Testing your knowledge...?

Finals are boring me. I have overestimated my powers of concentration. That is all. There is only so long the human brain can remain focused on something that never really interested all that much in the first place. But it will all turn out okay in the end, I know, its just that the process is so dreadful. There has to be a better way of doing this. There has to.

I overheard someone in the dining hall tonight saying, "But it all turns out all right in the end, doesn't it? I mean, have you actually ever failed a class?"

No comment.

Good night to all (who are not taking finals) and to all a good night.

Erasing Memory

At this appalling wee hour of the morning I came across the following on boingboing, which I haven't visited in quite some time and only stumbled across now after following the randomest of trails, true to the subtitle of this blog, but I will not enumerate the entire list of links explored now. Sometime I should track one of these trails of mine, though. What caught my attention was this:

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/14/rewriting-fear-memor.html

Being able to rewrite the fear from a painful, emotional experience- selectively erasing bad memories. It might sound good to some- but to me, even if it works, without some terrible kind of side effect (and I imagine a side effect could be pretty bad) but still, I think it's a terrible idea, for all its shiny intriguiness. (new word there!) You're supposed to learn from bad experiences- to face your fears and overcome them! To grow as a person! The bad things were not meaningless, nothing in life is. Everything that happens to you is an oppurtunity to be used. Part of being human is facing experiences that scare you and push you out of your comfort zone.

If you can just erase all that by taking a pill or whatever then what was the point? What's the point of experiencing anything if you can just choose to erase it all afterwards? Will we start erasing all the bad decisions we make from our memories, so we literally have no regrets?

To me, this seems wrong. I wish they would think things through before trying ideas like this out on people. Progress for the sake of progress should not be the goal, and even when some advantages can be gained from it (helping people with severe PTSD from really horrible events no person should have to think about, I guess?) first you have to think about all the consequences, their implications, and the eventualities that stem from them. If not, humanity will suffer all the more.

Reading Late at Night

I've been berating myself for years about staying up too late reading a book. I argue with myself- I'll feel awful and exhausted in the morning, I can always finish it tomorrow, no big deal, better to get work done if I'm going to stay up late anyway, etc. Sometimes it works and I go to sleep- more often it doesn't and I resort to coffee, if I'm lucky to wake up early enough to actually have time to drink some.

Last night I was up very late, reading one book I've read before and love, and finished it. Rather than going to sleep, I picked up a new book I hadn't read, one that I hadn't really been planning to read. I won't name it, but it is fast paced and somewhat melodramatic and in style reminds me oddly of Twilight, although they aren't really alike. I didn't finish it, luckily, because it was very late. But I got to the point in the book where most of the questions I'd been waiting to have answered were already resolved.

So I just put it down. Normally I feel a horrible guilt as I realize how late it's gotten, but this one night, I refused to look at the clock. I had a moment of happiness, then, as I turned off the light and crawled, blearily, under the covers. Like a sad, hollow feeling inside me had finally gone away. Just me, my book, a good solid story, and I'd made my own choice when to put it down and let my mind free into sleep. Don't know if it'll happen again. And I am still kind of tired today, but not in a bad way. But last night, I remembered in a different way why I love books.