Is this thing on?

INTARWEBZ!

Hi!  I totally remembered that I had a blog that LITERALLY ONES of people kind of read.  And I was all ZOMG I should for totes go back to that sort of FUNTIMES SPECIALNESS of pouring my RAARAGE and general perplexities out into the vast, sticky tubes of the WWW.  And then I was all, eh – PHD SCHOOL IS WORK YO and went back to reading my nice Kant and Foucault and generally letting my RAARAGE worry itself out in batshit crazy papers for perfectly nice profs who for totes did not deserve having to put up with my VERY SPECIAL CRAZYTIMES writing.

But I’m a giver, what the fuck can I say?

Possible True Fact Story

I totally have plans on returning to blogging soon.  Those of you who follow such things.

In which Hypatia's Girl tries to make up for being a navel-gazer

But only by being a self-obsessed blogger.  HA! FOOLED YOU!

But seriously - true fact #1 - People all over the internet find my post on Of Montreal's Aldhils Aborteum.  This is not my best post.  They should find a more fun one.

True fact #2 - Who the fuck do I know in Denver?

True fact #3 - I know who's in Honolulu!  HI THERE!

True fact #4 - I have taken multiple pictures of my cat like this, on multiple days.  WITHOUT SHAME

That is all.

In which Hypatia's Girl wakes up on the wrong side of the bed and contemplates whether or not Internet language is appropriate for the Internet.

(Are we still capitalizing "Internet," by the way?  I feel like we used to, but that maybe now we're over the whole ZOMG IT'S THE INTERNET kind of thing.  Someone call Strunk and White!)

I'm kind of unimpressed with this.  Kind of deeply unimpressed.

Look, this blog, she does not get a lot of comments.  A lot of that is that this blog, she is small, rarely updated (working on that) and I'm not totally certain how I want to develop it.  Now, I could post a bunch of meta-bullshit posts about finding my bloggy path and developing my interwebby tone, or I could recognize that I'm writing a fucking insignificant blog out in the hinterlands of blogspot, and, you know, just fuck around until I hit my stride.  This post (which will totes get interesting in just a minute) notwithstanding, allow me to assure you, 15 people on the internet (Internet?) who will read this one day, when in doubt I always go for the latter option.  For fuck's sake, I'm a philosopher, that's totally line one of my job description.

Anyway - comments - I don't get a lot of them . . . So I hadn't really had any hoops to jump through to comment on it.  In the same way as I don't really have a policy in my day-to-day life for what to do in case of shark attack.  And then, this morning, I wake up all cranky-pantsed and it's raining and some TOTES FOR REALZ FUCKING HELPFUL D00D CAN HAZ ANONYMOUS HANDY HINTS FOR THE BENEFIT OF MY LADYBRAYNE BUT CANNOT HAZ BALLS TO USE A NYM.  And now I'm all cranky-pantsed, and it's raining, and I'm deeply unimpressed with Anonymous Intarwebz D00d.  So now EVERYONE has to register to comment.  WAY TO BREAK THE TOY FOR EVERYONE.  Sheesh.

I mean for fuck's sake, the insane, anti-atheist, notorious internet troll Dav* Mab* can fucking have a name when posting crazy, vaguely anti-Semitic, death-threat laden, mass-produced comments.

Commenting under "anonymous" annoys me for two reasons, the first and most important, it removes the anonymous from the community.  I cannot respond to you by name or nym, and so I am addressing a blankness.  It's also fucking cowardly, and bespeaks a lack of imagination.  AID is probably relatively educated, and perhaps AID thinks that passive aggressive offers of helping my tone ARE REALLY FUCKING HELPFUL, but for seriously, why the fuck do you, who is simply a blank cipher, think that I should change one goddamn thing I do, because you think my using internet speak on the fucking internet makes me look bad.  For the fuck of shit, it's like saying "You know, Hypatia's Girl, using all that philosophical language in your philosophy paper makes you look pretentious."

And so, Anonymous Intarwebz D00d, allow me to devote the rest of this post to addressing YOUR ANONYMOUS HANDY HINTS FOR THE BENEFIT OF MY LADYBRAYNE.

Update on The Listening Project

Meant to post this, like, a week ago.
The Listening Project is on hold for a bit.  My car was broken into and part of what got stolen was my beautiful and totes loved external hard drive.  The hard drive that had all of my music (in addition to all of  my writing and most of my teaching materials).  Gone.  Disappeared like my last willingness to give this Rust Belt city a chance to turn my heart.

I have some music right now, but it sure as shit isn't anything I'm willing to tell the internet I listen to.  At least not without some decent stuff mixed in.

