Wicked ramblings

Good morning ladies!

My plan for today involved acing both my midterm and then writing an extremely celebratory blog and possibly some other stuff for fun.

Even though I have done pretty well on both my midterms I’m not feeling very celebratory. I feel like a right lazy slug in terms of any work getting done and more contemplative and philosophical than I’ve been since the beginning of the semester in terms of staring at my ceiling for hours. Prepare yourselves for ramblings…

I’ve been listening to the Wicked soundtrack on repeat basically since Michele and I saw it on Hallowe’en and it has lead my thoughts in weird directions.

First, I’m not sure if you knew this but Adam Lambert used to play the part of Fiyero before he went on American Idol. I was watching a few videos of him as Fiyero on YouTube and, as great as his voice is in the songs, all I could think was that Adam Lambert would much rather actually do Fiyero than kiss Elphaba and it completely ruined his whole performance for me. It got me wondering if the case was the same for the performance we saw.

I appreciate that it shouldn’t matter because it’s all acting and I could just ignore it and enjoy the show but, ugh, being a “mind reader” has its disadvantages sometimes. For me the most attractive thing about any person has always been what’s behind their eyes, any interest they may have in me being the sexiest thing I could see, and thinking that any part of the performance that could have held that kind of energy as being false just irks me to no end. At the same time it also makes me giggle to think of Elphaba and Glinda pining and fighting over a gay man.

Second, in the song “Wonderful” there’s a phrase that goes “They call me wonderful so I am wonderful. In fact, it’s so much who I am it’s part of my name”. That got me thinking about which word out there, or several words, would make up my name if I followed the same pattern.

This also has it’s applications in other geekery besides musical geekery – Ents for instance. Ents have enormously long descriptive names for each other and other things in their language so what would be my enormously long descriptive title? Maybe you can help me out.

Third, the song “For Good” makes me think all kinds of warm and fuzzy thoughts about you ladies.

Fourth, having nothing whatsoever to do with Wicked, one of the things my philosophy class is going to be talking about is dualism which is, roughly, the theory that the mind is made up of the soul and the brain. When we had our “class discussion session” in the last lecture I was surprised by the overwhelming number of people in my group who were quite confident in saying that any concept like the soul is complete hogwash (what a strange expression) and has no place at all in a discussion of the mind.

Really? Being a science major I can completely understand the desire to make things rational and testable before believing but has this kind of education gotten to the point where it becomes ridiculous to suppose that anything is that is beyond what our current knowledge and understanding tells us? Or is this a case of there being “precious few at ease with moral ambiguities” and it being easier for them to think in plain science or plain belief at separate times instead of mixing them up together? Has it become that difficult to accept that our future may hold a moment when science touches mysticism? There have been people who have tried before, notably Dr. Duncan MacDougall who tried to measure the weight of the soul. Can you image in it were actually possible?

Well, there it is – a whole load of rambling and questions. Hopefully you enjoyed it even though it’s not as fluffy and light-hearted as it usually is.

Much love,

Dina