The real surreal life.

Stayed up 'til 7:00 am last night (?!), helping Nat type his paper. He left it until the last possible minute, which is how we found ourselves in that sitch. But i always like to help when i can... it's not like i've got a whole lot else goin' on.
Basically, Nat is an old-fashioned type of guy: he still hand-writes all of his papers, then types them up. To most people, especially in this golden age of The Laptop, that is a complete and utter waste of energy. But this is simply how he rolls. So while he sat on the bed, consulting his texts and scribbling away, sometimes feverishly crossing off whole paragraphs at a time, looking dazed for minutes at a time and smoking a cig every thirty minutes, i was up here at the table, faithfully working my way through subject matter that was simply beyond me.
A lot of the time, i can (pretty) easily follow what Nat is saying in his papers, even if i have no background in his topic (quantum mech, physics, logic), because it is an essay. It just follows. And he is a good writer- gets A's, across the board. But for whatever reason, last night i was strugglin'. Typing each page was taking me upwards of a half an hour! What the hell?!

Sample sentence:

On the other hand, acts which are merely about individual things and their individual moments are not categorial, even though they might exhibit the logical structure of subject-predicate.

or wait! Here's an even better one:

If Husserl is here saying that a categorial act yields a general concept from particular founding acts, then all that remains for this to be transformation is for this general concept of a relation to be turned into a concept of the same property possessed by the relata.

...uhhhh, yeah. That is so true. Anyway, that's why he's the thinker, and i'm just the typer. The unfortunate end result of all of this was that i got to hit the hay at seven, whereas Nat had to stay up and edit the damn thing, then actually go to school from 11 to 6:30. :/ Yeesh. it is awful, running on no sleep, and i hate the thought of him out there trying to cross the street and such. Such is the life of a grad student, i suppose... if they don't suffer for their papers, then who will read them knowingly, scratching their chins and nodding their heads in interested agreement?