challenge

I want to challenge and not avoid. Avoidance is a sign of weakness and confrontation is a sign of strength. To abstain does not mean to avoid. It can also be a kind of confrontation.

What I am is a large, but finite, range of possibilities. I can strive to be anything within that range. ...

Questions

Am I going to see daily events as obstacles or opportunities? Life as tedious or creative? Am I stunted when things go wrong or do I grow? Do I have choice in any of this or not?

Cost-Benefit Analysis Please!
Should I lose sleep to finish assignments to keep up the grades OR get rest and suffer academically? (Short-term...? Long-term...?)

I am so used to the game and my role in it. If you master your role then you always know what to expect. Why should I be trying so hard to master this role? Am I not brave enough to be just what I am?

"Man no longer dares to appear what he is. What he is is nothing, what he appears is everything for him." (Rousseau)

Role breaking is harder than rule breaking.

Strange Days anyone?

deconstruction

I'm reading about deconstruction in ENGL 401: Methods of Literary Interpretation:

This is how deconstruction works: by showing that what was prior and privileged in the old hierarchy (for instance, between creative writing and literary criticism) can just as easily seem secondary, the deconstructor causes the formerly privileged term (creative writing) to exchange properties with the formerly devalued one (literary criticism). Would we write if there were not critics -- intelligent readers motivated and able to make sense of what is written? Who, then, depends on whom?

Not everyone, however, has so readily seen the attractions of deconstruction. Two eminent critics, M.H. Abrams and Wayne Booth have observed that a deconstructive reading "is plainly and simply parasitical" on what Abrams calls "the obvious or univocal meaning" (Abrams 457-58). In other words, there would be no deconstructors if critics did not already exist who can see and show central and definite meanings in texts. Miller responded in an essay titled "The Critic as Host," in which he not only deconstructed the oppositional hierarchy (host/parasite), but also the two terms themselves, showing that each derives from two definitions meaning nearly opposite things.

From "Deconstruction and The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"

listening to your parents II

I've been feeling slightly weird about how I criticized my parents for justifying themselves/their advice poorly when I was younger. I just stumbled across a possible counterpoint which has helped me gain some perspective:

But you don't give a kid the entire picture right away. First, you make damn sure he doesn't fall off the cliff. As he or she gets older, you can tell her more about mountain climbing.

Look - there's no such thing as "the entire picture". You could go on forever about the "entire picture". And I think the gun thing is a good example. You don't teach safe gun handling to a toddler. You scare the living shit out of him about even going near one first. Later, you explain how to handle one. He may feel burned that he was first taught to fear them at all costs. If he tells you of this trauma, you slap him in the head and tell him not to be such a wuss.

No, I am not entirely serious. I am burlesquing my point in order to more clearly make it.

I get this. I guess what you say to your kids really depends on what issue you're instructing them and how capable they are of understanding more complicated reasons.