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Skipped D&D tonight, ostensibly to study German and finish reading "Frankenstein." How far I'm going to get on that, I don't know. German class is kicking my ass, and I need to get a tutor.
I even went to the U.C. bookstore and got some flashcards and a little box for the flashcards and everything. Ended up spending more than I'd thought on postcards and eyeball gum and books and some other things that I don't actually remember buying. They do sell postcards, on a little teeny rack in the back, and that surprised me. Granted, they're all pictures of buildings. Nothing pretty like trees or the library park, like the lovely pictures of the Corpus Christi campus that I just got from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nyghtshayde (squee! happy! warm fuzzies! pretty flowers!).
The two books I got from the U.C. bookstore: "An Anthropologist on Mars," by Oliver Sacks, and "Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches," by Marvin Harris. Read the latter during dinner. It's pretty short, only 260 pages, but covers a lot of ground. Answers such questions as:
Why can't Jews eat pigs, besides "God said so"?
( Because... )
Why is there war?
( Because... )
What were the medieval witch hunts really about?
( It was really... )
There's also some fascinating information on the Hindu sacred cow and the economy of India, the potlatch ceremonies of the Northwestern aboriginal tribes (which almost makes me want to write "Dead Man" fanfic), the political context of the Gospels, South Sea cargo cults (protests against colonial exploitation. Still, it was the most interesting chapter in the book), and why the New Age movement did absoulutely nothing to mitigate the influence of the corporate-industrial complex.
I really like the idea that things like war and organized religion and rampant xenophobia are just social responses to economic factors. This might be wishful thinking on my part, but a lot of what I've been learning does point towards this. Even in Psych class, where the material tends to focus on the biological aspects of psychology, my prof likes to remind us that things like depression and addiction are often cognitive or environmental problems, rather than physiological conditions. Environment can count for so much.
I even went to the U.C. bookstore and got some flashcards and a little box for the flashcards and everything. Ended up spending more than I'd thought on postcards and eyeball gum and books and some other things that I don't actually remember buying. They do sell postcards, on a little teeny rack in the back, and that surprised me. Granted, they're all pictures of buildings. Nothing pretty like trees or the library park, like the lovely pictures of the Corpus Christi campus that I just got from
nyghtshayde (squee! happy! warm fuzzies! pretty flowers!). The two books I got from the U.C. bookstore: "An Anthropologist on Mars," by Oliver Sacks, and "Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches," by Marvin Harris. Read the latter during dinner. It's pretty short, only 260 pages, but covers a lot of ground. Answers such questions as:
Why can't Jews eat pigs, besides "God said so"?
( Because... )
Why is there war?
( Because... )
What were the medieval witch hunts really about?
( It was really... )
There's also some fascinating information on the Hindu sacred cow and the economy of India, the potlatch ceremonies of the Northwestern aboriginal tribes (which almost makes me want to write "Dead Man" fanfic), the political context of the Gospels, South Sea cargo cults (protests against colonial exploitation. Still, it was the most interesting chapter in the book), and why the New Age movement did absoulutely nothing to mitigate the influence of the corporate-industrial complex.
I really like the idea that things like war and organized religion and rampant xenophobia are just social responses to economic factors. This might be wishful thinking on my part, but a lot of what I've been learning does point towards this. Even in Psych class, where the material tends to focus on the biological aspects of psychology, my prof likes to remind us that things like depression and addiction are often cognitive or environmental problems, rather than physiological conditions. Environment can count for so much.
