A-Typical male's journal.

The good news is, that the WISE house will be doing some major renovations, which will be done by the time of our wedding (Including a new sound system!) Also, Mom consulted with a Bridal consultant, and she gave us some good ideas. Azura and I are considering hiring her for the wedding. We could do worse.

I was so exhausted today, I tried several times to write in my journal, but just couldn't. Even now, I'm coughing, my ear hurts, and I'm just generally tired. I did catch a nap earlier, so I'm feeling ok, but I'm still kind of out of it.

I have been keeping an eye on diary-l lately. I would unsubscribe completely, except I would feel totally disconnected from the journaling community. Part of my problem is that I see things going, on but by the time I read through the whole message base, I'm too exhausted and worked up to respond. And I have other writing I want to do, anyway.

We're having another go round of the Truth vs Reality, Objective vs Subjective truth thing again. I want to walk up to the differing sides and slap them upside the heads, shouting "Define your terms! Define your terms!" I can see what Al is saying about Objective truth, but I really think we define "truth" differently.

I remember reading Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Phaedrus, Pirsig's now-destroyed philosopher personality was an expert at wielding something Pirsig called the 'logician's scalpel'. The scalpel is a way of dividing things up, and analyzing them. If you divide things correctly, you can see patterns which are important. Definitions are a key way of wielding the scalpel.

I feel like I'm playing with a sore tooth, going over these philosophical questions again and again. Perhaps it's because Al and I have a lot in common, but arrived at such different solutions. Perhaps it's because I used to agree, almost totally with Al. Perhaps it's just me, constantly playing with the questions.

Then again, I've always loved this sort of debate. Dad was a philosophy major. Well he was a math major, but in order to continue working towards his major, he had to switch in his senior year, or be drafted into Vietnam. He'd already taken so many philosophy classes that Philosophy was a logical major.

Because of this, one of the first books in my library was "Dialogs with Plato" which contains The Republic. [The Republic has Plato's Allegory of the Cave in it, and the Cave forms the basis of Plato's philosophy.]

I'm looking at a book/game called Wff'n Proof that has inscribed in it "To Joe, on his 11th birthday, Aunt ____" Ok, so it doesn't say "joe" but you get the point. It's a logic game, or rather, it's a game designed to teach formal logic. I never figured out the game itself, but I did read all of the logic. It came with a challenge, you see, "Maybe my smart nephew can figure this out."

I remember, as a child, running to my dad with the realization that God exists. I told him, everything that happens has a cause, but someone had to cause the first thing, and since that's impossible, only God could have done it. It's basically Plato's proof of God as the Unmoved Mover, or First Cause. For a long time, that was the basis of my faith.

It was good enough for me then, to make the jump from 'God exists' to the Christian God, Jesus, the whole thing. Later I became disillusioned with Christianity. Or rather with Christians. I've been back and forth on this for a long time. Right now, I'm pretty far away from even 'God exists'.

That's not a step I emotionally want to take, but I feel my philosophy pulling me in that direction. That's probably the real reason these questions, these philosophical questions are pulling at me. And, of course, it makes it here, to my soapbox.

It is what's on my mind, so it is what I write.

Generic Joe's A Typical Male