this sometime: Total Expenses
Woke up super early to mail packets before the holiday cut off for overnight shipping, glad I asked about it on Saturday. Mailed rec letter sent to me for me to send to program. Called around to places to make sure they had everything assembled. Checked up on rec letter submissions, everything is as expected. Called clearinghouse about transcripts. Checked bank account to see if the GRE folks (ETS) had taken out their money yet, samesies for transcript folk. Crossed off last items on last lists.
Everything made it in on time! The statements of purposes; the transcripts unofficial, the transcripts official; the single goals statement; the rec letters; the GRE scores; the poetry work samples; the nonfiction work samples; the combined-but-not-interspersed poetry-and-nonfiction work samples; the writing samples critical, expository, and analytical; the teaching assistant applications; the teaching philosophies; the teaching statements; the statements of interest; the CVs; the cover sheets and cover letters; the pdfs; the pdfs that couldn't be filled out electronically and thus were printed, filled out by hand, scanned, and emailed; the documents uploaded, the documents mailed; the documents literally cut and pasted on top of one another and scanned (thanks Ben!); the online graduate college applications; the paper department applications; the payments!
Speaking of the payments...
A list for those who may want to do this sometime: Total Expenses
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
December 18th Update
So I haven't blogged since the semester kicked into gear. What a time, what a time.
Here is an experiment in how to summarize four months' worth of life-altering events in a single post. First thing: you condense time. Second: elements must recur for a secret narrative to tremble below the surface. Third: be honest and choose your details wisely.
Here is an experiment in how to summarize four months' worth of life-altering events in a single post. First thing: you condense time. Second: elements must recur for a secret narrative to tremble below the surface. Third: be honest and choose your details wisely.
Against "Faith"
I have been trying to put my thoughts about the irredeemably bad nature of religious thought into words for so long, and I just saw a post on Facebook that beat me to it. These first three paragraphs mirror my thoughts exactly. Post starts "In another thread, we are discussing atheism and anti-theism..." on December 18th (today).
http://www.facebook.com/TABCP
Yes I am atheist. Yes I am anti theist also. I will not censor my beliefs to comfort those who feel threatened by my ideas.
Though I only have personal experience with how Catholicism can ravage lives, the same idea holds true for all faiths: they deny reality in order to preserve beliefs. I feel fine making that generalization about all religions. And that is the problem: a distance from reality is sought, and it never makes things better. That distance allows religion, via faith, to interfere with the mind's sense-making apparatus, so that people will act in the best interest of the religion instead of in the best interests of themselves and other people. It took me years to intellectually become an atheist, and I still find myself trying to rid myself of the destructive emotional effects that exposure to religion at a young age enacted upon my mind (guilt issues, self-esteem issues, paranoia, fear of self-assertion, etc.).
What I love about this post so much is that it pinpoints faith as the primary problem, and religion as simply symptomatic of the faith pathogen.
I hope I'm not preaching exclusively to the choir here. I have had many conversations recently about the evils of religion, and always backed down when people say "Oh, well, it works for some people," and I can't deny that some people think religion does them good (besides not wishing to engage in the absurdity of refuting the hypothetically beneficial experiences of hypothetical people). But keeping faith-as-distancer-from-reality in mind, it becomes apparent that even if the short-term emotional gains of feeling secure and feeling comforted and feeling moral that arise from faith are what "work for some people," even if faith creates a belief in a better reality than the present one, in the long term the effect of faith (and religious practice as its proxy) is a slowly increasing loss of the ability to engage with reality in a rational manner.
If faith is needed for the world to be good, or for a person to feel their existence is validated, then for the believer there exists a much larger perceptual problem: why is the world or the self in need of validation in the first place? Why must people wait for death in order for good things to start happening? Faith asks people to become non-actors and wait for someone / something else to change things.
Religion (faith's proxy) plays on insecurities and gaps in understanding. Becoming comfortable with the imperfect nature of reality allows for both more reasonable expectations of behavior in people and a higher frequency of experiencing wonder. Just because we don't understand something doesn't mean there is no way we can. Just because there is wickedness in the world does not mean the whole of existence is flawed and in need of redemption.
