doing nothing

[martasfic]

Today's been a good day for doing not much of anything.

1. I picked up my key for the library carrel.
   
2. I bought socks at the bazaar at Fordham Plaza.
   
3. I ate lunch at Faculty Dining - rotiserie chicken, green beans, raw fruit and apple pie for desert.
   
4. I bumped into Dr. M. coming out of the dining hall and mentioned that I wasn't teaching and the basic topic of my dissertation. He pointed out I should look to Gorgias (the pre-Socratic philosopher) who did some interesting work on being, conceivability, and naming before that stuff was cool.
   
5. I attended the Fordham Philosophy Society meeting (our department's graduate student association), where I made jokes and managed to commit myself to nothing more substantial than presenting at the dissertation colloquium series.
   
6. Walking down the hall, I said hi to Dr. G, our local bioethics specialist and the old undergraduate program director (so he managed teaching). We ended up having an hourlong discussion on how the fetus's status as a person affected the morality of early-term abortion.
   
7. I settled business with the student loan peoples and my old bank in Cleveland. The first was easily handled (I'm still a student, they just need me to fill out a form proving it). The second, it's more theater of the absurd. I have a savings account containing $0.32 which is (a) too low for their guidelines, and (b) too low for them to issue me a check. I keep telling them I don't care about getting the money, the representative says she'll figure out how to handle it, and then three months later I get a call from another banker. Eventually I'll have enough interest where they won't charge me $5 to close the account...
   
8. I notice I now have precisely 200 friends on FB - family, Fordham peeps, fannish friends, and friends of friends who think I say interesting things, mostly. At what point can I stop pretending I'm an outsider loaner?
   
9. I drafted a ficlet for the series I mentioned this morning: Denethor impresses Finduilas at first meeting by being a first-class geek and owning it. (Wish fulfillment, much?) Needs work, but not bad for a start.

Now I have two hours until a seminar. I think I can crank out a few more paragraphs on Anselm and read at least one of the seminar papers for tonight. We're doing the cosmological argument. Not Aquinas's version, but contemporary ones and criticisms thereof. But it's been nice just doing nothing, as Christopher Robin says.

Comments

[hhimring]

I used to think Gorgias way cool. If I remember it right (it's a long time ago), he is supposed to have said that (a) nothing exists, (b) if anything did exist, we wouldn't be capable of knowing, (c) if we were capable of knowing it, we still wouldn't be able to convey it to anyone else.
I might be inclined to consider that a bit less cool now, but it still seems to me that he was very early to make quite such a radical statement.
Which material represents Finduilas-Denethor in the series? Silk?

[marta-bee.livejournal.com]

It could be either leather or steel. Probably leather, but that's because I will need steel for Faramir. Silk is most certainly a Boromir/Theodred thing, and lace just screams out for Strider-forced-into-a-kingly-role awkwardness.

I imagine Dol Amroth as being more like Sparta to Minas Tirith's Athens, and have always imagined even the women had some martial training. You have the Haradric threat and lack of a fortress like you have in Minas Tirith. So I think the daughter of the royal household would come off as decidedly not "girly," which Denethor would find attractive. She is feminine, to be sure, but not fickle. That suggests to me a fine-grain leather: supple, but with substance to it.

[hhimring]

That description reminds me of gloves--the kind you see musketeers wear in films.

[marta-bee.livejournal.com]

Mmm, good analogy. I may have to work it in. :-)