The First Exam

Well, the first exam is over. After working myself up to the brink of physical sickness, and its not just the exam, it was not bad at all. I got a 10, I have no idea what a 10 is, but I need a 6 to pass so I will take a 10. Its an oral exam of 20 minutes and if feels like you are in there for 3-4 minutes tops. I am, of course, blessed with a high degree of bravado and charisma so the oral exam is nothing for me (right!).

I take it like a conversation, like any conversation I would have in my daily life. I have a rule of thumb for when the conversation is getting out of my control or is just getting boring, and that rule is as follows: work the conversation immediately toward Socrates, Marx, Kant, Arendt or Nietzsche. There is an emergency rule too if you are having trouble accomplishing that: deconstruct the foundation of what the other person is talking about and then take the fragments and spin them so quickly in dialectics that the other person loses track of time.

I am not sure what just happened, but I just took a 20 minute "law" exam where in tenth minute I refuted the subject-object binary and then the last 7 minutes or so was a pleasant discussion of Heraclitus, the Buddhist teaching of the "not-self," and Schopenhauer's book The World as Will and Representation (which, for no apparent reason, I threw in my backpack this morning before I left for the test). Not quite Nietzsche but in the orbit of that great star, and close enough that I could breathe a sigh of relief.

So I have given you my secret! I do not even know how many people, or who, reads this webpage. Some of you are probably laughing to yourself thinking about the times that I seemed to ramble incoherently about truth being born out of falsity, the non-existence of cause and effect, etc...and then brought up one of the holy Dynamicisms like "thinking," love, flux, the One Will, or will to power. You've been had I suppose.

The really funny thing is that I do truly do this in all conversations, and not just academic conversations. This is why I have historically been such a hit with the ladies I suspect...