Today was such a good day I didn't even notice it was Monday until thinking about it tonight, at which point it was already Tuesday.

Today started slow. I woke up; went to orgo. We were doing synthesis problems for the mechanisms I missed when I took Friday off, but they were pretty clear, anyway. At least, today they were. They won't be during that middle period between tomorrow and three weeks, when I have a panic week and cram all the orgo that stopped making sense the day after I learned it. Went to bio. My prof's computer went down, so he couldn't just laze away behind his powerpoint slides. In chem, we only go through four or five chalkboard's worth of material because it is complicated and requires us to go over it slowly, meticulously drawing dots and arrows and O's and H's, and even then, we don't really go that slow. In bio, we went through two chalkboard's worth of material. Painfully. Reiteration after reiteration of the same theme of top down and bottom up control of predator and prey populations. Except, it was refreshing with the chalkboard, because instead of hitting a new slide, and hitting us upside the head with another way to rephrase the goddamn point, the prof would just point at the chalkboard with a dusty finger and wave it in a dangerous, warning mannor, like "you better not change your meaning, you simple-themed creation of mine! I only wrote you once, and I want you to stay that way!" It was rather fun, in fact.

Theory of Knowledge was also fun, but not in an ironic, "we're-getting-a-break-from-the-diamondback-crossword" way.¹ This prof, who looks and acts surprisingly like Robin Williams, but without the hair and only half the drugs, ok, maybe three quarters of the drugs, broke down the origin of analytic philosophy and the distinctions early 20th cent. phil's were trying to collapse in a way that made a lot of sense. Metaphysically, we have necessary/contingent. Epistemically, we have a priori / a posteriori. Linguistically, we have analytic/synthetic. Psychologically, we have innate/learned. Logically, we have logically necessary. Kant, who really was a romanticist at heart, tried to somehow collapse all necessary and a priori beleif into one and the same notion, but had the fun idea to split analytic and synthetic apriori/necessary truth. Which is kind of compelling. I mean, how could you possibly know about all possible worlds? And yet, that's the claim we make about necessary truth. It's not the fifth book of the Hitchhiker's Guide; we don't have a bizzaro cross-dimensional machine that can take us anywhere is space, time or possibility. There must be some way we make claims about it, because lots of people make claims about the possibility of stuff (like 2+8 cannot not equal 10) and everyone accepts that. So, I can see how the necessary-ness is cool, and usefull. It's just a shame it doesn't quite fit, being necessary is neither sufficient nor necessary for apriori beleif (i.e. there can be necessary truths that you can't know without looking, like where exaclty you came from, and there can be a priori truths that you know without looking, but don't exactly have to be that way, like the exact length of any unit of measure). Anyway, he deatailed how analytic philosophy was basically out there to stop Kant. And even though they went too far, boiling things down to sheffer strokes, like the hardcore binary action of computers, many people still agree with them somewhat.

So... that was fun. I do dork out on the philosophy somewhat, especially when you get the logic and the linguistics in there.² After that, I was going to sit outside at a table and write my bio lab because it was 80 degrees today, but instead found a buddy from last semester who had an hour to kill, so we walked around the union, where we ran into two more groups of my kids, who threw stuff at me and ran up behind me, respectively. Which, although it was awkward because they didn't know each other, still made me happy. I plan to have a dinner party with the couple (the party with emma and anna and alex two weekends ago was wonderful, we had grilled kabobs with chicken and beef and I made Josh's stoner hummus which turned out wonderfully) and get really whacked out of my mind with the other guy, incidentally, Josh, [I should have told him about the hummus, but that's for another time, I guess].