Your sympathies are appreciated.  I'll try to get back to this soon.

Until then, try this:

Alas, Hypatia's Girl is Busy

It seemed like such a decent idea to start a blog, but then, you know, you get busy.

What's interesting about this busyness (those parts that are not actually panic attacks about graduate school applications and the fact that ZOMG, if I don't get into a Ph.D. program this time I'll probably just be a loser and work retail, quietly dying inside from the fact that I have a dream and can't fulfill it, I mean . . . really) is that it all revolves around teaching and pedagogy and the fact that I, apparently, can't tell the difference between Critical Thinking and Ethics.

I just spent a very entertaining half hour talking about this semi-god-forsaken class that I'm teaching, and in doing so realized that what I want the kids in the CT class to learn is virtually identical to what I want the kids in the Ethics class to learn.

Now, this of course, is likely of little surprise to Hypatia's Boy, with whom I have countless and entertaining arguments about the role and availability of reason in thinking, but the connection between the course objectives in CT vs. ethics for me isn't that weird Kantian belief I have that clear thinking leads you to good ethics because prejudice and being a dick are inherently unreasonable stances (true story, you're not thinking clearly if and when you engage in systems of privilege) but rather that, quite literally, all I want my students to take away from either class is that you cannot think alone.

It's that line from the prologue to The Human Condition, "we must think what we are doing."  One of the most interesting and horrifying positions my students take (aside from the libertarian who really doesn't understand just what a terrible human being they are when they say that people only deserve healthy food if they can afford it) is that quasi-non-judgmental stance where they say things like "true for X."  As in, who are we to say that X's belief in Y is wrong, perhaps truth is relative.  It's more pronounced in the ethics classes, where there is this strange desire to not admit to a universal ethic.  This weird relativism extends into an inability to consider future, interrelated consequences.

I know where they get it from.  We don't see a lot of empathetic thinking.  We do see a lot of false balance.  Look, you do not want to live in a world where there is only solipsistic reasoning.  We do not actually live in a world where "true for X person but not Y person" has meaning.  The earth is an oblate spheroid, and we are capable of telling members of the flat-earth society that they are wrong.  The universe is 13.5ish billion years old.  Systems of privilege are wrong, and so is ignoring them.  This is true.

Critical thinking is not all about learning about models of argumentation, it's about learning to think what we are doing, learning to think about what effects our actions have on the world, and whether we are justified in taking that action.  Ethics is not all about reading papers on differing positions and trying to decide what a Utilitarian would do, or how to destroy the oppositions' argument, rather it's about learning to think what we are doing, taking into account our actions on others and whether we are justified in taking that action.

I've been thinking about this long enough that writing the last gave me such an intense feeling of deja vu that I find myself vaguely dizzy.  I should read more novels I suppose.

Time as cycles, or spirals, but never the linear.

I finished my thesis today.

This is not to imply, in any way whatsoever, that the stupid thing is done.  But it's done enough that my poor, dear, immensely patient thesis director can wade through the pages and pages of words and footnotes and interpretive dance and tell me what it is that I've said.

Because at this point, I'm not certain that I can remember.

What's interesting about this, besides the point that I may actually really get my damn Master's, is that I've been studying Arendt for ten years.

This question of the world in common has been my question for the past decade.  For ten years I've been worrying this question of the social.  And again, this is not to imply that I'm done with this worry.

A decade.

I like moments like these.  I liked when Harry Potter came to a close and I got to look at the loop my life had made from the first time I read the books to the close of the last one.  I like to look back and see where I've changed and where I have stayed resolutely the same.

And yet, so much more work still to do . . .

A Shot Across the Bow: or, a friendly introduction

Beginnings are difficult.


It's this first post that's kept me from blogging until now. How to set the tone properly, to establish purpose and direction, to justify doing this and not writing my thesis as we speak . . .

In short - how do I introduce myself when I know that most of those who will read this will already know me?
Look how meta I am!

At any rate, I am a political philosopher, with a deep and abiding love for Hannah Arendt, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Giorgio Agamben. I'm finishing my thesis so that I can have my Master's, so that I can go on to a Ph.D. program so that I can get a job to pay off the student loans I need to get my Master's. Also my B.A.

This blog will focus on those aspect of pop culture, current events, the mere facts of living in a world with other people that leave me cross-eyed and ranting. Only now I won't have to just rant at the boy and the roommate, and I won't be limited to the few words Facebook allows you to add to links. Hooray!

Also, my kitties are adorable.

This is Appie - she's an adorable idiot.

This is Alex, he's too smart for his own good. Or, more likely our own good.