Anyway, immediately following my response, he turned around and asked the waitress what hers were, and she happily responded in one line: I’m studying x so that I can be a y. So naturally, the gentleman came right back to me to tell me that I had a problem since I had “no direction”…

I then did what I rarely ever do: I explained myself and my plans thoroughly to a set of strangers trusting that they would understand my logic.  Fortunately, I was right, and it wasn’t a frustrating experience.  Nothing upsets me more than to waste my time explaining myself to people who can’t understand what I’m trying to say.  I would have loathed myself for the wasted effort had they not understood, or at least taken the time to discuss my plans thoroughly in an attempt to understand.

By the end of the evening, two had personally invited me to meet with them to discuss career prospects, while the others each ensured that we had exchanged business contact information.

Now, this pub night comes to mind because of recent events.  When I spend time with a particular friend of mine who is noticeably insecure, I take every hit he/she gives.  The reason is because between the two of us, I can take it.  The hits he/she gives tend to be assumptions regarding my career plans, and success in life.  I’ve noticed that he/she needs to feel as if I am an ambitionless person, making her way through life without plans or prospects.   He/she can’t handle the blunt truth so well, so I let it go.

But the truth is, he/she underestimates me, and I don’t defend myself.  Why?  Well, it’s simple: as insulting as that is, I know that to explain myself would be a waste of time.  He/she isn’t able to understand.

But let me make it clear: nothing in my life is unplanned or a mistake.  There is a lot of effort, thought, planning and time that goes into every aspect of my life.  It wasn’t easy or a fluke that anything in my life is what it is.  Ask me, and I’ll take my time to explain it to you.  Don’t ask me, and I won’t bother.

It’s being hypersensitive to everything anyone says to you.  The purpose of every word spoken in your direction is to put you down, and every person has ulterior motives. Did you mean to call me fat? Probably not, but that’s how I’ve construed what you’ve said and so that’s what I’ll base my response to you on.

How do you approach me each month when I’m like this? Well, unless you’re a stranger (and I’ll be nice to you), you just can’t beat it. There is no cheat that beats this game. It’s hit or miss, and hopefully you survive my wrath.

Postscript: …and when it’s over, it always feels like I’ve awakened from a nightmare, except, it was real.  I did say all those unwarranted, hurtful, and selfish words, and I did do all of those cruel, unnecessary, and inconsiderate things.  **sigh**  Every month until it stops…

…

I think it’s absolutely fucking ridiculous that in all of my requests for financial help over the years, I always get nailed for making too much money.

What do institutions want from me?  Oh, right, I know: be destitute so that I can be eligible for the scraps that they offer me, as if they are helping me by forcing me into a corner.  As if I were lying about the financial costs, and demands on my time as a caregiver for elderly parents with no other family and no other resources.  I work and make an honest living, but apparently, I’d only be eligible for help if I didn’t, and probably were even on welfare.

…

Well, fuck you, system.  Fuck you.  Just say what you really want to say: I’d rather you go into debt than help you develop a foundation in life from which you could potentially build a future.  This is because I let poor people just barely stay afloat.  If we helped poor people who worked for a living, well, they might actually get somewhere.  These are the real messages you’re sending with the rules that you have set up.

…

NB:  My opinion on going into debt for education is that you shouldn’t.

We grew up on social assistance.  In particular, my dad was receiving Disability benefits because of his poor health, and whenever the caseworker who looked after my dad was  changed, we had nothing.  Initial inspection of my dad’s file always led to the cancellation of our benefits.  He worked for years, but when he hit 57, he was often bed-ridden.

I don’t care what any website/brochure/slogan says.  Applying for OSAP when your family is living on Disability benefits is frowned upon.  Our benefits were often cancelled, and the reason quoted was frequently that there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be working full-time to cover our family’s living expenses.  So, I put my studies on hold and started working full-time.

Because of interruptions in the receipt of our benefits, we were often unable to pay our rent.  When benefits are your only source of income, and they’re constantly being canceled, it doesn’t matter that they will backpay everything you were “entitled” to, you’ll still be months behind on rent…  Just enough months behind to be threatened with eviction, and to not have enough money to pay for representation in court … which is where we were taken for non-payment of rent.  Just enough behind on payments to be starving, using up our credit thinking that the paperwork will get sorted out while we were desperately trying to find any work to cover any payments.  Just enough behind to have made it nearly impossible to dig ourselves out of the holes that we were buried into.

