No Strain In The Membrane.
Man, it feels great to be back at uni. I knew I just had to get through the holidays and that confidence would reestablish itself, hopefully next time I'll just be confident in the off season too. As I was on the bus towards St. Lucia on Wednesday morning I just felt completely as ease, not sure when I last felt like that. Sort of like that calm feeling you get just before sleep, minus the drowsiness and imminent sleep part. There's probably a fairly common term for that, but as it's not a normative state for me I'm not aware of it's name. That day I had my first lecture and tutorial for PHIL2750, Social and Economic Justice. Our lecturer gave us an introduction to distributive justice, different ideas regarding how involved the state should be in a person's life in direct relation to their happiness and survival.
Basically it seems to be about different opinions on welfare or more specifically how much should be allocated to the less fortunate AND who can be defined as being less fortunate. That must be a satisfying job, deciding which need stricken members of society deserve to be aided and which should be ignored for being too apathetic. This course will probably be my only source of controversial statements this semester as we're directly discussing various economic theories of which everyone has their own take. Already someone suggested that if minimum wage laws were eliminated during major financial crises it would greatly alleviate unemployment. Which is obviously true, but very, very unjust. To be fair the guy may not have been spurting his personal beliefs instead raising the hypothetical, but the tone in his voice suggested a frightening lack of empathy for the downtrodden.
Trying not to let those sort of comments bother me this semester, I will literally crumble if I take everything to heart on a long term basis. Alternatively I'm not aiming to be hard as a rock either, emotion precedes rationality by placing you on the right path to the just decision. What I really want to try this semester is to treat the classes like a political vacuum, so that myself and others can regurgitate any opinion simply for the sake of argument with no real-world ramifications. It's going to take a lot of restraint, but rationality and levelheadedness are key to partaking in a decent argument. It's not going to help my cause I forget how to speak because I'm too enraged, which has certainly happened in the past. Anger has a way of seriously limiting my verbal reactions.
What's been most amazing this week has been the difference in alertness. I feel more intelligent as compared to last semester and it's not simply because I have more knowledge. There's this sensation that my brain is more active, as if some of the alcohol related brain damage has been reversing itself. I've been frustrated by that in the past as I'm not an idiot yet I've felt like one at times because of slurred speech even sober, there's also been many occasions where I've completely forgotten parts of my vernacular and large sections of memory.
Robin was relating a story the other night at trivia about some photos he took of me for an assignment and I was completely blank. No memory of the photos nor that he was even a photography student. I'm beginning to suspect that my only memories of the previous decade are the ones I've written on this blog, I remember them well enough, but only because I bothered to write it down. So if I embellished or exaggerated some of the details, those are basically fact since I recall nothing else.
My point is that I have the distinct sensation that my brain is springing back to life. I've been to three lectures thus far and have remained alert throughout, understood everything at my whim and the information had been stored in the memory banks. A stark difference to the previous semester where I had to focus greatly on staying conscious and if I were fortunate enough to have a little bit more energy than usual I needed to pinpoint my concentration on the topic of discussion as if it were the small rodent to my single minded eagle brain. Otherwise I'd get distracted and quickly lose the plot.
Thursday bore an even larger challenge, starting the first lecture at 10AM, followed by a tutorial at midday. A lengthy two hour break after which another tutorial at 3PM, concluded by one final lecture. By the time all academic requirements were completed it was 6PM. Far busier than any day I've had in at least three months. The first lecture, POLS2511 - The Politics of Peacebuilding, a relatively young concept within the world of Politics. We learned the difference between various methods of striking peace accords, namely that 'peacekeeping' is about monitoring a situation up close and personal to try and end the violence. This is referred to as 'negative peace' i.e. the absence of violence.
'Peacebuilding' refers to the process of creating stability in the nation after the violence has ceased, which has not yet become common practice. It involves amongst other tasks establishing a stable government, law and order, some form of dedication to human rights, reconciliation between warring factions and ideally complete disarmament. It's a very hands on approach defined as 'positive peace'. When the lecturer mentioned that most conflicts in the world are intra-state, that being civil battles within one nation there was this beautiful moment of clarity. I wouldn't exactly label this as being propaganda, but we do seem to be under the impression that there are a lot more conflicts between different nations rather than internal struggles.
