Caught!

Tonight is Peasant Disco and a pre-party at VTL's place, so I went by the package store to pick up a six pack of the nice local IPA and who did I run into but the Horse and his wife, my mentor. I saw the Horse and, suave as usual, jumped about a foot in the air and tried to hide, but he'd seen me and he came over and said, "Philosophy is tough, you know? We're asking the big questions, and it doesn't always seem like there are answers, and then we turn to -" he gestured at my Dragonfly IPA - "medicine."

"You caught me," I managed after a long pause.

"Well," he said reasonably, "you caught us, too."

A very nice evening last night as well - after Tractatus group, I went with Mike to the GPSO happy hour at Nick's, where I made pleasant smalltalk with a cute, large-nosed Poli Sci major. I deserve major props for this, because I just went right up to him and used the classic line, "You look familiar - do I know you from somewhere?"

"I don't think so," said the boy.

"Well, you can meet me now. I'm Emily," I said, extending my hand.

I am pleased with myself for that.

After the GPSO thing I went for pizza with some of the other firstyears in the department - Sam, Scott, Josh, and Krista - which was really pleasant. We hung around Mother Bear's until almost eleven, at which point we went to a free showing of the Darjeeling Limited at the Union. It's no Royal Tennenbaums, of course, but I wasn't disappointed. Adrian Brody is lovely as always, and Jason Schwartzman was quite good, and visually it was spectacular, as Wes Anderson's movies always are. And there was even a little Angelica Houston, who always reminds me pleasantly of my mother.

So on the whole, good times fore and aft. I love it when things work out like this.

Found Poetry

I love the Horse's digressions so much I have recently begun making note of them in the margins of my notes. They form a lovely sort of Dadaist poetry.
gators/garters
hockey without a mask
bizarro hair
platform shoes in Venice...
KISS - forget about it -
I know he has a long tongue, but ...
firemen's outfits
in Italy
fabulous airlines

I have made the plunge and ordered two posters for our living room. I almost chose this one but decided it would be a bit odd to have the same art as my parents, so instead I (unknowingly) chose the Chagall my sister Floss has in her room at school and a Klimt I thought was nice. This will hopefully make our space look more lived-in.

Made a rather tasty vinegar chicken tonight - my mother's suggestion. It was extremely vinegary and delicious - I added extra vinegar and now I'm all parched. K's making scones in her bird apron and it's all nicely domestic. Time to do some set theory.

(This nicely sums up my thoughts on the recent Dumbledore situation. Let's not forget the context of the question JKR was answering: does Dumbledore find love? )

Tuesday: The Badger and the Horse

The Badger has reappeared; last week he skipped town without telling us and left a young man of my acquaintance as a sub. My philosophy of mathematics discussion group met while he was gone and since he's the only philosophy faculty member in the group, none of us knew how to proceed in his absence. We just sort of puzzled over what the hell Kant is trying to say, and concluded that we'd ask the Badger when he returned.

So when the Badger asked me today how the group had fared in his absence, that's basically what I told him. He said, "Well, the Oracle has returned." What the heck, Badger? I am pretty sure I did not want to call you an oracle. If I was being obsequious I am sorry.

Last Spring one of my Smith professors commissioned me to do some comic strips about logic. We didn't discuss an actual dollar amount of payment, but it was very clear that money would change hands. The comics have been in his possession since the end of August and so today I emailed him and asked, "Did we ever agree on compensation for those comics?" He wrote back, "You suggested $x and I agreed. I will send you a check tomorrow."

I never suggested $x. I was thinking more along the lines of $x/3. $x is a lot of money. I feel very guilty about this, but I guess I should just be grateful. I'd have gladly done them for free, but he offered to pay me and I accepted. There's nothing wrong with accepting money for a job satisfactorily done... yet I feel so guilty.

The Horse was not as amusing today as he sometimes is, but he did deliver a few gems. He was talking about how, if you want to endorse a crazy theory like skepticism, you have to walk the crazy walk and never say you know anything or behave as though you do. You have to, when you're a juror, say to yourself, "Sure the witness says she saw the accused standing over the victim's body with a smoking gun, but how does she know? She could have been dreaming." Then you have to vote not guilty. And no one wants to walk this crazy walk, so they should not be talking the crazy talk, whether in the philosophy room or in the courtroom.

"Of course," the Horse went on, "there are plenty of people who talk crazy talk and walk crazy walk, and this won't be any objection for them. People like religious fundamentalists, who say, for instance, that all moral authority comes from the Bible, and any statements that deviate from this one interpretation of the Bible should be rejected as false, and who try to get you to believe their crazy views and try to pass laws to make you walk their crazy walk and so on."