Years, jobs, and thousands of dollars of income later, things are better.  But there’s always this tiny little part of me that remembers what it felt like to be just moments away from being homeless, without any helpful resources, no friends who understood, and no hope for improvement.  I want to feel more carefree, but I can’t.

The past year has been filled with so many derailing events that I don’t remember what I’m like when I’m most productive.  I’m in crisis mode: all focus is on effectively managing the unexpected events as they come.  This keeps me from becoming overly stressed out.  Anyway, there are peaks and valleys, and even though it appears on paper as though my life is filled with valleys, I can’t pretend that I’m not just the slight bit optimistic about my plans for the future.

This post seems all over the place, I’m sure, the way that I seem so to many people around me right now.  But there is focus.  There are plans, goals, and targets being met.  Rest assured that ‘crisis mode’ is not negative, and not an impediment to my attaining my dreams.

What gets me through times like this are the pleasant surprises.  Amidst the unmitigated circumstances that currently govern my thoughts and actions, there are yet the unexpected moments that make it all worthwhile, such as making new friends, having fun in ways that I didn’t anticipate, and discovering new plans that were ever more exciting than the ones I already had.

She’s in the hospital now, as they have admitted her, hooked her up to machines, and told us that she has to meet with someone on Monday who will assess her ability to take care of herself and “recommend” “solutions” for her… Or should I just say “confirm her inability” to take care of herself because that’s what it sounded like the doctor was really saying.

In a way, it’s what I wanted: tests to be done, proof that she had problems that weren’t being addressed by her current doctor and specialists, and help for her to address them.  But the way it happened feels unsettling: using her dizziness against her when it was the result of diligently following negligent doctors’ orders.

I’m not sure what to think.

I’ve spent the morning speculating as to the reasons behind her need to tell me that she thinks I’m overweight, considering fluctuations in my weight, my apparent eating habits, and cultural background.  I’ve been chit-chatting with friends, discussing what I should do, being generous and thinking about how much of her advice I should heed, and commiserating about what it is to be made to feel insecure over something that wasn’t a problem.

The truth is, it doesn’t matter that I do eat sensibly, get exercise, and like my body.  There will always just be some people who don’t know this, think otherwise, and presume that it is valuable for them to tell me so.

There was the obvious one which said to get exercise.  Sure, no problem.  Another thing they recommend we do is list a couple of things that went right and things that I enjoyed every day/week.  Seems simple enough.  Except on weeks where my laptop unexpectedly dies when I’m trying to write a paper, I discover I owe more money to cover the cost of incidental fees for class, I get into an auto collision that’s not my fault but that I could be blamed for because there were no witnesses, etc… [and OMG does "etc" really mean "et cetera"], it’s hard for me to dig through and find the things that went well.  I have this sneaking suspicion that they’re numerous but tiny, including such things as “I ate” and “I woke up”, and that that’s why I can’t find them.  They’re such normal parts of every day that it’s hard to give them any credit as being something worth being happy about.

To illustrate the problem, let us begin with the following example:

In my experience, all F’s are G’d, and no cases of F’s have been found to not be G’s.

I arrive at the general statement that “All F’s are G’s” through inductive reasoning.

Is this generalization “justified”?  It is immediately clear that the generalization does not necessarily follow from the premise, since t is not arrived at deductively (that is, it is not entailed).  So it appears that we take a leap from premise to generalization when we reason inductively.

Upon careful examination of the above example, the generalization can be justified by the apparent “Uniformity of Nature”, as discussed by Bertrand Russell in The Problems of Philosophy, Chapter VI.  ”The belief in the uniformity of nature is the belief that everything that has happened or will happen is an instance of some general law to which there are no exceptions.”  Herein lays the problem: uniformity of nature is a premise that can only be arrived at inductively, so it cannot be used to justify inductive reasoning.  It is a circular argument.

