Life: the ever-oppressive season of ‘finals’

Life has (tried to) crush me like the ant I am, but I have managed to slip out from academia’s heavy thumb once more. [Groowwwwllllll] the oppression of finals…

Kant:

• Presentation on non-existent paper: done, well enough.
• Test over material I haven’t read yet: Monday.

Epistemology:

• Paper concerning my knowledge of what I ate for breakfast this morning (oatmeal damnit, I remember, I know I ate oatmeal!): done. –
• the author of the paper argued that belief in God is like belief in the past: we can’t really know either and since belief in the past is still justified, so is belief in God.
• I argued that I pretty darn well know what I ate for breakfast (the author’s example). I can have current visual experience of it along with a coherent story (propositional evidence) about me almost always eating oatmeal for breakfast (except when I eat pan con aceite oliva, Spanish for my other favorite breakfast: bread (in my case toasted) with olive oil. So anyhow, I have immediate (though partial) visual evidence along with a story (mediate evidence I can discuss with other people), so I have pretty good grounds for justifiably believing what I ate for breakfast. God on the other hand… I’ll go there another day.
• Big exam on this and half a dozen other papers: Wednesday.

Ecology:

• Pretty much done with all that needs to be done class-wise.
• Paper (a revision and expansion of a previous one) due next Tuesday.

Sigh… oh, a difficult week ahead. Then my Buddhism course final will be Friday; grading (almost entirely done by my lone, diligent, and saintly grader)… Oh, and I’ve put on ‘word verification’ for comments – as I seem to be a prime target now for spammers… Oh well, ’tis life in the electronic world.

And what else? My wonderful girlfriend tells me I should eat better and go to the gym and spend more time with my house mates. True, true, true. My boss at the Ethics Center happens to give me much the same advice, and so do my folks, at times – so I suppose they’re all quite right 🙂 Now I just need to summon the will to follow it.

Just eight days until my tooth-surgery (abscessed wisdom tooth removal right after the Buddhism exam). The pain has been tolerable, better than the mind-numbing pain killers they gave me.

Anyhow… after finals, tooth-removal, and grading it’s all smooooooth sailing through the holidays and into: Philosophy of Religion, the Greening of Religions, and Philosophy of Law. More goooood times. 🙂