And this of course was AWESOME, because there were at least four such people in that very room, including the cufflinks guy I mentioned before, who talked that very crazy talk to me the other day at the Spoon. I found it delightful that the Horse was willing to take it for granted that we're not crazy religious fundamentalists because we are doing serious epistemology.

Then just to cap it off he digressed, prompted by the idea of a smoking gun, "Or a smoking plug - that happened to me earlier today, I plugged something in and there was this big spark and smoke started coming out of the socket... but I was like the burning bush. I was not consumed." He paused. "But I did just consume your time with that story."

But the Horse can consume my time any day.

(That reminds me of one more thing about the Horse and then I swear I'll stop: I was at my friend Sam's house and we were talking about how people always like to sit in the same seat each class. I said, "That epistemology class is two and a half hours long. I can't pay attention for that long unless I am right up front. I need to be as close to the Horse as possible." I paused. "I didn't mean that the way it sounded," I said, but it was too late. "I am so telling [the Horse's wife, who is also my advisor]," Sam hooted.)

Stealth Recycling and Return of the Horse

Because we live in an apartment complex, the city refuses to pick up our recycling. This has been a major source of stress for me recently - thinking about throwing tin cans and milk cartons in the recycling gives me a stomachache, but I can't say walking 5 miles to the recycling center with my arms full of garbage appeals, either. I've been getting along okay without a car, and I can't say I wish I had one, generally, not even when I'm schlepping laundry six blocks to the laundromat or carrying groceries from the other side of town, but this recycling thing bugged me. K and I finally decided that, since the city collects our neighbors' recycling at no charge to them, we will simply slip our recycling into their bins each week. When I came back from my run yesterday I found that K had disposed of the month's worth of recycling we'd accumulated, and it was a great load off my mind. Moreover, it makes me kind of happy to get our environmentalism on stealthily like this. Recycling ninjas!

For today's class, the Horse had us read one of his own papers, although as he pointed out, we didn't know it was his - there are apparently three professors here with the same name.

"Of course, one's a violinist and the other's a cardiologist, but you never know, they might be men of many layers," said the Horse. "Anyway. I get their email."

Of course, we did know that it was his paper - it could have been written by no one but him. He writes exactly the way he talks - even in writing, he never finishes a sentence without one or four hyphenated asides and parenthetical clarifications. Possibly he meant that we couldn't know it was his paper until we had ruled out the possibility that our experience of the material world is all a dream, though this is not his position. I wonder what the violinist and the cardiologist would say to these questions.

The Bacon Digression

I absolutely adore my epistemology professor, the Horse. The Horse is perhaps the handsomest man I have seen so far here in the Hoosier State (and he is from Montreal) and he is simply hilarious - he never seems to be listening to a word anyone says, but just sort of rolls his head around and pulls on his lower lip and gazes into nowhere when spoken to. The Horse almost never finishes a sentence, which makes it very hard to take notes in his class.

Today I was in the lounge drinking a cup of tea and the Horse came in. "I'm worried that you'll peak too soon," he said, apropos of nothing, in his delightful rumbling, scratchy, nasal voice. "I mean, you'll peak really early and then ... and we want you to kind of -" he made a gradual swooping motion with his hand - "what's that you're drinking? Is that tea? Well, that's okay then. I was ... I was being facetious ... I guess you can't tell, okay, see you later." Then he trotted off.

Today in class he was talking about Descartes' requirement that we must rule out the possibility that we're dreaming before we can truly say we know things about the world around us. He said, "Of course in everyday life we're perfectly justified in saying that we know where the nearest hospital is, or who we are, or where you can get a flatbread with what R.J. Apple referred to as 'the Beluga of bacon' ... 'the Beluga of bacon,'" he repeated, almost dreamily. "It's this bacon called 'nueske's' and you can get it at a place called 'Trulli's' which is on ... is it 10th and 3rd? No - it's - it's 10th and the overpass - Trulli's - " and he wrote "Trulli's" and "nueske's" on the board. "Or you can get it at a place called the Butcher's Block. It is the caviar of bacons.

"Once," he went on, "we were in Memphis - I think it was Memphis - walking down the street and we were suddenly - beguiled by this smell of bacon and it drew us in to this little hole in the wall where we had this bacon, and you can actually get it here in Bloomington. Where was I?"

"You were talking about the Cartesian requirement," I prompted him. And he was off again, galloping away in another direction.