Fan Service!
Well, I took some pictures today, and I’m kind of surprised how A) Greek and B) much like a young Lenin by new beard makes me look. What do you think?
Greek look.
Lenin look.
And the real Lenin.
So how’s it look?
-Matthew
25 Things About Me
1. All of my heroes are long dead or fictional. I’m just not really super inspired by anyone alive today.
2. I can’t willfully damage a book. It just feels wrong.
3. I don’t instantly imagine mental images when people describe things, and when I’m around people who do I wonder which of us has the problem.
4. I think a lot of things sound cooler when prefaced with “the” for no reason whatsoever. Are you doing the math? I love the cheeseburger. &c.
5. I use &c. instead of etc. because that’s the way von Clausewitz did it. Before I read On War I didn’t even use &s at all. Now they’re the only “and symbol” I use.
6. I can’t help but think I’d be happier living as, say, a Spartiate in the 5th century BCE than I am now.
7. I like when, after having judged someone as stupid, they continually act stupid so I don’t need to change my opinion about them. This happens quite a lot.
8. Despite being Athiest, I kind of enjoy church and religious events so long as they’re not too preachy or crazy. I love sincerity and enthusiasm whether or not it’s mine so it’s nice to be with people who really believe what they’re saying and doing.
9. I had a huge enantiodromia last semester regarding justification, and as a result I’ve entirely abandoned the idea that reason is the only and/or best justification for things. I know it’s going back to pre-Enlightenment, but wouldn’t historical justifications make a lot more sense if you could easy record, store, and access the metric boatload of information that it would take? Especially for the judicial system.
10. Enantiodromia is my favorite word. It means the process by which something becomes its opposite and the subsequent interrelation between the two. A chance to use it makes me happy for hours.
11. It annoys me to no end when people use certain words to be polite or look smart rather than use words that have the meanings they want to convey…ugh…
12. I can’t tell if I’m emotionally shallow or emotionally resilient.
13. I truly love my job at Uris Library and will be extremely sad when I graduate and can’t work there anymore.
14. If Cornell offered a class on pickpocketing, lockpicking, social engineering, &c., I would sign up for it instantly. It’d be more practical than probably every other class I’ve taken here, besides languages.
15. I dislike when people have too high an opinion of me because than I either have to work hard to let them down.
16. Despite knowing the universe doesn’t work that way, I feel that a lot of good luck can only lead to several small bits of bad luck or one huge pile of bad luck, so every so often I throw away pennies to avoid some Polycratic bad luck extravaganza when a fish returns my ring.
17. Every so often I worry that everything I read in history textbooks is made up and no one really knows what happened before a century or two ago. How would one know otherwise?
18. I feel bad for lowering my future aspirations from “historical personage” to “history professor” over the course of high school and college. What a letdown for past-me.
19. The most awe-inspiring event in history to me is The Ten Thousand.
20. I shall never respect Wikipedia as a source, ever, and as a professor I shall ban my students from using it academically.
21. I love reading history and knowing that something terrible is about to happen to some famous jackass who, quite frankly, deserves it. On the other hand, I find it terrible when random villagers get hurt in history who have no idea what the war’s even about and are only involved in it because their king is a malicious, small-minded dumbass.
22. I feel more comfortable talking to my supervisor at work than I do to my mother.
23. If something bad happens to me but it results in a good story to tell, I don’t mind nearly as much.
24. I refuse to ever read Invisible Man by Ralph Waldo Ellison because the first twenty or so times I came across it, every time I got happy and excited, “Well gee!” I said to myself, “I bet this book is about a man, one who is not visible,” and with glee I would take the book off the library shelf before realizing that no. No one is invisible in this book. No one. The title is a lying bitch and I will never forgive it ever.
25. I always describe new crushes to close friends in case there’s something horribly wrong with them that I haven’t noticed. I’m worried I’m going to make a bad life decision when it comes to romance one day and I’m hoping my friends catch it.
This is from a while ago, but I thought it might interest people, so here ya go!
-Matthew
