Life : wowsers I’m busy…

(begun Friday around 1pm)

One week, no posts! Sheesh.

Forces of nature, academia, and all the rest are conspiring against me, trying to keep me from my precious blogger. But, for a moment at least, I can thwart them (keep in mind that this is also a moment that I could be calling Ana in Spain… wait, hold that thought…).

—- 2 hours later… Ok, so I did call Ana. And I’ve eaten a bit of lunch. And now I’m in the back yard soaking up some sun and trying to think about what more to write about now. Well, for one, I’m going to buy a ticket to Spain today, hopefully for the 3rd of August, until the 23rd. The thought of that brings a big smile to my face (and with the laptop I get to see myself smiling back at me – and I laugh). Ana and I are both worried about how things will work out, with us so far apart and the likelihood of that ending soon being slim. I don’t worry about it much though. Recalling the Buddhist Poet-Saint Shantideva: (I paraphrase and thus butcher…)

Why be upset?
If you can change the situation,
change it! – don’t bother being upset with it.

If you cannot change the situation,
what good will being upset do?

— 3 hours later… Now I’ve been to work, and cleaned a bit around the house (my new place). Oh! Good news came to me yesterday: two of my paper deadlines have been pushed back: those that were due Monday are now due on the 8th and 12th. So new deadlines are:

1. April 29-30: Moving out of the old house, in to the new (or at least getting a good start)
2. May 3: Sartre Paper (“Who am I?” A Sartrean Analysis)
3. May 4: Ethics and Evolution presentation (on Julian Huxley, Kant, and the Ideology of Progress)
4. May 5: in Spokane at Gonzaga University, I present my paper on “Buddhist Ethics: A Kantian Analysis.”
5. May 8: Ethics and Evolution paper due
6. May 10: [5/1/06 update] Sartre Test – Being and Nothingness and Search for a Method… (I forgot about this until today… why????)
7. May 12: Cosmology and Philosophy, paper presentation at 9am, paper due by 5pm (David Bohm and the hope for a Moral Cosmology).

— now Saturday…. (1pm) I have my ticket for Spain!!! I arrive August 4 and stay until the 23rd! So for both Ana and I any lingering worries have melted into giddy anticipation of actually being together again.

Now I have four hours to actually get some stuff done – and then it’s off to a philosophy department party. sigh. Life is so hard. I say that in jest, but maybe only halfway. Perhaps life is hard for so many of my fellow Americans because it is so easy – and easy isn’t meaningful. It’s the paradox of affluence, of ‘having it all’ – you still don’t necessarily have what is most important: meaning. (hmm… thoughts for a future post… ’till then, I suppose I have stuff to do.)

but first… pics –

[update per patia’s comment below] – yes, it has been mentioned to me by others as well (my father of all people) that Ana could be my sister (he says they look very similar). I’ll schedule an appointment with a Freudian psycho-analyst just as soon as I can 🙂 ‘Till then, here’s a picture of Ana, my sister Eve, and I.