//

P. F. Srawson attacks this problem from a linguistic standpoint, claiming that the question of whether or not induction is justified is nonsensical.  He says that it is “the absurd wish that induction should be shown to be some sort of deduction.”  His argument is illustrated as follows:

To be rational is to use induction and deduction.

Deductive and inductive reasoning are mutually exclusive.

The word “deductive” describes closed arguments that lead to a priori knowledge.

Deductive propositions are therefore either valid, or invalid on the basis of being either justified or not justified.

The word “inductive” describes the reasoning that leads to degrees of belief that are supported by experience.

So, questions such as “Is there reason in believing in deductive arguments?” and “Are inductive arguments justified?” have no meaning for Strawson.

//

Karl Popper attempts to show that “the belief that we use induction is simply a mistake. [...] The whole apparatus of induction becomes unnecessary once we admit the [...] conjectural character of human knowledge.”  He discards induction with his notions of the following:

1. Although we cannot employ induction to acquire a necessary truth, we can necessarily conclude the falsity of a generalization with falsifying evidence, and this is purely deductive.

2. Laws arrived at inductively were based on “unconscious, inborn expectations” or “scanty material, i.e. the few observed instances upon which the law may be based.”

He proposes that conjectures (hypotheses) are arrived at arbitrarily, either through myths, or inborn expectations, and that testing (trying to find refutations) is how one arrived at conjectures with (degrees of) corroboration, as opposed to inductive inferences with (degrees of) probability.  So, he discards induction, but only to appeal to it in different terms.

//

Neither attack of the problem is satisfying.  No one said it better than Russell when he said that “we must either accept the inductive principle on the ground of its intrinsic evidence, or forgo all justification of our expectations about the future.”  And all the while philosophers who attack this problem tragically become Kierkegaard’s Knights of Infinite Resignation: afraid and too calculating to take the leap that they miss the point.

___________________

Postscript:

This was my first assignment after returning to school after a 3-yr hiatus . This means it was written around October 2005.  It’s just a short little ditty, and I stumbled upon it while going through my old class notes.  I was awarded a 90%, and a comment regarding my criticism of criticisms on the problem of induction.

I’m disappointed to report that during the earthquake, I was at work watching my monitor shake, and yesterday during the riots, I was home sifting through personal documents.

I probably wouldn’t even have checked-in with the world had my sister and mom not stopped by for dinner.  When I turned the radio on to hear about all the commotion, I was so disappointed that I wasn’t down there taking videos.  Except for perhaps Immigration issues, I don’t think there was any bandwagon that I would have jumped on, and even then, I wouldn’t have because I don’t think  that a protest is the right forum.  I just wanted to be in the heart of the rare action that Toronto sees.  Oh well.  I’m safe?  I’ll find consolation in that.

//

I’ve finally decided to sit down and go through all of my filing.  They have been in disarray since I moved in with Daniel (September 2008).  Well, “disarray” as in “divided”: there are the pre-Daniel files, and the post-Daniel files.

In setting out about this task, I had wanted to merge them into one huge unified system.  But I changed my mind.

I cracked open the filing cases, and found neatly organized bank statements, credit card statements, bills, pay stubs, tax documents,  and more, all dating to as far back as 2001 – the year I started University.   Well, there were my bank statements from high school, but I changed banks before starting University, and I had no interesting documents until 2001.

So, I peeked through them all.  I looked at what I spent money on.  I expected to find generally irresponsible purchases reflecting youth and negligence, but what I actually found was lists of transactions resembling my current spending, except now I have perhaps 5x the income.  Ok, so maybe it was negligent to spend that way without the income I have now..  But it was still interesting to see that I haven’t changed very much: I love to watch movies, eat out at least once per week, I buy electronic toys, and I like to go away on one big trip every 1.5-2 years.  I’m … predictable.  And apparently, I’ve been so for many years.

I suppose this shouldn’t be a big surprise.  It just is because I felt like the last 10 years of my life were very formative, and that I’d grown and changed a lot, and further that a lot of things in my life had changed.  But I guess some things never do.

As for the files, I’m scrapping most of them.  I admit that it’s hard to just discard my neat and well-kept files, but … why keep them?  Without them I can entertain the myth that my metamorphosis into adulthood was more interesting than the documents would declare.