each day i spend a couple hours in old mens' offices swapping high sounding ideas i've collected with the high sounding ideas the professor has collected like baseball cards. quite a game, and my profs. love me for playing, following (under) their footsteps - entertaining each other with mind-games, theory accepted as valid, but practically they do not carry much weight - that is, they don't play intimately into our lives. i don't think many other students do this with their profs., but for me it's the highlight of my day (as far as school goes) - the philosophy professors are a wealth of collected knowledge and i feel like my personality blossoms more around them, because who else can i talk to about the things i learn about? the rest of the world doesn't give a shit! yes, co-dependency for those who worshipped their intellect more than social lives! in a group of normal kids, i have little to talk about but music and art (most of which is shallow talk, nobody invests enough energy into discussions - they're just not as high as one's with the philosophers i enjoy being with, and even they grow tiresome now), so it's more focused on drug use and silliness, playfulness.... sex.
let me let you in on some of the juciest of my academic scandals. tell me, if you can, what in the world is wrong with me?!? 1.) a course in experimental psychology - we had to perform an experiment of our choice and write a research paper, something that would be approved by the A.P.A. good Lord, an opportunity to do something I might find interesting. my paper was titled _The Effects of Music on Perception of Time_ in which I was going to compose several musical pieces and change different variables like tempo, and such, and see what effects it had on one's perception of time . you know, doing t-tests and chi squares and such. i had no time for it, but i had to hand in something. i made up false data and wrote a whole research paper based off it in a couple hours and made an oral presentation. everyone LOVED it, was the most interesting paper in the class. an A, while others who spent the whole quarter working on it got B's and C's.
2.) gender psychology - scenario, 24 girls, female professor, and 1 CJ! i was the male representive for the Gender psychology class. for kicks, as my own psychological experiment, i played it up like i was a stupid, sexist pig (I was heavily involved in theater in high school). well, i never cracked my book open, yet always got the highest grade in the class - usually the second highest grade was 15% or more lower than mine. our final grade was a 5 page mini research paper that was worth 25% of the grade, everyone paired up in groups of 2 except me. i made up this bull shit paper titled Awareness Beyond Gender in under 3 hours, with make-believe interviews, and quotes out of books like The Psychedelic Experience, and books by William James and Abraham Maslow and stuff - I expected to do pretty bad. after turning in my final exam, i cringed as i went up to get my paper - 100%! - the ONLY 100%! the prof. LOVED it and asked to keep my paper - on the paper she asked if i had dosed any of the people who I interviewed! i booked it out of the room while she was talking to somebody else about their paper before she could ask me anything about mine.... can you imagine how many laughs i've gotten out of that, how it shapes my perception of 'the real world', how it would inflate my ego?
3.) social and political philosophy - never read a single text and barely ever went to class, but for god's sake, it's my major - unlike kids who just happen to take a philosophy course to fill some requirement (there are only a handful of philosophy majors), I happened to already understand aristotle, montainge, rousseau, mill, marx, and nietzsche. our final grade was a 10 page paper worth 60% of our grade, comparing 2 of the philosophers. we had 5 weeks to do it. i went to talk to the professor the day before it was due impressing him with all these high sounding ideas from Cosmic Trigger by Bob Wilson because they correspond very well with John Stuart Mill's _On Liberty_, i cut and paste my writing about montaigne from my first paper (worth the other 40%) and checked out a book that is a critique on _On Liberty_, i stayed up that night mostly goofing off and smoking pot and saying goodbye to my friends who were going away for the summer, starting the paper at 2 in the morning and finishing it by noon. final grade - A.
4.) philosophy of Taoism - this professor is my hero, restored any faith in academic philosophy being any good thing - he appeared to be in his 70's and was retired, but came in to teach this one class. he was more energetic than all of our students combined! unfortunately this was his last year teaching, he was moving away (his wife was expecting twins!) this guy was a student of alan watts when he taught at Berkeley, and had lived in china for many years. we would sit and discuss the lao tzu and chuang tzu line by line going around the room getting each class member's interpretation (small class of 15 or so). i turned the guy onto bob wilson's The New Inquistion and Cosmic Trigger!, which he unfortunately lost. anyways, the point is, I loved this guy and me, my prof., and another guy all learned so much from each other (which was what was important - BUT i only did 25% of the coursework, and of the 25% i did, it was only 1 page when it was supposed to be 3-5 pages. well, of course i did great in the class - because we got along so well? because he knew i understood? because it's not my "Way?" who knows?
5.) I had a very cool prof. for Human Biology who I got along so well with - he offered to take me on mushroom hunts, and to show me how to identify ginseng and all sorts of cool things, and had me read great books he like - _The Shaman's Apprentice_ and Abbie Hoffman's _Steal This Book_, and he didn't mind that i missed a big test date to go see ram dass in ann arbor. well, I was using LSD several times a week at the time, and I didn't learn anything in that class, because it required linear thinking which I didn't have time for. I got to take my tests weeks later than other kids, I guess because my prof. just really enjoyed having me in class on the occasions that i attended, I always had interesting input. Even though I deserved an F, I got a C. I retook his class which he was offering online, because i felt guilty about it all, since he was such a great guy and it would be a good opportunity to learn something - he gave me my own unique password deadhead/shaman, and i did end up learning things from school for a change.
6.... I could do this all day, so let's stop.
things i always note..... i come to class with nothing on my mind, when i talk, i'm just talking - my thoughts aren't "my thoughts", they're just thoughts - i have fun with them, i like to explore... i like to go far out, so all eyeballs are on me when i speak, because i do it way different than most people, and my ideas are far out from the norm, but are usually very simple and lucid and appealing. people either LOVE me or HATE me, there's no inbetween or indiference to me entirely, i'm always a spectacle of sorts... i usually end up making friends with the kids in the class who have lots of intelligent opinions and do well and are respected by the professor for some sense of individuality, yet they are prepared and dilligent workers - everything is more important to them, where it's more of a game to me. i end up making friends with the professors of the classes i like very quickly. i usually find their course work to be pretty disappointing, even though the professors are intelligent and friendly, so i find ways to spice it up for myself, usually by doing whatever i want, because i have the ingenuity to make it work... often taking huge risks. in the classes where the professors like me, i obey no rules. deadlines don't apply to me, yet they do for other kids.
this is ridiculous. i'm not doing this for myself at all anymore. it's simply not where my interests lie, and i can't afford to cheat myself out of my entire life. i can't afford to be a little old stuffed-shirt man in a philosophy department for my life. i have to do what i want, i must be entirely self-disciplined. i must be self employed too, this is obvious to me. i'm going to look towards new schools. one that i'm interested in is called Goddard (the band phish went there, trey anastasio did his senior thesis the musical gamehendge there), and there would be no course-work or grades and i would work with advisors to map-out my ciriculum and send them packets of what i've accomplished every so often. i need to re-orientate myself, get myself focused. maybe eventually i'll find a spiritual master. that is training i could use.
Repent! Repent! Floss Often!
--------------------
Everything is better than it was the last time. I'm good.
If we could look into each others hearts, and understand the unique challenges each of us faces, I think we would treat each other much more gently, with more love, patience, tolerance, and care.
It takes a lot of courage to go out there and radiate your essence.
I know you scared, you should ask us if we scared too. If you was there, and we just knew you cared too.
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