Before I start, let me just thank all of my friends for being just so damn awesome. Not everyone has pals who will hang out with you all day everyday for two weeks straight. Plus, I think staying out until 2 am has helped me to adjust to the time zone change much quicker.

Note: all of this was written from my laptop and has now only recently been added, but I fiddled with the posting dates for greater continuity.

As of this writing I am in Newark airport, bored and tired, a victim of Tucson’s weather. Perhaps its last act of spite against me as I leave. Whatever the reason I am left with lots of free time and have been listening to audio tapes analyzing Nietzsche. The lectures are long and as one might imagine full of ideas that one needs to sit and chew on afterwards. So, extending that metaphor, I’ll chew with my mouth open on the blog. Nietzsche’s idea that compassion is a form of domination and altruism is a form of selfishness annoys the hell out of me. It’s along the same lines as the rhetorical question posed in one of my classes “Isn’t a lack of culture a culture in itself?” I ridiculed this paradox and invented silly ones of similar structure, so I’m bothered when I come to such things in the works of a great philosopher. I of course know that sometimes that such paradoxes do occur and that mutually exclusive ideas often have some common ground, but I am wary of them nonetheless. Maybe it’s my own ego that keeps me from accepting that acts of selflessness on my part are actually selfish. Do I have to hate my action and derive absolutely no satisfaction from it for it to be truly selfless? Applying Eastern philosophy to this quandary, Zen koans contain paradoxes, illogical statements and nonsensical parables. These koans are not meant to be taken at face value but to point at some concept greater than the ideas put forth in the sayings. Perhaps the selflessness is selfishness paradox isn’t to be taken at face value but to be used as a starting point for some greater philosophical question. Maybe I’m just talking nonsense. But then again, isn’t nonsense the most sensible thing of all?

OK, I’m on the plane now on my way to Freedom. And by Freedom I mean France. Anyway, I was thinking some more and the idea that the same trait, in this case selfishness can be used to produce two different results, namely greed and charity. Nietzsche had mentioned something to that effect, using philosophy as a hammer to both destroy obsolete ideas and to allow the creation of new and more helpful ones. One of the things in Behemoth that was mentioned was that the same regions of the brain are used in fighting as in sex. Again, a trait in all humans is used in both to create life and to destroy it. Hmmm… maybe it isn’t so much of a paradox as a double-edged sword.

Moving on, he also said that in order to completely get rid of God we had to get rid of grammar, claiming that the subject/object nature of our language reflected our deep-rooted mindset that a deity presided over all living beings. I dunno about that, I mean I don’t know much about the structure of non-Western languages but wouldn’t an atheist society need to have subjects and objects in their grammar too?
I completely agree with his take on the Seven Deadly Sins and how none of them are really serious enough to be sinful as traits by themselves. They’re basically made to control people. Make them perpetually happy, content, productive and meek. The perfect slaves. I once had a discussion about Christianity with a devout Christian; she explained some real interesting points about the way sins were supposed to work. Apparently, God is prideful but that’s not a sin because He actually is perfect. And since Adam and Eve were perfect it would not be a sin for them to be prideful either (the idea that two perfect beings can make a mistake is something I’ll have to ask about, after all God is perfect too…). So then it’s not so much a sin to be prideful so much as it is to think you’re better than someone you’re not.

The whole getting to Uppsala thing was a real joy. The storm in Tucson made me miss all my connections so I spent hours and hours in Newark and Paris. When I finally got to Stockholm I learned that my luggage hadn't arrived, I had no choice but to go to Uppsala without it. When I got there the office where I would get my room keys was closed so with no luggage and no place to stay I wound up in a hotel.

On a lighter note, since I'm in a foreign country making a fresh start for myself I've decided to change my post name. A nice internet pseudonym, a la Jinn and Bickbyro, whoever they are...


Freyr is the god of sun and rain, and the patron of bountiful harvests. He is both a god of peace and a brave warrior. He is also the ruler of the elves. Freyr is the most prominent and most beautiful of the male members of the Vanir, and is called 'God of the World'. After the merging of the Aesir and the Vanir, Freyr was called 'Lord of the Aesir'. Freyr was also called upon to grant a fertile marriage. The center of his cult was in Uppsala, Sweden.