Let me be empty, oh and weightless and maybe/ I'll find some peace tonight

Week 10 of 13 here for me, and I'm only getting my first respite now. Feels good. I had the time to go for a slow, longish jog earlier, though I must say my shins have been acting up again. I think it is time to find a doctor.

Why have I been so busy? Many reasons. One of them is that my supervisor has been pushing me to read stuff and getting back to him on stuff. This is, of course, a good thing - I would want to read philosophy in my own free time anyway, so he's basically planted that initiative for me. The downside is I feel stressed at times, because I need to get back to him on stuff by certain times; I gain motivation but lose flexibility.

Another reason is that I am taking an extra undergraduate language module in school. It's pretty heavy, with 5 hours of lesson time a week, homework, and regular tests. Learning a language at a later age isn't easy. You naturally seek to understand the new language with the languages you are familiar with, but that sometimes becomes more of an impediment than anything else.  But it's fine. I like the challenge. I like thinking in different ways, and the amount of cognition I exercise in this class isn't too far off from the amount of cognition I employ in a heavy Philosophy class - or so it feels. Hopefully this means I'm training my brain to be more flexible. Plasticity, I believe the term is. In any event, I've always wanted to pick up something new, and free lessons are a good place to start.

Being constantly pressed for time underscores the fact that life has so much, for lack of a better term, 'downtime'. In life, you do work, you engage in leisure, and you do essential stuff like eating, bathing, and sleeping. These are the 3 broad categories. Downtime is that category which contains things that don't exactly fit under any of these categories. Composing a simple email of 5 sentences can take me 15 minutes. Trying-to-be-funny on Facebook can take up 45 minutes. Sometimes I tell myself I don't have time for an Agricola game - but I end up watching one for 20 minutes anyway. A supposedly simple meal after class can span 1 hour 15 minutes. Dropping by the Honours or the Graduate Room before I head home sometimes takes up 20 minutes as I sit around and talk with people.

This is not to say I completely don't enjoy having all this downtime. In fact, in most cases, I do - else I wouldn't be doing them. What this just means is that I have to plan my life in such a way to accomodate downtime. So, for example, I can't just set aside 2 hours of computer games every night. I got to anticipate various downtimes and set aside 3 hours. Consequently I will want to do my work in such a way I am able to be online at an earlier time. If I know that there's a good chance I would be tempted to stay on after a simple meal, I would want to do more work the day before. If I know I would spend 2 hours writing a blog entry of this length, I would want to do more work beforehand. Such a plain thing to see now, but it's not so easy to see when you're in the midst of things.

In any case, I'm looking forward to a board games session with some people at a community center, and a dinner with some of my peers and seniors this Sunday. It's been a long time since I've had the breathing space to actually look forward to going out.

I ate $2.40 worth of sliced fruits today. I finished the honeydew first, then the pear, then the watermelon, for watermelon is my favourite amongst the 3. Too bad it wasn't juicy enough.

Hmm

1. Free health checkup by NUS Medical Society at a clearing in Toa Payoh Hub yesterday, the following conversation between me and a future doctor ensued.

A: Your blood pressure and BMI are normal. Are there any concerns you would like to raise?

Me: Yes. I have a habit of sleeping late. Is that unhealthy? I read somewhere that the liver detoxifies stuff only at 11pm at 1am. Should I be changing my sleeping habit?

A: The body is quite flexible actually. Your liver will adjust to your sleeping cycle. As long as you get enough rest you should be fine. Do you think you are getting enough rest?

Me: It depends on what you mean by enough rest.

A: 7 hours of sleep for most people.

Me: Ok yah I do get around 7 hours of sleep in general.

A: Then you should be fine.

Me: Hmm but I also read somewhere that the body produces melatonin only when it's dark in the night, and melatonin is important for one's immune system and it might reduce the risk of cancer too. By staying up late my body receives lots of artifical light. Is this an issue then?

