I just captured a cave cricket in my kitchen (which, for those of you who are wondering, is neither cavernous in size, nor in atmosphere.) I slowly approached the beast and carefully placed a cup over it as it sat still on the floor, perhaps blinded by the luminous kitchen light. It is now my prisoner.
I learned how to deal with these nocturnal pests when I lived in the basement of a house I shared with two friends. There, in the humid murkiness, I caught at least one every night. Through these pre-bedtime encounters I figured out that they never put up much of a fight. Most of the time, you can just walk up to a cave cricket and smash it, capture it or what have you, and it won't even move. And if they do respond by fleeing, they give up after two meager jumps. That's all they've got, two jumps. Millions of years of evolution-- two jumps.
Pretty pathetic.
It's like they're programmed to not even try; they know who got the short end of the evolutionary stick. Any attempt to escape is futile, it only delays the inevitable. They must realize that the absurdity of life is trying to flee from a well-too-certain death. How existential of them-- Sartre's got nothing on these fuckers.
It almost makes me rethink flushing this poor bastard down the toilet after I finish writing this blog.
Almost.
Perhaps I can draw parallels from this parable on knowing your limitations to recent failed attempts at expressing my feelings about current events. In the last few weeks I've started several blogs on issues ranging from the election, the economy, to politics in general, but I've had to abandon all of them shortly after commencing. I just found it impossible to focus my frustrations into specific subjective propositions supporting broader objective conclusions.
I attribute this to the fact that I've never been great at expressing myself, even about topics that I feel I fully understand. It's a weird cerebral process that I just became cognizant of recently.
I reckon that somewhere along my early developmental stages, I adopted a method for rationalizing complicated concepts that involves omitting given or obvious information from the process of inducing. We all do this to some degree, but I especially adapted it to perhaps debilitating proportions. Once I grasp a part of a process, it's automatically validated, and in my mind, no longer requires to be evaluated as part of the rationale.
So, I often come to conclusions without being able to explain my reasoning. It might just be that I'm full of shit, but let's not go that route just yet.
This shortcoming of mine is why I always hated math teachers that insisted that you showed your work on tests. It would drive me crazy because I often got the answer right away but I would have to learn the "proper" way to come to it so that my teachers didn't think I was cheating. They missed the point completely. I got the answer right, who cares how I got there? Isn't the point of math to develop pathways of logical reasoning? Shouldn't you be happy that I'm doing so all on my own?!
Anyway, this rationale, along with my poor writing skills (in heavy Italian accent: "dees ees a-not ma ferst a-language!") keeps me from making sense a lot of the time and I'd rather spare you the confusion. But I promise to work on it.
Now, how do you think one would go about water-boarding a cave cricket? Hmm.....
I learned how to deal with these nocturnal pests when I lived in the basement of a house I shared with two friends. There, in the humid murkiness, I caught at least one every night. Through these pre-bedtime encounters I figured out that they never put up much of a fight. Most of the time, you can just walk up to a cave cricket and smash it, capture it or what have you, and it won't even move. And if they do respond by fleeing, they give up after two meager jumps. That's all they've got, two jumps. Millions of years of evolution-- two jumps.
Pretty pathetic.
It's like they're programmed to not even try; they know who got the short end of the evolutionary stick. Any attempt to escape is futile, it only delays the inevitable. They must realize that the absurdity of life is trying to flee from a well-too-certain death. How existential of them-- Sartre's got nothing on these fuckers.
It almost makes me rethink flushing this poor bastard down the toilet after I finish writing this blog.
Almost.
Perhaps I can draw parallels from this parable on knowing your limitations to recent failed attempts at expressing my feelings about current events. In the last few weeks I've started several blogs on issues ranging from the election, the economy, to politics in general, but I've had to abandon all of them shortly after commencing. I just found it impossible to focus my frustrations into specific subjective propositions supporting broader objective conclusions.
I attribute this to the fact that I've never been great at expressing myself, even about topics that I feel I fully understand. It's a weird cerebral process that I just became cognizant of recently.
I reckon that somewhere along my early developmental stages, I adopted a method for rationalizing complicated concepts that involves omitting given or obvious information from the process of inducing. We all do this to some degree, but I especially adapted it to perhaps debilitating proportions. Once I grasp a part of a process, it's automatically validated, and in my mind, no longer requires to be evaluated as part of the rationale.
So, I often come to conclusions without being able to explain my reasoning. It might just be that I'm full of shit, but let's not go that route just yet.
This shortcoming of mine is why I always hated math teachers that insisted that you showed your work on tests. It would drive me crazy because I often got the answer right away but I would have to learn the "proper" way to come to it so that my teachers didn't think I was cheating. They missed the point completely. I got the answer right, who cares how I got there? Isn't the point of math to develop pathways of logical reasoning? Shouldn't you be happy that I'm doing so all on my own?!
Anyway, this rationale, along with my poor writing skills (in heavy Italian accent: "dees ees a-not ma ferst a-language!") keeps me from making sense a lot of the time and I'd rather spare you the confusion. But I promise to work on it.
Now, how do you think one would go about water-boarding a cave cricket? Hmm.....
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