She's A Lady, She's Got Time

Ye gods, am I horny! I'm bound to offend someone today. I ran into Miss Jolene at CZ and she had this tight black shirt on and I stared at her breasts and...and...

Last night went alright at The Pollack's. Although I got there later than I had anticipated, he was yet home so I had to let the hounds out and feed them. Buddy is not a problem but that fucking Pesto is just a bitch. Yapping and jumping and ramming her wet snout into my nuts - and, to make matters worse, she continues to eat her own feces. I just don't understand what The Pollack sees in that dog. Anyway, I let loose the dogs and went to the liquor cabinet. He wasn't lying when he said that he had multiple flavors. There was the usual Ten High but there were also 3 highly tasty and highly expensive varieties to be had. Firstly, was one whose smooooove taste and bright finish I was already quite familiar with, Basil Hayden. Secondly, there was the first of two elixirs that were unknown to my palate, 1792 Ridgemont Reserve. Lastly there was a bottle of Blanton's.

To begin the proceedings, I poured a Ten High and sour for myself and threw a glass with ice in the freezer for when The Pollack finally arrived. He did and he was bitching about his boss who called after about 5 minutes. No wonder The Pollack was pissed off - the guys calls and takes up 20 minutes of his time to basically say that he is going to e-mail a list. That's why they invented e-mail, so you wouldn't have to call someone. Especially after they've left the office.

So while they talked shop, I proceeded to fix up The Pollack's laptop. Firstly, I setup his e-mail signature which I had created while I was here at work yesterday. Then I set his dial-up connection to never disconnect because of inactivity. Then I figured out why he can't burn CDs: he doesn't have a CD burner, just a DVD-ROM. I didn't think they actually put optical drives in computers anymore that didn't burn CDs. Next up I looked at a few Word files that wouldn't open. These were documents that I had recovered from his old laptop that had been deleted. Word 2003 couldn't recover/repair them so I instructed him to open them in Notepad and copy any text over to a new Word doc. The last problem he had was that Outlook Express wasn't printing correctly. It was using extremely small margins and was not starting the text at the margin but rather at the edge of the paper. He said that Word prints fine, however. I installed the newest print driver from Canon's site but this didn't help. After tinkering around, I discovered that the problem was with Internet Exploder's Page Setup. OE gets its Page Setup info from IE, as they're tightly integrated, and IE had miniscule margins. The real problem was that IE would not accept changes to the margins. I'd change them and hit OK only to go back in there and find that they'd reverted to their original settings. I was ready to tell him to just fucking use Firefox but he's a creature of habit. I've spent the past couple years getting his computer abilities to where he now has to call me for assistance only infrequently and the switch could upset his routine and cause me more work. I found the registry keys for these settings this morning so now I have to create a batch file to enter the settings because I don't want his ass poking around the registry. That will cause trouble and I will have to bail him out of it.

I'm looking forward to lunch as, not only will I be away from my desk and my glaucoma-inducing monitor, but I'll be able to continue my current read, A Deeper Freedom. It's quite good. I just love how Anderson draws on so many ideas, so many philosophies, taking bits from them all to make a new whole. He'll draw on Locke, Alasdair MacIntyre, Plate, Aristotle, etc. for material as well as show how various aspects of their philosophies are deficient. Right now, he's getting to Pragmatism/Pragmatacism and his own personal hero, Charles Peirce. This kind of thing is what made his class so incredibly interesting in college. He woud take an idea employed by a modern author and go back to ancient Greece and discuss the origins of the idea. Then he'd move up through the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment and, finally, to modern times describing all the while how the idea was used and modified by various people in their own times and places. Absolutely fascinating!

I'm about halfway through the book. What he's done to this point is discuss shades of liberalism (and I mean "liberalism" in the classical sense) and brought up elements in our humanity that are not accounted for by the various incarnations. Exempli gratia, pure classical liberalism (Anderson refers to it as "skeptical liberalism") is predicated on the idea of imperfect knowledge. We can never know what is best for anyone so thusly each person should be free to follow their own life path and discover what is best for herself. But Anderson counters by appealing to a broad sense of human nature that is inclusive of telos, or, simply, a goal. Skeptical liberalism works hand-in-hand with pure utilitarianism and says that we humans are just out to maximize pleasure and minimize pain - these are our goals. But Anderson finds other goals towards which life is directed. When I left off yesterday, he had brought up love as well as the old Christian ideas of vocation. The concept of vocation here basically means that your job, your work is an extension of you, embodying your morals, your personality, etc. and is not just a means to survive.

I know that I am by no means doing justice to the book. Go read it for yourself.

Although my coffee cup is nearly depleted, I'm still not completely awake. I've put on Project Infinity by Man...or Astro-Man? to help get fired up but it's had only a minor effect so far.