long talk with morde'an again. i should bring a tape recorder when we talk. she always has these simple, yet profound insights, clever remarks... i don't know. and things i come up with in response make a lot of sense, but i can never recover them later. we've decided that people like ourselves are never male, and we're doomed to eternally being unfulfilled because in any serious relationship we search out, the other person will have no idea how to relate to us. damn, but sometimes i think it'd be easier if i were bi. which is obviously wrong, and yet....

we had a workshop on acceptance recently in our dorm. the role playing exercise we went through to demonstrate what it might be like to be gay.... well it totally didn't work for me. honestly i was ostracized long enough myself that i wouldn't have been any less popular or even less tolerated had i been gay. and then we were supposed to lose friends due to their lack of acceptence of our lifestyle.... i know for a fact that jenna, lisa, cara, debi.... none of them would turn their back on me. i know who i am, i know who my friends are, and none of us are people to discriminate or hate for such petty reasons. then there was the part where we were supposed to be unable to return to a place we loved because of some awkwardness there when we went on a theoretical date.... morde'an chose her loved place to be the desert. you can never go back to the desert, morde'an! um. yeah. my chosen place was a bookstore in dc. somehow i doubt anyone would look twice at a homosexual couple in barnes and noble in dc.

so i already seem to have had some of the difficulties one who was gay would have. now all i need is the part of the puzzle toward the end of the workshop where you actually have a working relationship and you've made peace with yourself. right.

so after morde'an and i got back my father called. we had a whole long discussion about philosophy, eastern vs western religion, plays of sophocles, and favoured composers. i want to know who else has these conversations with their parents when they get check up, "how are things?" phone calls. i suppose it was good to discuss some of this, though, because i was forced to summarize workings of oedipus for him spontaneously as a reminder, and i really need to know this stuff for tomorrow. eh.

meanwhile, i'm nowhere near caught up and i wasted three hours talking. gah. why is talking a waste? but i have some larger amount of direction to apply to work i have yet to do, so that's something. i really just want to have more discussions, though.

today at dinner i had a prolonged and annoying argument with someone about the nature and existence of god. i want to strangle this guy for his idiocy. first he claims he can definitively prove god doesn't exist, but then later claims that he understands the exact nature of god. if you don't believe in god, you can't know him. i kept interjecting, "no, *your* god does such and such," and he refused saying his god was the only reasonable and acceptable god. ummm.... bite me. damned if i'm taking your poorly thought-out, wannabe intellectual, insanely rigidly defined god as a given. damned if i *want* your god. you can keep him.

in conclusion, it is *stupid* to argue with someone who is sure of their answer and won't even consider what the definitions of their words mean. this guy wouldn't admit that any god could be defined without having the god be omnipotent and omniscient. then we tried to get him off of the concept of linear time. that bombed big time. the whole thing was an exercise in frustration, and these are the people who are always convinced they've won because they've out-stubborned you. yes, i've stopped arguing. no, it isn't because you've proved a point. it's because you've proved you aren't listening to anything i say. in the end you lose because you never learn anything.

i can see both sides of this idea, though. i'm reluctant to give credence to others' theories at times, so when i get in these arguments i want to just let the whole thing stop, because i know what a pain it is on both sides of the table. i feel, though, that when i inherently disagree with someone's ideas i'm not dismissing them as completely as this guy was. he blatantly admitted he stopped listening entirely at one point because he was too busy mocking some random guy for having broken a dish in the dining hall. *SIGH* people annoy me at times. how infantile is that, really?

still, though, i don't know if i can actually claim to be different from this guy. i want to say i am, but i can't really think of how to justify it. this will bother me forever now.

i want real arguments. i want to be wrong. i want someone more intelligent me to point out much better ideas. i'd be bloody thrilled to be ignorant again so that i can learn, rather than banging my head against a wall for a half hour at a time because this guy is dominating the conversation with his idiocies. i always claim i'm wrong. i *like* to be wrong. i like to have knowledge, too, but when i'm wrong, there is definitely an idicator that i've now learned something and progressed. being right is somewhat less rewarding in the long run, i think.

damn, what i wouldn't do to be able to just talk all day. read books and discuss their merit. listen to symphonies and other works and discuss their power, their beauty. learn. i want to learn. and not by going step by step through tutorial c of my visual basic book in which we discuss calculating what ten percent of any given number is and we merely add a few tweaks to an already mostly finished program. i hate having things laid out for me. that is not how i learn. i learn by attempting to find the logical progression myself. i got to do it all the time in high school. i was thinking about patterns and relations in chem and calc before the teachers brought up the ideas. to find the relations within ideas yourself allows such a more complete understanding than this stupid regurgitation of information handed to you, chopped up in tiny pieces. I HATE CONDESCENSION. damn it all, don't asssume that i can't learn. don't assume that i need help. let me bloody work it out myself, or i'll be miserable for all time.

so basically i guess i'm just saying i'm frustrated. *grin* gee, i guess i'm feeling forceful lately. it's too bad that the learning i want is not the sort that really anyone can afford to supply in this school. the other students probably are entirely used to having this all fed to them. but there's no encouragement to even *think* in these classes! or at least not until the paper is due, when suddenly they want us to switch over to independent thinking and profound associations, blah blah blah. it's all insanity.

heaven help me, i rather miss high school. at least there i was on a level with my peers and we all respected each other. here no one knows most anyone else or cares. damn. and i'll never know who i might have been on a different path in this life.
posted by Unknown at 10:32 PM