jd87: Some Things I Don't Understand

by Josh Delman

I'm a crazy college student who likes to write things. I eat peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon. I've really been appreciating bananas recently. I'm going to start telling people that when they ask me "what's new?"

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2009: January / February / March / April / May / June / July / August / September

Some Things I Don't Understand

This is a list of things I don't understand. Now, there's a tendency amongst somewhat snooty and pretentious people to say "I don't understand..." when what they really mean is "Anyone who thinks that ... is stupid." For example, when someone says "I don't understand how people can believe in god," what he's really thinking is: "Anyone who believes in god is stupid." (The statement also applies in the reverse -- religious people are perfectly capable of such snobbery.) But what I want to make clear here is that every case of "I don't understand..." here is explicitly using only the commonly denoted meaning of "understand."

In other words, I really don't understand it -- and in most cases, I also wish to understand it. This is a list of things, mostly, that I want to understand. But I'm phrasing it as "I don't understand..." because that more accurately describes the whole of the list, and I also want to point out (to myself, to you, to the world) my ignorance, my naivete, my awkward misinterpretations of the world, etc. Lastly, the order of this list does not reflect the importance of any particular fact.

I don't understand how people just decide one day that they're going to do something, something which usually goes against everything they're doing, or something that's so crazy that a movie gets made out of it -- and then they succeed (sometimes wildly.) I don't understand that kind of conviction. I don't understand that kind of devotion.

I don't understand my internal conflict over certain "mainstream" music, movies, TV: I don't want to like some of it, yet I do.

I don't understand why the song "Maybe I'm Amazed" is so moving. Is it Paul McCartney's raspy screams of passion? Is it the chord progression? Is it because Sir Paul himself was Moved to write the song?

I don't understand why I think "Teachers" by Daft Punk has the freshest fucking beat I've ever heard. (BTW, Check it out "Teachers" here, click the play button on the player to the right.

I don't understand how we can't make rules for some things ("what is funny?") yet we know it when we see it.

I don't understand what it means to be original, or what originality is.

I don't understand what it feels like to physically fight for your country. Or your ideals. Or for your family, your friends, or for people you've never met.

I don't understand why I feel like I have free will.

I don't understand how quantum randomness entails a non-deterministic universe; in other words, just because we don't (yet?) have the tools to predict some kind of super-small-scale interaction between really-super-duper small particles, does that mean we never will? Does reality ultimately ground out in probabilities?

I don't understand why some philosophy isn't taught in high school, or even middle school, or even elementary school. Isn't abstract thinking important sometimes, even in the "real world"?

I don't understand how at some point I stopped seeing a bunch of letters written together as squiggly lines and started seeing them as words.

I don't understand what it's like to be anybody else but myself. (This one I'll never really know.)

More will be added to this list later, probably.

January 25, 2009

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