Cognitive Rollah-Koastah

cognition involves both feelings and 'rationalized' responses. you can't tease either apart for very long. you can see the relationship everyday, at many levels.

i wake up, like many of us do, feeling groggy and not exactly thrilled about overcoming my own deadweight to move about. my body is switching on many psychological, physical and chemical processes to get myself ready for another day of graduate studentship.

i have a love for coffee. really good coffee. there are reasoned and emotional connections for me here. over the past few years i have gone from Tim Horton's (aka Jim Gordon's), to a bodum, to a stovetop espresso maker. Laura, my love, works at Ideal coffee and feeds me bags of organic dark roast beans every week. i grind them to a desired to fineness, pack the bowl tight, and hit the gas. a process of refining the experience that i can be proud of. in a broader sense, the relationship between my body, my work, my social interactions, and my ideas with coffee is quite multi-dimensional. years have been spent talking, writing, and thinking with coffee in hand. i will often put off doing these things until i have had a cup.

at one level of analysis, my coffee consumption is irrational. i can 'live' without coffee just fine...and perhaps i should given the addiction to a stimulant that makes me dehydrate. money would be saved and i could focus more on 'herbal teas' and water. this still argument fails miserably to cover over the glaring feeling that, in some way, coffee has some appreciable impact on how i live. for good and bad, light and dark.

the coffee is but a particular artifact of some process that is permeating and universal to my existence. for the most part, i think that the same sorts of processes i want to talk about here are also experienced by other people; same patterns, just different particulars.

two things happened over the past few weeks that speak to 'the' process.

a. i really started get down about not having a supervisor and feeling like everything was at a standstill. out of my mouth consistently came poisonous studential rhetoric about the institutions and the egos. teresa leung, at the mac postgrad info night, even remarked that she wasn't impressed with the denunciation of TPS ed admin. dwelling on the situation has caused me much stress and anxiety. why am i in school? what am i doing in toronto? should i be doing something else? will i finish? laura, do we have enough coffee?

i seem to have come through the worst of it now, even without having found a supervisor. hopeful connections fade off in the horizon like human mirages. i'm being forced to really think about why i'm doing this, and at the end of the day i can say i am strong because of my own merits. sitting in my little dingy, i row out into the ocean in search of salvation. i left shore some time ago, too long to ever be able to return. the sun beats down when the waves aren't crashing and as the days go by, i know that the journey is long. longer than i can fathom.

out at sea, in their own little dingies, are other people in my life. every so often we bump into each other and share our stories, some water from solar percolators, and big hugs. they are on on their own journies, and each of us, at many points feels alone. life at sea, away from the hard land, is hard goin'.

there are markers in the waters that tell me i'm on the right path. no maps ever written tell of where i might be going, so it's hard to recognize those markers for anything meaningful. sometimes, though, you just know.

yesterday and today are good examples. i came back to the article i have been hammering on for about a year now. into it i injected some conceptual gravy and quite shortly i will have 20 pages that i'm willing to ship to a publishing group. (see in next posting)

b. computer crash

so yeah, i knew it was going to happen at some point. i purchased an archos multimedia device to back up my hard-drive and a microphone to do audio interviews. a few days after backup, i began to seriously question whether or not my unit would last another few weeks. my eyes were open for a macintosh somewhere down the line and, quite fortuitously, someone at OISE advertised their powerbookG4 for $900. i picked it up the next evening for $850 and got home to turn on an old Dell that was completely defunct.

the smooth transition to a properly functioning computer has helped reduced the stress. i'm not fighting glitches all day. just smooth butter action now. plus, i found out just last week that the health science programme i work for is picking up the tab. i thank institutional capacity.


thanks to my dad, laura, erica, richard, jayson, gail, itay, joanne, and del for helping me get through this stretch. i'm still pumped to row my dingy into whatever comes next.

sp