Gender at NYU

Some friends and I on Thursday went to see Judith Butler's talk "Undiagnosing Gender." It was an NYU event and you had to be a privileged NYU student in order to get tickets in advance. Luckily, the nice folks at NYU broadcast it via monitor to a basement floor of another NYU building about two blocks away. I saved $3. It was a good talk. She's much easier to understand when she talks. I've tried reading her and it's extremely difficult. So I have to brag about something.

After the J.B. talk, two of us went to a bar to meet with some people from Lib. Studies. We were talking about our Modernity teacher and one of the women told me that she had meditated on something that I said in class and that when the teacher didn't comment, it was criminal. Damn. I wonder if her being drunk had anything to do with those nice words. It's things like that that keep me going. On Friday, I kind of studied but I wasn't totally satisfied.

I went to see Bowling for Columbine Friday night. There is a lot to take in but it is a must-see for conservatives, liberals and everything in between. I must admit to a tear or two every so often. It's both funny and heart wrenching and ultimately necessary. And here it is, early one morning and I'm looking at a lot of reading when I wake up. I wrote a draft of my paper on Notes from the Underground. I went on about reason and the freedom of will. The topic for next week is freedom and the resistance to reason. Or something like that.

I think I may have done a decent job, but we'll see tonight when I look at it with fresh eyes. I only have three more of these papers to write. That's good news. The bad news is that that means the semester is over halfway finished and I'm just now starting my Slavery and Race papers. My topics are good I just need to get them to where I can control the outcome. I tend to want to cover a lot and it becomes impossible to do a half-decent job. We'll see what happens. G'night.