Faith short-cuts the critical thinking apparatus, and places false answers designed to satisfy people emotionally erroneously in the places we seek intellectual answers. I think this is why faith is so hard to abandon. It is more emotional than intellectual. And emotional suffering is a brutal thing indeed. If you think of it this way, faith functions much like paranoia, creating a feedback loop of fear and alleviation of that fear (fear of not being good, of not acting good, fear of the unknown in death, fear of loss of faith, fear of loss of the validation religion and faith provide, etc), like a mental illness. The mind becomes a prisoner of faith. The inspiring part is that the mind is also the warden of said prison. You can unlock the door anytime you want.
To my religious friends, please, if you value your mind and its sovereignty, religion can only hurt you. Get out as soon as you can. I can guarantee you will find the better world you seek.
Not sure why I felt inspired to write this now, but I did, and so there's that. Maybe it's because of all the stupid Christmas garbage I'm surrounded with this time of year. Anyway, that's my reaction to this neato post.
-J
BTW, I am experimenting with female names in my personal emails, so I figured where better than this place? New names to come. Fell free to leave comments on them!
-Ylia
http://www.facebook.com/TABCP
Yes I am atheist. Yes I am anti theist also. I will not censor my beliefs to comfort those who feel threatened by my ideas.
Though I only have personal experience with how Catholicism can ravage lives, the same idea holds true for all faiths: they deny reality in order to preserve beliefs. I feel fine making that generalization about all religions. And that is the problem: a distance from reality is sought, and it never makes things better. That distance allows religion, via faith, to interfere with the mind's sense-making apparatus, so that people will act in the best interest of the religion instead of in the best interests of themselves and other people. It took me years to intellectually become an atheist, and I still find myself trying to rid myself of the destructive emotional effects that exposure to religion at a young age enacted upon my mind (guilt issues, self-esteem issues, paranoia, fear of self-assertion, etc.).
What I love about this post so much is that it pinpoints faith as the primary problem, and religion as simply symptomatic of the faith pathogen.
I hope I'm not preaching exclusively to the choir here. I have had many conversations recently about the evils of religion, and always backed down when people say "Oh, well, it works for some people," and I can't deny that some people think religion does them good (besides not wishing to engage in the absurdity of refuting the hypothetically beneficial experiences of hypothetical people). But keeping faith-as-distancer-from-reality in mind, it becomes apparent that even if the short-term emotional gains of feeling secure and feeling comforted and feeling moral that arise from faith are what "work for some people," even if faith creates a belief in a better reality than the present one, in the long term the effect of faith (and religious practice as its proxy) is a slowly increasing loss of the ability to engage with reality in a rational manner.
If faith is needed for the world to be good, or for a person to feel their existence is validated, then for the believer there exists a much larger perceptual problem: why is the world or the self in need of validation in the first place? Why must people wait for death in order for good things to start happening? Faith asks people to become non-actors and wait for someone / something else to change things.
Religion (faith's proxy) plays on insecurities and gaps in understanding. Becoming comfortable with the imperfect nature of reality allows for both more reasonable expectations of behavior in people and a higher frequency of experiencing wonder. Just because we don't understand something doesn't mean there is no way we can. Just because there is wickedness in the world does not mean the whole of existence is flawed and in need of redemption.
Faith short-cuts the critical thinking apparatus, and places false answers designed to satisfy people emotionally erroneously in the places we seek intellectual answers. I think this is why faith is so hard to abandon. It is more emotional than intellectual. And emotional suffering is a brutal thing indeed. If you think of it this way, faith functions much like paranoia, creating a feedback loop of fear and alleviation of that fear (fear of not being good, of not acting good, fear of the unknown in death, fear of loss of faith, fear of loss of the validation religion and faith provide, etc), like a mental illness. The mind becomes a prisoner of faith. The inspiring part is that the mind is also the warden of said prison. You can unlock the door anytime you want.
To my religious friends, please, if you value your mind and its sovereignty, religion can only hurt you. Get out as soon as you can. I can guarantee you will find the better world you seek.
Not sure why I felt inspired to write this now, but I did, and so there's that. Maybe it's because of all the stupid Christmas garbage I'm surrounded with this time of year. Anyway, that's my reaction to this neato post.
-J
BTW, I am experimenting with female names in my personal emails, so I figured where better than this place? New names to come. Fell free to leave comments on them!
-Ylia
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