>Terribly thankful for awesome friends I forgot I had.

>Zombie movie nights!

>Adult conversations I've been sorely missing!

>Hearing that I've been a lot happier over the last year, and that people noticed!

>Friends helping me move later this week!

>Getting my butt out of my apartment and actually doing something.

X-posted to i_am_thankful

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Had a good night hanging out with two coworkers, Tara and Diana tonight. We watched Diary of the Dead and then sat outside and talked till about 1am. It was nice. I have sorely missed talking and just being with people. I have really become a hermit lately, sadly due to so much going on over the last month. Hopefully I can break myself of that. But baby steps; I realized what went wrong with the whole Events and Adventures thing was it was just too much right away. Making plans and keeping said plans, keeping committments that I paid for... was just too much. Cuz some days, I just don't feel like going out. Blame the depression, anxiety, whathaveyou. But being almost pressured into being social just shut me down. So bye-bye, E&A. I'll just stick with my low-key get-togethers with friends. I'll worry about "meeting someone" later.

Okay... terribly overdue for going to bed. Meeting dad @ 10am to go kick some ass at Home Depot for being idiots.

Ciao.

The other day I picked up the best book evar at the B&N. Well, it's really more a series of books. It's the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series, and I have just gotten into it. The first book I bought was Batman and Philosophy: The Dark Knight of the Soul , and tonight at work I just got Family Guy and Philosophy. Titles to aquire next: X-Men and Philosophy and House and Philosophy: Everyone Lies. Why the sudden interest in philosophy? Well, for a) I've missed really good, thought-provoking conversations, etc.; and 2nd) this series applies the slight highbrow arena of philosophy to everyday and topics otherwise seen as unintellectual. And what better way to get people interested in the abstract and crazy world of philosophy than apply it to X-Men, Watchmen, Batman, The Daily Show or even Metallica?

So far I'm half way through the Batman volume, and it's pretty epic. This one essay, about the proper way to govern Gotham, was just epically amazing. The topics of dicussion in this book are some that have plagued comic fans for ages. Is it socially beneficial for Batman to even exist? Is Batman and his mission moral/virtuous? Is the Joker morally responsable for his actions? And many more. The one essay that should have been the milestone, cornerstone, keynote essay for the book, "Why doesn't Batman just kill the Joker?" was... well, quite disappointing. I mean, that's the big question no? Batman's one true nemesis, the ying to his yang, the Al Capone to his Elliot Ness. The ramifications of that action would just send the Batman universe---the whole DC Universe---into upheaval for years to come!! It'd be like... Why doesn't God just kill Satan? Ooooh... Let's sit back and ponder that for a moment....

This essay falls short of the gloriousness it could have achieved. The author could have done so much more with that essay than what he did with it. It was just... sad. Not very long, for one. And for second, I'm not really sure he ever really made a point. It was like, "Batman can't kill Joker because he just can't." And he kept on focusing on "killing one for the greater good vs. not killing one and loosing many". Bah. Well... why can't he? I may have to go back and re-read that one to see if I missed something. It was the first essay in the book, so I might have just not gotten what I should have gotten out of it because I wasn't sure what I had gotten myself into. But really, there was at least one good point he could have gone into more depth about with that essay. Like, if Batman did kill the Joker, would that mean he had to kill all the others? Because why kill just one when there are other baddies out there? Like Catwoman, Croc, The Riddler, etc? And if he killed the big baddies, would he have to stop there, or be morally bound to killing the rest on principle? Would he not have to, fairly and morally, kill all criminals, including the rapists, the murderers, the thug who sprayed graffiti on the wall, and the guy who kicked a puppy? Where would it stop? Batman would then have a God complex: who would live and who would die? What crime is bad enough to kill over? He'd turn into judge/jury/executioner then. I mean... those discussions were not fully developed in the essay, if they were in there at all. True it's almost 4am, so I can't remember that much, and I read that one first... must re-read.

I think the most interesting volume to read will be the House one. He is the most human, most realistic and the most bastardly of all the titles that caught my eye. I may have to wait on that one until I've seen a few more episdoes of House. The ones I have seen are just amazing (thanks to being rained out in Baltimore, I got to watch a whole House marathon!). I started the first essay of the Family Guy volume, and I'm not sure how I like this author. He admits in his essay right away, after calling Family Guy "conservative" *gasp?*, that he "is so far left, even the left doesn't want [him]". And there's a lot of weird interjected quips and (!)s in th emiddle of sentences, and other silly things that are distracting from the overall essay. I may have to skip that one for now and re-read it later. He seems to have a very definite and finite view on his opinion and I've only read half his essay. Like how he's "so far left, the left doesn't want him"? I'm findng myself comparing him to Ann Coulter, who is "so far right, the right doesn't want her", and how she has her set-in-stone opinion and really won't acknowledge any other viewpoint because It. Is. WRONG. Might have to come back to this guy later... and the sad part is he's one of the main contributors to the X-Men volume. *le eeeehh*

The weird thing about philosophy is that... basically... it's someone's opinion that others agree with. A whole school of thought based around... opinions. There's no way to prove philosophy, unlike biology, chemistry, calculus, or even psychology. There's things you can track, test for, experiment on, tabulate and calculate to come up with a definite answer. Like math: 2 + 2 = 4. We all agree that for thousands of years, that has always been the case, and will never change. However, with philosophy, and what is moral or just and the like, it's more like: 3 + 9x = y. The basis of the idea of morality is the same (the definite numbers), but each person can put whatever personal views into the equation to change the "truth" of morality (the x/y variables). One just can't account for those since each person (equation) has a different set of variables to plug into the original problem.

Damn. I'm pretty prolific at 4am. Shit. At least I think I am now. We'll wait and see what everyone else who actually got a good night's sleep thinks of this babble at 12pm.

See!? Another unaccountable variable! I'm fucking brilliant!!!