Deja DMVu

This morning, for the second time this year, I packed up all the necessary documents to get a driver's license into my briefcase, loaded Buggle into the car, and headed for the DMV. Actually, depending on how you count, this was both the second and third time; the first time, I had to go twice, because when I got there I found I had forgotten the briefcase. When I got back again with the briefcase, I discovered that my social security card was missing.

Today, I very deliberately packed my brand new replacement social security card in with the other documents, and was feeling pretty competent all the way to the DMV, where I bought the same cup of crappy coffee from 6th Street Donuts as last time, having forgotten that food and drink are not permitted in the DMV. Well, Daniel and I would sit outside while I finished the coffee, just like last time...wait, no, last time I was drinking the coffee on the way home to get the briefcase, which of course this time is in the back seat of the...wait, where, under that blanket? Behind the car seat? Hmmm.

Maybe I will never get a Texas Driver's License. When the Iowa license expires I will just start biking everywhere. It sounds easier than getting a few pieces of paper from point A to point B, of which I am evidently incapable.

Are we displacing behaviour yet?

I just want the world to know that when I read the following passage, I had reached such a degree of vexation with J. L. Austin's article that I was in fact standing on my head:

Observation of animal behaviour shows that regularly, when an animal is embarked on some recognizable pattern of behaviour but meets in the course of it with an insuperable obstacle, it will betake itself to energetic, but quite unrelated, activity of some wild kind, such as standing on its head. This phenomenon is called "displacement behaviour" and is well identifiable. If now, in the light of this, we look back at ordinary human life, we see that displacement behaviour bulks quite large in it: yet we have apparently no word, or at least no clear and simple word, for it.

I'm trying to start journaling in the morning, but my entries always amount to cryptic variations on "I feel like crap" or "I feel pretty good." Any advice?

Home Improvement

There's nothing like knocking over your wife's new lamp, smashing several crucial wall plugs to little pieces and making a borrowed power drill flash and smoke to make you feel like, you know, a natural not-man.

A funny thing happened on the way to the absolute idea

If you had been at Thomas More College in Fall of 2001, you might have known me as the guy who always ran all the way from the dorms to the classroom, every morning, and not because I was late for class, nor because I wanted the exercise (it wasn't that far). I ran to the classroom because I was running away from my body. I was rushing to dive head first into "Plato's honey head," the only place in the world I cared to be, and that because it was no place.

But this particular classroom was no refuge for despisers of the body. There I was taught, if not to understand how the body is incorporated into the identity of the whole person, at least to look for that understanding. It is for this reason more than any other that I am now fascinated by the German tradition of philosophers beginning with Hegel. More than the carefully orthodox (and therefore in my view correct) but somehow unintelligible formulations of Medieval philosophers on this matter, the ways of thinking of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger seem to be affording me a way to the truth of the body. More on this later.