Salience in the Uneventful

Oftentimes one might think that because the weekend has arrived that this means there is room for many events to take place. Instead, I am here at 2:35 in the morning on a Saturday night/Sunday morning only thinking about how nothing has been happening. Perhaps that is not a completely fair assessment of the way things are, since I did have some minor things happen this weekend. So I suppose I will transition into the activities of this weekend.

Friday night, after eating at Subway for dinner (great turkey subs), I went to Barnes and Noble and invested heavily in some reading material. It was probably more compulsive than anything else but I walked out of the store with four books. I bought a copy of the Koran (I thought it would be nice to have with my middle eastern politics class this semester), a copy of some "essential" readings of the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung, a classic book in sociology by a man named Charles Wright Mills called the "Sociological Imagination", and a copy of William James' "Pragmatism" (a piece of American philosophy by a renowned philosopher and famous psychologist responsible for the "Varieties of Religious Experience"). In passing, I will just mention today that I picked up a copy of G.W.F. Hegel's "Philosophy of History" -- it's apart of a longer term project I'm going to engage in to study Karl Marx and fully understand his thought.

Other than the mass purchase of books something else happened, I was approached by a woman. Honestly, this rarely happens to me so I think it might be kind of fun to summarize. I was standing in the Psychology section looking for a copy of Carol Gilligan's "In a Different Voice" (a classic study in human moral development) and I suddenly I'm being spoken to. Honestly, I was too trapped within my own thoughts to really remember much of how the conversation began, or even what it was about (or even her name at this point), but it was still interesting. I found myself being rather strict and picky though. She seemed like a sweet girl, but she seemed as though she was attempting to emulate me in some way. After asking me some questions about my own opinions I began to notice just how careful she was trying to be in selecting her words. I was flattered in a way -- I guess this meant she wanted to appeal to me maybe in the way that I may have appealed to her, but I felt that if she needed to do this then I would probably be better off without having to pursue it any further. And anyways, as all of you who would likely be reading this would know, I just had a rather rough break up and the idea of even having to conceive of taking a woman seriously at this point is nightmarish at best. Also, I spent an entire year being in a relationship with a parrot, I don't necessarily believe I need to approach anything that would resemble that again.

So, the salience in the uneventful seems here to be the calm, tranquil peace of life without the trouble of insanity or instability brewing overhead. I've felt ecstatic lately, I have my projects I want to work on after I graduate (basically to keep me sharp until I begin graduate school) and I'm wrapping up my remaining semester. Other than the chance (and self-esteem boosting) experience with the woman at the book store, nothing else has happened. I'm a little more irritable tonight over an entirely separate slew of issues, but I believe it would be best to leave those for another day's entry.