Temptation

It's late, I'm tired, and I only have two classes tomorrow. Surely I can put off this update until then? I've even posted once this week already. But good bloggers don't make excuses. They make regularly scheduled posts. Henceforth, my as-yet nonexistent crowd of followers, I promise to be a disciplined publisher. Every Friday, without fail, you will wake up to a fresh serving of piping hot paragraphs topped with sugary sweet pictures of the past week.

And now a more general note about temptation. This evening I went to the first spring meeting of The Forum, our campus's club for part-time philosophers, designed to discuss those "Big Questions", well-summarized by its iconic image of The Thinker, and formed by my very own and awesome roommate Stephen. But despite the questions now floating around my brain of morality and ethics and whether there is really anything objectively good in the world, I can't help but cling to my intuitive sense that there are some things we should and shouldn't do and that those things are neither subjective nor negotiable. Yet even if I was persuaded to drop these naive and perhaps fundamentally meaningless views, I would retain unflinchingly my respect for people who both hold and follow them.

Whatever your resolutions or moral systems, there's something incredibly honest and fulfilling about sticking to them. It's just the sort of good old-fashioned character building that Calvin's dad was so keen about that really makes you feel like you're doing something right. But see there? I'm back to feelings again. I guess I'll have to go to some more Forum meetings to get this intuition thing sorted out.

But until I undergo some thorough mind-changing on this issue, I'm resolved to be more resolved about my life. For the goals and resolutions I already have, I'm resolved to putting higher priority on them and, to help me do so, finding new ways to enjoy them. For the areas of my life that need work, I'm resolved to identifying them and improving them. Any input from you would be appreciated on this one.

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The subgroup of you who are quite definitely part of my imagination may be thinking that it sounds like I have recently faced some other temptations that I haven't told you about. Zarquon knows what, but I faced them. Another subgroup of you may think this was only somewhat more than incoherent psychobabble, this paragraph very much in particular, and wonder when I'm going to settle down on a topic I can commit to writing about with significantly much more structure. Finally, a very real group of you who I very much doubt extends much past me has not only caught all of the media references in this post (actually I only count three... this shouldn't really be hard if you try) and has thus gained a little insight to my priorities in life. And more importantly, being me, you have come to realize that seemingly unworkable, on-the-fly writing like this somehow frequently turns out to be pretty decent, and will be happy to hear I decided to write and publish it.

For the rest of you, I thank you for being real and for taking the time to read this. Hopefully it was interesting and made you a little intrigued to see where I'm going with this blog, if only you didn't have to wait a whole week to find out more. And with that, I give you my week in pictures: