ブッ片付けてやがったんだ | 8:24 PM >

For those of you who can read Japanese-- how's that for a title displaying linguistic mastery? (For those who don't, I'd loosely translate that as, "I totally and unfortunately cleaned the fuck outta it.")

Went back to the old place to do my part of the cleaning after work yesterday. Once you take down the wall gangings and throw out the plastic figurines, it's amazing how much character a place can lose. I read a book once (whose author, title, and plot escape me at the moment) where a girl discovered houses have spirits made from the years of memories of people living in them. I used to think that's a pretty accurate way to describe things, but it's a pretty weak spirit what can be tossed out with the trash.

Visa came through. Didn't want to say anything before, but there was a good chance that it wasn't going to come through before my trip and I'd have had to make a stupidly horrible decisiom between staying and keeping my visa or going home on my expensive ticket and losing my visa. Glad that's no longer a worry.

More reflections on Sophie:

In the story the philosopher notes that Aristotle refuted Plato's "World of Perfect Ideas" theory, saying that ideas come from people witnessing the reality around them.

Of course, the obvious rebuttal is that we have proof that there are things which, chronologically, came before us. (Even Aristotle used the shoulders of philosophers before him as stepping stones to his work.) If this can be assumed, then it can also be assumed that many things have existed for a long time. So to say the "Idea Horse" never existed before humanity is pure folly. Surely there must have been some sort of pattern from which horses were foaled long before they met humans.

"If a tree falls in a forest, and there's nobody around to reason out the purpose to the fall, did it ever exist at all?" I wonder how many philosophers have reasoned that nothing came before them only to have their children come to the same conclusion, negating the existence of the parent?

All that said, I bet the philosopher'll debunk Aristotle similarly when his next chapter reaches Sophie's hands.