Anthropology/History

Reading Amusing Ourselves to Death also makes me want to study anthropology very badly.

"We are in great haste to constuct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing to communicate."  -Henry David Thoreau 

"Prior to the age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to control the contingencies in thier lives.  What people knew about had an action-value.  In the information world created by telegraphy, this sense of potency was lost..."

We have so much information and so little action that we are cursed with elephantine impotence.

Stuff like this makes me want to be a philosophy major.

"What ideas are conveinant to express inevitably become the important content of culture."

"With the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events."

(from Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman)

procrastination

I can't stop thinking that willpower is the solution to stopping my procrastination habits, but I have been saying this for a long time without much progress.  But that is because I have not given it much effort I believe. I hope it is not for lack of motivation, or just plain laziness.  I suppose I should make much more effort toward ending this procrastination, and if that fails can I move on to some more desperate measures. Which I kinda hope is what happens, I think? At least that is what I have been reading on growth says: that giving up is the way to go.  But I'm not needy enough to give up, so I guess I need something to break me. (what am i asking for?)  

On the Other

There is this line in Brave New World that has been going through my head whenever I begin to think about writing: "You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, x-rayish phrases." 

And this has got me realizing, I am not "hurt and upset," cause when I try to think about what gets me all riled up, nothing comes to mind except for theology, which is incredibly hard to write about, cause I have too many questions.

So what can I do to cure this? I need to get my theology down to where I can write about it, which will be hard, but vital (both important and life-giving).

In the same vein, when I was thinking about writing, it seems to me that so much of writing depends upon feeling, upon unlearning numbness, upon getting "hurt and upset", as Huxley would say.