meaningful moments

this is the last stretch before the semester ends, and as i was scrambling away and chipping away at various tasks, i remembered that i had multiple posts that i'd been trying to write over the course of the year that i'd neglected under a pile of other obligations.

i thot i'd resurrect them now, in incomplete forms. but i think the intent in their conception is plain to see and certainly makes them no less real, so let them be. perhaps later i will find time to fill in the holes. until then, allow them to be the living non-dead.

yours,
stephanie

~~~
[from Nov 18, a Saturday]
i have had the most productive day, in the most unproductive way.

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i have developed a habit of doing little to no work on weekends, piddling my days away at parties, and in aimless wandering. i've been on a 20 year search for meaning in my life, and with little to no feelings of success.

dreams aren't enough to grow meaning from, and they only float for so long. when you try to cover your holes with feathers, they only get swept away. i've been learning to pack the feathers tight, and building them into wings...

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i've learned to actually enjoy my life for the first time. i've quit frittering toward meaningless ends, and have found pleasurable meaning in my own self-determined ways. while i used to feel accomplished because i did well in the university and formal educational system, now i realize the value of an external education. and i firmly believe that more can be learned in brief transitory exchanges with strangers than can be read from the pages of a textbook.

and forging a lasting friendship out of a meeting with a stranger can be the best tutorship one will ever receive. for instance, i have two professors this semester whom i owe a great deal of thanks to, especially my Satiric Film professor. the wonderfulness of this individual is beyond my descriptive abilities, but let me explain what is truly remarkable: our educational system teaches us to value professors as authority figures. this immediately calls into existence a relationship of power, which holds the student in the receptive role. there's no room for interaction in this relationship. in fact, it's not a relationship at all, but a very limited manufacture of knowledge. it's a mechanical view of human value and exchange:

IN: prof's knowledge/experience, student's attention
OUT: knowledge/experience

the products of this exchange are limited and not very profitable. from a capitalist standpoint, this would be a shit-poor business. there's no profit, no gain, the amount you put in is the same as what you get back. there's no room for growth or development, no progress, just a stagnation. it conceptualizes education as a producer of intellectual capital and pretends that capital is all we need.

call me a hedonist, i think i am one.

but for the first time in my life, i feel at ease with the uneasiness, comfortable with the discomfort. which isn't to say that i've become complacent or that i've resolved to accept things the way they are. surely not. but i've found pleasurable ways to deal with them. rather than agitate myself, rather than try to limit

i slept for 11 hours for the first time in years last
night, and it was amazing. i woke up and felt like 20
years had passed me by. the sun was shining off the
dew on the grass outside and lighting up the dark
little corner in my room where i rest my head at
night. i wanted to take a picture of it, but i just
put my head back down and fell asleep again.

luckily i have a mind camera and i wasn't too sleepy
to use it.

i've been seeing everything in vivid cinema lately.
that is, i've been lucky enough to pause and watch
things, and they're somehow fitting together in this
on-going screenplay i have in my head. hard to
explain, but maybe when i see you again it will all be
clearer.