mtl3p

so, yeah. Blogging…? I guess so.

Steven’s being really funny (I actually feel bad bc I just bought a pair of reeboks - which probably supports his point (i’m a reformed jock)). And Mir’s still doing her thing and it’s still really funny. Ethan just wrote about incremental-infrastructure … which is okay interesting.

There was an interesting article in the NYtimes magazine about nerds being super-white - specifically from a linguistic point of view. The article is protected, but the paper is here (pdf). I’ve been thinking a bit over the last couple of years about epistemologies and about how epistemologies change and move across areas. A big part of my criticism of the OLPC project was about it being poorly understood (and therefore unconsentable?) epistemological influences. To the degree to which it was not consented to would be the degree to which it was imperialistic.

The connection for me is about the ways we understand the world. I’ve had a couple conversations about Russian culture + philosophy recently (before and after another interesting article in the NYTimes review of books) and to what extent it was European or Asian or something of it’s own qualities. I’m going through the last book of Neal Stevenson’s trilogy and his fixation in his last few books on the enlightenment, the scientific revolution, and the beginning of the industrial revolution has reinforced my interest in looking at things with that transition in mind. So much of how we think now depends on the philosophies developed during that time, to the extent that it feels that we are just playing out the game dealt then. Even though I was only in West Africa for 6 months I left with a strong impression that there were cultural differences of epistemology and my own personal challenges as well as my time around people on the austism spectrum makes it clear to me that a shallow and strict adherence to rationalism is not a very rewarding path. I guess that this is also still me working through Saul’s discussion of intuition and the importance that we respect it somehow.

I guess I’m just as confused as anyone because especially since the death of communism, we all have a more heightened awareness of some of the problems of capitalism, but no one’s offering any compelling ways of looking at the world. “Buying local” and being politically sensitive is not really a theory one can get behind as a life view.

It felt like I was working through some of these ideas during weekly therapy sessions over the last 3 years. I stopped those a few months ago and I wonder where my movement is going to come from. Alison’s post on her trapeze courses touches on a conversation I’ve had with her - how physical non-orthodoxy can help you think differently. Whether it’s screwing different kinds of people that one is used to, changing one’s body (like me growing my hair), or changing how we move even by ourselves (her spending part of her week being upside down on a swing) I’ve seen how these things allow and force me to imagine myself differently. Especially right now as I’ve gone back to the gym and find myself running and working out I’m worried about impacting myself emotionally and mentally through returning to a really orthodox body that I had when I was a jock. It’s not (only) that I will look different, it’s that my muscles tighten up and get bulky, and I become very good at moving for long distances over a straight line. It’s so different from the three years I spent doing capoeira.

On friday I’m leaving to go camping for 7 days. Temagami, ontario. I’m looking forward to spending that time using my body intensively and alternatively, as the day demands it.

that was a ramble, but I’ll leave it up.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 6:15 pm and is filed under something. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.