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8/30/24 --> We refract everything through meaning-making.

I'm taking a class on Heidegger's Being and Time to fulfill some sort of graduation requirement that might have slipped through the cracks if not for my increasingly obsessive preoccupation with what the next two years (and beyond) will look like. The course itself isn't required -- imagine that -- but it meets criteria X Y and Z.

When I was 19 and more psychically distraught than ever before my instagram bio said 'PHENOMENOLOGICALLY DEAD'. At the time I meant to convey that the world had disappeared from me. I felt that it was something I no longer had any control or interpretive capacity over. It was something very inward and nonsensical and I didn't want anyone to understand precisely what I meant, which they couldn't have even if they tried, because I'm learning now that my idea of 'phenomenology' was bastardized beyond belief...

It seems that phenomenology -- and keep in mind that I've only attended two 80-minute long lectures on the subject -- doesn't care so much for the subjective experience of any one individual as it does for what fundamentally unifies these experiences. In the (abridged) words of Edmund Husserl:

"Terms like 'perception', 'memory', 'expectation'... express universal, essential structures...whose profound study and exact conceptual circumscription...is the first great task of transcendental phenomenology."

That you and I can only ever perceive an object from one side but still infer its 3-dimensional shape; that while listening to the radio you intuit the distance in space and/or time between yourself and the person(s) speaking no matter the ostensible immediacy of their voice(s); that I understand my professor to be human like me despite the angelic glow around the perimeter of his body, because it does not make sense that the glow is of divine origin when I know the light from the window is distorting my perception and aggravating the perpetual headache I've had as of late. These evidence the shared transcendent (inferential), temporal, and spatial logics grounding our conscious experience.

The chairs in Mazur room 721 make my head feel so heavy somehow. I have to prop myself up deliberately like a newborn.