meaning fascinates me.

so anyways, i've written about sociology here before, just some real basic stuff, mostly about theoretical perspectives and my tendency to observe and perceive the world around me using lenses that seem to correspond to those perspectives. i remember sitting in my urban sociology class and later in my social theory class and hearing about the symbolic interactionist or interpretive theory and suddenly feeling like the entire world made sense. basically what that perspective is concerned with is meaning, how people perceive the world around them, how the specific things they see and hear and subsequently and interact with are assigned their value.

what really blew my mind was when the reality that what we read and hear as words are no more than mere symbols in and of themselves. that is to say that the essence of something as clear as what i'm writing this very second is not at all what is seen and processed by your eyes and your mind; even though we see and hear symbols and representations that are identical, the nuances of meaning that those same representations and symbols convey to us are not always perceived identically.

so i'm writing about all this because i've been a bit frustrated with the process of interpretation, trying to understand what it is that people mean when i'm pretty sure that we percieve things in radically different ways. maybe it's not that, maybe it's more than that and i'm just frustrated because i suspect that people aren't shooting straight with me, which if it's the case puts integrity as opposed to misunderstanding at stake, which is far more serious.

i'll stop, i'm getting tired of this already.

feeling: a spinning head.
thinking of: clarity
music: "faith like a child" jars of clay