Fuck Baudelaire

OK, two things:

I apparently know some crazy ass people and drugs seem like a crazy amazing adventure.

I've always wanted to explore. Explore everything. Every kind of everything.

A friend of mine just told me about speed balls and when he was living his crazy, horrible, ghetto ass, fucked up, amazingly interesting life he could do two of those in a row.

And oh my god he will testify to what kind of shitty life he was living at the time, but I don't know what that's like and I want to.

The derelict and impoverished (both financially and every other sort of way) side of life have some horrible beautiful appeal.  It is another frontier I have yet to cross.

I'm running away

I am running away and will live out a dream.  


In August I am moving to Costa Rica.  oh man oh my god.  


This will be incredible and the thought is currently scaring the shit out of me.  I don't know what it's going to be like.  I don't know what to expect and I don't have a safety net.  


The gradschool bug in me is telling me to tour universities--take a backbacking trip across South America.  And I would so love that.  Part of me isn't ready for gradschool yet.  And part of me wants to settle down and get a job fast so I don't screw myself over and end up a hobo.


But despite what I'm freaking out about, I know it will be worth it.  This is something few people get to experience, be it because they actually can't or just don't let themselves (which is more often the case).


I live in Texas, and although it's Austin, people still react confusedly when I tell them I'm leaving.--"What?  You don't want to climb the ladder in your retail job?  What?  There's more out there?  Why Not just settle?" And so it makes me feel like a crazy person.


But now, I'm visiting my sister in Berkeley, which is a pretty cool place, and since everyone is a lot more accepting, it's helping raise my spirits.


I will be sad to leave Austin, but it feels like time to move on.  I've been there a while and I haven't been super happy.  I feel like I could do more somewhere else, so I need to go and try instead of stagnate.

I've got the grad school bug again

Ever since I got reunited with my grandpa over this last Christmas, I've been thinking a lot about family and genetics.  I've also been obsessed with determinism ever since I first heard of the idea.  Christmas got me fucked up with genetic determinism.


The thing is, it makes so much since.  I am so convinced that reality is dictated in a calculate-able, predictable, sensible way and there is no escaping it and we all lack free will.  I hate it and don't want it to be true so I'm reading everything I can to convince myself that it's not.  


I just finished reading "Who's in Charge" by Michael Gazzaniga and it is really good.  I recommend it to anyone interested in a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of the brain.  It did't quite convince me, but it made a really good case.  My current stance is that although complex systems can't be predicted, and human interactions and just even human existence is not only a complicated system, but a complicated interaction of multiple complicated systems, I still think that once we know more these calculations and predictions could be made.  I think they could, but I hope they can't.


How this relates to grad school is such:
I am interested in ideas.  When I studied literature, I studied it comparatively--how cultures and time periods interact to shape one another.  It is a representation of minds bumping into each other within one of our many complicated systems as humans.  It's mental evolution.  Through studying literature, you can see into the mind of the author, see where he came from, and see the people around him--his society--the world.  Books are doors.


There is a more precise study of ideas that I need to learn more about before I commit myself to it and that is the study of memes.  Memes are like the genes of thoughts. They are the building blocks of ideas and are transmitted and can evolve just like viruses.  


I would love to do a collaborative study with a neuroscientist involving memes, broadly, literature, specifically, and their quantitative role in the human mind.


There are so many places I would like to go with this!  For me, this seems to open doors to everything.


I just need to find what kind of program that would be and where I could find it.