I mean, wow. I am in stun (copyright Liz, 2000). It's just beautiful. And telling, oh so telling.
So, getting back to the pseudo-narrative of the past two weeks: Ultimate has been sweet. In the post that started with the fabulous picture of Sparkle Amuck, I left a post with a vague reference to a game in which I thought we were going to get stomped, massacred. Well, in short, we did not. We had a very hotly contested and generally awesome game - awesome within the context of hat league, but still awesome. Awesome. I am so verbose and eloquent. Anyhoo, the other team had a good handler named Sam and a great mid named Cole and there were just tons of hotly contested catches and scores and Ds and excitement all around. We were down more or less the whole game but clawed our way back and ended up losing by two, the equivalent of a 6-4 game in tennis. Big fun - and it started us (and me) on a great streak of Ultimate. The past two weeks featured two more wins in fun, fun games, also punctuated by good pick-up on Sundays. So it's been cool - a huge 15-7 win against the second place team in our div last week, a tight 15-10 win last night, lots of running and hucking and spiking and all kinds of good gooey goodness.
On the minus side, I'm getting hella dehydrated after each game, making me feel sick once I get home and feeling not so great the next morning AKA right now. I've been drinking plenty of water and gatorade and eating powerbars like normal, so I don't know what's up with that. Will keep you posted, but it may be some combination of the gerund "getting" and the adjective "old."
In other life-related news, the job is still the job - a lot of SAT tutoring, a lot of repetitiveness, but all in all pretty low-key, and it feels reasonably decent to help people. So, steering the focus away from the now and toward the future - the PhD program hunt is in full swing! I spoke with a college professor of mine Martin about writing a letter of rec for me for the ASU philosophy program, and because he is a great advisor, he immediately steered me toward some of the ASU professors on campus to talk more specifically about what the ideal program would be. I spoke with one of Martin's colleagues at the Honors college at ASU, and she directed me to some of the heads of the interdisciplinary science / philosophy programs that are available. There's one in the Biology Dept. called Biology & Society, which has tracks in both History and Philosophy of Science or Bioethics, Policy and Law, but also has a lot of leeway for individualized programs as well. There's another brand new one called Human & Social Dimensions of Science and Technology that would could offer more than just biology-based science / philosophy. And I met with a great potential advisor, Jason Robert, yesterday (and am meeting again with him tomorrow) who was fantastic in telling me about the programs, being highly encouraging and essentially recruiting me to join their department. He is a philosopher by training and also is very familiar with / interested in some of the postmodern philosophy angles I am interested in; he actually did his master's thesis on Foucault and the genome project. He does a lot of work in bioethics, neuroscience and applications of philosophy from a very scientifically / technically knowledgeable standpoint. So this is very cool and good.
So the questions I have, mainly of myself, is how much of a selling out is this, delving back into scientific angles at the expense of something "purely" philosophical? Not much of one, I hope. AS I'm writing statements of purpose and trying to figure out exactly what research niche I'm going to carve for myself, I'm realizing that a primary function of my interest, while on one level involving the collision of postmodern cacophonous narratives and the decentralization of truth, also fully involves a big overarching collision of science and ethics. I phrased it this way yesterday: "On the one hand, I'm disturbed by science's confusion of how and why - the recent explanations of morality / ethics as a survival trait fly in the face of humanistic reasoning, and in my mind have a treacherous relativity that seems to validate any action so long as it is a recourse towards "group survival advantage." And that to me is a plain-faced undesirable conclusion, as it supports reprehensible actions such as genocide, or any atrocity that you care to include that could conceivably grant one group survival over another. So I feel a strong need to reinforce humanistic leanings that truth, value, ethics and meaning are more than just a facilitation of continued survival, more than just an evolutionary product. At the same time, I recognize that both the hard science angle and the overly subjective humanistic one are entrenched in social narratives, and therefore have their own suspect assumptions that should be investigated. Both of these methods of investigation are highly socially constructed; I think it would difficult to argue that science is not the more effective, pragmatic one, if also the more brutish. I want to reconcile their narrative implications in a way that fully addresses their constructedness but maintains a reasonable respect for both as truth-seeking entities; in other words, I want to avoid both the extreme that science is the end-all be-all and the extreme that it is some kind of "social myth."
Woo. R U X-I-ted yet? I am; it is a very cool direction to take my studies and seems to be one with enough flexibility that I can maintain a strong devotion to my school of "contextually-determined meaning" thought. So that is sweet. Now, I just have to get all my app materials in, write a statement of purpose, and... ugh. I need a writing sample, and all of my good ones from senior year at Rice in this vein were destroyed by a computer virus a few years back, with nary a hard copy to be found (thanks for looking, Mom & Dad). So i am kinda stuck, and should probably just write a brand new one, which is obviously time-consuming and, with limited access to university libraries, a bit daunting. So I will have to figure this out, and somewhat soon - apps are due Dec. 15. Yikes!
In other news: Beck trekked up to Boston a couple of weekends ago; pics of the Searl clan can be found here. Her trip to San Diego to see Jamie and the rest of GPGDS was thwarted by the fires. So she's stuck in Phoenix for another couple of days instead of hanging out at the beach for a first visit to CA - sadness. On the plus side, she went into work voluntarily yesterday to work on a surgery and attend a practice meeting. I think that's a pretty clear sign that someone like their jobby job. Today we are hanging out (or rather, I am recovering from Ultimate sickness and Beck is going running/to the dentist) until I have to go into work. SHAZAM! So things seem to be going pretty well lately - we're also looking forward to some hanging with the Dan this weekend and a visit from Greg and Meghan in a couple of weeks. Good times, and 80 degree weather taboot.
Woah - and I complete forgot to mention - I inexcusably had to skip a sacred event last week for an Ultimate game. TRAGIC. But Beck got to go, and if you can figure out what demi-god of music she enjoyed, then you rule:
Either that or you can read. Backwards!!!
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