What do you mean you Kant?

Dear A,


Tonight I grabbed a RealSimple from the bookcase - a magazine I always love to look at in the grocery store and never buy. You gave me subscription (yea!) and then I never looked at those lovely magazines that arrived in my mail either (sigh). Until TONIGHT!

And what do I find in my delight? (I imagine you are at the edge of your seat wondering the answer)...

Vegetarian Cooking for Meat Eaters.
Privacy Online

And lastly... Philosophy 101.


Did you know that I minored in Philosophy?   Hmmm.  I'm not sure if this question is posed to you, A, or RealSimple. 

So, I'm reading the Philosophy Article in RealSimple (does this seem like an oxymoron to anyone besides me?) and of course I have to drag out my Philosophy book from college.

Wow - that almost sounds scholarly.

Let me back up.

I hated college.

Really hated college.

Granted I had the "college experience" i.e. smoked some pot (didn't inhale. BWHAHHAHA), had a lesbian experience (didn't we all?   no?  oh. well.  Awkward!), and had extreme guilt over the good money my parents were spending on COLLEGE while I desperately tried to figure out WTF I was doing.


Even with all of that.... I had this Philosophy Teacher. He was amazing. And by amazing I mean, we (the students) would show up, some of us had actually read the material (OH! That was me! That was one class I actually cared about! ) and then we would pick his brain.  He was an Asian man living in the rural Midwest.  Granted it was a liberal arts college.....  A liberal arts college surrounded by cornfields and guys with trucks filled with gun racks, guns, and dawgs.  And he listened to us, asked questions of us, spoke softly and passionately.  Put up with our shenanigans. 

So for the first time in my life I was introduced to other folks who were AS full of questions and angst as I was. Why is a fucking chair called a chair?
And what about Christianity? (What does that question mean for you? Now that's a can of worms... Or not)

So I'm looking through my college textbook for the highlighted parts (I paid a lot of money to highlight words of my choosing...!) And the first one is this:


We must appreciate how important it is to nurture our curiosity.

Interesting! 15 years later that when I now teach childbirth classes, this is one of the things I touch on drill in... The idea of being "curious" to the experience.

Was I truly that deep 15 years ago? Or am I just freakin' stagnant? Or neither. Or a bit of both? Am I curious to the answer?

Funny - in my anecdotal bits about college I tend to self-deprecate my slackeredness. In re-reading my philosophy book however, I was ALL kinds of serious. I have highlighted, underlined, and written in the margins. Maybe it's time to opt for a bit of forgiveness towards my time in college. Obviously I took some things seriously. Like my very core.