Posts by Cassie

     For me, the dance concert was a transcendental experience. I connected on a spiritual level with the dancers' every motion, and it lead me to a level of self actualization I had never before experienced as I attended to those who didn't have the decency to come in between dances, but rather insisted upon opening the squeakiest door in existence in the middle of the dance. 

     I think it's unfortunate that students spend so much time worrying about school to begin with. Senioritis wouldn't exist if everyone went to school with the intention of learning. Obviously not everyone wants to learn every day, but I think the educational system has really become a bit of a formality to some degree. The really brilliant people are the ones who realize that school is just a construction of society, and doing well in school doesn't make you a better or more valuable person. Which is why I think it's extremely unfortunate that people spend so much energy caring about their grades. I don't feel that all of the time and effort I've spent in school has been wasted. Some of the more random things I learned in gradeschool have proved the most useful to me. Latin roots, for instance, seemed pointless when I learned them, but now I rarely need a dictionary because they're invaluable when deducing the meanings of words.

     One of my favorite facts in psychology is that depressed people actually see the world more accurately than the rest of us. This is because people have a variety of self-serving biases, a more selective kind of rose-colored glasses that make us think more highly of ourselves. These biases include the tendency to attribute successes to ourselves, and blame failures on others (when's the last time you blamed yourself when a group project got a bad grade?), and the just world phenomenon. The just world phenomenon basically means that in order to believe there's justice in the world, we blame victims. When we read an article in the news about someone being hurt for no reason, we tell ourselves it was their fault- they weren't cautious enough, it was karma, etc.- because we need to believe that bad things don't happen to good people.

     J.D. Salinger died this week, so last night I decided to read Catcher in the Rye, which I've been meaning to read for a while now. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I ended up really liking it. People criticize the book because Holden Caulfield is unlikable, but to me that seemed to be the point. He is a completely self-involved, cynical, sexist, judgmental, and miserable guy. But he's also relatable. Maybe not everyone has the same problems as Holden, but I think we can all relate to the feeling of disenchantment with the world that leads us to also sometimes be cynical, judgmental, and self-involved.