Procrastination Epistemology

There are at least three things I should be doing right now: 1) Working 2) Reading 3) Writing.

I wish I could consider blogging as falling under the writing category, but that would just be wishful thinking. Maybe writing would better be restated as "homework."

Since I have a lot of each to do, I have decided not to do any of them. I shall, instead, ruminate. Today's ruminations (and yes, I'm chewing as I write this), will consist of my thoughts on Descartes, anomalies of English, and what I should cook for dinner.

First, about Descartes. He came up a lot in my class with Brainy Linguistics Professor today. So I thought I'd dig out my copy of Discourse on Method circa 1995 (complete with my inane comments in the margins). As Descartes ponderously describes what will become known as Cartesianism, my comments note he is "not much of a risk-taker." Ok, so I was a little shallow, but I think it would be fun to evaluate philosophers on what their philosophies seem to say about their personalities. You know, that Rousseau, "he's a bit of an ass," or that Mill, "he sure does like his freedom," and that kind of thing.

The next topic comes courtesy of e-e baby, who asked me to consider the phrase (or if you really want to be linguistic about it, utterance) "a whole nother." I see her point. I mean, really, if you have another, you should be able to have any number of nothers you want, especially a whole nother or maybe even a half-nother. As in, that's a half-nother thing altogether. Because it's really not fair to say it's another thing (that would imply it's something else), and it's especially unfair to say it's a whole other thing (because that would directly place it in the realm of things not even related to what you're talking about). But, if we could have half-nothers, well, then you could give credit to something while simultaneously detracting from it.

As for the last topic, nobody really cares about what Dear Mortgage Partner and I are having for dinner. I do, however, have an idea about how to begin my homework.