Still Beautiful

I've been at Carleton for a while now, and I've endured some shitty weather in my day. Winter in Minnesota is a face-stinging-nose-hair-freezing blank gray expanse of frigid cold. With my tendency toward Seasonal Affective Disorder, you might expect that, after two years in the Midwest, I've become just as bitter as those long winter nights.

Today, however, the first snow of the season blew in sideways with a gravity-defying gale, and I LOVED IT. Snowflakes paired up with falling leaves and danced a crazy drunken tango, in no apparent hurry to make contact with the earth. This windy snow-world is fresh and alive and somehow on the brink of the best kind of insanity.

I went to frisbee practice (pictured below) and froze my fingers. My socks got wet on the way from my dorm to the library. But I don't care because it's beautiful. Always.

Elucidation?

For part of my final project for PSYC 263: Sleep and Dreaming, I am going to teach myself to lucid dream. Or at least try. Thus far I have dreamed extensively about writing about my dreams in my dream journal (only to wake up and write about writing about my dream in my dream journal in my dream journal... so meta). I feel as though this is progress.

Why are you doing this, you ask? Well, first of all, it's hilarious to wake up in the morning and read dream-notes that I scribbled in semi-waking states throughout the night. (Last night: "Dining Hall... all the red food. Why was the kale red???") Secondarily, I'm finding that the simple exercise of remembering my dreams may be of practical use. You know that feeling when you have a really good thought, and then it escapes? I've found that chasing down such thoughts feels exactly the same as the struggle to remember my dreams.

But mostly it's just hilarious. You should try it too!

Some sources claim that those who have mastered the art of lucid dreaming can meet and interact in the "dream world." Let's meet there, guys.

Chickens

This is an excerpt from our last class discussion in Philosophy of Mind (which is unequivocally ridiculous):

Student: Sooo... there isn't a single property of a neuron that the chicken couldn't fulfill?
Professor: Correct.

MY BRAIN IS CHICKENS. Or I thought that it very well might be last Thursday night, when I had an existential crisis. I sat in the library, my thoughts clucking as I doubted the reality of my every sense perception, until I just couldn't take it anymore. At roughly 9:52 p.m. I abandoned my desk, trekked to the Cannon river, threw off my clothes, and hurled myself into the wine-black water.

The mud squished.
The icy river took my breath away.
My words flew the coop,

And it was real.

"When I was a student..."

Last week, as I was walking (slowly, of course) back to my dorm after Frisbee practice, I couldn't help but overhear a conversation between a balding man and a small girl who I presumed to be his daughter. "You know," the man said as the trans-generational duo stood arm in arm on the bridge over Lyman Lakes, "when I was a student..."

I don't know how the man finished his sentence, because those five words halted me mid-step. Was. With that stranger's offhand comment, I realized that I have almost no memory of, nor can I particularly envision in the future, a conception of myself that is not a student. I've been entrenched in some sort of educational environment for over sixteen years. When I began my academic career, George Bush the elder was in office, the Democratic Republic of the Congo was called Zaire, and the cost of gasoline was 95 cents a gallon.

I gazed upon the inverted projection of autumn on Lyman's glassy surface, staggered by the sheer temporal magnitude of my studenthood. Then, looking down at my grass-stained shirt and scuffed purple Crocs, I wondered if this is what America had envisioned as a product of her mighty and unparalleled Educational System.

Father and daughter and long since moved on when I realized that I was late as usual for some evening commitment. But the words still echoed across the still lake water: "When I was a student..." It's hard to believe that one day, perhaps not too far in the future, I will be able to utter that phrase. The prospect is at once terrifying and exciting beyond measure.