It's difficult for me to put into words. I mean it's an obvious fact, but it's not an obvious standpoint to have about world conflicts. We are raised on the stories of the first and second worlds wars, the following campaigns in Asia, the Cold War and finally all the conflicts in the Middle East. All of which are overtly international. The only civil wars we really discuss are those spanning previous centuries. But when you really list all of the conflicts it does become apparent how often they are an intrastate war, Rwanda, Sudan, Myanmar, Bosnia, South Africa, Cuba, Russia, China to name a very small percentage of the 20th/21st century quarrels that were internal. It's one of those moments where you really pay attention to the strangeness of the inner cranial workings, how we subconsciously piece information together.
It's certainly changed my perspective of war, I suppose that my focus on international wars such as the ones happening in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan made the intrastate conflicts seem less serious by comparison. I'm trying to think of another example where the subconscious fools you into thinking a certain way even though the truth is also in your possession just waiting to be accessed. I suppose animal farming is a bit similar, you know whilst you're eating your burger that this meal came from something that used to be alive, you can also piece together that they must have been killed specifically so that burger could reach your mouth. But it's not until you actually witness that death that it becomes very real, up until that point it's very difficult to equate that container of mince meat on the supermarket shelf with something that once roamed the land.
I love realizations like that, certainly wouldn't have had it sitting at home killing time. After the following tutorial I wandered devising ways to make the two hour break go faster. There's always so many people at the beginning of the semester, everyone making vows that they're going to work harder and attend every class I suppose. I don't want to sound cynical but numbers do drop drastically after a few weeks, maybe then I'll be able to find somewhere to sit around lunch time. I guess I started feeling a bit tired, two hours is a long time to be without mental stimulation and you start thinking 'can I be bothered to hang around?' After all if you're tired then, how are you going to make it through another three hours of classes? Surprisingly my energy levels went back up once I made it to that next tutorial before the final lecture. So much so that I didn't consider skipping class again.
I know I'm going on about very simple concepts, but it just hasn't been the case for me in the past. Having energy and being alert are relatively new sensations for me. Presumably I'll be able to keep it up, it completely relies on whether I can schedule everything perfectly. If I can manage my assignments without resorting to completing them at the last minute then I'll be able to go to every lecture and tutorial, which I love very much. It's seriously the best part of university.
My final lecture on Thursday was for POLS2302 - Political Thought, which examines the philosophies, ideologies and political ideas that have emerged since the time of Plato. Additionally we'll be looking at the history of our political institutions. In this lecture it was mostly focuses on Greek society during their democratic period starting approximately 500BC, Athens predominately. We then took a look at some of the fundamental concepts of Plato's arguments followed briefly by the philosophies of his student Aristotle. Whilst this lecture did grab my interest I think I'll be even more enthralled once we reach the Renaissance period where the political thought had a more direct influence on modern society.
It's a good thing that much of the resource material overlaps between these Politics & Philosophy classes, you get to hear the same ideas from notable philosophers and political thinkers thus making it easier to remember, but each class looks at those ideas in a different way giving you a much broader perspective.
So it was a very productive week, I'm enjoying the return to academic life, I just have to somehow remember that academic life doesn't exclusively have to be within the realm of university grounds. I'll eventually find the motivation to continue the learning outside of university hours and holidays, I'm sure of that. I'll also be able to start piecing together my schedule for the semester soon, must try and stick to it. It already feels much easier than last semester, probably due to the ever increasing gap between present freedoms and past abuses, but also because of dropping my workload to three subjects instead of four.
Will chill a little today, browse through some of my reading material and prepare myself for The Devin Townsend Project later tonight. I don't know what material he'll be playing whether there will be any Strapping Young Lad songs or even songs from his other solo projects. But I've been listening to his latest two albums under the Devin Townsend Project moniker, Ki and Addicted and I'm intrigued by the originality of it. If there ever was a master of genre spanning it would be Devin Townsend...at the very least he'd come a close second to Mike Patton.
First concert of March though, which makes me worry now that the busy festival season has ended whether I'll be able to continue this level of concert attendance. I suppose there's The Dead Weather on the 23rd and then Machine Head on the 27th to keep me content. But to be honest April onwards is looking a bit skint, I'm going to listen to a lot of new material to see if I like some of the bands that are coming during that time such as Paradise Lost, Spoon, Turisas, Gogol Bordello and The Cult. So hopefully I'll discover some great music within that lot. That was the original plan anyway, if there are few bands coming to Brisbane that I'm familiar with then it's time to branch out. I only discovered recently that I like Animal Collective shortly after they toured Australia, I don't want to make the same mistake with any of those bands I listed above.
It's only 6AM so I might try and get a little bit more sleep, but here's a couple of Devin Townsend Project clips which will hopefully entice others to want to see him live.
