All apologies

Thursday, October 2, 2008
Old man Carl was back again today to paint the house. Received an email from my former coworker and friend Chris, in which he mentioned the VP debate tonight and attached several pictures of another co-worker named Abie. Needless to say, we were always fond of her. Boys will be boys. Watched a 5 minute “Banana Man” cartoon from the 1980’s on youtube because I’ll do anything that takes me back to my childhood – the period of my life when I was happy. There were 2 “My name is Earl” episodes tonight. Joy had a staph infection in her big toe and in the 2nd episode, Earl stole and blew up an RV. The Cubs lost game 2 in the playoffs tonight 10-3.

Tonight was the first and only VP debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin. Again, unless there is a major gaff, rarely does someone win and lose these debates. Biden performed up to his expectations and Governor Palin definitely exceeded the low expectations the media had set for her.

What else should I be? All apologies. I wish I was like you, Easily amused, Find my nest of salt, Everything is my fault, I’ll take all the blame, Aqua seafoam shame, Sunburn with freezerburn, Choking on the ashes of her enemy, All in all we all are.

I read more about Sartre today. One of his major themes was unlike trees, watches, and other objects, humans have “existence before essence.” For example, if you find a watch, you know the watch was created by a watchmaker for a specific purpose – to tell time. Thus, a watch has essence (a purpose) first, and then it is created (existence) for that purpose. Humans on the other hand, have no innate purpose. Life is meaningless and we were not created or designed for a specific purpose. This is what separates humans from all other things. So we exist first, and have to later create our own essence (purpose). This leads to his 2nd major theme, “man is condemned to be free.” So, the positive outlook for his philosophy is even though there is no specific purpose to our life, we can create our own meaning because we have freedom to make our own choices throughout our life. But, Sartre says this brings the burden of responsibility since we are responsible for the choices we make in our life. Sartre said we always have choices even if we feel like we do not. For example, if you don’t like your job, you can quit it. You may say you can’t quit because you have to pay your rent. Sartre says paying your rent is a choice, you could chose to be homeless. He goes on to say every morning when we wake up, we make a choice because we can live our life or we can commit suicide. This freedom of choice is the silver lining in a meaningless universe for Sartre. He is also known for his quote that “Hell is other people.” Finally, Sartre is known for his warning about the “Danger of the Other.” Following Hegal, Sartre believes consciousness is a social condition. We become aware of ourselves by the way we are perceived by others. The danger is we might feel objectified by others, such as feeling they only see us as a man, a Republican, a Jew, a carpenter, etc. and not a fully conscious being. This can cause us in return to objectify others ourselves. This social objectification, leads to many dangers, such as colonialism, racism, and sexism.

I believe Sartre is correct, that freedom of choice is one of the few silver linings we have in life. While life usually only offers bad choices, we still have the freedom to choose among those bad options. For me, choosing between several bad options is better than having no option at all. That is just about the only thing that gives me a glimmer of hope in my life.