And at some point, there's reality

Oh boy. What have I gotten myself into?

Wednesday I moved in, and although I was quite tired by the end of the day roomie convinced me to go out to the dance party, which was a great idea. My aerobic fitness gained from running and biking gave me a lot of endurance. Thursday and Friday I went to a lot of orientation sessions, some boring, most more interesting than one would expect, and laughably many describing a principle or issue as an "ongoing conversation." It sounds pretentious, but I can tell that here it's sincere, and I really believe everything intellectual ought to be, in terminology I prefer, a living discourse.

Thursday night Senor Evergreen came to hang out, and Friday night had Noise Parade. Only at Reed. Where else would you see sanctioned a mass of college students in ridiculous costumes marching about campus, banging on pots and pans and blowing whistles and playing bagpipes and trumpets, carrying torches and shooting off fireworks, with a couple community-safety peeps nonchalantly following the fire hazards with extinguishers? To join in the gratuitous noise I thought I'd yell something about how awesome Reed is, but then I realized such a formal expression would be counter to the point. Reed doesn't need a pep rally - we express our spirit by simply honoring the human urge to flip the fuck out without any pretense of purpose.

Saturday was "get acquainted with Portland" day, so I skipped off campus and went on a trip through Macleay Park with the guy I've been seeing. We spent basically the whole time philosophizing. Among the gems: every little thing is an immense conduit of information, a local manifestation of what is globally going on. Humans are amazing animals because we create our own habitat, and because we entertain ourselves with an infinitely versatile substance called language. (Think about language. Think about substances. Doesn't it fit?) Everything can be a metaphor for everything else, and when it comes to actual linguistic metaphor, it's far more precise than trying to literal all the time and it's the way we understand things in more dimensions than we can sense. Code-switching is does not necessarily imply inauthenticity, but is a consequence of the fact that people have different areas of overlap in their linguistic habits. Belonging is feeling like the catacombs in the back of my mind (where I live most of the time, in case y'all hadn't noticed) exist separately from my own individual associations, are still there when I'm not, and are visited by other people, comprising all those living discourses. Tension as a physiological state is malleable, can be manifested as anxiety, nausea, jitters, arousal, and released as laughter, tears, vomit, orgasm. Breath is a great mediator, and one of the great issues in the world is how abstract entities like nations try to engage with these very concrete physiological states of tension. Release of tension equals pleasure, according to Freud, but there's at least two kinds of pleasure, the thrilling kind and the comforting kind, which are almost incompatible and you can pit them against each other for a while, but at some point, as the necessary third pole to balance it all out, there's reality. That's where accomplishment as a motivator comes in, a motivator for doing unpleasurable but practical things. Nature is immanent and forms circles in both time and space, but us humans in our drive to feel progress make rectangles and frame our experiences in linear terms.

I've been trying really hard to be a normal freshman here, and curriculum-wise I can basically do it, but in some ways it's just not possible. I don't think it matters that I went to UO last year or even that I went to school, although it's not just that I'm older, but I've been out of high school and out of my parents' house, and it makes a difference. Regardless of my actual class standing, I'm not entirely a freshman because of that, whatever curriculum I follow - but I can't feel like a sophomore because I'm new here. Even though I did go to school, I'm essentially a freshman with a gap year behind me.

Sunday was getting loose ends tied up, paperwork and books. I'm now $325 in debt to the bookstore and still scrambling for work study. Then at night I watched a movie full of violence, sex, fire, and relevance, which was not actually that awesome in itself, but anything can be made fun by a roomful of Reedies shouting snarky comments at the screen. So it was with Troy. Besides, Brad Pitt as Achilles is hot and a badass.

This morning I had my first two classes: humanities lecture and physics lecture. Physics was fine; the professor has a subtle and attractive accent, but the content was rather boring since science starts simple: dimensions, units, graphs. Humanities was a fascinating lecture on our perspective on "the Greeks," the nature of anger especially in storytelling, and verbal vs. physical virtues in warfare. It did nothing, however, to elucidate the themes we are supposed to address in our first paper, which is due Saturday at 5pm. Jumping right in, I see.

It's also starting to get weird how I see Lost Rocket multiple times a day.

Tomorrow is environmental chem and philosophy of minds, brains and machines.