Saturday, October 22

[soid]

 Woke up around 11am. Happy. Slacking around the house and otherwise procrastinating all morning.

Writing my paper 3-7pm. It was time to use some weapons – the "Bang" energy drink. Makes me work for a couple of hours, even in severe episodes of procrastination. I wrote about 3 pages; not too bad. Then it got to me: what am I doing here? What do I even write about? Reproducing some kind of ideology from the "history" textbooks. They are too analytical, feeding me their interpretations, and how do they know anyway? They can't even agree with each other: Hourani says the British were behind Reza Shah's coup d'etat; Abrahamian says he just manipulated everyone including the British, but it's too much to say he worked on the British. Gelvin avoids this topic. And who are they, the authors of these books? British-American historians. Maybe I would have learnt more from actually knowing someone from the Palestine or Iran. Oh, wait, I forgot, my ex-roommate was Iranian – so polished dude, totally got rid of his Persian accent, smiling like an American, acting like one – I don't know how he got so good at it. He didn't like telling me about Iran. I think he didn't like that I knew he was Iranian. I didn't learn much about Iran from him anyway. Perhaps I should've been more persistent asking him. Perhaps I'd learn more about the Middle East than from these fake books. 

But now I have to just finish this paper that I already started hating. 

The trip to Vermont is three weeks away, but now it feels so distant, almost forever. So much shit I have to finish in the upcoming weeks; it almost doesn't matter what happens after 3 weeks. 

Looked into some Topology proofs after dinner, but unable follow it. The mind is elsewhere. Topology is for the morning.

Watched another hour of "Lawrence of Arabia". The British guy assimilates with the beduins. It starts getting interesting. But a beautiful movie most of all. When am I going to Arabia? Maybe Israel, or Lebanon. It'd be exciting.

Bed at 1, but I didn't fall asleep until after 2am.

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

This is deep. But you don't have to express the ideas from books as something you share. You could as well represent them the way you perceive them, ideology and indoctrination (with some standard British approach to the rest of the world: "they are idiots!").

[soid]

Ha, yes, that's true. It's also more fun this way.