A Maundy set of Ramblings

Econs Test was a breeze, to my surprise, I was expecting in all honesty something a lot tougher given the amount of input the prof puts into his lectures. I guess the all nighter I pulled through was well worth it. Just a little aside, as I was handing up my paper, the prof walked past me and gave me a soft nudge with a cheeky little wink. Did not quite get the hint initially, but man, as I was packing up only did I realize that I was sitting next to a real hottie. I guess even she caught the Profs’ attention and is the just added motivation I needed to attend my 4pm econ lectures more regularly instead of attending the earlier one.

Anyway, with the long Easter break coming, it seems like everyone has a plan or another to get some well deserved fun out of the few days of rests before the finals. For myself, I didn’t have any plans and I only realized it fully when a friend of mine asked me on a trip to Seattle, something which I really wanted to do, especially given the company. However, its just the way things are, there’s got to be keeners like me in this world to make it go around, otherwise how would all the fun loving people get their fun in the first place.

Talking about keeners and slackers and what not, I remembered a point in time where we used to establish individuals to be such and such a person because he or she is just a loser, period. We do not even give much thought as to why the individual presents him or herself as such. Instead, labeling one does give the individual who coins the label a certain sense of superiority over the other – a top down comparison. So as it is easier not to think, and it makes one feel good about oneself when one resorts to labeling and stereotypes, people just go ahead about it without much thought and without realizing the farcicality and hubris involved in such actions.

If we think about it real hard. It’s just not keeners and losers we’re talking about. It is terms like terrorist, defeatist, patriots, democrats, republican, liberal, conservative. We have become enslaved to the dictatorship of terms and stereotypes, usually those tag lines are not even our own to begin with, but scraps we picked up from popular culture.

A close friend of mine once quoted Shakespeare in his famous soliloquy, “The world is a stage, we are all actors.” I nodded in agreement, for I know by my life, I’ve been living by a plot, a plot that from which we enact from every single day of our lives, a plot that has long been written. It is written in our genes, it affixes our temperaments, it translates into our idiosyncrasies, and most of all it crafts the environment in which we live, which partially constructs the individuals we are. As such, aren’t we products of these interweaving plots? Stage Actors, who in a final brush with deception, are lead to belief that we are free to exercise our autonomy over ourselves and even others. So then who are we? When we are to commit an action, no doubt it is of our doing. But it’s motives, it’s dimensions, it’s every livid detail was and is made up of elements and intermediaries beyond our human determination, rather engineered by complex neural and cognitive networks imbued in us beyond the scope of our autonomy?

Upon this realization, we do we do with ourselves? Wouldn’t it be contrary to say people can change, because people are such and would not and are not capable of altering themselves. No, people can alter their belief systems, but they do so only because they possess the characteristics which enable them to do so. These characters they possess outside of their decision pattern, but it is something in them which enables them to do so. Similarly, when an individual curses and scorns at another for a transgression, another individual on the other hand reacts in nonchalance. We will then say that the latter possesses a good temperament, whereas the former well, it has to learn to be more understanding and tolerant. We tacitly recognize both possess differences in nature, but we pause from going any further, as that will compel us to recognize the failure of our control of our own self-determination. However, if we do venture and take that step into the unknown, we cease to talk of our natures as free, but natures which are determined.