A: As far as I know this shouldn't be an issue. The body produces melatonin under sunlight too. So getting more under the Sun might help.

Me: Hm ok. So I don't need to change my sleeping habit then?

A: As long you have a regular sleeping habit, and you are getting enough rest, you should be fine.

Me: Good. I should tell this to my Mother.

A: Haha. Ok. Any other concerns?

Me: Yes.  I make it a habit to eat KFC once a week. Is eating fast food really bad?

A: Fast food is fine in moderation. In fact for most things we do, moderation is key.

Me: Why exactly is fast food unhealthy then?

A: Because it consists of mostly carbs and protein but very little other nutrients. But once a week is ok, as long as you eat healthily for most of your other meals.

Me: What do you mean by healthily?

A: 2 servings of vegetables and 2 servings of fruits.

Me: Ok. Do you not eat fast food yourself?

A: I do. In fact I eat Macdonalds twice or thrice a week.

Me: Wow that's even better than me.

A: Yea well I try to eat healthily for my other meals. Again, moderation is key.

Me: Suppose I want to increase my intake of food that happens to be unhealthy. Can more exercise compensate then?

A: To a certain extent. Exercise can help to get rid of fat that would accumulate in the body otherwise.

Me: What about cholesterol? The bad one.

A: As long as you do enough exercise now you can reduce the amount of cholesterol in the body.

Me: So I can eat unhealthily then, as long as I exercise too?

A: Like I said only to a certain extent. To be really healthy you have to eat healthily and exercise too. Cholesterol accumulates over the years, so even if you exercise regularly if you eat unhealthily you might find yourself in trouble when you're older.

Me: Ok. Thanks.

It's good to have all these free health screenings. It gives our future doctors some practical experience and helps remind the older people to live healthily. The open space in Toa Payoh Hub is a nice area too, and I enjoyed listening in to the young trainees interact with the old people, some of whom were intentionally jocular in some aged way. That tends to happen when a significantly younger person attends to a significantly older person. I sometimes wonder if this is so they can reassure, consciously or otherwise, themselves that they are still not that old.

I wanted to check my cholesterol and blood sugar levels too but unfortunately that was for the older people. Why is that so, I asked. Can't young people have high cholesterol and diabetes? Not enough supplies, they said.

2. I was having dinner with some philosophy peers, and 2 of them got into a heated debate over the nature of desires. I found it quite remarkable how a normal conversational topic over someone's future plans could so easily morph into a full-blooded philosophical debate, though I can't exactly remember how that was done.

The question here is whether we can actually form desires out of thin air. That is to say, if we can form desires that didn't come from previously existing desires. You might think that's straightforwardly true. A baby who doesn't know what a car is before grows into a young adult, sees a car, and forms the desire to own a car. The young adult couldn't have had the prior desire to own a car, because he didn't know what a car was. But perhaps we can say the young adult, when he was a baby, had already a latent desire to acquire social status. Combined with the belief that owning a car would give him social status, he goes on to form the desire to own a car. This way, we can say that his desire to own a car didn't come from thin air. It came from an antecedently existing desire.

Now, a baby clearly doesn't know what social status is either. But this doesn't stop one from having that latent, fundamental desire. Take food for example. Babies don't have a concept of food, but it seems quite clear they have a desire for food (well, for milk at least). This way, we can say that a baby has a latent, fundamental desire for food. In fact, the vast majority of us were probably born with that desire.

If the story told so far is right, then we are all born with a set of fundamental desires. Some of us have the fundamental desire to acquire social status, some of us not. A particular desire - like the desire to own a car - simply comes from those fundamental desires combined with beliefs we form about the world. If it's true we can't form desires out of thin air, then our fundamental desires constrain us. We can never act in such a way that can't be explained by the fundamental desires we were born with and our subsequent beliefs about the world.

3. I took a tour of a biology lab recently. I find that there's something deeply satisfying in spending much of your life holed up in a cosy, quiet, air-conditioned space contributing to the body of knowledge we already have.