My phil buddy and I were too poor to buy the 40 cent tofu icecream that we were aiming for at the coop, and she had to go to class anyway, so I went off and wrote a good chunk of the lab while waiting for Mary, who was driving home from work in Annapolis. She's loving it there, althought it is a lot of time on her feet. Her favorite parts of the day are ironically the drive there and back, which give her time to sit back and relax and listen to NPR. Five more years of this and she'll be putting on medieval chant like my dad. Anyway, she picks me up, we go to CVS to get some of that old uber-powerful stuff for my chappped lips [my lips hurt real bad!] and then I drop her off at home and pick up the lawnmower which Mike Newkum recently fixed, which I was tottaly psyched for.

Now, you must understand. I don't think I've written about it much, but this semester I've spent a fair amount of my free time either preparing seeds in the new state of the art greenhouse on campus or transplanting seedlings into the garden that the Sustainable Agriculture Club (aka Vegetable Eating and Growing [VEG] club) has behind the archives behind the golf course right off campus. It's a fairly large parcel of land, maybe forty by eighty feet, with beds and grass walkways that had two years worth of overgrowth at the begginging of this season. We cleared it off with a high, industrial mower that leveled everything about calf-high, and for lack of another mower, and lack of a tiller, and an excuse that we don't want to till the soil in order to be sustainable and prevent runoff, we've been transplanting in these high, weedy beds. Now, they're not well defined. It's hard to see where they start, and hard to plant accordingly. So I've been meaning to mow, so we can see what we're doing, for almost a month now.

Mike fixed the mower, and I promptly stole it for use at the garden. I met Chuck and company there around 5:30, and proceeded to turn our beds into an actual garden. They watered and transplanted till about 8:00 when it got dark, and then we migrated, with the addition of Mary who had taken a nap after work, to the Perk, in order to procure vegan sloppy joe, as that's the special monday nights. It was quite tasty. And cheap. Which is rare for the perk, which has a great atmosphere and good food at not-cheap prices. But the food tonight was delicious. Hopefully, we can make the garden-->food thing a ritual. That would at least ensure the plants get a little watering. With the addition of knowing a lot of people there (it's always crowded on monday nights) and having a purpose (eating, as opposed to the usual just being a coffeeshop bum) the perk was rather relaxing today.

After the Perk, Mary and I went shopping to get some food, and then returned home to watch part of a rocksteady 6 hour documentary on FDR. She's very moved by him and Chruchill, and the heroic nature of the war, and she pointed out quite astutely that our geneartion really doesn't have any heroes. The closest we have to someone persevering against evil odds is Lance Armstrong, and we're all pretty convinced he's a steriod user. I really rock out to the "Kennedy" song by Kill Hannah (there's an oldschool thought for you) and occasionaly the lyrics get stuck in my head. I sang them when I was home over winter break, and my mom got pissed. She's like, "you don't know the kennedy's! you don't know how they inspired us! don't sing about them dying young!" She's tottaly right. I know that JFK was cool and all, but I'm not moved in the same way that many people seem to be. His speeches are good; their rhetoric is strong. But they're removed for me, I just don't feel it. And with our government, I try specifcially not to be moved by the rhetoric. I'm skeptical. Since when are the youth skeptical? That's awful.

Anyways, the point of the story, which I accidentally walked past in my rambling three or four paragraphs ago, was the peculiar nature of our transplant predators, the evil, fence-punching groundhogs. We have scientifcally determined that they are not italian. They go for everything we plant; lettuce, kale, peppers, beans, corn, parsley... Everything but the basil, tomatoes and eggplant. Those three are fine. We're going to have an amazing basil farm. And with my three kinds (italian, thai and purple) we're going to have an amazing all-garden pesto. I just wish we could fix the fence and keep them out, so we could eat everything. Oh well, that's next weeks project.

1: Incidentally, I finally stopped procrastinating and tried the crossword. I sucked. At least I feel like a real UMCP student now.
2: Incidentally, I'm also making a list of things I dork out on. So far, it's up to logic and linguistics in philosophy, a touch of number theory, and every now and then the video games of video game dorks when they're really excited and I get to feel like not a dork for knowing what they're talking about. More to be added as soon as I realize it.