Our last tear
I forgot my ex-fiancée’s hairstyle. I realized that while high, camping alone in Wyoming. I had to look it up, but the thought made me cry. I think about her daily, sometimes with nostalgia, sometimes with sadness or guilt, sometimes…
Ten Sunrises
My uncle once said, “how many more times am I going to see you? Ten?” I’d never considered the finitude of that relationship. Within a few years, his brother, another uncle of mine, died. He was 54. I saw him…
Quantitative and Qualitative Experiential Knowledge
Stop asking me what Latinos think. Ask a pollster. I can tell you how I feel about stuff, but come on!
Circling the Flame
This is a sort-of-sequel to this post. It is all-but-decided that I will be joining the faculty of the University of Nevada, Reno in September. This blog has been going since I was a junior in college, it’s strange to…
Life is living through distinctions you had once denied existed
This is my third, and probably final year on the academic job market. I have been doing extremely well: I applied to 16 jobs, have been interviewed by six departments, and been offered fly-outs to four of those. My former…
Getting Your Hopes Up
I had a choice:
1. Remove all of the information about this interview out of my life, computer, and mind
2. Get my hopes up.
A Candle in the Deep, Dark Void
This is my third consecutive year of not knowing what the next year will hold. I’ve had a number of these years. In 2001, I didn’t know where I would go to college for a few months. It was panic…
Malignant True Believers
A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. – Winston Churchill On the way back home from my 30th birthday, I sat next to a 20-year-old, talkative Christian missionary to India. Aside from chattering about…
Life Buddies
We have gym buddies, we have drinking buddies, and we have shopping buddies. I want a life buddy. Someone to remind me to work toward my goals and to motivate me daily. I think, ideally, best friends or life partners…
I’m a doctor!!!
Dear freaders, When I started this blog, I was a lowly 19-year-old college student from New Mexico. In that time, I’ve lived in Australia, Seattle, and North Carolina, I’ve had a half-dozen jobs, and I’ve gone through graduate school. As…
Disparaging humor
One day, I stopped listening to the WTF podcast and to Walking the Room. I stopped reading the famous blogs of Brian Leiter, Jerry Coyne, and Larry Moran. I stopped hanging out with my friends Dave, Miranda, and so many…
The Agreement
Neil deGrasse Tyson recently made a stir in the philosophy community by disparaging the entire field as asking pseudoquestions. Essentially, he says philosophers waste their time, think they are doing important things, and he doesn’t have time for them. Admittedly,…
How not to encourage someone
I had a job interview this week. While people were encouraging me to do well, I realized humans haven’t really figured out certain conversational norms. We don’t know what to say when some tragedy occurs (except a frowny face and…
Conceptual Methodology
I read this today: What matters is to be right, not nuanced. Again, sometimes the right position is nuanced, but there’s no reason to assume that from the get-go. And I fully agree. But it inspired me to develop a…
Some more types of problems
My friend Benjamin Jagear used to always say to me, “Pixel – look at all of the problems in your life and ask yourself: how many of those problems were caused by your enemies and how many can be traced…
How to fail at Philosophy
There is no rest from now on. My friend’s girlfriend said today1 that it was silly for people to fail a philosophy class because it was just philosophy. “Nobody’s wrong in philosophy.” To the uninitiated, this might seem a plausible…
Book Smarts vs. Street Smarts [part 1 of 2 of (part 2 of 2)]
80. My circle of friends hasn’t really changed since middle school. This alone makes me want to leave New Mexico. This is Daniel’s long awaited response, In a recent conversation, Pixel and I argued whether or not “streets-smarts” was anything…
Why why isn’t interesting
I recently did a post on mysteries. It wasn’t very in depth, really it was just me asking everybody what their favorite mystery was. I worried when I wrote the post that somebody was going to ask ‘the big question’…