Synaxis TV

Woke late and went to Panera. Stayed there for quite a while. Read some Bourdieu and worked on my thesis. Had a strange cry thinking about a book I’d like to write and my dead uncle.

Got some Pizza Hut and had dinner with Carolyn then hung out.

Sleep is all fucked up.

Did some exercise, wasted some time online, then I worked on my thesis a bit at Panera.

After that I picked up Hubert and we went to Indy to pick up Carolyn. The Pepsi machine took my money and I heard the drink drop, but it never came out.

From the airport we had dinner at BD’s Mongolian Barbecue. It was pretty expensive and not all the great. Oh well.

We decided to come back home instead of going out in Indy, and had some drinks while giving Hubert a mohawk.

Came across a really interesting article about pro-choice women who get abortions but do not change their views. The author collected quotes from doctors who had dealt with women like this. This one captures the mindset of these women best:

“We have anti-choice women in for abortions all the time. Many of them are just naive and ignorant until they find themselves with an unwanted pregnancy. Many of them are not malicious. They just haven’t given it the proper amount of thought until it completely affects them. They can be judgmental about their friends, family, and other women. Then suddenly they become pregnant. Suddenly they see the truth. That it should only be their own choice. Unfortunately, many also think that somehow they are different than everyone else and they deserve to have an abortion, while no one else does.”

I’m not really sure how to feel about this. I suppose I’m glad that they are getting the help they need. It’s just unfortunate that they are the very ones who are contributing to the fear of exposure that they experienced.

But the real question is how someone can hold this position. I don’t think this is the same as the gay Catholics I did work on. They held their positions to be compatible while these women do not. I suppose it is the dual product of a radical individualism on one hand and an inability to extract personal experiences to society on a whole.

As individuals the pro-life women who get abortions are the ones who know what is best for them, and no one can tell them any different. And since they are only having abortions for exceptional reasons that allows them to maintain support for the anti-choice movement.

Very interesting how these things work out, but what else can this example be applied to? Maybe some very mundane things, like theft, rape, and murder? The ramifications for ethical behavior is quite eery.

I finally have an addiction.

I’d seen the sudoku books in Borders and could tell a craze was building but I really didn’t understand how it worked. Then a professor gave me an article about the puzzle. Next, trying to find things to amuse myself with, I installed a sudoku program on my PDA. Finally, the sudoku puzzle started appearing in our student paper two days later, and I’ve been doing them daily since.

I’ve never been much of a crossword kind of person. I find them too arbitrary. Sudoku puzzles on the other hand are self-contained and have a certain sort of predictable consistency. In other words, I have little fear that the puzzle will produce more frustration over lack of completion than it will satisfaction.

What really inspired me to write about this, however, was an article I came across about the first World Sudoku Championships in Italy! Very strange. Indeed, from the first time I started doing them I’ve been looking for others to race.

If anything, another article said that brain exercises like sudoku can help make us more clever. So, start puzzling now, because you’ve got a lot of catching up to do. And I’m not just talking about sudoku.