For behold, I have reached new depths of patheticness.

Hi everyone. I'm Laura, the Lowest of the Low. The latest of the late. A girl's gotta have some distinction.

I'm told that I have a dry sense of humor, and I know I'm very sarcastic. I frequently deadpan so well that people take me seriously (the poor things). A lot of my time is taken up helping my parents with their two foster children. I don't make friends very easily, but I don't really like the idea of being popular--it would interfere with my ability to be lazy, and we can't have that. I'm usually pretty happy as a loner, doodling and reading and playing Sudoku. (Also I procrastinate and have a terrible memory. Not that you could tell that.)

A lot of the things that Ramage said in the first 32 pages of his book made a lot of sense to me. Sometimes he knocked me for a loop and got me started thinking in new directions, and many other of his ideas helped clarify things that I had been turning over in my mind for a while. I agreed with his statement that a good rhetorician has to be willing to question even their most deeply held beliefs or they risk becoming dangerously Serious.

Also, Ramage’s talk of Plato resonated with me. As I read the Anti-Rhetoric Persona’s nostalgic accounts of how Plato would render his Rhetorical foes useless with the shining light of Truth, I remembered starting to read some Dialogues (I gave up 30 pages in, so wordy!) and getting frustrated because none of the narrator’s opponents ever said what I would have said. Sometimes I could have sworn that they saw exactly where the narrator was leading them and what arguments he would use to do it, and consented to be led there anyway. That wasn’t my first experience with debators putting unethical, irrational, or weak arguments into their opponents’ mouths, but it has never ceased to frustrate me. (I just learned the term ‘strawman’ recently and it made me so happy.)

I liked Ramage’s explanation of Theodore Roethke’s statement: “I find my way by going where I have to go.” Trying to figure out of destiny or free will is dominant is an excellent way to tie your brain up in knots, but it seems like they would have to reach some sort of compromise. The closest I was able to come to summing that compromise up was that every choice is yours to make, but you have to make it. Even deciding not to choose is a choice. That led me nicely into Ramage‘s idea that while humans are theoretically free to do whatever they want, every choice they make is chosen from a limited selection of choices and affects the possibility of certain choices down the road. What I took from that was that people spend their entire lives creating more and more rules and boundaries, imposing limitations on themselves. And sometimes that idea evokes thoughts of quiet desperation, but more often I find myself thinking, “There’s really nothing wrong with that. We need boundaries in our lives or nothing would make sense.” As Ramage says, “[W]hatever one knows from the past is irrelevant to a world that changes totally moment to moment.”