Wellness – Higher Thinking with Max Marks

The potato bread rolls turned out great. Really fluffy, and the combination of whole grain and while flour was just enough to give it a good texture. I never thought it would make sense to put mashed potatoes in bread, but when you think about it there’s no reason not to. I mean, mashed potatoes are just potatoes, milk, salt and butter, all of which are excellent ingredients in a good bread.

I’ve decided that sea salt is my favorite ingredient. Every dish I’ve added it to recently has just become twice as good.

Today was both a very good day and a very bad day. It was good in that all I did was some light studying before me and Sam made dinner. It was bad in that I had another existential crisis of sorts.

As I mentioned before, I take philosophy a little too seriously, and it has on occasion caused me some degree of mental anguish. Trying to think about certain questions about life and existence can make you feel like you’ve gone crazy for a while. Combining that with life’s inherent limitations can sometimes make me feel a little depressed even when everything is going right with my life. My entire life lately seems to be ruled by my realization that I can’t achieve anything I want to unless I become a much better person than I am, and I’m not sure how to do that. I’m pretty bad with directions, either physical or metaphorical.

I’ve been diagnosed with depression by a few doctors and psychotherapists, but I don’t take the meds because they’re pretty expensive (Ontario’s health plan didn’t cover a lot of it) but they also kind of ideologically offend me. I mean, every time I’m depressed I usually have something to actually be depressed about, and if I just take some pills and feel like everything is alright it doesn’t actually make my life better. Also, if you suddenly stop taking the meds I was on the chemical imbalance will cause you to freak out.

Lately, though, I’ve been really angry and sad for absolutely no reason, so I’m rethinking my stance on them. It’s kind of like how I refuse to make disability claims for my learning disability. I’ve always felt like accepting the extra time would give me an unfair advantage over everyone else, but when I’m having a hard time doing tests on subjects I understand perfectly, I begin to think the psychologists have some legitimacy in their claims.

I don’t think either of these realizations will actually change the way I approach such things, but it’s strange how adamant my stance on them was for most of my life.

So, here I am in Fairview. Me and Sam spent quite a few weeks moving in, and now everything’s totally set up.

Actually, we were done a few weeks ago, but for some reason my blog kept glitching and I never wrote about it. But yeah. First month of school is almost over, and I must say I’m feeling a lot better about this year than I did about last year. Honestly, I’m not sure I could reccomend the PPE program to any new students. While I met some interesting people and I liked most of my professors, I horribly failed at all of my economics classes. I’ve found a lot of students had similar problems in that the students who enjoyed economics hated the philosophy aspect. The thing is, philosophy, political science and economics all are connected, because the latter two owe their existence to philosophy, but they don’t go together that well anymore.

However, this year I’m not on a standardized timetable and I find I greatly prefer what I’m doing now. I don’t have any classes I dread going to or fail to understand. Even though I see my future in mostly analytic philosophy, I think my favorite class right now is Existentialism. I’d actually reccomend it to people who hate philosophy as well as people who like it. It’s just an all-around enjoyable class no matter what your background is, and the professor has a really good energy to his lectures.

If you’ve been reading Sam’s blog, you know we both joined seven clubs last week. My favorite of these is the Freethinkers. It’s a fairly new club at UBC, I think less than a year old, but I’m really glad they’re here now. They’re affiliated with the Center for Inquiry, which doesn’t have a large presence in Vancouver currently, but hopefully that will change over time.

All in all, the most depressing thing in my life is reading Kierkegaard. Which, to be fair, is really depressing, but as a whole that says good things about my situation.