First: It's been a shitty couple of days. Becky's been clobbered by a cold (this happens to her...when she is in a stressful or tiring situation, like driving 1800 miles in 6 days, she does great until she gets back and gets to relax. Then: sick.) I sent some well-meaning but, in retrospect, patronizing advice to my brother and pissed him off. My mom called this morning to report on massive family drama.* So I did what any enterprising 28-year-old with a new iPod would do: I went and bought enough cold drugs to last out the winter and got another cup of coffee.
Second: The other thing I did was go and buy my books for the History of Consciousness class I'm taking this term: Marx's Early Writings, Capital Vol. I, and Capital Vol. III. I walked back out onto Locust St. with three huge tomes of Marx in my bag and a Sleater-Kinney song came on. Foucault was reminding me the other day (we've got a personal relationship at this point) that the Greeks believed that one lived ethically in order to live beautifully, not because doing so would grab a good spot in the afterlife or even because it would hold the Polis together. Ethics were a question of aesthetics. So, following the Greeks by way of Foucault, I enjoyed my ethical-aesthetic moment of stodgy Germanic socialism mixed with hip Washingtonian radicalism.
* I'm really unused to family drama. Compared to just about everyone else, I had a great childhood (prompting the question: why all the neuroses, bucko?) So when this shit bubbles over, I'm out of my element.
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