Selling Sno-Cones at the Beach

crime and punishment

Hmm. If you are asked to give an update on your research to your fellow grad students, what would you do?

1. Try to make it light: pop appeal, lots of jokey references to drinking and working on your tan and meeting fun people;

2. Try to make it really intense, conveying your sense of the deeper spiritual and ethical purpose of your work; or

3. Show lots of scenic slides.

I think my natural inclination would be the second approach. But that's just me - cuz I'm basically a serious person and although I'm not above self-deprecating humor, sometimes I feel like showing the intellectual side I feel usually has to be hidden. That said, there are lots of advantages to the #1 and #3 approaches as well. Can it really be only about how you want to present yourself - at a point in time? If you have imprinted that impression, are you stuck with it?

Also today: a 90-minute conversation with a Boston attorney on my affidavit for a court case in Massachusetts. It reminds me that "I could've been a lawyer" and a damn good one, too; I really "think like a lawyer." But the law as it's developed in the US is an intellectual game missing its ethical/moral center, at least in my opinion. When right loses to logic, there's something amiss.

Yet the value of believable logic and servicde to truth mustn't be overlooked. Saddest case I can remember: someone I know looked like a total jerk on the witness stand because she "spun" her ideas to serve what she thought was the greater good, yet she wasn't skilled enough to pull it off, so everyone knew she was lying, which was just pathetic. Raskolnikov, are you listening? The end never justifies the means. Harldy ever anyway (which means I've bought into his fallacy of the superior intellect). Must the Truth always be disinterested?

The Pixies sound like an incessant, repetitive version of the B-52s. What's up with that? It's hurting my brain.

Posted by otto0114 at September 24, 2004 08:51 PM